Goulash Authoritarianism

Is that what we want?

Over the past few days, a peculiar argument has emerged on the American right: If Viktor Orbán can lose an election, then he wasn’t really an autocrat. James Kirchik, who eloquently opposed this claim in The Free Press, sums up their arguments like this:

“It seems commonsensical to say that if an ‘autocrat’ loses an election, he wasn’t an autocrat after all,” my friend Mike Pesca wrote in The Free Press. Rod Dreher, one of the many conservative intellectuals whom the Orbán government welcomed to Budapest, posted sarcastically, “But. . . but. . . but, I was told by so many experts and journalists in the West that this would never happen, that Orbán is a fascist dictator who would never surrender power!” And New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asserted that “strong political parties that bend the rules to entrench their power and succumb to corruption are a consistent feature of democracy qua democracy. And if your entrenched ruling party can lose everything in a wave election, you are not living in an authoritarian state.”

A Wall Street Journal editorial made the same point, sneeringly. In the Atlantic, my friend Eliot Cohen has another version of this argument, or rather a related point. He writes, roughly, that because Orbán lost we needn’t fear his influence in the US either, and we needn’t be pessimistic if elements of his system are adopted in America.

Politely, I’d like to disagree with Eliot, as well as the others. Yes, Orbán did lose. But he lost after sixteen years in power. During those sixteen years he did terrible damage to Hungarian culture, the Hungarian economy and Hungarian society. Orbán stayed in power by changing the constitution, altering the voting system, capturing the state bureaucracy, taking over courts and universities, and enriching his family and friends (about which more below). Some of those friends bought up much of the private media, which they still control.

In order to win against him, Péter Magyar had to spend a year and half building a nationwide social movement. He endured constant harassment. His phone was tapped. His girlfriend, who turned out to be an agent for the ruling party, made secret sex tapes and leaked them to the prime minister’s campaign. His party’s database was hacked by state operatives. State television and radio would not interview him. Instead, they lied about him, repeatedly. Grotesque smears were invented, designed to make him seem both crazy and cruel. Among other things, he was accused of killing and roasting the family dog (a claim repeated by Rod Dreher, one of the Americans on the Hungarian government payroll, as Cathy Young points out).

Right up to the end, Orbán seemed convinced that he would win anyway, or else lose in a close race and then challenge the results. On election day, members of his party were preparing that narrative, talking ominously about supposed violence being planned by the opposition. When the results started coming in from the countryside, which used to support him, he decided not to stop the election after all: the defeat was too large. But no one doubts he will continue to use the millions of Euros he has stolen, the people he has placed in key institutions and the judges who favor him to undermine the next government and try to take over again.

It’s not totalitarianism. But perhaps we can agree to call it goulash authoritarianism: a one-party-takes-all system that does enormous damage but can perhaps be removed after a generation in power if enough people are willing to risk their careers, families and fortunes fighting against the state, its security forces and its overwhelming propaganda.

Is this a good form of government? It is democracy? Would any of those questioning the significance of the vote like to have a similar system installed in the United States for the next sixteen years, until 2042?

Certainly some of Orban’s American admirers would indeed like that. As I have written before, Orbán’s actions have inspired the Trump administration’s ideological backers:

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Orbán held multiple meetings with Donald Trump. In May 2022, a pro-Orbán think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference, in Budapest, and three months later, Orbán went to Texas to speak at the CPAC Dallas conference. Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” In a video message, Steve Bannon called Hungary “an inspiration to the world.” Notwithstanding his own institution’s analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”

Hungarian models inspired the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which in turn has directly influenced the Trump administration. The President, the Vice President and the Secretary of State all endorsed the Hungarian prime minister in an attempt to help him win, something I don’t think any White House has ever done for any ally in a democratic election, ever. They liked him, admire him, and want to use his ideas.

I discussed exactly these issues on Morning Joe. He also mentions my book, Twilight of Democracy, which was partly about the radicalization of the Hungarian Right.

Also discussed some of these things with Ali Velshi (although I was staying in a rural Polish hotel with very bad wifi, so it’s a bit choppy)

With Fareed Zakaria on CNN, we talked about the difference between a center-right politician, working within a democratic framework, and an autocrat:

---

Kleptocracy Tracker: Hungarian Edition

The real damage Orbán did has yet to be measured. But we can start by following the money. For when Orbán returned to power in 2010 with a parliamentary supermajority, he transformed the Hungarian state, not only to entrench his own power but to enrich himself and his allies.

How? First, he made sure that any institution that could detect or punish corruption were under his control. He placed loyalists in charge of the State Audit Office, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the tax authorities and the Media Council. He expanded Hungary’s Constitutional Court and used Fidesz’s parliamentary dominance to shape further judicial appointments. In 2011, he lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 62—forcing out some 300 institutionally-minded jurists and filling their seats with loyalists too. (Later, this tactic was copied in Poland).

With oversight dismantled, the government found it easier to steer contracts to the prime minister’s allies. A Financial Times analysis of nearly 350,000 Hungarian public procurement contracts found that “14 per cent of all the funds awarded in state tenders under Orbán went to 42 companies owned by the 13 associates.” The same companies had won just 1 per cent between 2005 and his election in 2010.

From 2010 to the end of 2025, these companies received over €28 billion in net profit from state tenders. Some of the beneficiaries are legendary. Lőrinc Mészáros, a childhood friend of the prime minister, built most of his corporate empire in just five years on the back of government construction and EU contracts. Mészáros later underwrote the renovation of a former Habsburg estate in Felcsút, now owned by Orbán’s father, Győző Orbán, but believed to be primarily used by the prime minister.

The senior Orbán also owns a quarry that profited from orders placed by state-contracted road builders. Orbán’s son-in-law, István Tiborcz, co-owned Elios Zrt. when that company won €40 million in EU funds to install street lights in towns across Hungary—contracts that OLAF, the EU’s anti-fraud office, found represented conflicts of interest. When OLAF sent its findings to Hungarian authorities, police closed the investigation twice, finding no evidence of wrongdoing either time.

Some of these stories were put together by a Hungarian investigative website, Direkt36, in a documentary released last year (with English subtitles). Millions of Hungarians watched it:

When OLAF investigators visited Hungary to probe Elios’s contracts, Hungarian foreign intelligence surveilled them. The Hungarian government also used spyware to surveil journalists, lawyers, opposition politicians, and media owners who wrote or spoke about these issues. One of the masterminds of this system, Antal Rogán, who ran the prime minister’s office, was sanctioned at the end of the Biden administration. The US Treasury issued a statement:

Throughout his tenure as a government official, Rogan has orchestrated Hungary’s system for distributing public contracts and resources to cronies loyal to himself and the Fidesz political party. Rogan orchestrated schemes designed to control several strategic sectors of the Hungarian economy and to divert proceeds from those sectors to himself and to reward loyalists from his political party.

The EU suspended over €32 billion in funding to Hungary over concerns about public procurement corruption as well.

That’s the beginning of the explanation of how goulash authoritarianism impoverished Hungary. The new regime now has to pick all of this apart and restore some semblance of fairness to the Hungarian economy and society.

I ask again: is that what we want for the US? Because this is the system that MAGA admires, as does much of the European far-right.

---

Kleptocracy Tracker

Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)

April 12

• Trump announced the White House will host a UFC fight to celebrate his 80^th birthday in June.

April 13

• By openly profiting from the presidency without apparent political consequence, Trump has effectively dismantled longstanding norms against self-enrichment in office, potentially setting a precedent that future presidents can leverage their power for personal financial gain.

• Justin Sun, the crypto billionaire and World Liberty Financial investor, accused the firm of insider misconduct after it used its own WLFI tokens as collateral to borrow $75 million, raising fears of a market dump ahead of a major token unlock.

April 15

• David Ellison will host an invite-only dinner in Washington honoring President Trump and CBS News’ White House correspondents as his company’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery await regulatory approval.

April 16

• The crypto and AI industries have raised roughly $250 million to back congressional candidates in the 2026 midterms, with billionaire tech investors pouring money into Super PACs to shape policy on AI regulation and crypto legislation.

• Trump’s Federal Reserve Chair nominee Kevin Warsh is being investigated by Senate Democrats for failing to disclose $100 million in financial assets.

• Paolo Zampolli, a New York socialite-turned-Trump envoy, has built a role as an informal diplomatic dealmaker by leveraging his White House access to broker major commercial agreements—most notably a $8 billion Boeing deal with Uzbekistan—blurring the lines between personal business, loyalty politics, and official US diplomacy.

---

Joan Miró

The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC has a special exhibition, Miró and the United States, that shows paintings and sculptures by the Catalan artist alongside the work of his American friends and contemporaries. When hung side by side, the influences are clear, as is the evolution of Miró’s own thinking.

Also, it’s a lovely, uplifting show, in a perfectly sized small museum.