To set the stage for Orbán’s rise, we start with what happened in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  

The pace of political change in the early 1990s was dizzying, and the forces propelling democracy seemed unstoppable: old political barriers between East and West collapsed; free markets sprang up everywhere and democratic elections were held; a divided Germany was reunited; the Soviet Union dissolved; Europe expanded; and a new global economy seemed to be taking over the world.

These changes caused one optimistic observer to predict that democracy would be the final form of government.  But there were other forces at work, less visible at first, but leading to a very different kind of change. Some effects of the changes listed above included: international companies moving their factories out of Europe to Asia; neoliberal shock therapies cutting social spending in the new democracies of Eastern Europe; social services that had been provided by the old regimes were replaced unevenly by capitalism; corruption broke out as state assets were privatized; economic inequality grew between the new class of oligarchs benefiting from privatization and everyone else; bank bailouts and lending crises shook the financial system; then came the massive flow of refugees into Europe from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa. 

All this led to the rise of xenophobic politics – first in Hungary, then across Europe. It was a populist pushback against disruptive and disorienting changes.

This is when the assault on democracy began, and for seven years I was in the middle of it, in Hungary, where I was president of Central European University.  I saw first-hand how a politician like Orbán could manipulate a populist rebellion in order to take over a democracy and turn it into an authoritarian state. 

When my term ended in 2016, I returned to the U.S. – just in time for the first election of Donald Trump.  Friends joked that maybe I had carried the Hungarian anti-democracy disease back home.  

Hungary has been a laboratory for reactionary populism, years before it spread to the rest of Europe and to the U.S. The 2008 financial crisis hit Hungarians harder than most Europeans and Americans, and many began to feel no better off than they had been under communism. By 2014 a European Commission poll showed that 70% of Europeans distrusted their elected governments – up from only 25% in 2002.  In Eastern Europe people were feeling left behind by the loss of jobs, stagnating incomes, austerity programs and cuts in social welfare – all products of the economics of globalization.  

Hungarians, some have argued, have a deep-seated victim mentality – the product of centuries of invasions by Mongols, Turks, Russians, Austrians, Germans and Soviets – and Hungarian civil society was stunted by outside domination.  On top of that, the country was deeply divided between a majority rural population that spoke only Hungarian and a cosmopolitan minority who were the dominant elite.  

This set the stage for an anti-democratic politician, and in walked Viktor Orbán.

Ironically, Orbán had been a hero of the democracy movement that overthrew the old regime. He had good organizing and rhetorical skills, which he used to stimulate Hungarians’ sense of victimization. He attacked the European Union as “the new Moscow”. He railed against refugees, calling them “a threat to Christian civilization”. He campaigned on the memorable slogan, “make Hungary great again,” and he promised Hungarians that he would rescue them from migrants and foreigners and people of other races and religions. He created a new identity politics by offering the vision of a “Great Hungarian Nation” as a way to prop up a worn out and disintegrating society.  

Orbán boasted that he would build a new form of government, which he called “illiberal democracy” -- an Orwellian term he invented to justify turning his election into a weapon to attack democratic institutions. He maneuvered a narrow electoral victory into a supermajority in the parliament, and paved the way for rewriting the Hungarian Constitution:

Viktor Orbán has become an icon for anti-democratic nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic. Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”

Orbán took over the media through government regulation, censorship, and financial pressure -- and today he controls 85% of the average Hungarian’s sources of information.  

He undermined the judiciary and the rule of law by expanding and packing the Constitutional Court, forcing independent judges to retire, cutting back the Court’s jurisdiction and drastically revising the Constitution.

He built a governing base out of a new oligarchy of corrupt businesses who benefited from noncompetitive government contracts, with funding from Europen Union grants to Hungary as a new member state.  The grants totaled nearly 30 billion euros before they were finally suspended when Hungary was held by the European Court of Justice to be violating the EU’s rule of law requirements. 

Orbán attacked Hungarian civil society -- branding organizations that received any support from the US or Europe as “foreign agents”, conducting harassment investigations of critics, and taking away the academic freedom of universities.  

I was running an international university whose mission was to revive academic freedom in Eastern Europe. During the Obama presidency, when the US promoted academic freedom, I was able to protect CEU from Orbán and expand its academic programs.  But when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he endorsed Orbán, and Orbán took the gloves off and started attacking universities, forcing CEU out of the country and taking over others by censoring and dictating what they could teach.

Viktor Orbán has become an icon for anti-democratic nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic, and he’s had an especially large influence on Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.  Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”  

Orbán has developed a playbook that’s now kept him in power for 15 years, and his playbook is the foundation for Trump’s Project 2025.  Here are Orbán’s rules for turning a democracy into an authoritarian state – rules that Donald Trump is now working to implement in the U.S.:     

One: take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all dissent.

Two: build your base by appealing to fear and hate and branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.    

Three: use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.

Four: use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate -- especially if you don’t win a majority.

Five: centralize your power by destroying the civil service.  

Six: redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree.

Seven: eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. 

Eight: rely on your oligarchs to supervise the economy, and reward them with special access to state resources.    

Nine: ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.

Ten: get the public to believe all this is necessary, and resistance is futile.

The scope of Orbán’s influence reaches across Europe.  

In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.

Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies. 

Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orbán playbook, but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.  

In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.  

In Germany the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government.  Viktor Orbán, Elon Musk and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20% of the vote, and polls show that 71% of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past. 

Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orbán model.  A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.  

So, what lessons can be drawn from all this? 

One lesson is that populist movements are having a big impact on democracy.  They start as reactions to destabilizing events, like economic or cultural upheavals, and they demand change and democratic reform. It’s important to listen to these movements, to understand their demands, and to show how democracy can give people the ability to shape and adapt to change. Meanwhile authoritarians like Viktor Orbán may seem attractive at first but inevitably suppress people’s voices and freedom, and promote corruption and economic inequality.   

Responding to populism can be done by building coalitions for economic fairness on issues like healthcare, education, taxes and public spending.  There are historical examples of this, like the American Farmer Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers and black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century.  Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.

A second lesson is that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orbán playbook the national flag is hijacked by the authoritarian leader.  The flag of a democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, of a society built on human rights and freedoms and international alliances and humanitarian values. When these soft power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up -- to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Xinping and Vladimir Putin who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump. 

A third lesson is that the ultimate goal of an authoritarian leader is to weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Orbán’s playbook demonizes anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.” This stigma is then enforced by targeting opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties like denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, criminal penalties like prosecution. The result is a hollowed-out shell of democracy – like Orbán’s Hungary.

What about the U.S.?  The US is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism.  It’s thirty times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and its diversity is the source of its economic and cultural strength. The US has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.  Donald Trump won less than fifty percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls. 

This is not a mandate for hollowing out American democracy.  

National polls show that 70% of Americans today see democracy as a core American value.  Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, it’s essential, and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees, and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country, who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy. 

Defending democracy is a long game. For two and a half centuries Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law. These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025, because citizens across the country are beginning to resist authoritarianism. To succeed, authoritarianism requires big government, and Americans have long been opposed to big government. 

Building resistance is hard work and sometimes may seem futile, but every small act counts and many small continuous acts can make a profound difference in resisting an authoritarian regime.  Six decades ago, in South Africa at the height of apartheid, the original Robert F. Kennedy eloquently predicted what would be achieved by resisting authoritarianism:  

“Each time a person stands up, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression.”

A version of this piece was first published in Rappler.

Image credits:
Donald Trump and Viktor Orban in the Oval Office. May 13, 2019. Washington, DC. Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban on the sidelines of the Third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on October 17, 2023. Grigory Sisoyev/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.
Xi Jinping and Viktor Orban. Liszt Ferenc Budapest airport, Ferihegy, Hungary.May 8, 2024. Vivien Cher Benko/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.

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