Orban’s Defeat Is Being Dangerously Misread

Get audio access with any FP subscription. Viktor Orban’s defeat has triggered a collective sigh of relief across Europe and beyond. Following closely on the heels of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s exit in Brazil, the demise of the Hungarian strongman seems to signal the beginning of the end of the recent strongman era. This, however, would be a dangerous misreading of the global trajectory. Viktor Orban’s defeat has triggered a collective sigh of relief across Europe and beyond. Following closely on the heels of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s exit in Brazil, the demise of the Hungarian strongman seems to signal the beginning of the end of the recent strongman era. This, however, would be a dangerous misreading of the global trajectory. The Hungarian specifics should already caution us against an overly optimistic reading. Peter Magyar was an insider who campaigned on a rather restricted message—there is still a lot, some would say a shocking amount, of what we do not know about his politics. Ultimately, it appears, cost-of-living topics were central and brought voters on board for a change. It is questionable just how much the Hungarian model of transition can be replicated in other places. Would Turkish voters, for example, flock to such a narrow platform? Never mind that Magyar commands a supermajority in parliament and can now dismantle the Orbanist system—focusing too much on the Hungarian mechanics might lull us into a false sense of security. First of all, there are still lots of countries with wannabe strongmen testing out lessons from the playbook: Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Georgia are sometimes mentioned in this context. And there are still many established ones around. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is somewhere in between. But what’s more: The “illiberal playbook” is not dying; it is adapting and being updated. Those strongmen deeply entrenched in power are surely thinking a lot about Orban in these weeks. Rather than gently encouraging them to moderate, the falls of Orban and Bolsonaro are likely driving them toward further entrenchment and more extreme measures. There might be a sense of panic, even. At the root of this panic is what I call the “exit dilemma.” Lots of chapters and lessons have been written and are constantly being updated in the strongman playbook. The one thing that is missing so far is a chapter on the exit from power. It’s the exit dilemma, and it is real enough: Once you have dismantled institutions, enriched yourself and your cronies, and bent the law to your will, you cannot simply lose an election and retire to write your memoirs. If anything, Orban is the exception that proves the rule. For the strongman, the threat of judicial persecution is existential. So far, Russian President Vladimir Putin is the most prominent strongman to attempt a soft exit, granting himself a lifelong seat in the Russian upper house of parliament with immunity. It sounds like an ingenious solution to the exit dilemma, but as Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had copied Putin’s soft exit stratagem, recently discovered, it suffers from a fatal conceptual flaw. What if the next person in power simply revokes the lifetime immunity construct? This duly happened to Nazarbayev in 2023, when his family was stripped of legal immunity and his own immunity and powers were reduced. Ultimately, paper shields do not solve the exit dilemma. To understand how this trap is navigated in real time, we must look to a case unfolding before our eyes right now. More than Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Orban, or Bolsonaro, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan embodies the full arc of transition from liberal reformer to nationalist hard-liner and autocrat. In power for 23 years, he is one of the pioneers of the 21st-century wave of strongmen. He has shown himself to be highly adaptive, rarely letting a good crisis go to waste while continuously reconfiguring his voter base—and the Turkish Constitution, for that matter. Early on, he jettisoned his liberal and reform-oriented supporters. Later, he alienated many of his Kurdish voters when he deliberately forewent a historic solution to the Kurdish conflict to ally himself with hypernationalists—perhaps more adequately termed near-fascists—to secure the majority needed to install himself as an all-powerful “super president.” Erdogan has made the fullest use of the failed 2016 coup against him by purging real and perceived enemies. Well over 100,000 people have lost their jobs, and tens of thousands have landed in prison. Charismatic leaders of the opposition and civil society such as Ekrem Imamoglu and Osman Kavala have also been neutralized by being stowed away in the prison system. Erdogan also regularly intimidates critics—from prominent journalists to teenagers on social media—in thousands of civil lawsuits for so-called defamation. State institutions, from the courts and civil administration to the army and

Orban’s Defeat Is Being Dangerously Misread

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