Péter Magyar Led Hungarians out of Autocracy. Where Will He Take Them Now?

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The New Yorker; Source photographs from Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story. The theme of this year’s Riviera International Film Festival, which is taking place on the Ligurian coast of Northern Italy, is “No risks, no stories.” The festival opened on Tuesday night with the international première of a documentary called “Spring Wind,” which was squarely on theme: the high-risk, high-reward tale of Péter Magyar’s audacious quest to unseat Viktor Orbán as Prime Minister of Hungary. (One of the documentary’s producers described its “dramatic arc” as “a classic hero’s journey.”) Last month, despite Orbán’s formidable, long-standing attempts to rig the legal and electoral systems in his favor, Magyar won, in a stunning upset. On May 9th, in a ceremony on the bank of the Danube River, he will be sworn in as Prime Minister.

Revealing this is no spoiler, because “Spring Wind” ends before election day. Magyar granted the filmmakers, a husband-and-wife team named Tamás Yvan Topolánszky and Claudia Sümeghy, extensive access to his campaign. They shot for a year, in secret, accompanying Magyar as he rehearsed his speeches, berated his staff, walked to Transylvania, and held countless rallies before small crowds in the countryside. Then, a week before the election, they released the movie, temporarily, on YouTube. It quickly set viewership records. Some 3.3 million people watched it online—a number roughly equivalent to a third of Hungary’s population (and also, the filmmakers hasten to point out, strikingly close to the number of votes Magyar ended up getting).

A lot of the coverage of Magyar’s election, including my own, treated his victory as a hopeful harbinger, not only for Hungary but for the world. People were watching especially closely in countries, including my own, whose status as consolidated liberal democracies has been downgraded, in recent years, from “definitely” to “probably” to “it’s complicated.” There are many ways for a country to become unfree. There’s the classic military coup, the theocratic revolution, the swiftly adopted emergency decree. But these methods are blatant and outmoded, often more trouble than they’re worth, even for an aspiring tyrant who isn’t moved by human suffering. The cleaner, more contemporary path to autocracy has come to be known as competitive authoritarianism, and it was this method, as Jan-Werner Müller recently wrote in the London Review of Books, which “Orbán’s self-declared ‘illiberal’ regime had pioneered.” Orbán’s party won a super-majority in 2010, and for sixteen years he kept pressing his advantage, using the tools of the state to “staff the state bureaucracy and courts with loyalists, help wealthy allies acquire media companies and subjugate schools and universities.” As Müller notes later in his essay, “It’s hard not to think of parallels with the Trump regime.”