Orban Loss Shows Fascist Propaganda Has Its Limits
Orban's Hungary was a template for America's shitty right wing zealots. But the propaganda-fueled bullshit machine now sits at the bottom of the sea, drowned by an electorate finally fed up by 16 years of rampant corruption.
Hungary's authoritarian leader Viktor Orban was ousted over the weekend after a pissed off electorate showed up in historic numbers to kick his sorry ass to the curb. It's a real bummer for a U.S. authoritarian MAGA movement that viewed Orban's Hungary as their template for racist global populist domination.
Orban didn't just lose, he lost badly. Voter turnout topped 79.5 percent, the highest in a Hungarian election since the collapse of Communism in 1989 and the start of democracy in the country of 9.6 million. This despite the fact Orban had 16 years to consolidate his power over media, the judiciary, and electoral standards.
There will be ample buzzkills who will insist that because Hungary and the United States are dramatically different entities operating at immensely different scale, this is an apples to oranges comparison and enthusiasm should be muted.
Fuck that: Orban's massive loss at the hands of an angry electorate is a kick to the crotch of a cabal of global autocrats and an inspiration to everyone living under the hateful din of bigoted authoritarian sociopaths the world over.
Orban was a Putin puppet. It also can't be overstated how much U.S. MAGA zealots loved and idealized this guy. Despite Hungary's small population, Orban's political tactics had a massive, outsized influence on America's shittiest people.
Take, and enjoy, the win.
Orban's loss is a huge boost to EU coherence, a massive boost to Ukrainians fighting against Russian invasion, and a warning to MAGA zealots who genuinely believe they can build a lasting christofascist MMA hustlebro hegemony magically insulated from real-world outrage at their generalized, unprecedented shittiness.
Orban's loss obviously upset the unremarkable billionaire white supremacist named Elon Musk, as evident by his attempts to immediately frame Orban's ouster as some sort of Jewish conspiracy.
Orban had endless similarities to Trump; ranging from his love of racist populist anti-immigration rhetoric designed to divide and enflame, to his destruction of democratic norms via abject corruption and a hijacking of the courts.
But MAGA and Trumpism have long held particular admiration for Orban's control over the Hungarian media.
Orban spent sixteen straight years systematically suffocating the Hungarian press in ways that should now be familiar to U.S. residents watching Trump billionaire allies like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison attempt to dominate U.S. media.
Like Trump, Orban had his rich oligarch friends buy up the majority of the country's corporate press to the point where his once-dominant Fidesz party (now relegated to fractional government representation) directly or indirectly controlled around 80 percent of the entire Hungarian media market.
Orban's partners then pummeled the electorate with race-baiting propaganda 24/7 while the government strangled independent media just out of frame. Between 2010 and 2025, Hungary dropped from 23rd to 68th out of 180 countries measured in the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
The U.S. is currently 57th (and falling) in those same rankings as Trump-loyal right wingers gobble up traditional and new media giants, ensuring a massive right wing agitprop machine (Fox News, Sinclair, Twitter, Newsmax, OANN, CBS, etc.) works in well-funded unison to dismantle informed electoral consensus.
But as Orban's loss shows, this level of media control has very real limits. And it often results in weird zealots with a highly-distorted perception of their own popularity and power, incapable of seeing the playing field clearly when political reality begins to shift beneath their feet.
For example, Orban and the MAGA dipshit coalition genuinely believed that a last minute Budapest campaign appearance by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance (on pace to be the least popular VP in American history) would help boost Orban's chances (it did the exact opposite).
“Oppositions can win despite a tilted playing field,” Harvard politics professor and How Democracies Die author Steven Levitsky told the Associated Press. “Democracies are facing many challenges in many parts of the world, but so are autocracies.”
Orban's victorious opponent, Péter Magyar, leaned heavily into highlighting Hungary's corruption-riddled economy on the campaign trail. Democrats in the U.S. looking to make similar inroads have ample Trump parallels to choose from. The anti-corruption messaging writes itself if they have the backbone for it.
If what passes for a U.S. opposition party can't or won't take advantage of the situation (beyond bland platitudes about "affordability"), you can and should work to replace leading Democrats with younger, hungrier, smarter, angrier leaders who can. If U.S. corporate media outlets get in your way, stop giving them your money.
Even with a painfully broken media, there is a point where everyday reality eventually intrudes on the comfy delusions of a highly-propagandized U.S. electorate obsessed with voting against its best self interests.
And the reality is that Donald Trump is not popular, is not competent, is not healthy, is historically corrupt, started an unpopular war that's driving up consumer costs, and appears to be losing his fucking mind.
Orban's loss is just the latest example of how the check is finally, after more than a decade of this bullshit, finally starting to come due for autocrats that exploited COVID and legitimate anger at institutional failure (and shitty establishment politicians) to saddle the planet with something dumber and exponentially worse.
The con may have worked at first, but the bloom is off that decidedly turdish rose. And all the CBS or Twitter acquisitions in the world can't save it.
Two things will ultimately save the United States: the fact that Donald Trump is not bright, competent, or immortal, and the growing disgust at the sagging quality of life inevitably created by comical levels of corruption in an easily distractible country that's always been difficult to manage at scale.
Orban's destruction is replicable here. Do not concede in advance, do not award authoritarians competence and power they don't have, and show up in numbers and at volumes that are impossible to cheat or ignore.