What Kind of Autocrat Loses an Election?

How to Beat Trump is How Hungary Beat Orban. Just Vote Him Out.

This piece originally appeared in The Free Press. I also did a version of it on The Gist as part of my Spiel. You can listen to it here, starting at 26:32.

---

Viktor Orbán has been defeated. That is good for Hungary, good for Ukraine, and good for anyone who believes the will of the people should mean something. It is also, if we are being honest, a problem for a certain kind of political analysis—the kind that spent years insisting Orbán was something that the election results now suggest he wasn’t.

Orbán was a right-wing strongman: genuinely reactionary, an obstinate bully on the world stage, and, by any reasonable accounting, corrupt. He was an intellectual hero to J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump. He proudly called Hungary an “illiberal democracy”—his way of saying that the institutions would serve the party, not the other way around. For a while, Hungarians liked what he was doing. Then they didn’t. And they voted him out.

That last sentence is the one I want to linger on.

Photo: Bálint Szentgallay/NurPhoto via Getty Images

On his HBO show a week before the election, John Oliver said, “independent observers have deemed Hungarian elections” since Orbán took power and started changing laws, “free but not fair, which is an interesting combination. You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it’s Orbán or whoever inevitably loses to him.” The audience gave a big laugh.

He then threw to the Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele, who argued: “We tend to think of a coup as happening with tanks in the streets, you know, and the military takeover and the announcement on radio that all civil liberties have died. That’s not what autocracy looks like anymore. You don’t get phalanxes of tanks. You get phalanxes of lawyers.”

This is typical of the analysis around Orbán. He is not just a strongman; he’s an autocrat, ruling without constitutional limits, just a few steps from being a fascist. No tanks needed to stay in power, thank you very much.

And of course, one of the things autocrats do is steal elections. According to Civil Rights Defenders, which promotes democratic reform around the world, Orbán “systematically dismantled the country’s legal system and changed the election system to ensure future election victories.” Since his election in 2010, the group added, he has been able to maintain his hold on power through “a combination of fraud and a rigged election system.”

It turns out the system might have been a bit rigged, just not rigged enough. On Sunday, Orbán didn’t just lose, he lost in a landslide. And rather than insist that the election had been stolen or some such, he gave a gracious concession speech just three hours after the polls closed, congratulating the winner, Péter Magyar.

What kind of autocrat is that?

There are some people I think should seriously grapple with that. I will subscribe to the first political scientist or foreign affairs journalist who writes, without hedging, that they got it wrong—that autocracy may have been the wrong word, or at least that they deployed it in ways they shouldn’t have.

For instance, the historian Timothy Snyder has said that Orbán “created a model of postmodern authoritarianism . . . to create an apparently invincible strategic position for one-party rule and his own personal power.” David Rothkopf, a left-leaning foreign policy analyst, has also described Orbán’s time in office as an example of “authoritarian rule,” and has used Hungary as an example of where Donald Trump is headed. The philosopher Jason Stanley has described Orban’s Hungary as “the model for the global fascist assault on democracy.”

The public hears “autocracy” and imagines a place where journalists disappear and elections are theater. Sophisticated scholars like Stanley and Snyder sometimes surely know and make use of this kind of charged language, even if they mean by “autocracy” a place with a compromised judiciary, anti-gay initiatives, and tilted campaign finance laws—but still one that is closer to North Dakota than North Korea.

And is it really an autocracy if you can vote the leader out? Is it an autocracy if the strongman who bent the institutions didn’t bend them past the point where the people can say no and be heard? It seems commonsensical to say that if an “autocrat” loses an election, he wasn’t an autocrat after all. Maybe Orbán was Schrödinger’s autocrat, who we couldn’t know was or wasn’t an autocrat until he lost. But he did lose, and therefore, we have to conclude as a matter of intellectual honesty that he was something less than an autocrat, and certainly never a dictator.

Orbán wasn’t running gulags. Reporters could fly into Budapest, stand in the shadow of the parliament, conduct interviews with regime critics or even Orbán-insulting tour guides, and leave unmolested. Scheppele, from Princeton, told The New Yorker that “if you went there on vacation, you would never guess that it’s a dictatorship. And that’s because the way that Orbán exercises control is through money. Orbán has eliminated the system of welfare and unemployment insurance and so on, so that you only get those things if you pass his litmus test.” That is ugly and worth opposing. But it also seems to be the case that Hungary wouldn’t be recognizable as a dictatorship because it in fact was something less than a dictatorship.

The reason I have been thinking about all of this, of course, is that I am an American, and Donald Trump has been said to be everything Orbán was accused of: fascist, dictator, autocrat. Often the accusation came with Orbán as the direct comparison, the proof of concept, the cautionary tale made flesh. Orbán is the bottom of the slippery slope so many of our experts warn we are on. If Orbán could do it in Hungary, Trump could do it here.

So the question I want to ask the people who made that argument most forcefully—the “democracy indexes” that categorized Hungary as a fragile democracy according to allegedly empirical methods, the Jason Stanleys, the David Rothkopfs, the Tim Snyders, the scholars who mapped Orbán’s playbook onto Trump’s ambitions—is: How careful were you, really? Were you trying to get it exactly right? Or were you trying to scare us? Or were you perhaps a little too excited to have invented a category that only the truly sophisticated democracy-watchers who subscribed to your Substacks could perceive?

I understand the impulse to overreact rather than underreact when you think democracy is at stake. But “overreacting” does not mean “misdescribing.” And there is a version of overstating Trump’s power and cunning that does not make people more vigilant but more afraid and more irrational. Spending years insisting that Trump is so dominant, so strategically dangerous, so much more pernicious than ordinary politicians ends up not merely misdescribing his power but conferring it.

Orbán, who is 17 years younger than Trump, who was genuinely rigorous about consolidating power, who actually understood how his government worked, who had a coherent ideological vision, who was not a real estate developer but a lawyer, lost power in the ordinary and democratic manner. What does that say about the prospects for a man who never once had a coherent plan for anything, who is less popular in his own country than Orbán ever was in Hungary, and who is watching his poll numbers deteriorate in real time?

Here is where I have reset my calibration. I have always believed Trump’s party was going to lose in 2026 in a free and fair election, and on that basis alone, I thought the autocracy talk was overblown. I still believe 2028 will be a free and fair election. I believe the will of the American people will be registered and respected. There will be some tinkering at the margins for electoral advantage because there always is, from both parties, but that doesn’t mean a king is in the offing, “No Kings” rallies notwithstanding.

Trump is not a dictator. He was not one on day one. He won’t be one on day 1,461. He is something more ordinary and in some ways more manageable: a cartoonish thug who is losing popularity and is about to lose at the polls, which will be counted accurately.

---