We’re now five weeks into Donald Trump’s second term. To offer a somewhat novel perspective on what’s happening, I’m going to talk about President Trump’s favorite European leader, Viktor Orban, and Orban’s formula for transforming democracy into authoritarianism.
Viktor Orban is the longtime leader of Hungary. Since Orban is Trump’s political model, Hungary is a window into what the US could become during Trump’s new term. The similarity between the two leaders is striking, and based on the past few weeks, Trump even seems to be outdoing Orban. Whether Trump can succeed as an authoritarian in the US the way Orban has succeeded in Hungary will depend on how Americans react to what’s happening to their democracy.
To understand how Viktor Orban got his start let’s look back to the events in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The pace of change in the early 1990s was dizzying, and the forces propelling democracy seemed unstoppable:
- political walls separating East and West collapsed;
- democratic elections and free markets sprang up everywhere;
- a divided Germany was reunited;
- the Soviet Union was dissolved;
- Europe expanded eastward;
- and a new global economy seemed to be taking over the world.
These changes led one optimistic observer to predict that “democracy would be the final form of government”.
But there were other factors at work, less visible at first, but eventually producing other kinds of changes:
- international companies were moving their factories out of Europe and the US to Asia;
- neoliberal shock therapies were cutting social spending in the new democracies;
- services provided by the old regimes were replaced unevenly by capitalism;
- corruption broke out as state assets were privatized;
- bank bailouts and lending crises shook the financial system;
- economic inequality grew between the new oligarchs of privatization and everyone else;
- then came the massive flow of refugees into Europe from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa;
- and all this led to the rise of xenophobic politics — first in Hungary, then across Europe — populist pushback against the huge 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 (CEU). I saw first-hand how a politician like Viktor Orban could manipulate a populist rebellion to take over a democracy and turn it into an authoritarian state.
When my term at CEU ended in 2016, Ellen and I returned to the US – in time for the first election of Donald Trump. Our friends joked that maybe we were carrying the Hungarian anti-democracy disease.
But the disease had already spread.
Eroded trust
By 2014 a European Commission poll had shown 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.
By 2010 Hungary had become a laboratory for reactionary populism a decade before it came to the rest of Europe.
The financial crisis of 2007-08 had hit Hungarians hard, and many began to feel they were now no better off than they had been under communism.
Hungarians 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 badly stunted by outside domination. On top of that, the country was deeply divided between a majority rural population that speaks only Hungarian and a cosmopolitan minority who are the dominant elite.
This set the stage for a populist politician, and in walked Viktor Orban.
Orban 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 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.
Orban boasted that he would build a new form of government, which he called “illiberal democracy” — an Orwellian term he invented to justify turning an election into an instrument to undermine democratic institutions.
Regulation, censorship, pressure
After he was elected in 2010, he maneuvered his narrow electoral victory into a supermajority in the parliament, paving the way to rewrite the Hungarian Constitution:
Orban 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 with loyalists, 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 supplied indirectly by EU grants to Hungary as a new EU member state. The grants totaled nearly 30 billion Euros before they were finally suspended by the EU in 2020 when Hungary was held by the European Court of Justice to be violating the EU’s basic rule of law requirements.
Orban systematically weakened Hungarian civil society — branding organizations that received funding 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 Orban and expand its academic programs. But when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he endorsed Orban, and Orban 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 Orban has become the icon of anti-democratic nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic, and he’s had a big influence on Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
Steve Bannon has declared that “Orban was Trump before there was Trump.” Orban developed a playbook that’s kept him in power for 15 years, and it’s now a blueprint for Trump’s Project 2025.
Orban playbook
Here’s what the Orban playbook prescribes, and what Trump has been doing:
First, take over your party and enforce party discipline through the constant use of political threats to stamp out all dissent.
Second, build your base by appealing to fear and hate and branding immigrants and cultural minorities as threats to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.
Third, use misinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.
Fourth, use your election to claim a sweeping mandate even if you don’t win a majority.
Fifth, centralize your power by destroying the civil service and dismantling the professional government.
Sixth, redefine the rule of law as your rule by executive decree.
Seventh, eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society.
Eighth, create an oligarchy to supervise the economy, and reward it with special access to state resources.
Ninth, ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.
And tenth, get the public to believe all this is necessary, and resistance is futile.
So that’s the Orban playbook that Donald Trump is following today.
To get a sense of Orban’s influence in Europe, let’s look at what’s happening in the rest of Europe, where democracy is struggling.
There’s bad news in Austria, where a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar right-wing nationalist government has taken over next door in Slovakia.
Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung to the right, but so far they’re still democracies.
Italy has a far-right government headed by Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orban playbook, but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on the hot-button issues of 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 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. Today, parliamentary elections are taking place that will determine whether the far-right AfD party will become part of a new government. (Editor’s note: AfD, Left win enough seats to block constitutional changes.)
Viktor Orban, Elon Musk and JD Vance have all endorsed the AfD, but the polls show that 71% of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its continuing connections to the Nazi past.
Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe at first adopted but is now resisting the Orban model. A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeat the regime in 2023, replacing it with a centrist government headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.
So, what lessons can we draw from all this?
One lesson is that populist movements start as reactions to destabilizing events, like economic or cultural or pandemic upheavals. And it’s important to listen to these movements, to understand their demand for a political response, and to show how democracy can give people influence and the ability to adapt to change — while authoritarianism only suppresses their voices and their freedom.
Responding to populism can be done by building coalitions for economic fairness on issues like health care, education, taxes and public spending. There are many 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 new coalitions on economic fairness.
A second lesson is that defending democracy is a patriotic cause. In the Orban playbook the national flag has been hijacked by the authoritarian leader. The flag must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, of a nation built on human rights and freedoms and international alliances and humanitarian values. When these soft power assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up — to be filled by authoritarians like Xi and Putin who are the ultimate political models for Orban and his followers.
A third lesson is that Orban’s playbook demonizes opponents and labels anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.” This stigma is 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. An authoritarian weaponizes the state to destroy democratic opponents. The result is a hollowed-out shell of democracy – like Viktor Orban’s Hungary.
The US may be different and better situated to resist authoritarianism. It’s thirty times bigger and infinitely more diverse than Hungary, and its diversity is the very source of 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 rapidly growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive dictates, and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country organizing demonstrations and lobbying Congress and state legislatures to stand up for democracy.
Defending democracy is a long game. For two and a half centuries Americans have organized and 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 seem today to be blocked by the Trump administration, but the US is not Germany in the 1930s or Hungary in 2025, because citizens across the country are beginning to act to resist authoritarianism. Resistance is hard work and sometimes may seem futile, but every act counts and many acts together can make a difference. Six decades ago, in South Africa during apartheid, Robert Kennedy eloquently described how this can happen, and I’ll end with his words:
“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.” – Rappler.com
John Shattuck delivered these remarks at the Camden Conference in Camden, Maine on February 22. He is an international legal scholar, diplomat and human rights leader. In 2009, he became president of Central European University, an international graduate institution in Budapest, Hungary, where he defended academic freedom against the increasingly authoritarian regime of Viktor Orban.