Very soon, eight million Hungarians will vote in an election whose results will resound across Europe and the US. For the first time in 15 years, MAGA icons Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz movement look beatable - this time at the hands of a defector, Péter Magyar, and his Tisza party.
Have you been deranged by a decade of Trumpism? Do you need a nail-biting political battle over the future of liberal democracy but without Orange Man and his cult? If so, this is the podcast series for you. Dropping every Sunday between now and election night in Hungary, this special series will bring the latest campaign news and expert guests covering politics, economics, history and culture.
This week’s guest is Stefano Bottoni - an Italian-Hungarian historian and one-time Orbán admirer, whose critical biography of the prime minister sold more than 18,000 copies and topped Hungary’s best-seller lists despite ghosting from local publishers.
When opinion polls were tight in 2022, Stefano still expected Orbán’s re-election but now he’s not so sure. “The point here is not how strong Tisza is; Tisza is strong and won’t weaken. The point is how Orbán could react to a possible defeat, and we have heard every kind of rumour here from postponing the elections due to the ‘state of exception’ ... or switching to a presidential system ... allowing Orbán to become president of the republic”.
Aside from Fidesz’s perpetual gerrymandering and media dominance, the government is also throwing money at pensioners, who make up 30% of the electorate. The Fidesz “regime is not like the old communist regime in 1989 - accepting almost gladly that it’s over: ‘we can hand over the government, so now the ball is yours and do whatever you want. We are done with it’. Orbán is not this kind of guy ... and we also had very different international surroundings in 1989. The US president was called George Bush Senior and the last secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, we have Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin. Both of them, for very different reasons, are greatly interested in keeping Viktor Orbán in power”.
Twenty-Four Two is hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen and is a podcast from 242.news - a newsletter focused on the remaking of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
