Hungary for change? A challenger to Orban

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1:05The Economist

1:12Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

1:16Rosie Blau:And I'm Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:27In pre-colonial times, the real kings of South and Central America were the Jaguars. Today, they're ever more confined to disconnected patches of land. We examine a promising set of policies that might at last halt the loss of the Big Cat's range.

1:45Rosie Blau:And more saints have been canonized in the past 40 years than in the previous 400. Our correspondent explains why the number is climbing towards heaven.

2:05But first...

2:13On a chilly day in late March, I took a train from Budapest down to a small Hungarian city called Hodmejo-Vasareli, which is near the border with Serbia.

2:23Rosie Blau:Matt Steinglass is our Europe editor. I was there to watch a very important man make a speech. There were thousands of residents packed into the city's center, which is a beautiful, sort of quaint Habsburg-era central square. And they were down there to hear the same man, Peter Magyar.

2:45Peter Magyar is the leader of a center-right political party in Hungary called Tisak. There is a general election coming up on April 12th, and Magyar is giving his speech, with small variations for local towns, over and over and over again at four or five rallies every day. Magyar's campaign is very social media savvy, and at the beginning of the rally, before he showed up, organizers sent a video team up on the stage to prompt the crowd to chant, Arad Atisa!

3:22Which means the Tisa will flood. That's a pun on the party's name, which refers to the nearby Tisa River, but the name also stands for Tistelet Es Sabadzag, respect and freedom. Magyar probably poses the most serious threat of any candidate so far to the country's authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, and his party, Fidesz, who have been in power since 2010. And this election could reshape not just Hungary, but European politics and populist strategies all over the world.

3:57Rosie Blau:Okay, Matt, let's start with Petr Magyar. Who is he and where did he come from? Petr Magyar is 45 years old. He is a former member of Fidesz. He has a sharp sense of humor. He has a terrific flair for social media. He has a big stage presence, and he has a huge ego. He's occupied various positions for the party, but he really came to prominence in early 2024, when he abruptly defected from the party and started posting videos on Facebook denouncing it for corruption. Magyar was married to Judith Varga, who was the ex-justice minister, and in early 2024 had been selected to lead the party's campaign for the upcoming European party elections.

4:37But around that time, they went through a divorce. So Magyar seems to have been looking to see what he could do next with his political career. And coincidentally, a scandal broke around the pardoning of the former director of a children's home. The director of the children's home had tried to cover up sexual abuse by a staff member. And people were outraged. Magyar's ex-wife signed the pardon. And Magyar used this as a launching ground for a political career. He started publishing private conversations with his ex-wife, which he had recorded without her knowledge, which she was rather upset about.

5:13And it gave people a window to the inside of Fidesz. And it was an extraordinary month or so when he broke with the party. People who had been in Hungary's opposition for a long time and who had lived through repeated defeats by Fidesz suddenly felt that there was this extraordinary, charismatic new voice who was giving them a new sense of hope. People describe it as a sort of a mass psychological phenomenon more than a political one. So Magyar took over a tiny small party, TISA, and turned it into a juggernaut. And within a few months, he won 30 % of the vote in the European parliamentary elections in 2024.

5:48Rosie Blau:So aside from highlighting the corruption of the ruling party, what does Magyar actually stand for? Magyar's own politics are somewhat vague and fluid. He's definitely center-right, and some of the people on Hungary's left find that somewhat disappointing, but they don't expect that at this stage. What they're looking for is someone who gives them a chance to unseat Viktor Orban. And it's important to understand that corruption in Hungary is not the sort of petty kind of corruption that you expect to hear about handing over bribes to get approvals for things and that sort of thing. Hungary is a political system built on corruption.

6:23It's what political scientists call a competitive authoritarian system. And Viktor Orban has restructured the economy, restructured the government, taken over the court system, taken over most of the media, and used that to essentially seize control of the entire mechanism of political power and sort of colonize the economy. That's made it effectively impossible to unseat him without some kind of enormous wave. So when Magyar talks about corruption, what he's really talking about is the entire system of power that keeps Viktor Orban in place. Young people are particularly inspired by this message.

6:56Support for TISA among people under 30 is absolutely overwhelming, but there are people in other generations who find it equally inspiring. But the most important thing is that every other opposition group has gotten on board behind him. They have pulled their candidates out of the race and are standing aside to allow TISA a shot at knocking Viktor Orban off.

7:16Rosie Blau:So if corruption is at the center of how Orban has held power since 2010, is that at the root of why he's there still? Or does he also hold appeal to the people of Hungary? Viktor Orban is an incredibly talented politician. He initially came to fore as a leader of anti-communist demonstrations back in 1989 during the overthrow of the socialist government. For a long time, he was basically a center-right liberal politician. But he had a kind of Damascus moment in the 2000s after losing an election where he realized that the center of Hungarian politics was really on the right, traditional, conservative.

7:57So he reoriented his ideological platform to be more conservative Christian, the sort of populist, nationalist, anti-Brussels message. He was an early adopter, let's say, of that kind of message. For a lot of people, that does resonate. They're very anti-immigrant. So the 2015-16 migration crisis in Europe was a godsend for Orban. He was the first European leader to say, we're going to put up fences, we're not going to let people in. In poor areas, there's very little access to outside information. Hungary has the lowest rate of fluency in foreign languages of any country in Europe. That makes it harder to get access to outside information flows, outside news.

8:36and Orban, on taking power in 2010, immediately took over the national media, turned it into a propaganda outlet for his party. He used complicated legal strategies to reorganize the courts. Orban is also very effective at throwing around money to try to court voters, partly by raising pension payouts, more importantly by exempting mothers of three or more children and soon two or more children from income taxes for the rest of their life in order to try to raise the birth rate. That doesn't work, but it's an interesting electoral strategy. And from the beginning of the war in Ukraine, he has presented himself as the so-called peace candidate.

9:16He's not going to let Hungary get involved in that war by being too friendly to Ukraine. The pro-Russian part of his message is not popular in Hungary, but the peace candidate part of it is.

9:27Rosie Blau:So with that kind of grip on power, then how is the opposition now gaining ground? Hungarians, they may be willing to tolerate a certain amount of corruption as long as the economy is doing well. For the last few years, the economy has not been doing well. Since the COVID epidemic, Hungary's economic performance has been worse than that of its peers in Central Europe. The GDP only grew 0.4 % last year, whereas in Poland it grew 3.6%. When people can't afford apartments, when the healthcare system deteriorates, then that anger over corruption really comes to the fore. Given that Hungary is a member of the European Union, which is supposed to guard against that kind of corruption and increasing autocracy, why hasn't the EU been able to stop Hungary descending?

10:16That's a very good question. The EU reacts very slowly and it has very limited powers to interfere in the affairs of its nation states. Right. The assumption always was history is moving towards democracy and liberal systems and the rule of law. We have all these ex-communist countries which have joined now, they've adopted democracy, and things are just going to keep moving forward. So there's nothing really written into the EU's treaties that makes it easy to handle situations where countries are backsliding. There's the famous Article 7, where if a country persistently defies the rule of law, then eventually, theoretically, it can be denied its vote in the European Council.

11:00But that requires a unanimous vote of every other country in the system. And because Viktor Orban always has at least one ally, including at the moment Robert Fico in Slovakia, sort of Andrei Babiš in Czech Republic, he's always going to be able to wiggle his way out of that. It took about a decade for the consensus to really build inside the EU that what we were facing with Viktor Orban was a new animal. Ultimately, starting in 2022, they began cutting off the flow of EU money to Hungary. At the moment, about 16 billion euros worth of aid has been blocked. It has dramatically slowed growth in Hungary.

11:38An economist we spoke to thinks that It's cut about a percent point or more off of growth each year for the last few years. People are feeling it in their pocketbooks. The EU doesn't have a lot of ways to force countries to implement changes that it wants to implement it.

11:53Rosie Blau:And Matt, you said that this election in Hungary could reshape European politics and popular strategies more generally. Why is that? Why is it so important beyond Hungary? Viktor Orban, for good reason, is an idol to the global nationalist conservative right. He has invented a way of turning a country from a democracy into a competitive authoritarian system without using violence, just through complicated legal mechanisms and the spreading of control through the economy and through information systems and the bureaucracy. That has been an example to MAGA in the U.S. Project 2025, which served as a blueprint for how Trump has reshaped American governance, was based in many ways on innovations that Viktor Korban came up with.

12:45There is absolutely no way to know what's going to happen on April 12th, even more so than in normal elections. Pollsters are going every which way. If he loses, then the standard bearer of this nationalist conservative movement will have suffered a defeat. And if you can have a wave election, even in Hungary, where the electoral system has been dramatically tilted in Fides' favor, then there's hope for doing it elsewhere too.

13:13Rosie Blau:Matt, thank you very much. Thanks, Rosie.

13:28With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

14:23free at quo.com slash business. That's quo.com slash business.

14:36The Pantanal is a vast area of tropical wetlands in Brazil. It's home to a huge variety of bird life, including blue macaws, toucans, and red-necked gabiru storks. Ana Lankas is our And the wetlands have this permanent background hum that comes from what locals call Formula One frogs because the sound they make is so similar to a car racing around a track. But like many thousands of tourists who visit the Pantanal, I was there to see one species in particular. The jaguar.

15:18By an island of wild cashew trees, I saw not one, but two jaguars, a mother and son, feasting on the carcass of a nine-banded armadillo. The male cub was almost the size of his mother, and he was whining for more food and for her attention. He was very needy.

15:40As I approached the pair in a jeep with a guide, they briefly raised their heads before getting back to their delicious lunch.

15:50This was a very hopeful scene for a species that has faced centuries of persecution. And tourists like me may yet help save the species and those it depends on for food.

16:05So you say that you are like thousands of tourists in this regard. They are easy to spot, these things? No, they're actually pretty hard to spot because they're very shy. They're very elusive creatures. and second there's not that many of them left except in the Amazon and in Pantanel but I went to a reserve that puts GPS tracked collars around the necks of some of the jaguars so I was able to see them. The jaguars used to roam all around the western hemisphere they ranged from New Mexico and Arizona in the United States to Patagonia all the way in Argentina in the South, and they were the undisputed apex predator of the region.

16:45Many indigenous groups considered them sacred, and so they mostly left them alone. But in the past century, they faced enormous persecution. Their range has been reduced by half, and half of that has happened since 2000. And so when you say they faced persecution, what do you mean? They faced threats from several different angles. First, people killed them because of their skins and sold them in Europe and the US. Then there's been massive deforestation. So their habitat has just shrunk. And now there's a lot of conflict between cattle ranchers who kill jaguars for preying on their cattle. There's also wildlife traffickers because in the early 2000s, it became harder to poach tigers in India because of restrictions.

17:27And so to feed, especially Chinese demand for tiger teeth and skulls, poachers started exporting jaguars. In Mandarin Chinese, the jaguar is just known as the American tiger. So in a sense, this is a familiar animal conservation story that's down ultimately to land use change. Yeah, that's right. And the main problem for jaguars is that they need a huge amount of land in which to roam. And what's happened with deforestation is that jaguars are now living mainly in these isolated patches of forest. And that kind of fragmentation is a problem because it leads to inbreeding. and that increases genetic diseases in jaguar populations and eventually it prompts population collapse.

18:12But how to fix that if that's just simply what the landscape now is? So because fragmentation is the main problem, lots of conservation organizations and governments are now trying to buy land to create corridors between these kind of patches of undisturbed forests where the jaguars live. So 16 Latin American countries have recently signed up to an effort to connect these different patches of land. And in September, they launched a regional plan, which basically involves adopting standardized methodologies to monitor jaguar populations and diffuse conflict with landlords. What do you mean by that?

18:45So one of the main reasons that jaguars are persecuted today is because landowners kill them out of fear or in retaliation for them preying on their cattle or for whatever reason. There are different ways to prevent landowners from killing jaguars. One is you can have remuneration schemes for farmers who lose cows to jaguars, but those can be very hard to run. An easier solution is basically teaching people how to coexist with the jaguar and defend their flock more efficiently. So I spoke with Yaha Bahos, who runs a jaguar conservation unit in one of the national parks in southern Brazil. It's the park that houses the Iguazu Falls on the border with Argentina and Paraguay.