Corruption Toppled Viktor Orbán. Could Donald Trump Be Next?

0:00This spring, the Chicago Independent Venue League presents Civil Fest 2026, a celebration of live music and community events across Chicago's independent stages. From April 16th through 25th, experience concerts and special events at venues like Metro, Salt Shed, Talia Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, The Auditorium, Ramova Theater, Beat Kitchen, Chop Shop, and dozens more. From intimate clubs to legendary rooms, all spotlighting the artists and spaces that define our city. Learn more at civlchicago.com. Civil Fest 2026. Your city, your venues, your festival. What is your favorite Trump Pope meme?

0:46Oh my God, they are so good. But I kind of like the one of Jesus holding up his fingers and the caption says, this is my eye doctor asking me how many fingers I see. That was pretty good. I was going to say, I happen to like the one of all the doctors in the pit dressed in their white robes and red sash. That has a nice touch about it.

1:09Kim Lane Scheppele:Well, you know, it's backfired for Donald Trump a bit when no less than Sarah Palin is tweeting a picture of Jesus saying, it's time to put down the phone. Wow. Yeah. You've lost Sarah Palin, folks. Well, I feel like this episode, it's a successor to last week's episode. That's true. You're right. Because last week we talked about J.D. Vance's question mark. Will he manage to miraculously do what others have failed to do and solve the 47-year impasse between the United States and Iran in his peace talks in Pakistan? Question mark. Will he manage to rescue the Hungarian would-be autocrat Viktor Orban from what appeared to be almost certain defeat by his intervention?

1:59Kim Lane Scheppele:Question mark. Answer to both. No. So consider this J.D. Vance Part 2.

2:11Kim Lane Scheppele:Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos. Hey, Jane. Hey, Susan. Hey, Evan. Great to be with you. Good morning, guys. All right. So what is J.D. Vance Part 2? It is a question raised by some of his activities over the past few days, which is, to be a populist, don't you need to be popular? A simple insight. Our subject this week is an election that even Steve Bannon called a warning flare for November for Republicans and Donald Trump here in the United States.

2:57Kim Lane Scheppele:Last Sunday, after 16 years in power, many of them as the focus of a lot of excitement from the American far right, Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban lost his bid for re-election in Hungary. His opponent, Peter Magyar, won a landslide supermajority in an election that saw historic levels, nearly 80 percent turnout. This was the highest since the fall of communism. The key many people believe in this election was the corruption of a ruling elite after 16 years in power. We will talk today with an expert who has lived in Hungary, who's written about Hungary, and more importantly, who can help us unpack how did this happen, what are the implications for the global far-right movement, and especially what might it take to defeat a would-be strongman here in the United States.

3:57Kim Lane Scheppele:And, you know, maybe after years of the J.D. Vance's and Donald Trump's of the world focusing on what's going on in Budapest, it's going to be the moment where the American center tries to focus on what the lessons of this small country in Central Europe just might be for the United States of America this fall. Evan, you are in Europe right now. Tell us a little bit like, I mean, this was kind of a seismic moment for many Europeans who had come to believe that Hungary and Orban was almost like a plant from within. You know, somebody supported by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin right in the midst of the EU gumming things up.

4:41Yeah, it was really kind of amazing to be here when this news has unfolded. I was at an event in Amsterdam just the day after the results were announced. And when the topic came up of Orban's fall, there was this spontaneous cheer in the crowd. It was really noticeable. I'm over here speaking in a bunch of places to a lot of people about upheaval in the world. And I think that the fall of Orban has felt for a lot of people, they would say to me, that it feels like the first moment of, frankly, joy that they have felt about politics in a very long time. Because I think he has felt to people here that he is the icon of the revival of blood and soil politics, which is such a present memory for people.

5:29It has been such a terrifying prospect, the idea of far right parties in France and Germany and Italy, which have been coming back. And frankly, everybody is asking the same question we are, which is what does this mean for those movements? And what does it mean in the United States for Donald Trump? What are the lessons here that this might hold for us in America? So everybody over here, I can tell you, is asking a lot of questions about what's happening where you guys are in Washington. And I'm curious how it's been reverberating over the course of the last few days.

5:58Kim Lane Scheppele:Yeah, Jane, we're here in D.C. and phrases like corrupt oligarchy, the strong man who wants to create a quote unquote golden age but leaves his people struggling with no jobs and high inflation, that kind of resonates, doesn't it? Absolutely. I mean, everybody's trying to read into this what they can and learn from it. I mean, and I think a few things come to mind that I've been seeing that have at least caught my eye in it. One is obviously, as we're all talking about, the corruption issue is the Achilles heel of autocrats. And it's not actually a bug in the system. It's the model. You dismantle accountability, you're going to have corruption.

6:36And that's what we've seen. But one of the things that's interesting to me anyway is the way it worked as an issue in Hungary was that the opposition to Orban connected it to the daily lives of ordinary people. They had to close the circle and say, this is why your schools are terrible. This is why you can't get decent health care. You have to bring it home to ordinary people. And so that was one lesson. And the other thing, I think just the reason for the kind of the joy is that there's such a sense of futility that you can't oppose these kinds of dictator-like figures, strongmen. They've corrupted so much of the system.

7:18And I think the lesson a lot of people are taking from this is, oh, resistance is not futile. You can topple these people. And I think that's the upbeat part of this. All right.

7:30Kim Lane Scheppele:Well, that's a perfect introduction to our guest today and a conversation not only about what Viktor Orban's fall means for Europe and the far-right movements he's inspired for so long, but also what does it mean about campaigns here in the United States of America this fall? Our guest today is Kim Lane Shepley. She's a professor at Princeton University, an expert on Hungary, on Orban, democratic backsliding. she's going to help us unpack what actually happened in Hungary this week. Kim, welcome to the show. I'm so thrilled. Kim, thank you so much for joining us today. Obviously, there's a lot to unpack in this election.

8:14Kim Lane Scheppele:You've watched the development of what Viktor Orban called illiberal democracy taking place over the last 16 years. But I want to start with a question about something related to his downfall. And the word here is zebras. I want you to tell me about the zebras and why it is that this might be something that has relevance far beyond Hungary's borders. Yeah, I'm so glad you asked about this. The zebra meme has become one of the agents of Orban's downfall. And that's because Orban is massively corrupt. And in Hungary, it was a little more hidden than it has been, for example, here in the U.S. But Orban has perfected the art of putting public money into private pockets.

9:05A lot of that wasn't so apparent to the general public, but one of the things that broke was a story, because there's still a few intrepid investigative journalists, despite the fact that Orban has just squashed the media. And some investigative journalists discovered this palatial estate that was being built outside of Budapest. The property was allegedly owned by Orban's father because one of the things he does is most of the assets are not held by him, but they're held by his relatives, his childhood friends, and so on. They put up a ladder, looked over the wall of this palatial estate that was being built and saw a flock.

9:43I have to figure out what the collective noun is for zebras, right? But a gaggle of zebras.

9:47Kim Lane Scheppele:Let's call them a flock of zebras. Why not? I tried. Under a gaggle of zebras that were either on Orban's father estate or on the adjacent estate owned by his childhood best friend. And it's like, who owns zebras in Hungary, right? It was the sign of corruption and excess. And as these pictures came out, the opposition, and this is something crucial if we're thinking about this here, it's important to have a sense of humor. And it's important to lean into memes. And the zebra became the symbol of all of Orban's corruption. And so people had zebra costumes and zebra pins and zebra posters and all kinds of zebra memes were floating around the Hungarian Internet.

10:26And it just encapsulated in one symbol just how bad things had gotten. So zebras were crucial to this election. Who knew?

10:36Kim Lane Scheppele:That's right. All right. Quick follow-up question. Did it matter that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were coming in on the side, let's just say, of the zebra man? Yeah, so the Russia influence and the U.S. influence were kind of different, okay? So Putin's influence was less visible. As Orban was failing, it became clear that the opposition was running 10 points ahead, 15 points ahead for the last six months, you know, so this was not a surprise. As Orban got desperate, he literally called in the disinformation team from Russia that had rigged the Moldovan election. It was the same people.

11:16Another one of these fabulous investigative journalists figured this out and publicized the fact that the Russian disinfo team had come in. Suddenly, the Hungarian internet is just flooded with disinformation, with all kinds of Russian bots. But because it was exposed, it was like the zebras. The Russian bots started getting circulated by the opposition saying, here's a bot, there's a bot, here's another But, you know, and so it got it got disabled. OK, so that was actually I'm not sure the Russians had the influence Orbán wanted. But there was another thing that came out during the campaign that was really crucial.

11:53Tapes came out of Viktor Orbán talking to Vladimir Putin and saying, you are the lion. We are the mouse. You know, all we can do is just help you. And it became abundantly clear that Hungary. I mean, if you hadn't realized. We've got a full zoo here, right?

12:08Kim Lane Scheppele:We've got the lion, the mouse, the zebra. I know. There's so many memes floating around. All the animals, right. A whole menagerie of right-wing politics. It's exactly true. But, you know, if you'd followed what Hungary was doing in the EU these last years, Hungary was running interference for Russia with regard to Ukraine. They were blocking aid to Ukraine. They were blocking sanctions on Russians. Now what we had in the run-up to the election was the smoking gun evidence that Orban was talking on the phone to Putin and offering his assistance. But even more incriminating, because more specific, were repeated conversations between the Hungarian foreign minister and the Russian foreign minister.

12:47Again, on tape, it all came out in the run-up to the election, where the Hungarian foreign minister gets a call from the Russian foreign minister. Russian foreign minister says, you know, Peter, can you please get these people, you know, Russians off the EU sanctions list? And Ciaro says, like, I'm on it. And then the Hungarians do it. So it was just clear that this was a direct, you know, taking orders relationship. So that's the Russian piece. The American piece, okay. So this is where, you know, the Trump team and the Orbán team have been joined at the hip for a long time. Orbán has an English language think tank.

13:23It's called the Danube Institute. A lot of the Trump people pass through there. They get courses in sort of how to make an autocracy at home, you know. And so there is this influence that goes all the way down through the two groups. Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation, Heritage and Danube have this formal relationship. You could see it in Project 2025 that the initial steps of the Trump takeover were exactly copying what Victor Orban had done after 2010. So I knew it just from reading Project 2025 before I knew about the formal connection. You could just see it. The influence is so clear.

14:01So there's that connection. So then you start to get above the water level where the stuff is visible. Trump's repeated praise of Orban. Orban made trips to Mar-a-Lago in the run-up to the U.S. presidential campaign. He was received at the White House earlier this year. And of course, Marco Rubio was sent to Hungary after the Munich Security Conference. And J.D. Vance shows up in the closer. Okay, what Orban really wanted from Trump and what Orban thought he got from Trump in that first Washington meeting was a guarantee like the one that Trump had given to Mille in Argentina. You know, if my guy is elected, we're going to bail you out of all your economic trouble.

14:40And Trump had apparently said that. Then Trump took it back. And Trump was, you know, waffling on this. The night before the election, Trump issues a truth or whatever that thing is on his social media platform, basically saying, you know, if my guy Victor Orban wins, we will bail them out. It was too late. Yeah, that was something that mostly got missed, I think, in the U.S. press. Everyone was focused on the Vance visit. Okay, so if Trump thought Orban was going to win, he would have gone himself and claimed victory, right? He sends Vance because he knows that Orban's going to lose. And he sends, shall we say, his least charismatic spokesperson in the run-up to the election.

15:19The polls in Hungary after the Vance visit showed that Orban's popularity dropped after the Vance visit. Oh, that's wild. I mean, but isn't there a real connection between Vance and Orban and basically this whole right movement that underneath the surface seems very cozy with Russia? I mean, and you see it flowing, as you said, through Project 2025, through the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025, that Vance really represents. He really is kind of their ally, even more than Trump in some ways, isn't he? Yeah, I think that's true. Now, I think they all have slightly different agendas, right?

15:59So it's not as tight a network as you would imagine. I mean, it's not like what I was saying where Orban's literally taking orders, you know, from Putin. It's not that kind of relationship. But Russia has always seen its future in undermining the European Union, you know, which sits on its border, which is a real contender. And the way it's done that is it supported right-wing parties. So yes, it's the Danube Institute. It's a much, there's a much bigger operation in Hungary called the Matiesz Korvinas Collegium, which is the Hungarian version. Orbán has devoted about 1 % of Hungarian GDP to holding up this MCC, as it's called.

16:36And Danube Institute is a subsidiary. There's also a Brussels think tank. There's a university in Vienna. There's something called the Center for Fundamental Rights, which is the group that hosts CPAC when it comes to Hungary every year. So there's this whole network of organizations that the Hungarians have built up. and that these are all training grounds for far-right leaders across Europe. I mean, we've seen that Hungary really single-handedly trying to stop funding from NATO for Ukraine in its effort to defend itself against Russia. Is that going to change now? So the answer is yes and no.

17:10Okay. So the yes answer is that if Peter Mbadyar is casting the Hungarian vote in the European Council, then he's already indicated that he's going to remove the Hungarian veto on funds for Ukraine. That said, you know, Orban has over 16 years whipped up a huge anti-Ukrainian sentiment inside Hungary. And the reason is that there's this Hungarian minority in Western Ukraine. And as the Ukrainians were trying to exclude the Russians from participation in public life, The way they did that was by attacking minority languages in Ukraine. So they abolished the bilingual schools. They made Ukrainian the official language so that no longer was the government speaking in any language other than Ukrainian.

17:55That was aimed at the Russians in the East. It also hit the Hungarians in the West. And Orban kept building this thing up saying, you know, our compatriots are being discriminated against. They can't speak their language. They can't educate their kids in their own schools and so on. And so that anti-Ukrainian sentiment is not going to go away in Hungary. So Modyar can't come out and give a giant, pardon the expression, bear hug to Ukraine. He will allow the EU to do it. And I think his whole campaign was return to Europe. And so he will be very pro-European. He will not gum up the works on foreign policy.

18:33So he will enable the EU to support Ukraine. That's the good news. The bad news is that this right-wing network that we've talked about, the Matthias Corvinas Collegium and all of its think tanks that are spread out around Europe, that organization, as the election approached, Orban made those organizations financially independent. The state gave them a huge block of money, which invested in those organizations. So Peter Mordyar can't just cut their budgets. The budgets are insulated. So that right-wing network is going to go on propagating this Russian disinformation stuff and also all this right-wingery that has been undermining liberal government in Europe.

19:16So what you may see is this now supporting Mr. Fizzo in Slovakia, right, or Babish in Czech Republic. So the veto against European support for Ukraine may now come from another source, also funded through that network, right? So the network survives, the government falls. Kim, I'm curious how you think, if you put yourself in the minds of the Hungarian voter for a moment, we started this conversation talking about corruption. And I'm trying to understand how much does corruption succeed in picking the lock on a base of voters who we might think is locked into a candidate? Is it able to, you know, breach that boundary and get somebody to reexamine a candidate who they might have decided they were completely devoted to?

20:04Yeah, I think corruption was huge in this election. But, you know, what was so good about Peter Mondiar's campaign was that he didn't campaign on a list of issues. Here we have corruption. Here we have the decline in public services. Here we have, you know, the Russians are back. You know, remember communism. I mean, he had all those issues. but what he was so clever at doing was saying the reason why public services are underfunded is because all the money is going to Orban's families. The reason why inflation was as high as it was was because the economy has been so tilted in favor of Orban's oligarchs.

20:42He put it together with the pain people were experiencing in their daily lives and that was the genius of it because here he's going around campaigning on kitchen table issues. But he was also, this is where I'm sorry, I have to do a small Hungarian lesson. The word he was using to describe the Orban government, like we'd say Orban government, right? In Hungarian, that would be the Orban Kormán. That would be the normal kind of government. He was talking about the Orban Renser. And Renser means like a system. It's an order. It's an unbreakable block. and it's the word they use to refer to the communist governments.

21:20And so in 1989-90, the new government came in and said, what we're doing is a rencer valkash, which is a change of system, right? So he's advertising this as an 89-90 moment to get rid of the Russians, to get rid of corruption, to get rid of all that dysfunction and all the stagnant economy that the Soviet Union produced. He's saying, here we've got it all over again, right? So it was corruption linked. He linked all those issues in a big message, right? So that if you didn't care about corruption, you might care about, if zebras weren't your thing, you might care about the fact that your local hospital had no toilet paper.

21:59There was a whole toilet paper thing that went on also. None of the Hungarian hospitals had toilet paper. So that was a big issue, right? In the countryside, it really matters that everybody, and that was even true when I lived there, you always have to bring toilet paper to your friends in the hospital because they don't have any. And he would just latch onto those little tiny, you know, these daily life issues. But he linked them together. That was why it worked.

22:23Kim Lane Scheppele:We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, more on how to run against a corrupt autocracy. The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back.

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