Introduction

Today’s guest is Kim Lane Scheppele. She is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. You might remember Kim from a previous episode where we discussed the aftermath of the 2022 elections in Hungary. 

That conversation focused on her essay “How Viktor Orbán Wins” which has become incredibly influential. She’s the author of many other influential essays on democracy and authoritarianism as well such as “Autocratic Legalism”, “The Rule of Law and the Frankenstate: Why Government Checklists Do Not Work”, and “Hungary’s Illiberal Turn: Disabling the Constitution.”

Kim has studied Hungary for decades so when it suffered severe democratic backsliding, she was among the most qualified to explain not just what was happening but what it meant for how we think about democracy. Her latest essay in the Journal of Democracy is “Can Péter Magyar Restore Hungary's Democracy?”

Her essay both explains how Péter Magyar’s political party Tisza defeated Viktor Orbán and Fidesz and the challenges he will need to overcome to restore democracy to Hungary. Our conversation explores those themes in depth. We consider what the most recent election means for Hungary and its politics, but also the challenges democracies face when seeking to recover from democratic setbacks. 

While the conversation focuses on Hungary, the lessons are applicable to a large number of countries around the world. Poland and Brazil are just a few examples of countries where elections offered the promise of a democratic recovery. But anyone familiar with those cases knows it takes more than a successful election to reverse years of democratic backsliding. So Hungary is the latest case to help us understand how to recover after an episode of democratic erosion. 

My challenge to you is to consider whether it’s acceptable to break democratic norms to restore democratic institutions? You’ll find Hungary is an example where leaders face hard decisions about whether to take dramatic steps to reverse democratic backsliding. What do you think? Is this the right approach or the wrong one?

Please share your thoughts. If you listen to Spotify, you can leave them as a comment on the episode. You can also send me your ideas to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. There is a link to the complete transcript in the show notes.

The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. But for now… here is my conversation with Kim Lane Scheppele…

Podcast Interview

jmk: Kim Lane Scheppele, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Nice to be back.

jmk: Well, Kim, I'm always extremely impressed with the work that you do on Hungary. You're one of the people that I really turn to to understand what's going on in this very important country for understanding democratic backsliding within our age.

And your most recent essay in the current Journal of Democracy, "Can Péter Magyar Restore Hungary's Democracy?" was really helpful to understand the most recent election and the current turn of Hungary and the challenges that it has. One of the things that you note are some of the limitations that Péter Magyar and his party are going to have while in power, and it reminded me of this quote from a leader of Fidesz.

It was László Kövér who had said right before the 2018 parliamentary elections, "If we can govern successfully for another four years, much of what we have done will become irreversible, not only in Hungary, but through our example, perhaps throughout Europe as well." And the reason why I bring that up is because that quote was eight years ago, not four.

So now we're at a point where Péter Magyar and his coalition are going to try to undo that. So the question that I've got is how entrenched is Fidesz within the political system within Hungary today?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. So first of all, lovely to be here. Glad you're talking about this topic because we hope that some countries near us might one day face this challenge, right?

So here's the bad news zooming out from Hungary. In the last, I think it's 50 years, there has not been a single case of a democracy that went into a sustained autocratic dip that had a successful election. We call these things U-turns. The pro-democrats come back. And by the way, I'm gonna talk about autocrats and democrats rather than left and right because some of the autocrats are left-wing, some are right-wing, but the dynamic is very much the same.

So there's not a single case where you've got democracy followed by autocratic capture, you get a pro-democratic election and that everyone sort of writes, "You see, everything can turn around. Maybe autocracy's not so bad." None of those pro-democratic episodes have lasted longer than five years, okay? In other words, there's almost always a falling back into the autocratic system.

Why does that happen? That happens because when an autocratic government comes in and entrenches itself, it's very difficult for a new democratic government within the span of, say, a four-year electoral cycle to both get rid of the capture of the institutions and accomplish enough to give them a record to be reelected on.

You know, it turns out four years is not very long to do all of that, and most of the governments that come in after one of these periods of autocratic capture don't realize that they have to act fast to break things, to borrow a slogan from the tech sector, okay? So this is now the challenge that Péter Magyar faces.

He's got 16 years of autocratic capture. That quotation from László Kövér that you read was halfway through this system of 16 years of entrenchment, and frankly, most of what Orbán did got entrenched in the first three years. That's why he's been elected ever since, because he was able to lock down all the independent institutions, change the electoral law, and every time he comes up for election, he changes the electoral law to be able to win again.

Okay? So suddenly that system failed, and Péter Magyar was elected. So how did Péter Magyar do this? He did this because basically the economic bottom fell out of Fidesz. Some of that was their corruption, which caught up with them. Some of that was the pandemic, and Hungary had inflation that went to 17, 18, 20% for several years after the pandemic.

That would kill almost any government. They did manage to get elected in 2022 because they had no challenger. So the economic bottom fell out of Fidesz. The second thing was that Péter Magyar was an unusual challenger. He didn't come from the standard left to liberal sort of opposition parties. He came out of a Fidesz machine, so he was sort of coded center right, but his campaign was definitely not center right.

But the point was that he understood how the center right operated, and he understood how Viktor Orbán's electoral system operated. Votes in the countryside counted two to three times as much as votes in the cities, because Viktor Orbán assumed the cities would always vote against him, but his heartland was the rural countryside.

So Péter Magyar, who was unknown to anybody but his friends, basically, popped out of the woodwork of the Orbán machine in February 2024 and began campaigning by going to every village and hamlet across Hungary.

jmk: Hungary is like the size of Indiana.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Magyar went to 700 different locations in rural areas in Hungary over a two-year period, some more than once.

And when you look at an election map, you realize that the places that he went to in person and campaigned directly with people, understanding how people from the center right think about stuff, because that's really where the countryside is. He flipped all those jurisdictions. So Orbán in 2022, when his popularity was starting to slide, won 85 of the 106 electoral districts, 'cause there's lots of gerrymandering and lots of other tricks.

This time, Péter Magyar won 96 of the 106 districts, which is to say he flipped all these Orbán districts. So that was just remarkable. Okay, so now we can start with the what do you do next? Okay, so now you've got this cobbled together Tisza party, which is still kind of unknown, and the individual MP candidates were not really allowed to speak during the election campaign.

So all we really knew was Péter Magyar. It was Magyar all the time. So we've got this fraction of the parliament where a lot of those candidates are not well-known. People were voting Tisza, which is Magyar's party, rather than voting for the specific personalities. How do you take this ragtag party and turn it into a governing force?

So Péter Magyar has already done several amazing things. We're two months in, and actually since my article was published a couple weeks ago in the Journal of Democracy, already there are new things since then. So what did he do right away? The first thing he did was he named a cabinet of experts. He'd kind of promised this, so he put in charge of each ministry people who had extraordinary expertise in that ministry.

So the new foreign minister left her job as vice president of Vodafone London to come and take this job. She has an American PhD in law and diplomacy from Tufts. Language skills, international experience. The new economy and energy minister just left his job as global vice president of Shell. The new health minister worked for 10 years in the National Health Service as a very distinguished orthopedic surgeon.

Okay, so you can just go through the whole cabinet and it's people like that. So they're people who weren't involved in politics before. None of these folks have political backgrounds. They're people who have global experience, international ties, they speak languages, and they have expertise, and he's put them in charge of all these ministries and said, "Go have it."

So already, just to give you one example of how he has to govern. The health minister comes in, immediately starts trying to figure out, okay, he knows what's wrong with the health system. He's worked in it. So for example, two weeks in to his reign as health minister, there was an operating room in a regional hospital in a city called Veszprém, and the operating room's air conditioning went out in the middle of a heat wave. He's a surgeon.

He understands how catastrophic that is. He describes in Facebook posts — 'cause all these ministers are on Facebook telling you every day what they do — on his Facebook post, he said, "Look, there was this emergency. The docs knew that you pack the patients in ice. Immediately, the technicians went to work.

They figured out some fix for the air conditioning, but what I've realized is that this is a structural problem." So he put out this survey to hospitals saying, "What is the air conditioning system like in all of your hospitals? How many of your rooms are air-conditioned? How stable is the air conditioning in the emergency rooms?"

He gets a survey back from all the hospital directors in a week. Only 52% of the hospital rooms in the country have reliable air conditioning. So he then says, "Why don't they have air conditioning?" Then it turns out it's because the electrical grid won't handle the upgrades. Within a couple weeks, what the guy did was he put together a budget.

What would it take to upgrade the air conditioning in hospitals across the country so every hospital room and every hospital has reliable air conditioning? Some of that's air conditioning budgets, some of that's upgrading the power grid. He submits this to the parliament. They immediately vote an emergency appropriation to fund the air conditioning, and they put the upgrade of the hospital electrical grid into their plan to the EU, which involves upgrading of critical infrastructure.

All that's been funded now in a month. So here's how you govern effectively. You take really practical, down-to-earth problems, and you could see thousands of Hungarians following Zsolt Hegedűs, who was the guy who's posting all this stuff about what's happening to air conditioning in hospitals. Other ministers are doing similar kinds of things.

So they hit the ground running, and they govern.

jmk: When I look at countries that are trying to create a democratic renewal, there's two tensions that I notice. One is there's an impulse to try to install technocratic leadership that just gets basic things done and gets them right. But then there's also a secondary impulse, which is oftentimes that the party that's now in power is moving in a different ideological direction, and oftentimes they see this as their opportunity to fundamentally change not just the institutions to make them more democratic, but to put policies in place that they previously couldn't put in place.

I feel like that's oftentimes where we run into trouble because oftentimes voters are voting out things like the corruption, the incompetence, the poor governance, and it's oftentimes misread as a message to go in a different ideological direction when that's not always the case. It sounds like Péter Magyar is much more positioned to focus on just getting things done right, renewing democratic institutions, rather than trying to shift the country in a completely new ideological direction.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, I think that's true, and I think the thing to say about Péter Magyar's campaign is that it was not particularly ideological. It focused on Fidesz's massive corruption, which had finally become visible to all, and it functioned on the fact that government wasn't working, and it connected the two by saying they've stolen all the money.

That's why you're not getting these services. That was his campaign, and that's very much the focus of what he's doing when he governs, okay? So he puts technocratic people in charge of the ministries, but then there's the separate thing he has to do, which is to renew the institutions so that they're not trying to sandbag him with Fidesz loyalists who get in the way of trying to actually fix the corruption and fix the brokenness of Hungarian democracy.

So that's the part that he's doing himself. It's a nice division of labor. I think it's actually a pretty good model. You send the technocratic ministers out to just get stuff done, so you have a record to run on for the next election. Then you hold close to your vest these proposals to change things, and this is where Péter Magyar — I mean, he's a lawyer. Orbán's a lawyer. They all work by changing the law, then moving into it, in a way, and that's what Péter Magyar is also doing.

So they've hit the ground running with a huge number of laws. As we speak, they just yesterday passed this massive 17th amendment to the Constitution, which has the effect of firing the holdover president, getting rid of four of the constitutional judges, including its, shall we say, inadvisable president, and it also now fixes a lot of the corruption in the system.

So one way that Orbán's system was corrupt was that a huge number of laws that weren't really about the basic structure of society but were about rewarding his cronies got entrenched through laws that required two-thirds majorities to change. But Péter Magyar has two-thirds. He can change them. One of the things he's done is to change them so they no longer require two-thirds majorities.

In other words, put a whole bunch of things back into the democratic process so that ordinary elections can change policy. So they took all that policy stuff and detached it from the constitutional structure and made it amenable to democratic change. One other thing they did was they passed an earlier constitutional amendment.

The first one they passed, it was the 16th. Orbán's constitution went into effect in 2012. He'd already amended it 15 times. Once a year, they just figure out, "Well, how do we want to escape the handcuffs we put on ourselves?" Okay, so what Péter Magyar is doing is trying to put more handcuffs on the process.

And so the 16th Amendment limited the terms of office of any prime minister to eight years over a career. And he said, "And I will be bound by this." So he's binding himself, right? He's telling you, "I got elected for four years. Maybe I can get reelected if you'll have me, but after that I have to leave." And he said, "I'm bound by this."

The clever thing about that amendment is, of course, that it disqualifies Viktor Orbán from ever coming back. Viktor Orbán was prime minister for 20 years, four, and then he came back for 16. So that disqualifies Orbán. And so what they're doing is they're aiming to remove and disqualify the people who constructed the dictatorship.

And what they're also doing is because they're focusing on corruption, they established in the 17th Amendment something called the National Asset Recovery Authority under the parliament, so not under the Prime Minister's office. And there are investigative committees in the parliament that will feed into this operation, and what it's allowed to do is to go after the corruption and claw back the money.

Okay? So the slogan is "Make Fidesz poor again." Take all of these people that got immensely wealthy under Orbán. I mean, Orbán himself, but the richest man in Hungary is his grade school-educated pipe fitter, who is actually the guy who's holding all of Orbán's accounts. They call him Orbán's walking wallet, like it's where Orbán stashes his cash.

But Orbán's father is wealthy, Orbán's kids are wealthy, Orbán's son-in-law is wealthy, and the whole inner circle. So what they're trying to do is figure out how did all that money get stolen out of the state budget, and they've come up with some eye-popping amount that they believe was stolen from the state budget, and they're gonna go after these guys and claw it back.

Okay, so that's interesting because so far they're not talking about criminal prosecution. The way they're dealing with these guys is to disqualify them and to take back the money. You know, I actually think that's kind of brilliant. I mean, if you disqualify them from serving anymore, and if you take away their cash, then maybe you don't have to put them in jail.

That way you tamp down the anger of their supporters. So that's what they're trying to do. They're methodically going through the government and looking at all the choke points where Fidesz people were in charge of stuff, and they're trying through legal means to get rid of them.

jmk: So I was shocked that Orbán did not just lose but the opposition actually won a two-thirds majority, enough to be able to completely change the constitution, because what terrified everyone who studies democracy about Hungary in 2010 was that Orbán did not just win — it was the fact that he won this two-thirds majority that allowed him to completely rewrite the constitution without any input from any other parties, any other groups.

He was able to write it the exact way he wanted, and then the idea behind it was that they could lock in policies even after they lost power because if it required a two-thirds majority to change the policy, even for just basic legislation, it meant that if they lost power but they had, I don't know, forty percent of the seats, they'd be able to block any change to previous policies and previous reforms that they had done.

The opposition now has the same two-thirds majority that Orbán had and the ability to completely rewrite the constitution however they want. They can pass constitutional amendments at will. They can do everything that they want, assuming that his coalition is in lockstep. So I guess the question I've got here is how consolidated is this coalition?

Do they actually see eye to eye with each other or is it this gangly group of people that just happen to oppose Orbán and now all of a sudden you've got leftists, you've got center right, you might even have hard right former Jobbik supporters within the party that want to go in completely different directions and nobody can quite agree so that they can't pass anything?

It sounds like they're passing constitutional amendments. So is this a party that actually has a vision of where they're going or is this just a loose confederation of groups opposed to Orbán?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, I think we don't know yet, and part because we don't really know who these members of parliament really are. From what I gather, there were a couple ways they found these people. One was that Péter Magyar... And this is another article in Journal of Democracy, by the way, by Hanna Folsz, as long as we're promoting that issue. She's an amazing Hungarian sociologist, just finished her PhD at Stanford, has a postdoc at Harvard.

She's just a star. And what she's been doing is to go out and figure out, so what was happening in the countryside that enabled Magyar to win all those votes? And then how did they generate the candidates from 106 districts if there was no real party there? It was Magyar and whomever, so he didn't really have a party structure.

So how'd they do it? So it turns out that Magyar had organized, had encouraged people to self-organize, 'cause he didn't have the money, he didn't have the media, he didn't have a lot of stuff. He encouraged every place he went people to organize these semi-autonomous groups. Again, his party, in quotes, 'cause it's got very little infrastructure, but his party was called Tisza.

Tisza's the name of a river in Hungary. And so he would say to people, "Look, organize among yourselves. Figure out what you can do. You have power. You can do stuff." And there were more than 2,500 local groups that were formed that called themselves Tisza Islands, taking advantage of the fact that Tisza's the river there, the islands.

And these groups did everything from hold book clubs or have speakers in, to some of the ones like in Budapest provided concrete aid to poor families in the countryside. They provided legal advice to people — whatever the local group had as a thing they could do, they did. And these 2,500 groups helped the party figure out who among them is good at organizing.

You know, who actually follows through on what they say they're gonna do, you know? So it was less ideologically driven and much more who's effective, who can get stuff done? Like, if you have a book club, is there somebody who actually organizes the meetings and has cookies when you show up? It was literally kind of that level of organization.

And the Tisza Islands helped this small group of people around Péter Magyar figure out who to pick as the candidates. So far as I can tell, a lot of them are people who were like small businessmen or teachers. It's kind of the professional self-starting middle class. They were the people who actually got the most hit by Orbán in the end, because what the corruption did was take business away from independent small businesses and channel it into the people who had contacts, and therefore contracts, with the Orbán system.

So these were the people frozen out and mad. So a lot of the people who were part of this Tisza movement are against corruption, in favor of having the state work. Their ideological configuration is not so clear. So what's starting to happen now is that the traditional liberal to left parties in Budapest who weren't sure about this guy, 'cause he came out of the center right, who knew they were gonna disagree with him on stuff like immigration, which they already have, they're starting to say there is no opposition in the parliament.

Okay, now Fidesz is sitting there, and then there's the far right party. So there are technically opposition parties, but what the sort of liberal groups mean by this is that we're not there. Nobody from our groups got picked, and we are not included, and therefore there is, quote, "no opposition." And then those liberal groups are starting to criticize some of the laws that Péter Magyar is putting through.

And I must say, I agree with some of their criticisms. Not all these laws are perfectly well drafted, and Péter Magyar has included in his inner circle no one who was involved in any government before, and that includes his legal team. They're taking a lot of Orbán tricks and running them in reverse. So what all that says is that the coalition may break apart, or the coalition may get challengers, or there may start being resistance.

But these liberal groups in Budapest, I hate to say it because these are all my friends, right? But you look at opinion polls, and you've got 70% of the public behind Magyar. That was more than he had when he was elected. He got 53% of the vote and 71% of the seats. That's the legacy of Orbán's disproportionate election system.

Once you hit this tipping point, then you get bonus seats, and that's what he got. I think it was two weeks after the election, one of the good pollsters actually conducted a poll and said, "Who did you vote for?" And 70% of the people said they voted for Péter Magyar. And his popularity has stayed up for two months, even though he's doing stuff like firing the president.

They just dismantled the media authority, and they fired the guy who'd been the chief censor for the last decade. And they've been doing this fabulous stuff with media, if you believe in getting rid of disinformation channels. The public media was broadcasting only Fidesz's line. So Magyar came in, fires the board of the public media.

They're gonna completely redo the news organization. And last week, I think it was, on everyone's television screens, if you turned on public television, it said, "We apologize because we have been telling you lies all these years. We are remaking ourselves to tell you only the truth. Please stay tuned." You know?

And it was just remarkable. So in the meantime, they're showing movies until they get their new news organization together, but they've already started hiring real journalists. There's a ton of absolutely fabulous journalists in Hungary who have been freelancing, working for international media and so on, and a lot of them are now gonna be repatriated into the public broadcaster.

So they are moving fast and breaking things and increasing their public support.

jmk: So in 2022, there was a sense that the opposition was going to win up until it got to be much closer to the election, and then it turned out that Fidesz had a landslide victory.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah.

jmk: And that was actually what your article was based on, how Viktor Orbán wins, was about that election, explaining how it is that he went from being expected to lose a close election to having just a dominant landslide victory. And it felt that part of the problem was really threefold. One of them was Viktor Orbán didn't play fair. We can set that one aside. The other one was that the opposition didn't really stand for anything. I mean, it was this loose amalgamation of leftist groups and then Jobbik, which Jobbik is even farther to the right than Fidesz.

And to be honest, it felt like Jobbik actually outperformed the more leftist groups within Hungary within that election. And now we see somebody who's from the center right winning, being able to beat Orbán. I guess what I'm wondering is, what does this say about the Hungarian electorate? I think there's widely been an assumption that Orbán won in 2010 because the socialists were discredited, the left was discredited, and then he continued to win through dirty tricks and manipulation.

But watching how this past election turned out and how the last few elections have kind of hinted at a sense of what the Hungarian people are looking for in terms of policies, I do get the sense that Hungary is much more conservative, much further to the right than I think a lot of people fully acknowledge who want to see a democratic renewal.

Am I understanding that right? Or do you think that this is just kinda how this past election played out, and that we'll see a resurgence of the left in future elections?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. So I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I think Hungary is a center-right country, and one of the ways that Orbán was able to stay in power as long as he did, a lot of it was dirty tricks.

A lot of it was also that he kept killing off all the other competitor parties of the center right, and then he started trying to steal voters from the far right because he always saw his biggest challenge as being the far right. Because again, if you rig the election system so that if you win the countryside, you win bonuses, the countryside was also where the far right was strong, so he was always worried about them.

Didn't care about the liberals or the left because they were gonna win Budapest. They might win Szeged, but they were not gonna win anywhere else really, and frankly, they didn't try. I mean, in all of these countries in the former Soviet world, the liberals are terrified of leaving the cities. They just don't go anywhere.

So they live in a bubble, and they talk down to people. I mean, anyway, these are my friends. I love them dearly, but I don't think they're effective politicians, frankly. And Hungary really is a center-right country. So what you needed was a force that was at least not hostile to center right to win an election and to win an election big, and to also realize that the way the system was rigged was that you had to win the countryside to win a big enough election.

And to their credit, the liberal and left parties in Hungary stood down and did not try to interfere with this, and they went along, and they mobilized, and they voted for Péter Magyar even though a lot of people had reservations. Because, you know, one thing that would have been very easy for Péter Magyar to do is to step into Orbán's seat and drive this tractor off into the sunset with the machinery that Orbán had put in place.

That was the worry. So far, that does not seem to be the case. The fact that he's firing people quickly I think is a very good sign. I think he also understands that unless you really break down the Fidesz monopoly on all of these institutions that are likely to be able to block what he can do, that he will not have enough to show for a four-year term in office to be reelected. And I think he's going to have to — I hope he does — follow through on the promise to change the electoral law so that it really is a proportional representation system and not one that generates these huge super majorities for the parties that understand how the system works.

Yeah, I do think that whoever is gonna govern Hungary is certainly gonna be center right. Let me just say, this is true across the region really. Like, if you look at Poland, the party that people describe as the left-wing party, like the coalition that's currently in place, to us — I mean, he's a member of the European People's Party at European level. Those are the Christian Democrats. That's the Angela Merkel party. That's the left in Poland. The Hungarians were always members when they went to European level of Alde, and one party was affiliated with the Social Democrats, but that party is gone. Okay, so the left in Hungary is still centrist in Europe.

Even so, I think they're to the left of where the majority of their electorate is.

jmk: In 2010, when Fidesz won two-thirds of the seats rather — with barely over a majority of the electorate — the Socialists who had been in power for two terms before that and multiple terms before that even, they collapsed.

Now, some of that was due to a scandal where the prime minister had said that we lie all the time. They had dealt with a lot of fallout from the financial crisis. I mean, there was a lot of stuff going on. But for Orbán to lose in such a dramatic fashion when he had tried to rig the electoral system on top of that to make it so it was impossible for him to lose this badly says to me that this was just a catastrophic loss of just monumental proportions.

Is he still the leader of Fidesz, and if so, is Fidesz even likely to return, or is the opposition going to reform into a completely different political party? I mean, we saw the Socialists try to survive after 2010. They weren't able to do it. Do we think Fidesz will?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, so you're right, the socialists and the liberals — and the liberals didn't even run a slate in 2010 — and the socialists were discredited and just disappeared.

And then various small parties on the left came up and collapsed and fought with each other. You know, it's the usual thing on the left. You know, you wanna really go to war with somebody with whom you disagree with 10%, and you kind of ignore the people with whom you disagree with 80%. It's the US too, right? It's a lot of countries. The left just loves to eat its own young.

So if you ask people now in Hungary, and my friends from sort of across the political spectrum all tell me, "Fidesz is dead." They can't survive this kind of monumental collapse. Viktor Orbán has lost all of his credibility. The party cannot survive without him 'cause it's really built as his vehicle. And actually, what happened yesterday when the 17th Amendment went through the parliament is that the party leader of Fidesz in the parliament resigned from the parliament and just said, "I'm quitting." Gergely Gulyás. So yeah, I mean, it's just like you can see Fidesz kind of crumbling. So most of my friends say, "Okay, Fidesz is dead."

I'm not saying that, A, because I've known Viktor Orbán for 30 years, and B, because I've looked at all these other U-turn countries. And Fidesz won 37% in the election. Now their popularity is around 20%. Viktor Orbán's popularity was 20% two years after he came to power when he ran through the new constitution and everybody could see they were engaged in autocratic capture.

His popularity dropped, and he came back. Viktor Orbán's only 62. He can come back, and he's a fighter. He's not the kind of guy to give up. He muscled his way back in. They had a party congress. They reelected him the leader of the party congress. He has said very little, but he's got his hand up the back of his puppets, as they say, in the Hungarian government. And President Sulyok, who doesn't have much of a spine, said, "Okay, well, you know, maybe I should leave." You know, like he was sort of open-minded to the thought that he could be replaced somehow. Viktor Orbán got to him and said, "You're there to provide checks and balances." So Sulyok immediately says, "Checks and balances."

So Orbán's feeding lines. I mean, I know it's him. I know his signature style. He's feeding this stuff to them. He's gotten to the international monitors. So Human Rights Watch came out with a "No, you can't fire the president without due process. He has human rights." The Venice Commission immediately took up the invitation by the now-fired president to come to Hungary and intervene in the process, which usually they wait for a law to be finalized before they comment.

They jumped in right away. The people that they've sent have previously said in other transitions, "You can't honor the rule of law by breaking the rule of law. You can't fire people." In other words, the Fidesz line has got the international organizations on their side. That's gonna give Fidesz a boost.

You've got this third-largest parliamentary party that he's formed. It's still there. He's got an infrastructure that is actually pretty resilient. Now, they've defunded it. One thing that also passed in this 17th Amendment is the defunding of Orbán's big propaganda outfit, okay? So he's gonna have to get money from elsewhere, but he had lots of money coming from Russia, from China, from various autocrats who were supporting him.

There are a lot of people who have survived in exile when their party had representation in the European Parliament, which Orbán's party has a big fraction there. Like Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, these guys survived on the fact that their parties were supported from Brussels until they could win at home.

Orbán's got a structure, and Orbán's got determination. Sometime later in July, he's gonna give a speech to the party faithful at the annual party congress, which meets provocatively enough in the Hungarian region of Romania, to basically say, "We still believe in greater Hungary," the old borders of Hungary, which now encompass a lot of the territories of the neighboring states.

He's gonna come out with a speech. He's thinking. After every defeat, Orbán takes time to think, and he comes back, and he fights back, and he wins. So I don't think he's gone, and I'm worried that a lot of people in Hungary believe he has gone, and they're not preparing for when he comes back.

jmk: Well, Fidesz surviving and Orbán surviving might be two different things.

Kim Lane Scheppele: True, but Fidesz is his vehicle. I mean, Orbán is nothing without Fidesz, and Fidesz is nothing without Orbán. So Fidesz may go through a huge transformation. A lot of people will leave.

jmk: Or they could end up founding a new party, and it could be just as anti-democratic as Fidesz. It doesn't mean that a new party is going to reconcile itself with democratic values either.

The opposition could be very anti-system, just as much so, maybe even more so. Could fold Jobbik within its wing and have a very strong far-right presence. We don't know what direction that they might end up taking.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, if I can just say one thing. Jobbik, by the way, also collapsed after the last election. So in this election, there is a far-right party, looks, talks, acts like Jobbik, but it's called Mi Hazánk, which means our homeland, okay? So already Jobbik collapsed because its leadership tried to cooperate with the liberal parties to get rid of Orbán, and then their followers all voted for Orbán, and the party collapsed, okay?

So it's not Jobbik. You have to keep updating your Hungarian parties. It's Mi Hazánk. They have six seats in the parliament. When the 17th Amendment passed yesterday, Fidesz walked out. Mi Hazánk were the only ones who voted against it, so it was all of Magyar's representatives against six of the far right.

jmk: Now, you mentioned how some democratic monitors are questioning some of the moves that they're making within Hungary. That is something that concerns me in a lot of parts of the world, is the fact that you start playing constitutional hardball, and it starts becoming difficult to determine what is something that is defending democracy versus something that is further undermining institutions or destabilizing institutions within a country that could harm democracy in the long term.

But one of the things that is different about Hungary right now is that they actually have the votes to legally change the constitution, which is a very big difference than what's happening over in Poland right now, where Tusk has a small parliamentary majority, doesn't have the presidency. Still, even after this past election, he wasn't able to capture the presidency within Poland.

So they have much more limited means to be able to make change. Now, to be fair, the Law and Justice Party over in Poland never had a two-thirds majority either. They didn't have the ability to just change the constitution at whim. And so a lot of the moves that they made were oftentimes questioned because of legalities, the fact that they were making moves that people questioned whether or not they actually abided by the constitution.

Hungary was always different because Orbán had the votes to change the constitution, and now Péter Magyar has the votes to change the constitution in a different direction. So it feels like it's a very different situation in both directions within Hungary in terms of questions of rule of law compared to other countries that we've seen that have undergone democratic backsliding and had the opportunity to recover as well.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And there's part of me that's terrified about watching what Magyar is doing so quickly to change the constitutional system. So it's just one of those tightrope walks that you gotta get to the other side and see if he climbs down. There's a lot of reasons to believe he's going to, and that there would be a rebellion if he didn't.

So in all these countries that have had U-turns, just to go back to that, 'cause here we are in one. You look at three leading countries. You look at Brazil after Bolsonaro, you look at Poland after the PiS government, you look at the US after Trump won. None of their successors won by very big margins. So the fact that they didn't have constitutional majority possibilities in their parliament was a function of the fact that the elections were close.

Okay, and when the elections are close, you're in a fundamentally different situation than you are when you get this overwhelming majority that gets bigger after the election, in which the governing party seems to collapse. Okay? So that's the unique situation. One of the things it tells you is that if you're aiming to overcome a dictatorship, you need a huge tent and a big victory to get the running room to do it, 'cause if you have a narrow majority, you just won't be able to change enough, and then that's when the autocrats come back.

That's step one — you gotta win the election big. And when the elections are big, that's hard, so Hungary is an interesting example of that. So then the question is, okay, so what's the rule of law while you're destroying the rule of law? If the rule of law is the Fidesz rule of law, you've gotta get rid of the Fidesz part of the rule of law, which often means getting rid of the law.

So what's being criticized in the 17th Amendment is that the president was fired by lowering the retirement age effective now, applied immediately to him, and once he signs the law, he is then fired the next day. That seems pretty harsh. And ditto, that's how they're getting rid of four of the constitutional judges, by just lowering retirement age, showing them the door more or less immediately.

That's not very rule-of-law-ish because, you know, normally if you're elected to a position that has a term of office, you should be able to serve out the term, and then the law applies prospectively to the next occupant. Okay, so this is a rule of law violation. This is why Human Rights Watch has been critical of what Hungary's doing.

It's why I suspect the Venice Commission will also be critical. We haven't seen their report yet, but it's the kind of thing they would say. So I've been defending this kind of rule of law violation, not so much on legal grounds, but on political transformation grounds, like what we know from the track records of other countries.

If you don't do this, you can't change enough to get rid of the autocratic capture, and it comes back. And I remind people of what happened after the revolutions of '89, '90 in this part of the world. Everybody was fired from their old jobs, like starting now. As soon as the election replaced people, everybody was fired, and they replaced the heads of the judiciary — I mean, they did all this stuff.

Now, they did it under a slightly different cover, which was lustration. What did you do in the communist time? And if you did bad stuff in the communist time, you can't continue to serve. Some of that was more individualized, but a lot of it was just not. If you were a party member, you were out. And at that time, none of these organizations thought that was a problem, because you're getting rid of communism, and it's an ideological shift, and we're all in favor of democracy.

And these were dissidents taking over, and we believed them. So I'm saying when Péter Magyar was campaigning, he referred to the Orbán government not as the Orbán kormány, which is the Orbán government, but as the Orbán rendszere. Rendszere was the term they used to talk about the communist regime. It means more like regime.

And what happens when you have an end of regime is you have a rendszerváltás, which was what they called '89, '90. And when Péter Magyar won on election night, there was this huge sign above the stage, you know, where Magyar accepted the election results, and it said, "Most rendszerváltás" — now regime change. And he's been talking about it as regime change, and duplicating the kind of stuff they did in '89, '90.

I just find it interesting that all the human rights groups thought that was great and think this is not great. Now, I was there for '89, '90, so that's my memory, and I remember when they all did that. And it is scary, 'cause you've gotta trust the new people, and you've gotta trust them to put in place restraints on their own power.

So that's why the 16th Amendment is that Péter Magyar can't serve for more than eight years. That's good. And soon, Péter Magyar says, "We will start a new inclusive constitutional drafting process to make the permanent changes. These are interim changes so that we can get to the point where we make permanent changes."

That's also good if they actually convene a constituent assembly, if they recognize restraints on their own power. We're gonna see when they get to appoint a new president. If they just appoint Tisza loyalists, this will be not good. If they appoint somebody who rises above politics, that will be a good sign.

By the way, Péter Magyar's own uncle was one of those presidents who rose above politics, a guy called Imre Mécs. Péter Magyar comes from a family of lawyers, and his uncle, Imre Mécs, was one of Hungary's most distinguished international law experts and served as president in a very distinguished way. So if that's the model Péter Magyar has for a president, we're gonna be okay.

jmk: Is the constitution actually a problem? Because it felt that a lot of the issues with the constitution was the fact that it took very high thresholds to be able to change things. And because Fidesz was currently in office, it meant that they were entrenching their ideas into power. But that's not necessarily a problem, or you could just change the things that are a problem and just look at those piecemeal.

I mean, is the constitution itself really a problem that was put in, or is it something that just needs a couple tweaks to be able to make it functional within a more democratic system?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Actually, I think it needs more than a few tweaks, and I think it would be good to open this up to a public discussion. Orbán's constitution was written behind closed doors by who knows whom, shoved through on a party line vote. It needs to be looked at. And in particular, I think what Hungary really needs to think about is a huge structural change, and this goes back to the transition, the very fast transition from communism to what followed it, and that is that they took the communist constitution, amended it and kept going.

And the amendments didn't fundamentally change the system. So what happened was that they took a unicameral parliamentary system and added a constitutional court to check it. Not enough checks. Once you capture the constitutional court, it's game over. That's what Orbán did. So people are now talking in Hungary about maybe we do need an upper chamber of the parliament.

Maybe we need more devolved power to county and local governments. We need to put more checks into the system. Maybe we need ombudsmen with actual checking functions. Maybe we need more fourth branch institutions, all those kinds of things. That's constitutional talk, and I think that those would be bigger changes than just a few amendments.

I think actually there's a bunch of the constitution that can stay the same. The rights provisions are more or less the same as they were in the '89, '90 constitution. You know, a lot of stuff will stay the same. What they need to focus on is putting in more speed bumps so that another government that sweeps the election can't just change everything all at once, as Orbán did and now as Magyar does.

And so, you know, the other thing that we need to watch for is will they change the electoral system before they're up again so that they can't get a two-thirds majority again? That'll be another interesting checkpoint, but this is a dangerous time. If I can just say one last thing. What Hungary has going for it, which frankly the US would not if we get to that same point, is it's embedded in the EU and it's embedded in the Council of Europe.

Those are two very dense bodies of law that actually require honoring democracy, rule of law, and human rights. If the Hungarian government moves Hungary toward honoring its obligations under EU and European human rights law, that will all be good. I think that's what they're doing. In fact, one of the big amendments they have waiting in the wings is the amendment to bring Hungary into line with all the things Europe is requiring for them to get the money back from the EU.

Okay? Now, that's also requiring constitutional changes, some of which are in this bill, some of which are in a subsequent bill, and that's changing the constitution to restore European standards. Means we're honoring rule of law in Europe, which has always conflicted with rule of law in Fidesz. So my thought was if you use European law as kind of an anchor, that's the thing that tells you whether you're going in a right direction or a wrong direction.

Are you moving toward European standards or away? Then I think that's the check on the system. And so far, Péter Magyar has spent so much time talking about this return to Europe. By the way, Hungary also just a couple of days ago officially now has joined the European Public Prosecutor's Office, which can investigate corruption in Hungary in the use of EU funds, which is something else he's prioritized.

A huge check not only on what the Orbán government did, but on what Péter Magyar's government's gonna do going forward. They've accepted that check on their power. So far, all the signs are pretty good, but, you know, you always have to worry in this kind of system that you've got a new autocrat who just wants to take over and do the same.

jmk: So Kim, we've been talking a lot about Hungary. To kind of fit this in with just bigger picture questions, what has the study of Hungary really taught you about the meaning and purpose of democracy?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Well, I've always said that democracy is bigger than a current government. Democracy isn't about whether the person currently governing your country was elected in the last election.

Democracy is about whether you can get to the next election, have a free and fair election, and rotate power if the people are fed up. In other words, it's a future-oriented concept rather than a past-oriented concept. And I think that the problem in Hungary was that until now all the elections were rigged, and Orbán undermined all of the opponents that he had.

He couldn't undermine Péter Magyar because in many ways Péter Magyar was the mini me. If you knew Orbán 20 years ago, he was so much like Péter Magyar. He doesn't look like it now, he's gotten older and he's out of shape. You know, he's kind of lost that charisma, but he had it once. So Orbán couldn't fight against a younger version of himself.

But democracy is about future elections. But here's the thing, you can only get to the point of restoring democratic institutions if you win the last election with such a huge majority that you really have the public with you as you make radical change. And you may have to make radical change to undo the way that the so-called democratic institutions became not democratic under an autocratic regime.

And you may have to do that quickly 'cause you're on a four-year election cycle, and you may have to do it in a way that just fires the people who are responsible for the dictatorship that preceded you. All of that is much easier if you actually have big popular support behind you, which means big tents, non-ideological, preferably not left or right, 'cause you need people from across the political spectrum to defend democracy over autocracy, and that's what the fight is about.

Once you restore democratic institutions, then you can go back to having left-right fights. But until you have democracy restored, the institutions that allow you to go forward into free and fair elections with real electoral competition, you know, you gotta have a centrist program that's focused only on that.

So big tent, big election victory, big changes, then you can go back to normal politics.

jmk: Kim Lane Scheppele, thank you so much for joining me today. To plug your most recent article one more time, it's "Can Péter Magyar Restore Hungary's Democracy?" Thank you so much for discussing it. Thank you so much for writing the article and writing many of the pieces that you've written before. Thank you.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Thanks. And thanks for recognizing that democracy is a paradox.