By the time Viktor Orbán shuffled to a microphone on Sunday night to concede, his face bloated and the gray of Soviet-era apartment building, his voice doing that wounded-strongman quaver, the autopsy was already written.
Hungarian voters had just ousted the long-serving prime minister after 16 years in power, handing a landslide victory to a pro-European challenger, Péter Magyar, in a bombshell with global repercussions.
With 97 percent of precincts counted, Magyar’s Tisza party had taken 138 of 199 seats on 53.6 percent of the vote, while Fidesz collapsed to 55 seats and 37.8 percent. Turnout cracked 77 percent, a record in post-Communist Hungary. That’s not just a win. That’s a blowout for the ages, a beatdown beyond the eager spin of Moscow and the Trump Administration. (But I repeat myself.)
Read that again. A populist autocrat who had gerrymandered the maps, captured the courts, swallowed the media, and bent the constitution into a pretzel got blown out by ten points in a country he had spent sixteen years rigging in his own favor. What he accomplushed are the things Trump, Bannon, and their fellow travelers only dreamed of in the United States.
How? One word, friends. Corruption.
Corruption is the killer app of anti-authoritarian politics. It always has been. Voters will tolerate a lot of culture-war chum and a lot of flag-humping bombast, but they will not, in the end, tolerate watching the Dear Leader’s plumber buddy buy his fourth yacht while the village clinic runs out of gauze.
Magyar, a former Fidesz insider who knew exactly where the bodies were buried, built his entire insurgency on this one searing accusation: they are stealing from you, and they think you’re too stupid to notice. He campaigned on potholes and waiting lists and the price of eggs. He toured up to six towns a day. He let Orbán’s regime indict itself.
And what an indictment. Orbán’s officially declared net worth is, on paper, the modest stash of a country lawyer. In reality, his childhood friend Lőrinc Mészáros, a former plumber from Orbán’s home village, has become the richest man in Hungary, worth $4.8 billion according to Forbes, atop an empire of construction, energy, banking, and media firms feasting on public contracts. Who do you think really controls those assets?