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The Orban System

Coming soon to a country near you

Orban on election day

This piece called “How Orban Wins”by Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungary, is a must read if you want to know what the future may very well hold if the Republicans have their way. Trump and some of his minions may be clownish and inefficient, but there are plenty of Republicans (DeSantis for instance) who aren’t:

On 3 April 2022, Viktor Orbán won his fourth straight election with his fourth straight supermajority in parliament that allows him to amend the constitution at will. This essay traces how he managed to do that. Orbán’s skillful use of the war in Ukraine and his major expansion of social benefits right before the election were important in that victory. But even more crucial were the rules of the game that Orbán established after his election victory in 2010, rules that have been constantly modified as the opposition has tried to work around the barriers that those rules erected.  Hungary has already been demoted from democracy to autocracy by all democracy raters. This essay shows precisely why those rankings are right. As long as Orbán retains complete control over the rules that govern elections, he can remain in power indefinitely.

In the run-up to Hungary’s 3 April 2022 parliamentary election, the race looked too close to call. But insiders knew that the structural bias in the electoral system meant that the six-party opposition coalition, United for Hungary, was fighting an uphill battle. The opposition had done everything it could to unpick the lock on power that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of the Fidesz party had installed with his revision of Hungary’s electoral system ten years earlier. By giving up their individual party ambitions to run a single coalition candidate against Fidesz’s candidate in each district, the opposition maximized its chances of winning.

Days before the election, even the most Fidesz-favorable poll predicted that Orbán would lose his two-thirds grip on the 199-member unicameral parliament even if he managed to scrape out a majority.1 It takes just a single two-thirds vote of parliament to amend Hungary’s constitution. Thus having a supermajority, as Orbán’s Fidesz has had for all but a short time since coming to power in 2010, means that a party can put itself above the law by changing the constitution at will. So even if the opposition failed to win, taking away Orbán’s two-thirds majority would have been a victory.

In 2022, victory seemed not only possible but probable. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz had won parliamentary supermajorities with less than half the vote. Orbán’s victories could be chalked up partly to social-benefits giveaways before each election and partly to campaigns of fear against migrants and cosmopolitans. But much of Orbán’s electoral success results from an election system crafted to ensure that any division in the opposition automatically generates supermajorities for the ruling party. In 2022, with the opposition united across the political spectrum and running neck and neck with Fidesz in the polls for more than a year, it finally seemed that Orbán could actually lose.

Against all predictions, however, Orbán had his biggest election triumph yet. On the eve of the election, polls had put Fidesz at about 5 percentage points ahead of the opposition, within the margin of error. Yet Orbán came out 20 points ahead on election day, winning 83 percent of the single-member districts and 54 percent of the party-list vote. Orbán did not just retain his two-thirds majority in parliament—he now has a comfortable cushion with 68 percent of the seats. With the worst opposition showing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, United for Hungary members are trying to figure out what path might lie ahead given that four more years of autocracy are in store.

How did the contest go from being too close to call to a blowout? Elections can be organized to turn a plurality party into a supermajority winner. While the Hungarian case has distinctive features, it demonstrates more generally how autocrats can rig elections legally, using their parliamentary majorities to change the law to neutralize whatever strategy the opposition adopts. Understanding how Orbán won his latest supermajority shows defenders of democracy what they are up against when autocrats lock in their power by law.

I highly recommend you read the whole thing if you have the time. She lays out in details exactly how he rigged the electoral system in his favor. And it is very familiar.

When you look at the likes of Ron DeSantis don’t look at Trump as the model. He is just the demagogue who pulled the coalition together. The system they are building to ensure it’s longevity is all Orban. And they know it.

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