The Joy of Choosing Democracy

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It was a bad weekend for J.D. Vance and a good one for democracy, at least in Europe. Vance, of course, had one of the losingist weekends any world-class loser on a losing streak has ever had — the type of weekend that makes Neville Chamberlain look downright Churchillian by comparison. He campaigned — quite loudly and ineffectively — for the reelection of Hungary’s autocrat, a stunningly inappropriate meddling in a foreign election, an event that itself went so poorly that when he tried to flex and call Donald Trump live on-stage, his call went to voicemail.

Then he departed for Pakistan, where after only a single day of negotiations with Iranian over a possible peace deal that would avert a further geopolitical spiral of escalation in Donald Trump’s war-of-choice, Vance announced failure and flew home.

Before I get to the actual point of today’s column, it’s worth noting just how unserious Vance is as a negotiator and diplomat. It astounds me that they couldn’t even pretend to spend a second day at the negotiating table, but then again, when you send Vance, you’re not sending your best. As Jamelle Bouie noted over the weekend, “The funny thing about sending JD Vance out to do sensitive diplomatic negotiations is he has literally no experience. Like, none whatsoever. He doesn’t even have related experience in lawmaking or some executive role. I think people have forgotten that Vance is quite possibly the least experienced person to ever serve as vice president of the United States.”

But anyway — onto to today’s column, which if you’re paying attention is the second-straight hopeful column I’ve written in a row, a perhaps unprecedented streak since January 2025. (As a PS to Saturday’s column on the “pure joy of joy”: Watch this video of the Artemis crew debriefing, where they talked specifically about the role that joy played for them in their crew and their mission. The lesson is important, as I wrote Saturday: Make joy a purposeful part of your life.)

And now the reason for today’s hope:

Last night, after a 16-year reign, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán — Europe’s would-be authoritarian — was defeated in a massive landslide by Péter Magyar and his opposition Tisza party. A democratic country that across the 21st century has slid steadily toward autocracy rose up, resisted, and — for now, apparently — chose a different path. It is as titanic an achievement for democracy as we have seen in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall, one to stand alongside Ukraine’s Orange Revolution or its Maidan protests in 2014 that led to the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych.

The election mandate was so huge that Tisza secured the supermajority that will allow it — if it follows through with its campaign promises — to amend the national constitution and prohibit the rise of any future Orbáns (or even the return of Orbán himself). Perhaps most importantly of all, Magyar in his victory speech said he and his party were coming for all the “Orbánists” who enabled the corrupt regime, demanded the immediate resignations of cronies installed across government, and promised “never again a country without consequences!” In return, the victory night crowd chanted a warning to all the corrupt lackeys and self-dealing cronies who made Orbán possible: “To prison! To prison!”

“Hungarians showing how to win big in an unfair election: organize AND protest AND vote AND demand profound change,” Timothy Snyder posted last night.

It’s important to understand Hungary’s trajectory and pressures in order to see why it matters for the United States.

But first a little background:

I spent roughly a year or so after my original FBI book in 2011 traveling back-and-forth to Budapest and attempting to research and write a follow-up book on the rise of Russian organized crime. I was particularly fascinated with the story of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mafia boss and — at the time — the only international figure on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list alongside Osama bin Laden. Who was this guy that rise to “bin Laden levels of criminality” in the 2000s that I had never heard of?

Hungary represented this fascinating edge between the east and west, between the Russian sphere of influence and the western democracies of Europe. Post-Communist Budapest through the 1990s had become a center of the Russian mafia because it was something of the continent’s “westernmost eastern city,” a place where you could enjoy all the perks of the west with the weak institutions and corruption that eased a life of crime in the east. (Today in book recommendations: You don’t know it, but you really want to read this 20-year-old tale of Hungary’s most famous bank robber — The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber.)

The city for a while teemed with Russian mafia and violence; walking through the city with FBI agents, they’d point out this nightclub that had bombed or that restaurant that had had a grenade thrown through the door.

Mogilevich himself set up his own base in Budapest for years, until the FBI arrived in town and set up its first overseas Russian organized task force in Hungary — an unprecedented half-FBI, half-Hungarian team that became something of a new model for Robert Mueller’s vision for how the FBI could combat the growing threat of vast and sophisticated overseas criminal enterprise. (Here’s a line from my 2011 book The Threat Matrix that now reads a little too prescient: “The FBI photographed at least one of [Mogilevich’s] aides attending a Republican Party fundraiser in Texas.”)

In the end, I never wrote that nonfiction book — nor finished the 200-pages or so of the novel that I tried to turn it into instead — but have ever since remained fascinated by the rise of Russian organized crime and the trajectory of Hungary over the 15 years, both subjects that became more central to the world than any of us would have liked.

• Aside: I did write a big piece about Russian organized crime in 2018 here, if you’re curious for some background — including its relevance to Trump. Fun fact: The Russian equivalent of a “godfather” is known as vory v zakone, a so-called “thief-in-law,” e.g., a thief who makes the law. There have been only a handful ever uncovered in the U.S., fewer than a half-dozen. The first to arrive in the U.S. moved straight into Trump Tower, and a second ran what prosecutors called “an international sportsbook that catered primarily to Russian oligarchs living in Russia and Ukraine and throughout the world,” run out of Trump Tower’s Unit 63A, and a few months after his federal indictment showed up at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Through the 1990s and the 2000s, Hungary — like many eastern European countries — lurched unsteadily toward democracy and the west while fighting off the ghosts of its eastern past and political traditions. Then Orbán arrived on the scene. Under his rule — Orbán, both as prime minister and head of his Christian nationalist far-right party, known as Fidesz — has led an enormous backslide in Hungary. He’s followed the would-be authoritarian’s playbook in every way — attacking the free press, punishing the political opposition, and aligning himself with Putin as the Russian dictator’s puppet-in-Europe — and transformed Hungary into what political scientists call “competitive authoritarian state,” which is to say that “free elections” continue but under increasingly unfair conditions.

Orbán did to Hungary in many ways exactly what Donald Trump, with the full support of the Republican Party, has been trying to do to the United States since last January.

That approach enriched Orbán and his willing cronies, but didn’t do very well for Hungary or for greater Europe —its standard of living fell dramatically and corruption rose as Orbán solidified power, which was terrible for the business environment. For years now, Orbán too has been a thorn in the side of Europe — helping to stall aid to Ukraine and use its own internal EU negotiating power and vetoes to advance Vladimir Putin’s agenda rather than contribute to the progress of a democratic Europe. (Orbán also appears to have some important help along the way from, you guessed it, Semion Mogilevich.)

Along the way, Hungary became something of a rallying cry and focal point for the US far-right, a model of what they could achieve and build (and destroy) here in the United States under Trumpism. Tucker Carlson embraced Orbán. CPAC, the far-right political conference, began offering a Budapest version. And Trump and Orbán have developed as close a “friendship” as Trump has with any foreign leader and — most recently — Trump dispatched JD Vance in an attempt to sway the Hungarian election, meaning that both Putin and Trump were offering foreign interference on the same side, which is quite a sentence to write.

Now, though, we have a different story to tell about Hungary — and ourselves in the age of Trumpism.

Writing in The Atlantic, the great Anne Applebaum, perhaps the world’s keenest observer of eastern Europe, said, “In the end, the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, required not just an ordinary election campaign or new messaging but rather the construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement. And by building exactly that, Hungary’s opposition changed politics around the world. Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people. As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that.”

Certainly history’s long-term verdict remains unsettled today; it may or may not someday show tell us that this weekend in Hungary was a speed bump — akin to Joe Biden winning in 2020, perhaps — before Orbán himself or his regime return and consolidated power for good. Perhaps Magyar and the opposition aren’t the champions of democracy they purport to be.

But for now, Hungary has a chance for a fresh start.

In the short- and medium-term, if Magyar follows through on his promises, it will be great for Europe, good for Ukraine, bad for Russia, and bad for the far-right over the entire globe — all of which, to me, is a victory for the forces of good in the world.

But beyond the geopolitics, the lesson can and should be bigger for us in the United States, as Applebaum says. Autocracies are more brittle than they would like us to believe. We have a chance to restore and fight for democracy. History can swerve, turn, and change.

Every move by Trump and the MAGA Republican movement is meant to project that resistance is futile and their vision for a white Christian nationalist autocracy is inevitable. But we have a lot of evidence to the contrary — from the streets of Minneapolis to the courts to the regular “blue wave” elections happening in unlikely places — and Trumpism isn’t even anywhere as far advanced as Orbánism was in Hungary, where he’s had 16 years to solidify control and depress the opposition.

Simply put, as Timothy Snyder reminds us, “Do not concede in advance.”

How to follow the model of the Hungarian opposition, though, is itself an important case study for Democrats and the pro-democracy opposition here in the United States; the Financial Times’ Ed Luce made an important observation: “People will be closely studying how Hungary’s opposition pulled off their win in such a pro-incumbent system. Important to note that the theme was corruption. Democrats need to get much better at calling out Trump’s corruption.”

To me, “Never again a country without consequences!” is as good an organizing principle as we can have for this moment.

We must always remember, first and foremost, this simple point: We today are still the ones who write tomorrow’s history.

GMG

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