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Yeah, of course. Just feel free to come to the center.

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We just did a panel here at noon on the Hungarian election, and everybody had slides in different formats. So it was… Yeah.

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Okay, I think… I think we're starting.

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Thank you.

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Right.

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Good afternoon. I'm Dan Treisman, co-director of the Center for European and Russian Studies at UCLA.

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It's less than 2 weeks since the historic Hungarian election that threw out Viktor Orban, the most skillful and seemingly unbeatable illiberal populist in Europe.

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Back in the early 1990s, Orban was one of the leading voices for freedom and democracy in the aftermath of the Soviet… of the, uh… Soviet communist order in Hungary. But in his second spell in office, which extended to the last 16 years, he systematically undermined democratic governance, attacked liberal institutions, and hamstrung the European Union with repeated.

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vetoes. His defeat set off celebrations in Budapest, but also across the Western world. I, for one, am still digesting what this means.

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To help us understand this, I'm delighted to have Kim Lane Shepley as our guest today. Kim is the Lawrence C. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton, and a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

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She's an internationally respected expert on the sociology of law, with a long list of publications on post-communist transition, on democratic backsliding and populism in the West, and on the European Union's efforts to restrain illiberal regimes.

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in its midst. She's also a close observer and frequent commentator on the politics of Hungary. So, as I said, I'm delighted to have her here. Welcome, Kim.

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Oh, thank you so much for inviting me and lovely to be here, and I wish I were there in person, because we're having a really awful yucky, rainy, cold day here.

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The weather here is beautiful. So, Kim, if you'd like to start off telling us a bit about what just happened in Hungary.

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Yeah. Right? Well, what I'd like to do, if you don't mind my sharing some slides. What I'd like to do is to explain a little bit about what happened, because on one hand it looks like just an election where the Hungarian public got fed up, but it was actually way more than that.

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And it was way more difficult than that to win. So let me start by just saying that one of the things that contributed to the selection was that the turnout was massive. This is something that was produced the election commission was producing throughout the day.

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updates on election turnout. They didn't, so far as I could tell, actually release the picture at the end of the day of what this looked like, but turnout reached nearly 60… I mean, nearly 80%. And what you see in the chart, the red line was the last election, and then the blue line was the current election.

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And at every point during the day, the crowds just kind of came out. That said, this election was really conducted on a highly unlevel playing field. So one thing I've heard people say is that, you know, weren't you all a little overexcited when you said Hungary was a dictatorship?

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a hybrid regime, or, you know, that it wasn't a democracy. If the opposition could win, then it must have been a democracy, okay? But this is where you need to see how unlevel the playing field was, okay? So, first of all, Orban changed all the rules for the election.

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I detailed all of those in an article in the Journal of Democracy. I can't go into all the details, all the tricks, but the one that's biggest and easiest to understand.

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Was that when Orban came to power in 2010, they cut the size of the parliament in half.

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Even the opposition voted for that. It looked like a good idea. What it meant was that that gave Orban and his allies a chance to redraw all the districts in the country at once.

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And they weren't obligated, as we are in the United States, to make the districts of equal size.

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So that some of the urban districts were three times the size in population terms of the rural districts, which meant you needed a lot more votes to get someone elected from the urban districts and rural districts. It tilted the whole system.

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toward the rural districts, and Orban always assumed that the opposition being sort of cosmopolitan left, whatever, pro-European would never win in the countryside. And basically, he tilted the system so that urban votes were not enough.

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That was true for this election. There was media saturation, because, of course, the Orban people took over every TV station, every radio station, all the dominant print media. The only thing that the opposition did that had this time where they really made extremely good use of it.

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was they had a YouTube channel, they had… they were using Facebook, they were meming the whole thing, they brought out young people through social media, but they did not have, and they were operating against every single billboard owned by the Orban people.

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You could not see that there was an opposition if all you did was look at the mainstream media. The election observers said this time for the fourth time in a row that there was a merger of state and party, which meant that that feed us, the governing party, used state resources to support their program.

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So they were able to hand out 13th and 14th month pensions to pensioners. They were able to raise the salaries of public workers by 20%. They were able to put a freeze on energy prices. So, as the rest of the world has experienced an energy price spike.

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Hungary's… Hungarians didn't see it. So it was just the governing party was using all the levers of the state to stay in power.

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And finally, throughout the campaign, the government weaponized both the prosecution service and the security services. So at what point… one point they tried to charge Peter Madria, the opponent, with a crime. I think they probably provoked a bar brawl.

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Peter Modiere used to have a short temper. Fortunately, he's kept it in line through the rest of the campaign, but they provoked a bar brawl, Peter Modria through somebody's cell phone into the Danube.

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They tried to prosecute him for this, but by this time, Peter Modular was elected to the European Parliament, and he had European Parliamentary immunity.

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And they refused to lift his immunity. So after the prosecution services were dulled as a way of going after him, they then used the security services. So they sent him a fake girlfriend. He'd just gone through an acrimonious divorce. They sent him a kind of honeypot girlfriend who recorded their conversations.

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and made those public toward the end of the campaign, the security services attempted to infiltrate the party's IT system with a goal of shutting it down. Fortunately, at the end, someone came forward from inside the security services two weeks before the election to say.

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Here's what the Urban government is doing. Okay, so they really, through everything at Peter Maudiur, okay? Nonetheless, he was able to win. And how was he able to win? Okay, so one of the secrets is zebras.

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So on the left, in Hungarian, which all but the you know the the Hungarians can will understand that picture. There was an anti-corruption campaigner who flew a drone over the this enormous estate owned by Orban's father, which we really think is owned by Orban.

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And what the drone spotted was a little flock of 10 zebras.

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On the Orban father's estate. The zebra then became weaponized by the opposition as the symbol of all of Orban's corruption. And corruption was one of the huge campaign themes. The picture on the right just came out a few days ago, right? Where like the opposition manage to win the election?

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Sending orban out of town with his zebras, the picture of Putin, the picture of Trump, and, like, all these, you know, kind of symbols of corruption. Okay, that was a big theme in the Maude campaign. But this was connected to the other theme in Madhyard's campaign. So here's Peter Madiar delivering.

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A truck full of toilet paper to a children's hospital. This was in August of 2024. He would go around to the hospitals and he would show with a camera crew and show what terrible condition the Hungarian hospitals were in.

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He did this with schools. He did this with public transportation. Finally, the government banned him from all hospitals in the country. But this was when he was still allowed to go in, and he would say, you go into the hospitals, and they have no toilet paper.

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And why is that? It's because of the zebras, right? It's because Orban is corrupt. So the campaign linked the deprivation of social provision of basic social resources with the anti-corruption campaign. And then linked it again.

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Why is that happening? It's because you've lost your voice, because the last elections were stolen, right? Because democracy has failed. So that was the campaign. This was the result. Okay. Blue is Tisa, orange is always fetus. Green here is the.

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small right. Far right, a small far-right party. Tisa won 141 of the 199 seats in the election for 71%.

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of the Parliament, okay? He won 96 of the hundred and 106 single member districts. Those are the districts Orban gerrymandered for himself. Okay, Orban won 85 of those districts last time.

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Peter Maudier 196 of them this time. So he flipped Orban's bass.

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And he got 45 seats from list votes. Hungarians go to the polls and vote in a constituency election like U.S. House of Representatives. They also vote for a party. And then the seats in the parliament are divided between them. If you know the German parliamentary system, that's the same system.

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All right. So how did? How did Peter Moyer do it? This map tells you everything. Okay, a little map of Hungary. Blue is Tisa, orange is feed us the districts that they won.

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And the darkness of the color tells you the margin of victory.

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Okay, so what that tells you is that not only did Peter Mazdiot win all the blue districts.

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But the dark blue districts went at least 20 points ahead for him. There's a 20 point spread, at least. Some of them were much bigger, like in Budapest, where there was, like, 30, 40% spreads.

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The fetus districts were barely won by fetus. That light orange tells you that the margin was 5% or less.

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Okay, which is to say that Peter Moyer went everywhere and in the places where Fides won.

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Feed us one with very tiny margins. Okay, so this is just, it's a bigger revolution than I think most of the international press has led on. Okay, so how did Peter Mandiar do that? So he realized early on.

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that the system was rigged in favor of rural areas, and he also knew that the urban areas were going to vote for any challenger to Orban that wasn't, you know, a complete far right person, for example.

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So he took his campaign to the countryside. The black dots on this map are where Peter Mardier held rallies, at least once, sometimes two, sometimes three rallies.

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And this will tell you, you look at where the elections were flipped. It was the in-person visits by Peter Moyer. Sometimes he would show up in folk dress. He would always show up.

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Um, you know, and just speak to people in these small villages where no opposition campaign had ever gone before. And you can see that in the, you know, his, I mean, maybe it's a spurious correlation, but I suspect not because again, the fetus media is broadcasting.

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all Orban all the time. Everything the government's done for you and a scare campaign about, you know, if Peter Maduro is elected, he will enter a war and send your kids to Ukraine. Okay, so there was just an overwhelming media blitz in favor of warban, so this was the personal.

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campaign that Peter Mojiar ran. And this is the result again. You sort of see it even more clearly. It tells you that in those dark blue districts, Peter and Moir dire won 60% of the vote or more.

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and in the light shaded areas. You want at least 45%. There was no place in the country where he won less than 45%.

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Right? So this was just an earthquake victory. Okay. Now, this was in a geopolitical context in which the countries in orange had endorsed Orban or helped him before the election.

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And the number of countries that actually supported Peter Moyer and the Tisa Party are there in blue.

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Yes, Poland, more or less, okay? And Hungary. But otherwise, this is one of the few areas where, you know, the USN and Russia were on the same page. This was the rally the night of the election, okay? So everyone turned out. Peter Modria, by the way.

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always travels with the camera crew. Perfect video angles. Everything is done for TikTok. Everything is done for social media videos. His election rally night of the election was on the banks of the Danube. And if those of you know Budapest to the right off screen is the is the beautiful Hungarian parliament building.

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So when he's accepting, you know, and acknowledging his victory, he's got the Parliament behind him. I show you this because the crowds were so enormous.

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that they overflowed this side of the Danube, and some crowds went over to the other side of the Danube and were shooting off sparklers and stuff, trying to get attention. The big banner that characterized, like, the big sort of slogan.

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That was on the banner at this rally said most and that means now regime change. And Peter Mautier always talked about the Orban government, not as the Orban government, which would be Korban.

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But the Orban Renser, which is how the communist government was referred to as system, like a block. It's not a government.

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Now, if we have this big election, so he should be able to govern, because under the Hungarian constitution, a single 2/3 vote of the parliament can change any law up to and including the Constitution, right? So he can undo Orban's constitution. He can undo all those laws that Orban put in place.

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The problem is that all of those offices, the presidency, the head of the election office, but the head of the competition office, the audit office, and, you know, the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, they're all in the hands of Warban's allies. This is a picture of Mr. Shuiak. You'll be hearing more about him in the days to come.

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He is currently the president of the Republic. Okay, so Hungary has a parliamentary system.

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But it has a president with mostly ceremonial tasks.

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However, the president has to sign all the laws the parliament passes.

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And Mr. Schuach, former president of the Constitutional Court, is now President of the Republic, firmly in Orban's camp.

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So the prompt can pass all the laws at once. He can veto them. And and in the last couple of days, as I predicted actually before the election, they would lean into the Orban people would lean into hanging on to the presidency.

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as its way of blocking everything Peter Modiere does, and the way you could see that was that the Orban government.

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amended the law on the presidency last December to make the president impossible to remove by impeachment unless the Constitutional Court approves of it, and the Constitutional Court is also packed. Okay, so you've got this overwhelming election victory in this huge roadblock.

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which is fetus holdover appointments in all of these key offices. And so how is Peter Maudier getting around that? Some of you may know that for the last 30 years I've been writing about the Holy Crown of St. Stephen. Okay, this is the Holy Crown of St. Stephen.

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It's allegedly the crown given by the Pope to the first Christian king of Hungary, nationalists revere it. But also every Hungarian is… it's a kind of symbol of Hungarian unity at the best of times.

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There is usually when you take the oath of office in a government, you pledge loyalty to the Constitution.

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Peter Modiar's people are going to pledge loyalty to the Holy Crown and not just Maduro's people, but the entire Hungarian parliament is going to swear an oath on the Holy Crown instead of the Constitution.

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Right after the election on the left, you see Peter Magier, like, day after, two days after, as soon as he gets into the Parliament building, goes and pays his respects to the Holy Crown.

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What this is, is a kind of symbol of Hungarian unity and nationalism. It's also a symbol that is admired by the far right, so we'll see exactly where this goes. But this is the first sign that Peter Madiar is going to try to get around.

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The Orban Constitution. And good luck with that because he might have to break the law to create new law. And so that's where I'm going to leave it, because that's the road ahead.

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Thank you so much, Kim. That was really a very rich, compact.

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review of what's been happening and the significance. So… You told us quite a bit about just what an extraordinary campaign ran. But Orban is was also a great campaigner and a skilled manipulator.

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So why did he fail this time? Did he?

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I mean, it looks like a mistake or a series of mistakes that he didn't do as good a job as he had in the past.

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People were concerned that perhaps he would refuse to leave office, he would claim fraud, but he chose not to do that. So, can you give us any insight into what went wrong with Orban?

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Yeah. Yeah. So part of what went wrong with Orban was that the EU finally caught up with him. Okay, so Orban's government has been held together, I mean, by autocratic maneuvers, which is to say the opposition has been systematically frozen out of power because it never campaigned in the countryside.

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They just couldn't win under the election system they had. So that was part of it. But it was also the case that the economy under Orban was doing well enough that Hungarians could retreat to private life and everything was okay.

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Couple things went wrong. The pandemic exposed the fact that the hospital system had been massively underfunded.

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The hospitals were full. They, in fact, I think to this day, we don't know how bad the pandemic was in Hungary. It officially has the highest per capita death rate.

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A third highest per capita death rate in the world after the US and Brazil.

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And I think they're hiding stuff because when the pandemic hit, Orban had the military take over the hospitals.

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and exclude journalists, exclude everything, and really limit the information that came out of the hospital system.

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But Hungarians understood. that the public health system had collapsed and it collapsed from underfunding. Okay, so that was the first thing. And the pandemic, of course, you know, had knock-on effects everywhere. Inflation pretty much everywhere.

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Inflation in Hungary after the pandemic. went up to 20%.

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You know, there's almost no government that can survive a 20% inflation rate. And on top of that, and this is where I want to say the EU caught up with them.

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Hungary was getting 2, 3, 4, and sometimes 5% of its annual GDP.

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from EU funds, particularly the so-called cohesion funds that are directed at, you know, development projects, sort of development money for the poorer regions of the EU.

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I must say this was the part I was involved in, so I might overstate it. But for the last goodness I started in 2012.

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gathered steam with a lot of other people to try to convince the EU that the way to bring down the Orban regime, because it was massively corrupt.

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was to cut off the EU money. There's a great and there's some independent journalists, some independent research institutes that, you know, Orban's gone after and attacked and they function anyway. One is something called the Corruption Research Center Budapest.

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Which has done this really excellent analysis of the procurement process and the state contracts that were allocated. And their estimate is that a third to a quarter to a third of all the EU money was just siphoned off into Orban's crony's pockets.

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For example, I'm sure they paid for zebras. You know, I can't prove it, but, you know, where else did they come from?

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And so the question was, could we get the EU to cut the funds?

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Because A, that would be visible to Hungarians, and B, it would cause a crisis inside Orban's regime, because he couldn't pay off his loyalists.

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It took goodness, we had to write the law review articles to say it was possible. And then you had to convince all the institutions to pass the laws. It wasn't just me, it was a whole campaign. I was part of it. And finally, they passed the laws.

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2020 to go with a new budget cycle in the EU.

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And in December 2022, the EU cut off all the money except agricultural funds to Poland and to Hungary.

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36 billion euro were frozen for Hungary, which is a lot in a small country. And it was frozen overnight.

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And what you saw was that suddenly Orban systems started to crack.

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And when Peter Magiar came out of the woodwork, remember, he came out of Orban's party.

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Um, and he… I think the party inside, we were hearing, you know, they didn't have the money to give out. And how were they going to do this? They started raiding the state coffers. The whole thing was a house of cards that was going to fail with 20% inflation as well, right? So the economy fell apart.

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The other thing that happened on Orban's watch, this is… it was sort of Orban's system falling apart, you know, because.

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He hadn't maintained it because autocrats lose their good feedback loops to figure out what's actually happening. The other big thing, so cut off of EU funds, crash of the economy, the health sector is a mess, the final straw.

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A lot of the people standing behind Orban were religious, or they believed Orban's line about Christian conservatism.

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And in the spring of 2024. So this is just a little after the EU funds are cut.

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There was a scandal. pedophilia scandal, it did not involve Orban or Moir dire as players, okay? But it involved a state orphanage, basically. And there were employees of the state orphanage who had been abused, sexually abusing kids.

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And the principle of that orphanage had colluded in covering it up.

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That whole network was broken. They were all convicted of criminal offenses. They were all serving time in jail.

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The principle of the school had connections in Orban's orbit.

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And we think it started with the president of the public, might have started with Orban. In any event, the Justice Minister recommended a pardon for this guy, and the pardon was kind of secretly given.

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And then the pardon was disclosed. And then Orban trying to contain the damage, the moral damage that came from that.

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fired the justice minister and asked for the resignation of the president. The only 2 women, by the way, in Orban's government. Okay.

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Um, that's when Peter Moir dire jumped out of the woodwork.

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By saying, Viktor Orban should not hide behind women's skirts. There's a little bit of a drama here. The justice minister who was fired.

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is the immediate ex-wife of Peter Moyer. And he… acrimonious divorce, everybody knew about it. She had accused him of all kinds of, you know, abuse of her and the kids, and anyway, it was awful.

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He comes out and says, I know where the bodies are buried, and he has tape recordings from the acrimonious divorce with the ex-justice minister showing where the bodies are buried. Okay, he goes on TV, not TV, the YouTube channel. Anyway, but all of that is to say, I mean, I'm giving you lots of detail here.

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But it's not so much. I mean, it's just a whole set of things. It's the economy failing. It's the EU signal which finally broke through to the Hungarian public, which is very pro-EU, that the EU.

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was no longer on board with Orban, and it got through that it was for the corruption.

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And then their moral, you know, authority is challenged by this pardon scandal.

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And then you get somebody who jumps out of Orban's orbit. This is a center-right country. The left, frankly, was never going to win an election unless it built a big tent, which it hadn't done really effectively so far.

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He starts campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. And then he also starts going around the country giving speeches and saying.

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This country should not live in fear because people had retreated because of Orban's control over everything.

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And he started bringing people out to rallies and really just changing the national tone.

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People would say, you'd go to rallies and you'd see suddenly, oh, right, your neighbor as opposed to Orban, too.

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You had no idea because people weren't talking about it. And so that was a kind of snowball effect.

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Tisa Peter Mugger's party has been comfortably in the lead for more than a year, okay?

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And Orban threw everything at him, like I said. They threw the security services at him. They tried to prosecute him for crimes. They… oh, there was a point when they actually showed the government media got a picture. I was going to show you the picture of the bedroom. It was a bedroom.

00:25:28.000 --> 00:25:38.000

camera at the ceiling, rumpled sheets on the bed and saying, coming soon, right? Promising to drop like a Peter Madre sex tape.

00:25:38.000 --> 00:25:57.000

Peter Madrez fans get on, you know, with their social media skills, start doing all kinds of memes of, like, what happened in the bedroom? They show Orban in bed with Putin, and then Orban in bed with Trump, and then all these other, like, configurations, so that, in the end, the government never released the sex tape, because it would have looked like all the AI videos.

00:25:57.000 --> 00:26:04.000

of everything else happening in that room. So, I mean, it's not that they didn't try. They tried everything.

00:26:04.000 --> 00:26:09.000

And this in-person meme-based, very different kind of campaign.

00:26:09.000 --> 00:26:14.000

Let everybody know that everyone else was fed up.

00:26:14.000 --> 00:26:25.000

And it was that sense of not being alone that Peter Madiar generated, that then meant Orban. And Orban looked tired, you know, and he doesn't look healthy.

00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:31.000

And he was trying to campaign on an old campaign of fear of Ukraine.

00:26:31.000 --> 00:26:44.000

Zelensky's picture was all over the place saying, don't let him have the last laugh, which, by the way, was the same slogan they used in 2018 with George Sora's picture all over the place. They couldn't even come up with a new meme.

00:26:44.000 --> 00:26:57.000

They looked tired, they looked old. Orban fired his campaign team part way through the campaign, brought in a new team that had never run a campaign before. It just was a mess, right? On Orban's side.

00:26:57.000 --> 00:27:03.000

And Orban's reaction… he also had fake pollsters, by the way, predicting he would win.

00:27:03.000 --> 00:27:07.000

And some people are now saying that he actually believed his own pollsters.

00:27:07.000 --> 00:27:16.000

You should have known that they don't actually interview people. And he didn't. He seemed vaguely shocked on election night because.

00:27:16.000 --> 00:27:26.000

He was living in a bubble. That's a very long answers, but it gives you a sense of like the whole set of things that had to come together for this to happen.

00:27:26.000 --> 00:27:42.000

Yeah, it's it's fascinating. Of course, it's a very common thing for an authoritarian leader to lose touch to believe the lies of the people that he's appointed to basically lie to him. But at the same time that.

00:27:42.000 --> 00:28:03.000

recent election was in a way, a rerun of the 2022 election, right? A lot of the things that the circumstances had already been there in 2022 so it it.

00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:04.000

Mm-hmm.

00:28:04.000 --> 00:28:14.000

kind of leads us to focus even more on Peter Magyar himself, right? And the role that he played. So I want to ask, what does he stand for? Can you tell us more about who he is, and should Hungarians.

00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:26.000

trust Him, and let me just remind viewers, the Q&A is open, so if you type your question on the question and answer.

00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:32.000

portal, I will get to questions in a little while.

00:28:32.000 --> 00:28:42.000

Great. Yeah. So we're still finding out who Peter Moder is. And actually, I have the feeling he's still finding out who Peter Monter is. Okay, so he.

00:28:42.000 --> 00:28:51.000

He's a center-right guy. He went into Fides, the governing party. You know, right out of college, basically. And he'd been a cog in the machine of the Orban.

00:28:51.000 --> 00:29:01.000

Vancera, as they say, the Orban regime, for 20 years. His views insofar as we know them, are kind of track Orban's views.

00:29:01.000 --> 00:29:22.000

Probably anti-immigration. He has not cozied up to Ukraine. You know, he's, you know, he when the when Orban tried to ban the pride parade last year and then more than 100,000 people showed up, that was also an interesting embarrassment for the Orban government. Peter Mardier did not go to the pride parade, nor did he endorse it.

00:29:22.000 --> 00:29:27.000

So he kind of stayed away from any issue that would endear him to the left.

00:29:27.000 --> 00:29:34.000

Um, and everyone thinks that probably he would basically hold the same domestic policy positions as Orban.

00:29:34.000 --> 00:29:43.000

That said, you know, in traveling around Hungary, and also in becoming the hope of Hungary, you know, you could see him changing as he went along.

00:29:43.000 --> 00:29:49.000

And so, you know, his campaign was focused. It wasn't a left-right campaign.

00:29:49.000 --> 00:30:06.000

It was a democracy dictatorship campaign, right? Different political axis. That's how we could build the Big Tent. It was corruption. You know, he has zebras, you don't have toilet paper, right? It was very much organized around that the Orban circle has enriched itself at your expense.

00:30:06.000 --> 00:30:17.000

And the only way to get it back is to restore democracy. And he just stayed on that message and didn't veer into issues that were left, right, polarizing.

00:30:17.000 --> 00:30:23.000

So, therefore, we don't really know. Now, there are a couple of hints that he may have changed. So, for example, on election night.

00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:35.000

One of the lines in his rather quite dignified election speech was, this is a country. He kept saying this also on the campaign trail. This is a country where no one should live in fear.

00:30:35.000 --> 00:30:41.000

And this is a country where nobody should be afraid because of who they love.

00:30:41.000 --> 00:30:49.000

Okay, so that was a big change. He had completely avoided, you know, LGBTQI issues during the campaign.

00:30:49.000 --> 00:30:57.000

That said, you know, he's now almost prime minister. It'll be the inauguration will be May 9th. They've set the date.

00:30:57.000 --> 00:31:07.000

And he's forming a cabinet. And the cabinet are mostly, um… not entirely, but mostly X feed us people.

00:31:07.000 --> 00:31:12.000

who left Fides early on in the process of autocratic consolidation.

00:31:12.000 --> 00:31:21.000

to go into international business, you know, so the foreign minister is a vice president for global communications at Vodafone.

00:31:21.000 --> 00:31:30.000

And Gary National, but you know, she's moved on to international business, and a lot of his folks are his inner circle seem to be mostly business people.

00:31:30.000 --> 00:31:35.000

Not government people, not not constitutional lawyers. I'm a little worried he doesn't have enough of them.

00:31:35.000 --> 00:31:44.000

around. He floated the idea this week of appointing a womanist education minister who runs a network of.

00:31:44.000 --> 00:32:02.000

far-right religious schools. And the left started screaming, and then he said, well, just a suggestion, and he seems to be moving away from that, but the fact that he thought that might be a possibility. So we don't know, right? Yesterday, he appointed a guy.

00:32:02.000 --> 00:32:17.000

who was a kind of advisor to SDS, which was the Liberal party, liberal in Europe means almost libertarian sort of pro-market, pro civil liberties. He appointed an old advisor to that party as his.

00:32:17.000 --> 00:32:28.000

kind of right-hand man, chief of staff. And so that was welcomed by the center and center-left parties. So you see him kind of cobbling together a team.

00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:32.000

Um, but here's the dilemma. I mean, you can't run a government by yourself.

00:32:32.000 --> 00:32:50.000

His party was always a bit of a fiction, kind of like Emmanuel Macron's, you know, homage party, right? Like, first you have a person, then you say, geez, we need people to run in the parliament, you know. And so Peter Mardiot, through the campaign, did not allow any of these MP candidates.

00:32:50.000 --> 00:33:06.000

to ever speak out individually. So we don't know who they are. I mean, we know their names, we know their occupations. You know, it's a lot of small business people, school teachers, you know. It's kind of the middle, you know, the Hungarian middle class.

00:33:06.000 --> 00:33:12.000

But we don't know anything about those people, by and large. They've never held office, and they weren't allowed to speak.

00:33:12.000 --> 00:33:19.000

So you know what's coming? Couple good signs. Okay, 2 things Peter Modior said he would do.

00:33:19.000 --> 00:33:30.000

The first day in office. One is that Hungary is massively corrupt. Everybody knows it. It's deep in the… texture of the whole Hungarian state by now.

00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:42.000

And the prosecution service is corrupt. So how do you get an investigation and prosecution of people who have stolen money from the Hungarian state or from the EU for that matter?

00:33:42.000 --> 00:33:45.000

And the answer is, you know, Hungary is a member of the EU.

00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:54.000

The EU has this office called the European Public Prosecutor's Office, which has the jurisdiction if a country joins it, which was optional.

00:33:54.000 --> 00:34:02.000

If a country joins it, that office is given the jurisdiction to go into a country and investigate the misuse of EU funds.

00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:23.000

Peter Mother said, we're joining the EPPO day one. That will be huge. He can then and also that will probably unlock some of the European money that's been withheld because a lot of it was withheld because of corruption. So… That will be a big thing if he does it. The second thing he said was that the first constitutional amendment he would propose.

00:34:23.000 --> 00:34:29.000

is an amendment to limit the number of years anyone can stay in office as Prime Minister to eight years.

00:34:29.000 --> 00:34:41.000

Including himself. Okay, but then the subtext is including Orban, who's already been there for 20. Okay. So that would disqualify Orban from running again.

00:34:41.000 --> 00:34:52.000

So those are the two things concretely, he said he would do. So, you know, we're feeling our way through this. It looks like he's going to prioritize exactly what he campaigned on, which is.

00:34:52.000 --> 00:35:02.000

Going after corruption, you know, trying to restore democratic institutions and trying to root out and prevent from coming back into office.

00:35:02.000 --> 00:35:07.000

the people who turned, you know, Hungary into an autocracy.

00:35:07.000 --> 00:35:17.000

So let's talk a little more about the obstacles that he's going to face. You mentioned the fact that the president is.

00:35:17.000 --> 00:35:22.000

an associate at four events, a supporter of Orban.

00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:37.000

and that all the highest institutions are peopled by Orban.

00:35:37.000 --> 00:35:38.000

Mm-hmm.

00:35:38.000 --> 00:35:48.000

Orban supporters. But at the same time, he has this two-thirds majority in the parliament that's sufficient for a constitutional amendment. So can he simply force these people to resign or fire these people and replace them?

00:35:48.000 --> 00:36:00.000

If necessary, having Parliament pass a law to accomplish that. Or, I mean, in a sense, that would make these obstacles much less worrying.

00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:12.000

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So the answer is yes and no. Okay. So the what he's what he did is like sort of election night was to call on a set of.

00:36:12.000 --> 00:36:29.000

people to resign. So the president of the country, the Constitutional Court, the president of the Supreme Court, the head of the State Audit Office, the head of the Data Protection Office, because also Orban has turned Hungary into a surveillance state, really. I mean, it's just remarkable. We can talk about that.

00:36:29.000 --> 00:36:40.000

But the data protection officer was supposed to stop that and he enabled it. He called on the head of the competition office because there's all this corrupt mergers and so on.

00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:45.000

He listed a set of key officials, and frankly, he listed exactly the right set.

00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:51.000

and called on them all to resign. So far they've all been silent. Nobody's resigning.

00:36:51.000 --> 00:37:01.000

The president wavered a bit and said, well, let's talk about it. And then, like I said, Orban has now come out with a petition. There's a place where you can go online and say.

00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:13.000

Restore checks and balances that Peter Moder has this dangerous 71% of the seats. That means he's above the law and he can do anything. So we should ensure that there are checks on his power.

00:37:13.000 --> 00:37:22.000

Save the presidency, okay? Like Orban, Mr. Anti-checks and balances, of course, now using. But you can imagine some people.

00:37:22.000 --> 00:37:29.000

saying, oh geez, I meant to vote for… to get rid of Orbein, but I didn't mean to vote to put somebody else in the same position.

00:37:29.000 --> 00:37:38.000

you know. So we'll see what happens. I mean, I he's called on them to resign. So the good news is that he sees the problem. Okay, the bad news is.

00:37:38.000 --> 00:37:48.000

There's a body called the Venice Commission, okay? And I've worked with the Venice Commission for 35 years. I've loved them. I've worked… I mean, they have been historically great. What is it?

00:37:48.000 --> 00:37:52.000

It's a body set up by the Council of Europe after the fall of the Wall.

00:37:52.000 --> 00:38:11.000

To help countries, particularly in Eastern Europe. Change their legal structures to be able to accommodate both democracy and market capitalism, basically. They're simply an advisory body, says, here, bring us your laws and we'll tell you whether they're kind of Euro compliant.

00:38:11.000 --> 00:38:20.000

And then, as many countries in this region started to turn away from Democratic constitutional values.

00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:24.000

The Venice Commission has been called upon by the European Union and the Council of Europe.

00:38:24.000 --> 00:38:31.000

to provide advisory opinions that have underwritten, essentially, sanctions against those countries.

00:38:31.000 --> 00:38:48.000

So now what the Venice Commission could do, as I've advocated, including at a speech at the Venice Commission, is to say, now what they need to do is to help these countries that have fallen into, you know, dictatorship again, or autocracy again, for these hybrid regimes, you know, dictatorship's too strong.

00:38:48.000 --> 00:38:59.000

to restore democracy again. But to do so, they may need to permit these countries, excuse me, to break the law to remake the law.

00:38:59.000 --> 00:39:09.000

Okay, in other words, if these governments, you know, how to put it at the end of communism, I moved to Eastern Europe sort of shortly after the fall of the wall. You could not find a communist in sight.

00:39:09.000 --> 00:39:16.000

Everyone hadn't been one, or if they had been, they didn't mean it, or, like, nobody… like, the Communist Party was gone, like, just overnight.

00:39:16.000 --> 00:39:22.000

Here, that's not true. You know, Orban may have only gotten 37% of the vote, but he got 37% of the vote.

00:39:22.000 --> 00:39:35.000

It's like Trumpers after they were defeated here, right? Which is to say, they're not going away. They're going to, you know, still stay there. They're going to contest everything. We're in a different world now than we were in the first transition.

00:39:35.000 --> 00:39:46.000

What the Venice Commission could do is to say, okay, well, we need to, given that so many of these transitions, both in Poland and Hungary, were done pursuant to law.

00:39:46.000 --> 00:39:59.000

entrenching their people. You know, after communism, all their people just left. We didn't have this problem. And so what the Venice Commission has been doing, though, is just the opposite. So you may realize we had the same problem in Poland.

00:39:59.000 --> 00:40:11.000

that we now have in Hungary. So Poland was able to get a new government. That new government came in with a promise to sweep away, you know, Donald Tusk's famous election phrase to sweep away with an iron broom.

00:40:11.000 --> 00:40:17.000

All the remnants of this the acronym is PEACE, but the Law and Justice Party government.

00:40:17.000 --> 00:40:26.000

And so they had their justice minister, Adam Bodnar proposed a set of laws that would restore the independence of the judiciary.

00:40:26.000 --> 00:40:35.000

It involved getting rid of some of the judges who were appointed under laws the Venice Commission had said Poland shouldn't pass.

00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:45.000

So they show them to the Venice Commission, trying to get permission, saying, we want to break the lottery, make the law, and the Venice Commission said in 2 opinions a year or 2 ago.

00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:53.000

No, you can't do that, because you must follow. If these judges were lawfully appointed, never mind under laws that the Venice Commission told them they shouldn't pass.

00:40:53.000 --> 00:40:58.000

They have been lawfully appointed, and you can't fire them.

00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:09.000

They did that also in Ukraine when Zelensky tried to clean house at the Constitutional Court. And they will do it also in Hungary. They will come in and say, you can't fire occupants who were legally appointed.

00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:15.000

Even if the laws under which they were appointed themselves violated European standards.

00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:32.000

I broke with the Venice Commission, went public with this critique. They don't like me so much anymore, but… Unless we get somebody to authorize this right from outside the country, that the EU has to be okay with it, the Council of Europe has to be okay with it, you've got to be able to fire people.

00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:39.000

who were appointed in a dictatorship, even if they were appointed through legal means. Okay? And.

00:41:39.000 --> 00:41:42.000

I'm not sure that Peter Magdiar is there yet.

00:41:42.000 --> 00:41:58.000

Right? But I I understood that the the real problem in Poland was that they didn't have the legal authority to fire these people. Do they also not have the legal? Does Magyar, with his two thirds majority in parliament, not have the legal authority to.

00:41:58.000 --> 00:42:04.000

pass a law to replace the president to and to make these changes.

00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:05.000

hit.

00:42:05.000 --> 00:42:11.000

Yeah. Yeah. So and the difference between the 2 governments was that in Poland, the peace government never had a constitutional majority.

00:42:11.000 --> 00:42:12.000

So the Constitution was never changed. They changed the, you know, subconstitutional laws.

00:42:12.000 --> 00:42:17.000

Right.

00:42:17.000 --> 00:42:22.000

The Tusk government could change the subconstitutional laws, in fact, bringing them into compliance with.

00:42:22.000 --> 00:42:27.000

the Constitution, which they were always in violation of, right? So that's what they tried to do.

00:42:27.000 --> 00:42:30.000

And that's what the Venice Commission said, no, you couldn't do.

00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:43.000

I mean, Poland can do it anyway, but then the question is, will they be sanctioned by the Council of Europe and or the EU for going against the opinions of this expert soft law body, right? That's the dilemma.

00:42:43.000 --> 00:42:48.000

Now, in Hungary, it's true. Everything was done lawfully. Orban changed the whole constitution.

00:42:48.000 --> 00:42:59.000

Some of these things require constitutional amendments, but it will be the same problem, right? Which is that you can change the laws. I mean, assuming you can get around the roadblocks, but to get around the roadblocks.

00:42:59.000 --> 00:43:09.000

You have to fire the current occupants, and that will require breaking the existing laws in place before you can change the laws.

00:43:09.000 --> 00:43:14.000

Right? It's a chicken and egg problem. Which do you do first? And so, you know, this is where.

00:43:14.000 --> 00:43:26.000

I think Peter Bonjour is going to have to find a way to get rid of people. Now, Orban did find a way to get rid of people when he came in, right? So one thing Peter Monjour could do is reverse engineer.

00:43:26.000 --> 00:43:42.000

What Orban did, so I'll give you one just one example. Orban did this with a number of institutions. So the Hungarian Supreme Court, Hungary has a constitutional court like in Germany, which only handles constitutional questions. Then it has the Supreme Court, which handles all the regular appeals from the.

00:43:42.000 --> 00:43:50.000

ordinary judicial system to capture the Supreme Court, the person they wanted to sideline was the president of the court.

00:43:50.000 --> 00:44:03.000

He had been a judge, excuse me, a judge at the European Court of Human Rights for 17 years. He was parachuted in to be president of the Supreme Court. He'd only been in that office for 3 years. The reason why that matters.

00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:10.000

Orban renames the Supreme Court the courier, which was the medieval name of Hungary's highest court.

00:44:10.000 --> 00:44:16.000

He did a lot of renaming of stuff. That was one thing. Then he said, Well, because it's a new institution.

00:44:16.000 --> 00:44:22.000

All the judges on the current Supreme Court have to reapply for their jobs. On the Supreme Court.

00:44:22.000 --> 00:44:27.000

And so they… but we now will require somewhat more stringent criteria.

00:44:27.000 --> 00:44:32.000

So they set up a bunch of stringent criteria, one of which, which made perfect sense in isolation.

00:44:32.000 --> 00:44:41.000

was you can't be named a judge on the Supreme Court of Hungary unless you've had five years of judicial experience in Hungary.

00:44:41.000 --> 00:44:47.000

Every single judge on the Supreme Court reapplied. They were all waived through, and the President was disqualified.

00:44:47.000 --> 00:44:52.000

Because it's 17 years in Strasbourg didn't count. Okay, they did a lot of stuff like that.

00:44:52.000 --> 00:44:54.000

Right? And uh… Yeah, it seems that.

00:44:54.000 --> 00:45:12.000

So. And then, yeah, the president of the Supreme Court, by the way, then challenged his firing, went to the court of, you know, Human Rights, where he had sat as a judge for 17 years. They said Hungary was in violation. Hungary has never complied with that judgment of that court.

00:45:12.000 --> 00:45:25.000

Right. It seems that Peter Madhya could use similar procedures. He could change the constitution slightly alter the institutions and require new appointments for for the members.

00:45:25.000 --> 00:45:27.000

Right.

00:45:27.000 --> 00:45:45.000

So, okay, so I understand now, I think, that the real obstacle is Europe, that once again, Europe's actions may inadvertently complicate the path, complicate the task of.

00:45:45.000 --> 00:45:50.000

It's…

00:45:50.000 --> 00:45:51.000

Mm-hmm.

00:45:51.000 --> 00:45:58.000

removing authoritarians and strengthening democratic institutions, just as they did by providing these huge subsidies for years that supported the non-democratic regime. I wanted to ask also about the security services, because.

00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:01.000

Exactly. Yeah.

00:46:01.000 --> 00:46:29.000

the relationship with Russia has become closer and closer. I imagine that the security services are… in close communication with Russia. There was a lot of reporting on Russian help to Orban during the campaign. How big a problem is that going to be? Is Budapest as.

00:46:29.000 --> 00:46:30.000

Yeah.

00:46:30.000 --> 00:46:40.000

The rumors suggest full of Russian spies is. the government going to have to fight a battle against that at the same time as dealing with all these institutional problems.

00:46:40.000 --> 00:46:44.000

Yeah. So so it's a little hard to know exactly how deep.

00:46:44.000 --> 00:46:55.000

the foreign penetration in the security services goes. Okay, what we do know, just to say something about the Russian influence, when Viktor Orban got really desperate about a month before the election.

00:46:55.000 --> 00:47:05.000

He literally called in the disinformation team from Russia that had blown up the Moldovan election.

00:47:05.000 --> 00:47:21.000

and great investigative journalists, a guy called Savoltz Pani in particular, deserves every award that he gets from EU, of which he's gotten many. He uncovered this, you know, Russian bot machine, and they had to come to Hungary because they couldn't do it in Hungarian language until they got there, right?

00:47:21.000 --> 00:47:32.000

And then the Facebook, which is what most Hungarians use, which is filled with these Russian bots, at which point, you know, Mandiar is very adept young people who can deal with this stuff.

00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:40.000

Started flagging all the Russian bots. I mean, they really did a very good bot awareness campaign. But yeah, so the Russians were involved in that.

00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:57.000

What also came out, and this is where the European security services are really helpful, I think, because Sabolzpany produced a… investigative report that showed that the foreign minister of Hungary, Peter Sciarto, had been in regular communication with Sergei Lavrov, who was the Russian foreign minister.

00:47:57.000 --> 00:48:08.000

And after every European Council meeting, that's where all the heads of European governments meet to decide what to do, everyone knew that Orban was the Russian Trojan horse in those meetings.

00:48:08.000 --> 00:48:19.000

But what came out tapes, actual tapes came out of Ciarto and Lavrov having these conversations where Ciarto would pass on to Lavrov.

00:48:19.000 --> 00:48:27.000

confidential communications in the European Council meetings, alerting Russia to what Ukraine, what EU was thinking about Ukraine.

00:48:27.000 --> 00:48:33.000

Okay, now there was also something which didn't make the international news, which was that maybe 5 years ago.

00:48:33.000 --> 00:48:40.000

Pani, again, he's the guy who does all the kind of Russian spy stuff in Hungary. I mean, exposes it.

00:48:40.000 --> 00:48:49.000

He had discovered that there was a hack into the Hungarian Foreign Ministry's IT system.

00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:53.000

which was identified at the time as a probable Russian hack.

00:48:53.000 --> 00:48:58.000

And the Russians could just go in and take documents out of the foreign ministry's files.

00:48:58.000 --> 00:49:10.000

So you don't need bench, you know, dead drops in the middle of the night. You don't need like this little scarf on the park bench that tells you that the package is ready. They were just taking the documents about the EU and NATO.

00:49:10.000 --> 00:49:16.000

out of the foreign ministry's files. Okay? So this was exposed. The foreign ministry said, Oops, we'll have to look into it.

00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:21.000

And people inside the foreign ministry later said that the hack had never been patched.

00:49:21.000 --> 00:49:29.000

So this kind of communication has been going on, I think, for a long time. So then the question is, what about the security services?

00:49:29.000 --> 00:49:33.000

I think the foreign ministry is more compromised than the security services.

00:49:33.000 --> 00:49:43.000

For this reason. Like, that seemed to be where they went in, right? And the other thing I think that was compromised, you know, in all of this, um, was that.

00:49:43.000 --> 00:49:52.000

Orban, sort of like in Soviet time, right? That people are going to do really dirty stuff. You hive it off into special units. You don't compromise the whole thing.

00:49:52.000 --> 00:49:59.000

Um, and so Orban, when he came to power, set up a special anti-terrorism police unit.

00:49:59.000 --> 00:50:16.000

which reported kind of directly to him, and which bypassed police rules. I was the first one to expose that. Actually, what their mission was, and back in 2013. Um, because I just said, what I do is I sit here in Princeton and read their equivalent of the Federal Register, right? I just read all their laws.

00:50:16.000 --> 00:50:31.000

Orban and his team are all obsessive lawyers. They do everything in law before they do it in reality. So once you figure out how this thing is set up and what competencies it's given, then you can kind of figure out what it does. So they've been the ones that have been tasked with.

00:50:31.000 --> 00:50:41.000

A lot of the espionage and counter-espionage work. In the name of fighting terrorism, the Hungarian terrorism laws allow them to go after the opposition.

00:50:41.000 --> 00:50:45.000

So that may be the unit that can be dismantled.

00:50:45.000 --> 00:50:49.000

And then the rest of it may not be quite as compromised as you think.

00:50:49.000 --> 00:51:02.000

The good news is that people are now coming forward out of Orban's machine and saying, it wasn't me, it wasn't me. And there was a whole group of people inside the Hungarian security services.

00:51:02.000 --> 00:51:14.000

who last week came out with an appeal to Peter Modiar saying, we're not on board with the Orban government. We are happy to work with you. Don't fire us.

00:51:14.000 --> 00:51:18.000

And so I think there are going to be a lot of people down several levels.

00:51:18.000 --> 00:51:24.000

who were never actually turned by the Orban government, and were never… are not true believers.

00:51:24.000 --> 00:51:31.000

And so I don't think Hungary will have to get a wholly new security service. One last thing, though.

00:51:31.000 --> 00:51:42.000

I'm a little worried about the military. Excuse me. When Orban came to power after 2000… after the 2002 election, he'd sort of left the military alone, more or less.

00:51:42.000 --> 00:51:48.000

The new defense minister came in and fired 50 Hungarian generals overnight.

00:51:48.000 --> 00:51:51.000

and really reorganize the top echelons of the military.

00:51:51.000 --> 00:52:03.000

During the last 4 years, Orban has presided over an immense privatization building up, but then privatization of the defense sector in the hands of Raban's cronies.

00:52:03.000 --> 00:52:18.000

What we now see is, of course, the EU's got this huge thing called the Safe Package, which is a big tranche of funds borrowed on the markets like the recovery fund after Covid, which will be a big windfall to the countries that get this new money.

00:52:18.000 --> 00:52:23.000

Orban, and actually Hungary is slated to get between 16 and 17 billion euro.

00:52:23.000 --> 00:52:30.000

Out of the SAFE Act. And I shouldn't call it the Safe Act, that's the American one, but the SAFE program, the European one.

00:52:30.000 --> 00:52:38.000

And that money will go slosh through the Hungarian government into the defense sector, which Orban's cronies continue to control.

00:52:38.000 --> 00:52:53.000

After he's out of office. So Peter Magiot fortunately did make a comment last week about looking into the privatization of the defense sector and maybe clawing it back. But you know the I'm nervous about the.

00:52:53.000 --> 00:53:06.000

revolving door, excuse me, between the people in the defense ministry and the people in this crony privatized defense sector. So it's a complicated answer. It's not the whole security apparatus, but it's pieces.

00:53:06.000 --> 00:53:17.000

Okay, uh… you don't know this, there's no way to know for sure, but what's your instinct? What's your hunch? Is this the end of Orban as a political leader?

00:53:17.000 --> 00:53:27.000

Or will he be back? You said that Major may get a law passed limiting prime ministerial terms to eight years.

00:53:27.000 --> 00:53:30.000

Um, but is… is he done?

00:53:30.000 --> 00:53:44.000

No, Orban is a fighter. I mean, he's like Trump, right? He's gonna… he's gonna first deny losses. He denied that he lost in 2002. He… that Orban, he denied that he lost in 2006.

00:53:44.000 --> 00:53:55.000

There's some evidence that he fomented the violence that happened after the 2006 election, which almost immediately discredited that government and made it very hard for them to govern, okay?

00:53:55.000 --> 00:54:12.000

I don't think Orban's going anywhere. He's a fighter, he's got loyal troops, he's got a machine. He does have his people all over the system. And he also set up both the defense sector, also the universities before the last election, all the universities were privatized.

00:54:12.000 --> 00:54:24.000

into the hands of his cronies, who can asset strip universities and keep themselves wealthy. In other words, they have all kinds of sources of income. Raban also has this network of.

00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:35.000

Universities, think tanks, fake pollsters, you know, a whole apparatus for propaganda purposes. The Matiasz Korvinus Collegium is kind of the mothership of all of that.

00:54:35.000 --> 00:54:44.000

That… that, um, group used to get every year about 1% of Hungarian GDP allocated to their enterprises.

00:54:44.000 --> 00:54:49.000

Excuse me, coughing. What Orban did before this election.

00:54:49.000 --> 00:55:01.000

was to give them this huge endowment and vest it in their hands, which is to say, they don't need money to come from the state budget anymore. And unless Peter Modiere is going to claw back what's now private property.

00:55:01.000 --> 00:55:09.000

They are set to go for a long time. So Orban's got a whole shadow state set up that is still there.

00:55:09.000 --> 00:55:20.000

That because it's in private hands will be hard for Peter Modular to claw back. And then, unfortunately, the story came out yesterday. I did an interview weeks ago in which I predicted.

00:55:20.000 --> 00:55:23.000

Because, again, I just read the laws. Okay, so.

00:55:23.000 --> 00:55:33.000

I can channel Madhyar from Madyar Orban, I kind of, you know, go back to… why do you may have already, but I can channel Orban by seeing what he does in law.

00:55:33.000 --> 00:55:42.000

Last December, they amended the law on the presidency to make it impossible for the parliament to impeach the president.

00:55:42.000 --> 00:55:53.000

That tells me they're going to use that office. What I predicted several weeks ago, not realizing that Peter Modric could get the 2/3, thinking he was going to just get a simple majority.

00:55:53.000 --> 00:55:58.000

Excuse me, was I predicted, there's a lame duck parliament now for a couple of weeks.

00:55:58.000 --> 00:56:02.000

The president of the country, Mr. Shuok, whose picture I showed you.

00:56:02.000 --> 00:56:07.000

Um, only has 3 years left in his term. Madia has 4.

00:56:07.000 --> 00:56:09.000

They're going to want to cover that extra year.

00:56:09.000 --> 00:56:13.000

So what I suspect is that Schulach is going to step down.

00:56:13.000 --> 00:56:20.000

allowing the Parliament to elect a new president, reset the clock at five years.

00:56:20.000 --> 00:56:32.000

And I thought that there was a big headline in this Dutch website saying I predicted this after the election. I predicted it before, that the parliament will elect Orban into that position.

00:56:32.000 --> 00:56:42.000

He gets Parliament. He gets immunity, he gets a house, he gets a car, he gets the privileges of state, he gets access to a lot of state resources. A lot of things he's going to want going forward.

00:56:42.000 --> 00:56:46.000

So I, you know, I don't put that past them.

00:56:46.000 --> 00:56:54.000

And the fact that they came out 2 days ago with this write this petition to save the president as a check on the system.

00:56:54.000 --> 00:56:59.000

is trying to tee up Orban's base to say we need him as a check.

00:56:59.000 --> 00:57:04.000

on Peter Madiar. So. And they've got till May 9th.

00:57:04.000 --> 00:57:05.000

and there's there's no formal way that the other side could contest that.

00:57:05.000 --> 00:57:08.000

So…

00:57:08.000 --> 00:57:14.000

Nope. No. Because again, it's like a lame duck Congress in the US.

00:57:14.000 --> 00:57:15.000

All right.

00:57:15.000 --> 00:57:23.000

you know. How do you undo what they've done? I mean, they could undo the law right? But then they have to fire the occupants.

00:57:23.000 --> 00:57:29.000

And they understand full well that the thing that's going to be hardest for them to do in a rule of law way.

00:57:29.000 --> 00:57:35.000

As firing the occupant, especially if there's a big public outcry now saying.

00:57:35.000 --> 00:57:42.000

Peter Magier needs guardrails. And we need to put a guardrail on him by having a president.

00:57:42.000 --> 00:57:47.000

who can still veto whatever Peter Modiere does?

00:57:47.000 --> 00:57:58.000

Right? Okay, let's let's go to a few of the questions that are coming in on the Q. And a lot of questions. So you already mentioned the universities. But one question.

00:57:58.000 --> 00:58:08.000

asks about the future of higher education, universities in general, and the CEU in particular. Is there anything you can add on that?

00:58:08.000 --> 00:58:24.000

Yeah, so the universities. So CEU got all the headlines because it had a good Pr operation, basically, and as founding faculty at CEU, and I might add that I I started the gender program at CEU. So.

00:58:24.000 --> 00:58:35.000

you know, doubly hated by Orbit. So CEU is flailing a bit in Vienna. They… they are in the terrible building. A lot of the faculty are still commuting. It it hasn't.

00:58:35.000 --> 00:58:41.000

I mean, CEU, I love CEU, right? But it it hasn't the transition has not been good for it.

00:58:41.000 --> 00:58:54.000

They could move back. They still have all their buildings, which are empty and cobwebs and sand to walk around the old buildings. So they could move back. It requires a change in the law that permits.

00:58:54.000 --> 00:59:01.000

them to give degrees. They could, you know, and the modular government could easily repeal the law that made them leave.

00:59:01.000 --> 00:59:05.000

The question is, if you're going to do that whole move back again.

00:59:05.000 --> 00:59:07.000

How long are we going to have a modular government?

00:59:07.000 --> 00:59:14.000

And is Orban gonna stage a comeback the way Trump did here? Okay. He still has a lot of supporters.

00:59:14.000 --> 00:59:20.000

It's going to be very hard for Peter Maggio to hold this coalition together.

00:59:20.000 --> 00:59:34.000

Would you make a long-term decision based on one election? Are you going to wait and see? So I don't know. I haven't talked to the folks at Cu. And by the way, CEU is at the moment without a permanent rector. They're having a rector search. So it's they're kind of in a leadership transition, and.

00:59:34.000 --> 00:59:42.000

Let's see. Okay. I mean, the buildings are still there. I mean, I'm sure they could change the law, but is it wise for CEU to do that?

00:59:42.000 --> 00:59:52.000

On the rest of the Hungarian educational system. or been privatized 24 of the 28 universe public universities in Hungary, which is most of the higher ed sector.

00:59:52.000 --> 01:00:01.000

By privatizing, I mean literally there's an act of parliament that donated, that created a set of private law foundations.

01:00:01.000 --> 01:00:12.000

and then donated the universities, the land, the buildings, the faculty contracts, the libraries, you know, everything to these private foundations. And then they put boards of trustees on top.

01:00:12.000 --> 01:00:24.000

That are all Orban's cronies. Okay, now that system is now a private system, right? Which is to say you'd have to nationalize the sector again.

01:00:24.000 --> 01:00:36.000

to do that. Orban nationalized a bunch of stuff when he was Prime Minister, and maybe Peter Mardier will do the same. But Peter Madier is kind of a market forces kind of guy. Is he going to be willing to.

01:00:36.000 --> 01:00:49.000

to make to pull back into the public sector, the defense sector and the universities, which are the 2 big things he's going to have to think about. And then, when he does that, what happens to the Orban.

01:00:49.000 --> 01:01:05.000

Installed leadership of those universities. Again, it's a matter of do you fire the rectors that Orban put in place? Do you fire… They have these now as chief financial officers that Orban had installed. Anyway, there's a whole apparatus that Orbine controls at the top of universities.

01:01:05.000 --> 01:01:11.000

Um, and are you going to undo all the damage of the faculty who left the faculty who were fired?

01:01:11.000 --> 01:01:27.000

And the Academy of Sciences was the bigger tragedy because that was really decimated when the Academy was taken over by Warban's people. They spun off the research institute. Some of them were taken over and failed. So there's a lot of reconstruction. And Peter Modular said zip about higher ed.

01:01:27.000 --> 01:01:31.000

Which is to say, I don't think it's his highest priority.

01:01:31.000 --> 01:01:46.000

So I just told you everything that has to be done. There are people who could do it. There's so much reconstruction. The question is where it comes in the hierarchy of his priorities.

01:01:46.000 --> 01:01:47.000

Yeah.

01:01:47.000 --> 01:01:56.000

Right. Another question here about the electoral system. So my year one under this electoral system against all the odds, is he now going to view it as something he wants to preserve?

01:01:56.000 --> 01:02:02.000

Or will he reform it to perhaps reduce gerrymandering and make it fairer?

01:02:02.000 --> 01:02:18.000

Yeah, so he has said he wants to restore a democratic election system. So I do think that's a priority. And and that wouldn't it be hard to do? I mean, it's… It's a it's a two-thirds law, so he has the votes to redo it.

01:02:18.000 --> 01:02:29.000

For me, the big question is the timing of all of that, right? Because he was, I mean, this was a kind of tinderbox into which a Mardiar flame was thrown.

01:02:29.000 --> 01:02:35.000

If Margia manages to restore things. So the the you know the the country looks okay.

01:02:35.000 --> 01:02:44.000

And Orban is going to be still fighting there as an opposition party. If you restore a proportional representation system.

01:02:44.000 --> 01:02:54.000

Will Orban come back? under it. Will Orban's people come back? You know, I think he's pledged to do it. I think for him the question is going to be timing.

01:02:54.000 --> 01:03:02.000

Um, and exactly, you know, do you really go back to full proportional representation when you've got functionally a two-party system?

01:03:02.000 --> 01:03:05.000

PR works really well if you've got a lot of parties.

01:03:05.000 --> 01:03:13.000

But if you've got two parties, it just, I don't know how it works, right? So I think they're going to have to think that through.

01:03:13.000 --> 01:03:18.000

that it. So you're assuming that T show remains as a party.

01:03:18.000 --> 01:03:23.000

rather than the various supporters of my dear splitting up.

01:03:23.000 --> 01:03:43.000

Yeah, so this too. So you know, one of the things Orban used to do between every election since 2010 is his audit office would go through and look to see, you know, whether campaign finance rules were were violated. And of course his audit office found that every single party had violated the campaign rules except.

01:03:43.000 --> 01:03:54.000

Yes. And then they would be defunded between elections, and then they would be refunded in time for the election monitors to come in. So none of these parties have any infrastructure, really.

01:03:54.000 --> 01:04:03.000

And so TISA is a big tent. Those parties, those little left parties that he that went over to supporting him.

01:04:03.000 --> 01:04:12.000

have nothing left. They're barely parties. Right? So it essentially you're going to have to build up a party system from ground zero.

01:04:12.000 --> 01:04:19.000

And then the question is, will Peter Mardier donate publicly fund the parties as used to happen?

01:04:19.000 --> 01:04:29.000

Where do the resources come from? It's a huge project because essentially they're starting in some ways from a worse place than they were starting from in 1990.

01:04:29.000 --> 01:04:39.000

You know, in 1990, they had all these different dissident groups, and they had… I mean, the worry, the fact, the reason why the election law was set up the way it was, was that they were worried they were going to have 20 parties.

01:04:39.000 --> 01:04:42.000

Now the worry is that you have 0 parties.

01:04:42.000 --> 01:04:52.000

you know, so it that's a it's a brownfield development, you know, as opposed to the greenfield development you had after 89.

01:04:52.000 --> 01:05:07.000

There's actually a question here from from a viewer about the campaign financing. So how was Tisha's campaign financed? Were the contributions from businesses? Were those businesses persecuted by the regime?

01:05:07.000 --> 01:05:09.000

What can you tell us?

01:05:09.000 --> 01:05:24.000

Yeah, so it's really hard to know, because what what they did do this time was abolish the campaign finance rules. Okay, that was interesting. And I think a lot of it was because they were getting a huge amount of flack from international observers, also because.

01:05:24.000 --> 01:05:37.000

They were, I think the campaign finance on this campaign may have been coming from foreign sources, at least to Orban. Okay, the way they controlled campaign finance, and they put Peter Maggio under investigation from this.

01:05:37.000 --> 01:05:43.000

Was that they created something called the Sovereignty Protection Authority.

01:05:43.000 --> 01:05:47.000

and the sovereignty protection authority had kind of unlimited.

01:05:47.000 --> 01:05:54.000

Surveillance powers and investigative powers to go after foreign money coming into.

01:05:54.000 --> 01:05:59.000

Hungarian politics. Okay, so it wasn't campaign finance regulation.

01:05:59.000 --> 01:06:06.000

It was this other thing. And they did investigate Peter Moyere. They investigated everybody on the left.

01:06:06.000 --> 01:06:12.000

And they were threatening to, and they were sort of going public with… so Peter Magyar took zero international funds.

01:06:12.000 --> 01:06:18.000

Okay, absolutely zip. It's a little unclear where he did get his funds from.

01:06:18.000 --> 01:06:23.000

Um, but the sovereignty Protection Authority is going to go after anyone who gets foreign money.

01:06:23.000 --> 01:06:37.000

And so a lot of Peter Moder's campaign was a shoestring operation. How much does it cost to have a YouTube channel or to put stuff up on social media? How much does it cost to walk across the country and stay in your supporters houses? Okay.

01:06:37.000 --> 01:06:50.000

I mean, it was a low budget campaign in a lot of ways. And my guess is that whatever funding they had came from the kind of people that he's now gotten putting into his cabinet, which are.

01:06:50.000 --> 01:07:00.000

Hungarians who made their way through international business to having reasonably there weren't oligarchs, but they were wealthier than your average Hungarian.

01:07:00.000 --> 01:07:04.000

I don't know. It hasn't… you don't really know all that yet.

01:07:04.000 --> 01:07:06.000

Yeah.

01:07:06.000 --> 01:07:13.000

Great, thanks. What about migration policy and immigration? I believe that.

01:07:13.000 --> 01:07:23.000

Uh, Pedo Magia was quite careful not to go too far from Orban's position on this. What policy do you think he'll end up with? And.

01:07:23.000 --> 01:07:28.000

Right?

01:07:28.000 --> 01:07:35.000

Is he likely to converge towards the EU position?

01:07:35.000 --> 01:07:39.000

Well, the EU position converged toward Orban is the first thing to say.

01:07:39.000 --> 01:07:54.000

Right? I mean, when Orban was, like, putting up the wall and doing all that stuff in 2015, um, you know, and Angela Merkel was saying, we can handle it, you know, bring it on. Nobody's saying bring it on anymore. And the EU has now set up.

01:07:54.000 --> 01:08:04.000

you know, an intensified border control regime. Their border control people are letting lots of people die at sea. I mean.

01:08:04.000 --> 01:08:13.000

The EU has is scandalous when it comes to honoring the right of asylum. And it has done that by.

01:08:13.000 --> 01:08:24.000

making agreements with quote safe third countries, lest you, I mean Libya, for example, you know, to take migrants back. That's now officially EU policy.

01:08:24.000 --> 01:08:29.000

Excuse me, guarding the borders is now officially EU policy.

01:08:29.000 --> 01:08:33.000

So Peter Modera basically took the EU policy line.

01:08:33.000 --> 01:08:45.000

which is basically Orban's policy, right? So he doesn't have to deviate from Orban to be you compliant. And there's a whole bunch of some of the money that is withheld from Hungary is withheld.

01:08:45.000 --> 01:08:49.000

Because Hungary's domestic law is even worse than the EU in terms of.

01:08:49.000 --> 01:08:57.000

not even really giving people asylum hearings, and in detaining people who are waiting for asylum determinations.

01:08:57.000 --> 01:09:04.000

Such like perhaps Peter Madriel will bring Hungary into line with that as a way of getting EU money.

01:09:04.000 --> 01:09:07.000

My guess is that he made you that, but.

01:09:07.000 --> 01:09:15.000

You know, Orban and the EU are singing from the same song sheet on migration these days. And Peter Maggio will be pro-European.

01:09:15.000 --> 01:09:26.000

Right? On I'm still on the. theme of EU policies and and Hungary's future relation to them.

01:09:26.000 --> 01:09:37.000

There's been a lot of reporting. really on on hopes that Mudyar will adopt a new line on Ukraine that, in fact.

01:09:37.000 --> 01:09:51.000

he has said things that suggest that he's going to remove the veto on the 90 billion loan to Ukraine and so on. What do you think his policy there is going to be?

01:09:51.000 --> 01:10:00.000

Yeah. So orb on orbit didn't attend the European Council meeting. The loans already gone through. Okay, because he just.

01:10:00.000 --> 01:10:07.000

He decided he's not showing up because they would all go after him for those… it's been a while. I mean, those tapes that leaked.

01:10:07.000 --> 01:10:23.000

Oh, actually, there's another tape, by the way, that leaked of Orban talking to Putin, saying, you are the lion, we are the mouse, and how can we help? I mean, all that's leaked since the last European Council meeting and Orban was going to get ravaged if he went. So he didn't go. They've already passed it.

01:10:23.000 --> 01:10:30.000

So Peter Moder, first of all, said, and I'm just going to mute myself while I cough.

01:10:30.000 --> 01:10:38.000

That's from lots of Zoom teaching. Okay, Peter Madia has already said he's going to cut ties with Russia. Okay, that's very popular.

01:10:38.000 --> 01:10:44.000

In fact, some of the slogans people were chanting at his rallies, or, you know, Ruski Hazak, which meant, like, Russians go home.

01:10:44.000 --> 01:10:52.000

And so he's going to cut ties with Russia. He's not going to be the Trojan horse inside the EU for Russia. So that will be a big change.

01:10:52.000 --> 01:10:56.000

That said, he's not going to cozy up to Ukraine.

01:10:56.000 --> 01:11:06.000

And the reason is that Orban has whipped up anti-Ukrainian sentiment for many years. Some of it kind of justified.

01:11:06.000 --> 01:11:12.000

Excuse me. Why is it justified? So there's this region of Ukraine which has a Hungarian ethnic minority.

01:11:12.000 --> 01:11:30.000

And as part of actually a lot of this policies, prize Zelensky or the Ukrainian government in trying to marginalize the Russian influence after Yanukovych fled right? And after there was a re-Ukrainianization, shall we say, of national policy.

01:11:30.000 --> 01:11:36.000

They started going after the multicultural policies of the prior government.

01:11:36.000 --> 01:11:53.000

Including getting rid of bilingual schools. They were bilingual Russian-Ukrainian schools in the East, but there were also bilingual Ukrainian Hungarian schools in the West. Also, Ukrainian Romanian schools or Ukrainian Polish schools. I mean, the whole borders, when you look at just.

01:11:53.000 --> 01:12:03.000

you know, look at the borders of Ukraine in the 20th century. They've come and gone from different empires, and so there's still linguistic minorities kind of all around the edges.

01:12:03.000 --> 01:12:21.000

And the way the government handled that after the fall of the wall was through these bilingual schools, through permitting dual language state offices in those areas. So first they got rid of the bilingual schools, then they got rid of the ability of a citizen of Ukraine to go into a state office and approach.

01:12:21.000 --> 01:12:28.000

the State official in the language that wasn't Ukrainian that was dominant in the region. They just did this language policy thing.

01:12:28.000 --> 01:12:37.000

Orban whipped that up into they're going after Hungarians. They don't respect us, and we can't trust them, because look at what they're doing to our people there.

01:12:37.000 --> 01:12:44.000

and Zelensky softened those policies some. He recognizes that that's a stumbling block for the EU.

01:12:44.000 --> 01:12:48.000

I think they restored the bilingual schools in one of Orban's showdowns with the EU.

01:12:48.000 --> 01:13:04.000

But there's a lot of anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Hungary because they believe the line that Ukrainians left to their own devices would deprive the Hungarian minority of equal rights. So I think Peter Madia in the EU.

01:13:04.000 --> 01:13:17.000

We'll go along with the flow on aid to Ukraine, but he will not be the one that proposes it and he will not be depending on what that Ukraine looks, that aid looks like. You may have some qualifications.

01:13:17.000 --> 01:13:24.000

on relations with Russia, Hungary is still extremely dependent on Russia for energy supplies, right? So… Is it realistic to?

01:13:24.000 --> 01:13:27.000

Yeah.

01:13:27.000 --> 01:13:45.000

distance the country from from Russia. What? What can that mean? I'm anticipating that there'll be some pretty difficult relations, especially since Russia is quite prepared to continue with sabotage and cyber attacks and all sorts of.

01:13:45.000 --> 01:13:53.000

tactics to try and undermine a regime that's viewed as as not sufficiently pro-Russian.

01:13:53.000 --> 01:13:59.000

Yeah, so Russia gets Russia sends oil to Hungary through the Druzhba pipeline, by the way.

01:13:59.000 --> 01:14:06.000

It was blown up. As Zelensky said by the Russians, Orban said by the Ukrainians.

01:14:06.000 --> 01:14:08.000

They just resumed the oil today. Okay, so right after the election. So.

01:14:08.000 --> 01:14:10.000

Okay.

01:14:10.000 --> 01:14:26.000

who knows exactly. But anyway, the point is, that's the oil supply for Hungary. The gas comes by way of the Turk stream pipeline from Russia through Turkey to through Serbia to to Hungary. And then there's Rojatan, which is.

01:14:26.000 --> 01:14:30.000

The only nuclear power plant in Hungary was built under the Soviet time.

01:14:30.000 --> 01:14:36.000

And the Hungarians have given no bid contracts to the Russians to reconstruct it and enlarge it.

01:14:36.000 --> 01:14:43.000

Okay, so the EU tried to slow it down because anyway, the whole EU tried to stop it. They've now green lit it.

01:14:43.000 --> 01:14:49.000

a bit, but all of Hungary's energy supply, from nuclear to gas to oil.

01:14:49.000 --> 01:14:56.000

is all Russian inflected. So Peter Moder said he would look into ways of getting.

01:14:56.000 --> 01:15:03.000

Um, energy from other sources. There's a pipeline that runs through Croatia that I think is LNG fueled.

01:15:03.000 --> 01:15:13.000

where the US could get in there and supply LNG. But you know, it's a really… it's an infrastructural problem, right? Pipelines, you don't just grow them overnight.

01:15:13.000 --> 01:15:18.000

and Hungary's landlocked, and so you can't really deliver it by sea. And so.

01:15:18.000 --> 01:15:29.000

It's going to be a long process, and my guess is that the EU will jump in. One thing they could do is speed up their reconstruction of Rojatan nuclear plant.

01:15:29.000 --> 01:15:39.000

and switch Hungary over to. EU generated nuclear, right? Because the plant they have under construction is way bigger than Hungarian needs are.

01:15:39.000 --> 01:15:47.000

And that could be one source of hope. But yeah, it's that's really going to be the Achilles heel for Hungary in breaking free of pressure.

01:15:47.000 --> 01:16:00.000

Right. So broadening the perspective a little. What does this mean for the rest of the world? What does this mean for right-wing populism? Some some see this as a potential tipping point.

01:16:00.000 --> 01:16:12.000

What do you think? Was this a sign of changing political weather globally, or more… The result of specific local factors.

01:16:12.000 --> 01:16:20.000

Yeah, so it's both. Okay, so the the global thing is that I I don't think everyone's realized enough.

01:16:20.000 --> 01:16:26.000

How pivotal Hungary was to the spread and support of right-wing parties in Europe.

01:16:26.000 --> 01:16:31.000

and to the basic infrastructure of the Trump administration.

01:16:31.000 --> 01:16:41.000

So Orban created. I mentioned this Mathias core venous colleague, huge enterprise. Their English language think tank called the Danube Institute.

01:16:41.000 --> 01:16:46.000

was one of the partners with the Heritage Foundation in writing Project 2025.

01:16:46.000 --> 01:16:51.000

So the blitz we saw in Trump, you know, Trump 2.0.

01:16:51.000 --> 01:17:05.000

was exactly the blitz we saw in 2010. Mass fire civil servants, weaponized the national budget, go after all your enemies, everything, everywhere all at once. Defund the civil sector, go after the universities.

01:17:05.000 --> 01:17:19.000

I mean, this was exactly what they did in Hungary. Pull all the offices that matter into the circle around the Prime Minister or the president, you know, the cabinet offices become talking shops that don't really do much. I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff.

01:17:19.000 --> 01:17:37.000

that we've seen Trump duplicate from Orban's takeover in Hungary. So there's a playbook. And that playbook was cobbled together by Orban with help from Putin, from Modi. I mean, not… I mean actually sometimes literally, but they… Orban is a very well-prepared student of comparative politics.

01:17:37.000 --> 01:17:42.000

And so he's now got this playbook, and the playbook is something they were using in Poland.

01:17:42.000 --> 01:17:48.000

So that thing survives. Okay. What we get out of the modular election is a playbook for undoing it.

01:17:48.000 --> 01:17:55.000

right? And that playbook for undoing it involves figuring out how the autocrats want rigged the elections.

01:17:55.000 --> 01:18:00.000

and unrig them by holding your nose and going to their base. Okay?

01:18:00.000 --> 01:18:08.000

And also running a campaign that doesn't touch the third rails of left-wing and right wing issues.

01:18:08.000 --> 01:18:14.000

But that goes squarely on corruption depriving you of public services.

01:18:14.000 --> 01:18:21.000

And that says that the through line is you need to vote for somebody who isn't enriching themselves at your expense.

01:18:21.000 --> 01:18:30.000

You could imagine a campaign like that working here. You could imagine a campaign like that working in all the places like in Putin's Russia. Good, you know, goodness.

01:18:30.000 --> 01:18:47.000

Because all these autocrats, if they stay in power long enough, generate that kind of wealth and that kind of… collapse of public services eventually, right? So we now see a playbook for undoing it, if you get that far. So that's the good news. The bad news is that, like I said, Orban endowed that network.

01:18:47.000 --> 01:19:02.000

with money that doesn't that isn't immediately. Cut off by the election of Peter Modiar. So his network survives and Mathiasz Gorvin Skole, maybe, and the Danube Institute may be based in Budapest.

01:19:02.000 --> 01:19:08.000

Orban's Mathias Korbenzkolygian bought the largest private university in Vienna.

01:19:08.000 --> 01:19:14.000

They have a think tank in Brussels. They can set up shop in other friendly places.

01:19:14.000 --> 01:19:22.000

and continue their operations from there. So this is not the end of the influence on the global right.

01:19:22.000 --> 01:19:25.000

And a lot's been made of the connections with.

01:19:25.000 --> 01:19:30.000

I mean, not just the inspiration, but the concrete connections with the Trump administration and other right-wing governments around the world.

01:19:30.000 --> 01:19:44.000

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just to give you a sense of how close they are. So so we had questions about higher ed. So everyone who's on the higher ed beat will understand the name of Christopher Ruffo.

01:19:44.000 --> 01:19:52.000

who has been… he was the brains behind the new college takeover. He's really been the higher ed guy for the Trump, you know, onslaught on higher ed.

01:19:52.000 --> 01:20:07.000

Chris Rufo spent two years at the Danube Institute figuring out how Orbine was doing this before he came home to Hungary. Orban created this thing in Hungary, probably it'll be dissolved now, but it's called the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs or something like that.

01:20:07.000 --> 01:20:14.000

They put in charge of it an unknown American academic here. I mean, named Gladden Papin.

01:20:14.000 --> 01:20:24.000

But Papin turns out to be best buddies with J.D. Vance. There was just a piece that dropped in the Atlantic documenting their ties. So when Vance went to.

01:20:24.000 --> 01:20:40.000

Budapest. By the way, everyone knew Orban was going to lose if Trump thought Orban was going to win, he would have gone himself and claimed credit and taken the trophy and left or like whatever. But he sent Vance instead, but Vance is very tied into this American group of Americans around Orban.

01:20:40.000 --> 01:20:44.000

And then, therefore, the people who have gone over and worked.

01:20:44.000 --> 01:20:53.000

Deep in the machine of the Trump administration. So there's just lots of people who've gone back and forth. I might say also one other smoking gun we have here in the US.

01:20:53.000 --> 01:21:04.000

There's a guy called Sebastian Gorka who kind of made a name for himself in Trump's first government by showing up at Trump's first inauguration wearing a full dress Nazi uniform.

01:21:04.000 --> 01:21:16.000

Um, it was the… it was the outfit of his father. They kept saying neo-Nazi. It's like, no, his father was old enough to have belonged to this civil defense unit that operated jointly with the Hungarian military.

01:21:16.000 --> 01:21:31.000

on the side of Nazi Germany in World War II, okay? So, Sebastian Gorka shows up at Orban's… at, uh, Trump's first inauguration, wearing his dad's Nazi uniform. Once that was outed, he had to leave his job as special advisor to Trump. Okay, so then he was.

01:21:31.000 --> 01:21:38.000

hanging around Trump's circles. He's been brought back, and Trump 2.0 quite quietly, because he hasn't made much of a fuss.

01:21:38.000 --> 01:21:52.000

As Trump's counterterrorism advisor. And there was just a New York Times story a couple weeks ago documenting that Sebastian Gorka is now working with these right-wing parties in Europe, the Orban network, so to speak.

01:21:52.000 --> 01:22:02.000

To start weaponizing anti-terrorism law against Antifa, which is not a thing. It's not a set of organizations.

01:22:02.000 --> 01:22:19.000

But we're doing this here now in the US, using anti-terrorism law to go after left-wing groups. And this is now the blueprint that that Gorka is working with right-wing governments or governments that have right-wing parties in them to try to spread to Europe.

01:22:19.000 --> 01:22:28.000

Now, Gorka is Hungarian. I mean, he grew up in the Uk, moved to Hungary after the fall of the wall, worked his way up through the defense sector.

01:22:28.000 --> 01:22:39.000

Then, after Orban lost the 2006 election, Gorka. Pops at Anova kind of like Peter Moyer did, starts his own political party in Hungary.

01:22:39.000 --> 01:22:44.000

then has these negotiations with Orban. quietly dissolves his party.

01:22:44.000 --> 01:22:47.000

All the people from Worker's Party go into feed us.

01:22:47.000 --> 01:22:53.000

And then Gorka marries an American, gets US citizenship, moves to the US.

01:22:53.000 --> 01:23:01.000

in around 2,010. and as an age of the President when Trump is elected in 2016?

01:23:01.000 --> 01:23:15.000

So there's a lot of ties we can go over between the Orban circles and the Trump circles.

01:23:15.000 --> 01:23:16.000

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right.

01:23:16.000 --> 01:23:20.000

And in fact, it goes back much further than that, because there were Republican Party connected political consultants going over to help Orban in the elections, and also Netanyahu. And there's a close relationship between Netanyahu and.

01:23:20.000 --> 01:23:25.000

Exactly, exactly. Right.

01:23:25.000 --> 01:23:26.000

or bonds. So.

01:23:26.000 --> 01:23:37.000

But in fact, I mean, so that was true for Orban's 2010 election was run by these Republican consultants who also ran, I think they started running Reagan's campaign. So they sort of go way back.

01:23:37.000 --> 01:23:38.000

and the Nixon, they ultimately come out of the Nixon underground.

01:23:38.000 --> 01:23:55.000

And those can oh Nixon. Oh, well. Okay, so you, I mean right. So that's the group that Orban imported to help him win in 2010. They were still there in 2014. One had died by 2,018.

01:23:55.000 --> 01:23:57.000

But they were not there for 2022 or this campaign.

01:23:57.000 --> 01:23:58.000

Go ahead.

01:23:58.000 --> 01:24:07.000

And so you see that the magic was lost in part because those guys were really smart at how you do this stuff, and he lost.

01:24:07.000 --> 01:24:13.000

He didn't have these Republican Party foreign advisors helping him out. You're right to point that out.

01:24:13.000 --> 01:24:14.000

Yeah.

01:24:14.000 --> 01:24:21.000

Okay, we're almost out of time. But I just want to ask you for your thoughts on how people who oppose.

01:24:21.000 --> 01:24:41.000

right-wing international networks can. combat what seems to be a growing phenomenon, Western governments, Western civil society groups, what's the best strategy against this kind of Orban-Trump far right?

01:24:41.000 --> 01:24:45.000

political network.

01:24:45.000 --> 01:24:50.000

Yeah, so big tent, big tent United Front. The only places.

01:24:50.000 --> 01:24:56.000

where electoral victories have been able to overcome autocratic governments.

01:24:56.000 --> 01:25:01.000

is where the political spectrum has got to shift from left, right.

01:25:01.000 --> 01:25:08.000

to democracy, autocracy, right? And because if you're fighting a left-right campaign, these guys always win.

01:25:08.000 --> 01:25:24.000

Um, especially in countries which really do have, I mean, and it depends. I mean, think of it's not just right-wing parties. If we focus on Europe and North America, yeah, but think of Bucha Chavez, right? Think of, um, Rafael Correa, for example. Think of all the left-wing dictators, right, that have done the same.

01:25:24.000 --> 01:25:35.000

you know, as as your work will say, is Putin left or right? You know, who knows? Right? I mean, just putting things on a left right spectrum and assuming that populism is right.

01:25:35.000 --> 01:25:40.000

And therefore can be fought by a left. It's just the wrong way to think about.

01:25:40.000 --> 01:25:53.000

What's been happening in politics. This is… these are opportunists who use whatever rhetoric will gain them power because they suss out what the political, whatever the political traffic will bear.

01:25:53.000 --> 01:26:01.000

And they position themselves in that place. Okay? And so that what that means is that it fragments the opposition.

01:26:01.000 --> 01:26:10.000

who were not in that sweet spot that tends to win majorities in democracies. And so you've got to win over some of the people who voted for the autocrats.

01:26:10.000 --> 01:26:27.000

And you've got to hang on to all the people who were likely to think the campaign should mean they're going to get rid of that right wing stuff and therefore we have to do more left-wing stuff. That's not the dynamic of the campaigns that win. That wasn't, you know, getting Lula back in Brazil, that wasn't getting.

01:26:27.000 --> 01:26:39.000

the coalition groups together in Poland. That wasn't this victory either. Okay? Big tent. Everybody's got to hold their nose and stop fighting with the people who disagree with 20% of what they care about.

01:26:39.000 --> 01:26:57.000

and start disagreeing with the people who care, who disagree with them 80% about what they care about, right? And so, Big Tent Unified Front, Eyes on the prize, it's corruption, it's democracy, and it's the restoration of public services and a decent state.

01:26:57.000 --> 01:27:01.000

The only thing I wonder about is the democracy part, because.

01:27:01.000 --> 01:27:15.000

In the US, the idea of campaigning for democracy against Trump really doesn't seem to have worked. People don't buy it. Trump supporters think that they are defending democracy against the Democrats. The corruption.

01:27:15.000 --> 01:27:17.000

Exactly.

01:27:17.000 --> 01:27:20.000

aspect and the economic performance and the public service sites seem, yeah, clearly they should work.

01:27:20.000 --> 01:27:29.000

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I so I think democracy is an abstract concept.

01:27:29.000 --> 01:27:31.000

is hard to campaign for because it's abstract right? So what you need to do is to kind of link it.

01:27:31.000 --> 01:27:36.000

Yeah.

01:27:36.000 --> 01:27:40.000

And this is where the modular plan was so crucial, right?

01:27:40.000 --> 01:27:41.000

the zebras, right?

01:27:41.000 --> 01:27:54.000

I mean, I think zebras, right? It's like zebras and toilet paper. That's why I showed you those two pictures, right? It's because of the zebras that you don't have toilet paper. And then the through line is it's because you've lost your voice.

01:27:54.000 --> 01:27:56.000

which is different than abstract, you know, ideals of democracy. It's that this is not working for you.

01:27:56.000 --> 01:28:00.000

Mm-hmm.

01:28:00.000 --> 01:28:05.000

Right? And so and and then you can, with more, I mean, different kinds of audiences, you can then.

01:28:05.000 --> 01:28:13.000

talk about, you know, autocracy. But the problem is that democracy to most people means that.

01:28:13.000 --> 01:28:17.000

Whoever's running the government now got elected the last time around.

01:28:17.000 --> 01:28:28.000

Okay? And they don't take into account that when autocrats get elected, they just rig the system.

01:28:28.000 --> 01:28:29.000

Right.

01:28:29.000 --> 01:28:39.000

So they can keep getting elected, and then they keep saying, I'm a Democrat, you know, and Democracy is not just about who won the last election. So I think what Peter Madiard did was to operationalize, to borrow it, not, not a word you'd use in the general public.

01:28:39.000 --> 01:28:48.000

Um, the things that I must say I'm trying to say about democracy in my book that's almost done, which is destroying democracy by law.

01:28:48.000 --> 01:28:53.000

And democracy is not about who won the last election, right? It's about who wins future elections.

01:28:53.000 --> 01:29:03.000

And the question is, can you get to a free and fair election the next time that will actually reflect what people vote, what people want?

01:29:03.000 --> 01:29:10.000

Right? And so what Peter Matriot was saying actually was, if I'm elected, I will immediately vote to limit myself to two terms.

01:29:10.000 --> 01:29:16.000

in order to preserve the idea that you can go on changing who governs you.

01:29:16.000 --> 01:29:19.000

He never he doesn't really use the word democracy.

01:29:19.000 --> 01:29:20.000

Right.

01:29:20.000 --> 01:29:31.000

He used everything democracy is. You know, it doesn't respond to your voice, and I'm going to pass this on to somebody else someday so that you retain your voice.

01:29:31.000 --> 01:29:36.000

Right? That was really successful. I wouldn't use the word democracy.

01:29:36.000 --> 01:29:40.000

But what does democracy mean except that?

01:29:40.000 --> 01:29:55.000

Makes perfect sense. Okay, we're we're out of time. I want to thank you, Kim, for a really incredibly fascinating review of what's been happening and explanation of what's… of the story behind.

01:29:55.000 --> 01:29:56.000

The story here. Oh, no, no, no.

01:29:56.000 --> 01:30:02.000

Thanks for tolerating the Hungarian detail. I'm always looking for an audience to talk about the detail with.

01:30:02.000 --> 01:30:08.000

Absolutely fascinating, and we hope to get you back when your book comes out, or maybe before that.

01:30:08.000 --> 01:30:18.000

Great. Thank you. And we need to see what happens from here. This is the giant experiment on can you uproot a really entrenched regime?

01:30:18.000 --> 01:30:24.000

Most Vincent Valtas is the Hungarians say, now regime change.

01:30:24.000 --> 01:30:34.000

Yeah. Thank you.