Orban's massive win in Hungary

Portent of things to come in the global battle of democracies vs autocratic kleptocracies?

Notwithstanding all the polling that warned that today’s (April 3) elections in Hungary were strongly tilted to incumbent Viktor Orban (Fidesz Party), preliminary results showing his party with 53.1% of the vote vs 35% for the united opposition candidate Peter Marki-Zay, are by any measure, astonishing. There has been a growing drum roll against Orban’s Government in the tumultuous months leading up to the election. Among other things, resistance to Orban’s anti-democratic policies included the first-ever EU sanctions against a member state with the EU withholding 7 Billion Euros of Covid pandemic recovery over Hungary’s track record on “democratic rights and values.” There have been demonstrations not only in many Hungarian cities, but across Europe (and the world) protesting the Orban Government’s anti-LGBT actions, just as there were numerous outcries when Hungary shuttered the Central European University forcing its move to Vienna from Budapest. On top of all of these and many other controversial moves, Orban was well known to be Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in the EU. In fact, in his victory speech on Sunday evening, Orban specifically singled out Zelensky as a foe who called Orban’s Government to task for being the only EU (and NATO) Government that did not clearly call out Putin’s Russia for its aggression in Ukraine.

So, the electorate (with 73% of eligible voters casting a ballot in an election supervised by 900 foreign election supervisors, including from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe), has spoken. They have voted to double-down on Orban’s kleptocratic, anti-democratic (or as he proudly claims, “illiberal”) regime. When this result is set alongside Russian polling numbers that show upwards of 65% of Russians continuing to support Putin’s war in Ukraine, it is hard to find solace in the wisdom of the electorate to impede - much less reverse - what appears to be a continuing global trend toward autocracy and away from democracy. In increasing ways, the globalist, liberal democratic capitalist era that prevailed for much of the second half of the 20th century, seems to be giving way to something terrifyingly similar to the first half of the 20th century.