Gabor Scheiring: You don’t protect democracy by delivering these normcore lectures about the importance of the Constitutional Court, of the Supreme Court because the number of people who care about these institutions is relatively little. You protect democracy by protecting people against the power-grab of power-hungry economic and political elites.

That’s why Hungary, an opposition [unintelligible], and this new center-right organization or figure appears to be more efficient in talking about some of these changes.

Alex Lovit: These days a lot of people are wondering what can be done to prevent American democracy from backsliding into authoritarianism. Fifteen years ago people in Hungary were asking themselves the same question.

Today we’ll find out what Hungarians wished they’d known back then that could help the U.S. today.  You’re listening to The Context. It’s a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that’s so hard to do.

I’m your host, Alex Lovit. Today I’m speaking with Gabor Scheiring. He’s a professor of Comparative Politics at Georgetown University, Qatar, and he’s a Global Fellow here at the Kettering Foundation. In 2010 Gabor was elected to Hungarian parliament. That same year, Viktor Orban was reelected as Hungary’s prime minister, a position Orban still holds to this day.

Gabor had a front row seat while Orban dismantled Hungary’s democratic institutions with the help of Orban’s political party, Fidesz. Gabor says the U.S. should look to Hungary as a cautionary tale for what can happen if Americans don’t act now to change the way we think about and talk about democracy. Gabor Scheiring, welcome to The Context.

Gabor Scheiring: Thanks for having me.

Alex Lovit: During the Cold War Hungary was a communist nation in the orbit of the Soviet Union, but it’s been holding regular elections since 1990 so is Hungary a democracy?

Gabor Scheiring: At the moment I don’t think Hungary is a democracy. It was a democracy before, but soon after Viktor Orban was elected for a second consecutive term sometime around that time in 2014, I think, Hungary stopped being a proper democracy, and its form of competitive authoritarian regime. If you want a more popular version of it, it’s more of a zombie democracy. Pretends to be a democracy, but it’s dead inside.

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s drill down into that a little bit because I think for Americans it’s sometimes hard to understand what it looks like for a democracy to decline. If I go to Hungary today I’m going to see elections. I think the votes in those elections are mostly counted fairly. I’m going to see opposition parties, but if all that’s going on then how isn’t it a democracy?

Gabor Scheiring: It’s a real good question because many of us used to think of the end of democracies using more historical parallels. Democracies die under the fire of the tanks of a want to be autocratic leaders, and then democracy is over like that. But really, that’s not how democracies die these days.

Sometimes, this more straightforward version still applies, but in most cases we have this more incremental procedure that political scientists call democratic backsliding. It’s a set of incremental tweaks that eradicate the social foundations of democracy. They hollow the institutions.

They maintain an institutional facade like elections or there’s a set of competing parties that are institutions like judiciary. There might be a degree of free media. It’s not completely impossible, but very, very difficult to get rid of the ruling political party or personality.

But really, the degree of competition is not fair, and resources are extremely centralized in the hands of the governing party, but the competition is just extremely unfair.

Alex Lovit: Can you give me a sense of what that looks like on the ground? If I’m a Hungarian citizen who is critical of the government what restrictions might I experience and how might I experience the lack of ability to influence change?

Gabor Scheiring: That’s why this is more challenging to see them especially for people. For regular citizens to recognize it because they won’t necessarily recognize many significant changes in their day to day lives. There are still competing political parties, but if they pay close attention then they won’t see those competing political parties to an equal degree.

For example, political parties would face in Hungary these random fines that would, in the case of some of the smaller parties put them basically on the verge of financial bankruptcy. Now, they don’t ban these parties, but if you are financially bankrupt how are you supposed to compete? That’s just one element.

The judiciary is controlled more from the top. The public prosecutor’s office is run by a closed loyalist, and friend, and ally of Viktor Orban so there are procedures. Sometimes, important procedures, but when it comes to politically relevant procedures that would go off their grand corruption organized by Viktor Orban and his party, and key allies the public prosecutor would never go after those cases.

Alex Lovit: It sounds like then democracy can be suppressed not by a totalitarian oppression of the average citizen, but rather by controlling what might be called elites of other political parties, of media, of the judiciary. Do I have that right?

Gabor Scheiring: Absolutely. You won’t see policemen or the military standing next to the polling stations. They won’t tell you how to vote, but there are these subtle or in some cases not so subtle ways of controlling the flow of information from the oligarchs.

The Hungarian versions of Elon Musk and the like played a really important role in buying up especially local media outlets, television stations, print media, tabloid media so if you want to get local news you would get it from media outlets that are one way or another affiliated with Fidesz.

And you can see this happening also in the U.S. where there’s this erosion especially of local media sources available. At the local level the diversity of information is much less pronounced so that’s a crucial part of the story.

Alex Lovit: Let me ask a little bit about your own experience. You’ve served in the Hungarian parliament so you’ve been a part of the democracy. And now, you’re saying that the country is no longer democratic. What has your experience been like? Was there a moment when you realized, “Uh, oh, we’re in trouble here”?

Gabor Scheiring: I think me and the Green Party group that I was a member of, we realized the threats to Hungarian democracy fairly early on. We even organized a massive demonstration around the Hungarian parliament. Basically, a living chain where we blocked the entrance route to the building of the parliament during a critical day with the help of Fidesz and Peace.

The parliament voted for serious [flaws] that started to dismantle the basic institutions of democracy so this was just a day before Christmas as it happens. In Hungary it’s December the 23rd. we chained ourselves to the entrance of the parliament, and that kicked off a quite significant set of demonstrations in Budapest.

I have to say that at that point the majority of Hungarians still believe that at the end of the day Viktor Orban wants to bring a new era that will benefit the majority for millions. They had a pretty bad memory with the transition era mostly led by liberal parties leading to significant social and economic problems.

Viktor Orban was riding the economic anger to get elected to power, and this is like in the case of the U.S. and many other instances with [unintelligible] liberal leaders are getting elected by riding the wave of things like [unintelligible].

That it’s a problem if you have a large segment of the population that didn’t perceive liberal democracy as something that would perform and protect the rights of everyday citizens. Then at the end of the day there are a large number of citizens who are like, “Why should I care about liberal democracy if liberal democracy didn’t care about me?”

Alex Lovit: With the benefit of hindsight do you think there is something that could have been done? If you could go back to 2010 and 2011 now would you do things differently?

Gabor Scheiring: I think one of the biggest mistakes of the opposition was the failure to organize a clear majority. And too much focus on some of the institutional issues that are super relevant for the functioning of healthy democracies.

You don’t protect democracy by delivering these normcore lectures about the importance of the Constitutional Court, of the Supreme Court because the number of people who care about these institutions is relatively little.

We need to organize a majority based on issues that people really care about, and I think that’s where Hungarian opposition [unintelligible] There were several instances that are fairly spontaneous opposition movements rising from the streets basically.

And then, leading figures of the opposition committed these tactical mistakes of diverting the oppositional energies away from labor issues, for example. The issues related to institutions, rule of law, media, and these sort of things.

I’m not saying again that these things are not important. They are very important, but they are not the issues based on which you can build majoritarian identity to protect democracy. You protect democracy by protecting people against the power-grab of power-hungry economic and political elites.

Alex Lovit: One way of thinking about that is through narrative. That there’s a narrative that right-wing populists are telling and potentially either alternative narratives that the opposition should be offering. How do you think about, “How should the opposition think in terms of narrative and identity?” What should be being offered to the public?

Gabor Scheiring: I think too often these forces of democracy have become reactive. They come across as political forces that are only interested in protecting the status quo. They don’t really offer any transformative narratives or visions that would lead from the current status quo that many people find deeply disillusioning to a new political and economic arrangement that offers new hope.

Renewed chances for mobility, renewed chances for inclusion, for more social justice. Their economic and political elites cannot just grab whatever resources they find. Unfortunately, it’s authoritarian populous. Especially right-wing liberal populous that have managed in a completely fake way, by the way.

It’s a very fake identity, but they have managed to occupy this political space where they appear as the forces of change with narratives about how they are going to give back power to the people. How they’re going to increase their control over those uncaring elites.

This is the deep fundamental problem. When democracy, liberalism, social democracy was working up until let’s say the ‘70s, ‘80s it was working pretty well across Europe. It used to be a political force.

A political home that had a vision about how to change the economic system in a way that leads to a more equal distribution of resources that gives power to people. This has really gone away so that’s a major problem.

As the left has moved to the center or liberals have moved to the political center and have become really the forces of the status quo there you can see the space opening up especially among lower income citizens, working class citizens. It’s the same story in the U.S. It’s the same story in Europe. It’s the same story in France, in Germany.

It’s especially working class citizens. Lower middle class citizens that tend to be more disillusioned with the system whose [unintelligible] is in all of these countries have more or less stagnated. If you are a German citizen without a college degree your [unintelligible] has not grown in the last couple of decades.

It’s the same as in the U.S. In Hungary the average [unintelligible] just when Viktor Orban to power in 2010 was only like 10 percent higher or 13 percent higher than it was at the end of the ‘70s. So that’s basically the beginning of the last decade of state socialism, and that’s the average.

Inequality was skyrocketing in the ‘90s so when you have that situation, and there’s no progressive alternative that would narrate these stories in a way that resonates with peoples’ social and economic frustrations then you will have Donald Trump is always ready to jump into the garbage truck and pretend that he is this folksy outsider.

Even though he is a billionaire he pretends to be a folksy outsider who goes against these nasty bureaucrats who are just stealing money and just grabbing power for themselves. That’s the narrative that they are selling. This is working because there are real social and economic problems. There’s real economic anger among people.

There’s real frustration. [Unintelligible] frustration on the one hand, but there’s also the lack of a democratic alternative that would address these problems. You both have the social and economic [restructural] problems, but you also have the strategic failure of the democratic forces that then allow the liberal leaders to capitalize on these problems.

And then, once they’re elected to power they will use that power in most cases to entrench themselves in power. Political scientists also call this executive aggrandizement which is about [unintelligible] the power of the executive over the rest of the political apparatus.

And then, they would go after the bureaucracy, the career bureaucrats, the administration. They would go after human-centered [administrations]. You can see that in the case of the U.S. pretty well how they are about to dismantle the whole education department. Orban did the same.

They’d go after organized labor. All these sorts of institutional channels that one way or another help lower income citizens to organize themselves. Like in the case of Hungary teachers cannot demonstrate anymore. They cannot join trade unions because once they do that they risk being fired.

And in the U.S. public service unions have also become the most important unions so it’s very important how the education sector is being controlled.

Alex Lovit: It sounds like you have a lot of sympathy for working class people who might be voting for Fidesz. How should the opposition, or the left, or liberals be thinking about working class folks that are voting for these populous parties?

Gabor Scheiring: I think one big mistake is to try to find the populous voter. It’s very often a mistake committed by scholars of populism. They are there to find the populous voter, but there’s not one single type of populous voter.

So yes, there is a fairly large number of people who are deeply into nationalism and racism for cultural reasons. They hate migrants, but there’s also a very large group, and this is what’s really making liberals competitive. There is a very large group that’s drifting between social democratic parties [left-wing] parties and these populous parties based on their economic appeal.

One of the biggest problems with democratic and liberal elites in the past couple of decades has been that they lost their ability to listen to and understand these people. So very often they jump to these conclusions that all of them are just racist. All of them are stupid. They are unworthy of listening to. They are unworthy of our representation.

This is a big mistake because this really leaves no other choice for these people but to seek their representation on the other side. On the liberal side of the political spectrum. Yes, I am in many ways sympathetic to these people. Not all of them, and I don’t agree with what the liberal political forces are proposing to these people. I think it’s really important to see that a large part of this is happening because these people have no alternatives.

I’m coming from a working class family. I lived this through my family. How my father always used to say, “We’d vote for a social democratic party if there were any in Hungary,” but there’s none so he ended up being a Fidesz sympathizer.

And then, I researched this topic. I campaigned throughout these rural mid-sized towns in Hungary among these working class people. Many of them used to be left-wing voters in the ‘90s or early 2000s, and some of them, they just simply stopped voting. Others have shifted to the right.

There’s also this generational element where the elderly would just stop voting and their sons and daughters would directly shift more to the radical right so yes, I’ve lived through this. I researched this, and I think there is a significant lack here among educated democratic and liberal elites in their ability to listen to and their willingness to represent these people.

Alex Lovit: Let me run through a few comparisons between the U.S. and Hungary or places where I think there might be similar things to talk about. For one, Republicans currently have complete control of federal government here in the United States. White House, House, Senate, Supreme Court.

Their electoral majority is not large. In fact, it’s not even a majority in some cases. It’s a plurality. That’s also somewhat true in Hungary, I believe, where Fidesz does not have a huge majority of voters, but they do have a huge majority of parliament. Can you describe a little bit how that plays out in Hungary? How a small majority is translated into overwhelming control of government.

Gabor Scheiring: While it is true that Fidesz has not been extremely popular socially and politically in terms of the number of votes that it gained Fidesz has used its power to restructure the constitution. To restructure the institutional landscape so that one vote for Fidesz carries more weight than one vote for the opposition.

The tricks to the media landscape. They wrote a completely new constitutional system. All of these elements served the purpose of translating a not so overwhelming electoral result in to an overwhelming parliamentarian majority.

In the case of the U.S. the political situation is much more balanced, and that’s why I always like to stress that although its situation is pretty horrible it’s also important to realize in a federal system like the U.S. it’s just much more difficult than it is in a unitary and much smaller country like Hungary.

Alex Lovit: And so, it sounds like you’re saying that the U.S. may be protected somewhat by our federal system by how hard it is to amend our constitution.

Gabor Scheiring: I’m not sure I would use “protected” at this moment in time because I think the house is on fire, and we need to panic, and I don’t think the U.S. is protected. What I would say is that the opposition or the democratic opposition in the U.S. still has time to fight back and slow down this process because simply by the design of the American political system it takes more time for Trump to get to where Orban has gotten within a few years’ time.

Alex Lovit: Well, so what I want to ask you is are there lessons that we can learn from Hungary? Are there changes that we should be looking out for right now for Americans who want to protect our democratic way of life?

Gabor Scheiring: So it’s really a full-frontal attack that Trump has carried out in multiple dimensions at the same time. The administrative shock therapy has been pretty well-described in Project 2025. Russ Vought himself has repeatedly used the term “shock therapy.”

Alex Lovit: One of the primary authors of Project 2025.

Gabor Scheiring: Yeah, and he’s one of the key allies of President Trump in implementing this institutional shock therapy, I think, is at the [unintelligible] in the office of —

Alex Lovit: OMB, Office of Management and Budget.

Gabor Scheiring: Yeah, that’s it, and the way it’s being employed to take control over the administration and entrenched loyalists within the administration and get rid of the more independent-minded employees, it’s just also very similar to what Viktor Orban was doing. So I think following that and trying to fight it also legally is going to be really important.

The whole situation with the media is, of course, super important.  And if you know anyone who has some money to invest I think one of the best ways to invest it would be non-Trump-aligned, widely available, locally-oriented tabloid media that people trust in the U.S. can read and start going to underpin Trump’s narratives.

It’s really important also to protect the New York Times or The Atlantic. Probably these are going to survive, but the majority of people who would want local media or want tabloid as opposed to high-brow educated news sources, they have much less choice and so, that’s really crucial.

Tracking how Trump is consolidating his alliance with tech billionaires is really, really important. We’ve seen the same taking place in Hungary. Orban is very often described as a person who is only out there to steal money and give it to his members of family and close friends which is absolutely true. It’s part of the picture.

Unfortunately, the system is more stable because he has a much wider network of businessmen economically including foreign investors that thought, “Well, we have this strong man in power. He is good at going after labor unions. He’s making production cheaper. He’s reducing taxes for us so he’s not our first choice. He’s not the same kind of guy that we would maybe elect to represent our interests, but we are still quite happy with what he is doing.”

I can see that the same kind of oligarchic alliance coming together in the U.S., and checking that and trying to break that up is extremely important. Again, Viktor Orban’s stability in part depends on the support that he got from a wide network of domestic businesses. Not just the corrupt oligarchs, but a much wider network, but also, from German corporations. Car manufacturing companies.

You know which country has the lowest succession rate across the OECD when it comes to corporate taxes? It’s Hungary. Trump has announced that the U.S. would not only withdraw from the WHO and from the Paris Climate Accord, but it would also withdraw from the OECD agreement on global corporate taxation that would set a minimum global corporate tax rate.

Before Trump there was one guy who was fighting extremely hard against that global agreement. His name was Viktor Orban. I really want to stress this because there is this misunderstanding in political science that economic elites are by default on the side of the rule of law and democracy, and sometimes, they are.

Sometimes, they are among the most important allies, but very often they’re maneuvering is more tactical. If they have something to gain financially unfortunately, they are ready to give up on these basic principles. That, I would say, is also really important to track and deal with.

Back to what the most important thing is really for liberal and democratic groups to learn to construct a symbolically appealing identity that gives voice to the majority of Americans. That really requires a fundamental reset of what it means to be a liberal in the contemporary context.

Alex Lovit: Yeah, well, on the capitalist front I’ll say I’ve been concerned about democracy in the United States lately. I’ve had some thought of like, “Well, there’s just too much money involved in the American system. It won’t be allowed to collapse. The capitalists will save democracy in the end.” And then, I read your book and now, I’m not so sure.

Gabor Scheiring: Unfortunately, yes, I’m sorry if the book was disillusioning in that dimension, but really, if you follow, Jeff Bezos just announcing how he would restructure the opinion pages of the Washington Post. Just one example, and you could track how this scary alliance has come together in support of Donald Trump.

In many ways it’s also an interesting alliance because previously, we would have believed that tech capital would be more aligned with liberal forces so it was more like categorizing a progressive kind of capital.

We can see now that it’s not true that if for example, the European Union announces that it wants to regulate the information flow on social media platforms. Then suddenly, these oligarchs owning these social media platforms are really happy if a liberal strongman in the White House is representing their interests.

They also learn that this tech capital really needs a lot of energy. Trump’s pivot back to fossil fuels and cheap energy domestically is really something that the tech capital also needs to maintain the whole network of Internet with the data centers, and AI, and the competition capacity needed for that. And again, this is something that I don’t think has received enough attention.

Alex Lovit: Let me ask about a couple other potential similarities between Hungary and the United States. In addition to being a former legislator you’re also a professor. I know Orban has attacked higher education in certain ways in Hungary. I have two questions. One is how has that attack taken place, and the other is why? Why was it important to him to go after higher ed?

Gabor Scheiring: I think the reasons are really similar in the U.S. and in Hungary. Higher education is an important institutional source for independent thinking and independent research. It’s not true that higher education in general is always more necessarily liberally oriented.

It’s certainly true that if you have a highly liberal conservative party then the university sector and the higher education sectors really [unintelligible] that would be the most receptive to that kind of conservative politics.

It’s also true that university students have always tended to lean more towards the liberal than the conservative side. So for all these reasons if you want to be autocrat one of the first things that you would want to do is to rein in the independence of universities.

This really fits Orban’s power strategy. It’s the cultural hegemony in addition to the economic hegemony. That was also in an American university in a country, by the way, called Central European University, and I know that you’ve been following that story.

Viktor Orban had this very choreographed conflict with that particular American university, and they just basically ended up kicking it out so the university has relocated to Vienna. It’s a top university. It was one of the only universities in the country which was recognized for example, in political sciences. It was in the top 50 globally. Now, it’s a university in Vienna.

That’s also because that was a private institution. Orban had no control over it, and it employed quite a few intellectuals and produced young graduates who were not necessarily buying Viktor Orban’s messages. It’s the same story in the U.S. We have just seen how Trump is going really, really hard after universities. It’s a direct attempt to control universities from the top.

Alex Lovit: We’ve been talking for a long time about some pretty complex problems. Let’s give at least a little bit of time to talk about solutions. What is your advice for Hungarian citizens who want to restore democracy in their country? What can they do?

Gabor Scheiring: The case of Hungary has become really peculiar politically just very recently because the problems with the opposition that I’ve been referring to have accumulated to the degree that almost all of these political forces have vanished. Now, just a year ago an ex ally of Viktor Orban has quit Fidesz and put together a new center-right political party.

She’s very new, and it’s shiny, and it’s now really attracting quite a bit of support from the Hungarian people. It might have a chance to give a hard time to Viktor Orban. Beyond that, the most important thing is if you are organizing a thing the most important thing is always to keep your eye on issues that lend themselves to organize from the local levels ground-up to national kind of majorities.

Don’t let the organization splinter in to these factional issues or issues that are crucial about institutions, but they should not take center stage in the organizational work. The organizational work or the identity-building should really roll around things that show people that democracy delivers so that they really can trust democracy as a system that is about people and not just about elites.

I think that’s also perhaps one of the most important things for the U.S., but of course, in the U.S. it’s in many ways a different society so I think litigation is also an important part of defending democracy. Those legal procedures can slow down Trump, and I think identifying them, and I think potential legal avenues is going to be really, really important.

At the same time I think that if you look back legal procedures against Trump are not new. The guy has really successfully survived all of them, and if you only concentrate on the legal procedure that again, if you just look at this from a political perspective it creates the position that there is this elite that is going after the friend of the population. A friend of the people.

So just reinforces this kind of populistic divide between the technocratic elites and the friend of the people. The peoples’ candidate. I think that’s why the legal pathway has to be combined with an identity-building that really attracts the majority.

I would also draw a line again and draw attention again to the importance of trying to break this alliance that runs from disgruntled workers to the oligarchs. In many ways it’s a fragile alliance. How can you create this cross-class coalition between workers and business elites, right?

It’s a fragile one, but it’s working because again, some of the problems with the liberal alternative, but also, because of the dynamics that we have [unintelligible]. How economic nationalism emerges as a solution that is appealing to both business elites and appealing both to a large segment of workers.

Trump’s favorite word is [unintelligible]. That might be appealing to a lot of businesses, but also, a lot of workers in these industrializing areas. It’s not a long term economic solution, but this kind of veneer of economic nationalism helps to keep this otherwise fragile coalition together.

I think identifying ways to break up that coalition is important, but it also again means a shift in the way we think about democracy and think about democracy as a resolve of competing social forces coming together in a grand compromise.

It’s not just about institutions. It’s not just about [unintelligible]. It’s about organized social coalitions. That’s really important to identify those social coalitions, and try to break up some of them, and put together a new progressive or liberal and democratic majoritarian and social coalitions.

Alex Lovit: Well, Gabor Scheiring, thank you for your wisdom. For your practical advice, and thank you for joining me here on The Context.

Gabor Scheiring: Thank you very much for having me. I think it’s really important to have these kind of transatlantic dialogues about democracy. It’s a mutual learning process, and I hope it was sobering enough, but not completely disempowering, but rather, empowering.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Strait, Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our Director of Communications. The rest of our team includes Jamal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich. We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.

In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org to learn more about the Foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show you can reach us at TheContext@Kettering.org.

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