Orbán, Trump, and the Autocrat's Playbook

In April 2026, the world was shocked by when Péter Magyar handily defeated long-time Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán. In this episode, LCHP Assistant Director Rose Campbell speaks with legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele about this unexpected upset after sixteen years of Orbán's autocratic regime, and what it reveals about the rise and fall of modern authoritarian regimes. Drawing on decades of research in Hungary and Eastern Europe, Scheppele explains how leaders such as Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among others, have used legal and constitutional mechanisms to consolidate power, weaken democratic institutions, and entrench their rule while maintaining a façade of legality. Orbán's tactics have been widely used by aspiring autocrats around the world, and his defeat throws the political future of these regimes into uncertainty.

The conversation explores how corruption, economic stagnation, independent media, and grassroots organizing ultimately contributed to Orbán’s downfall and the rise of Péter Magyar, whose campaign successfully united opposition forces and mobilized voters across Hungary. While not a progressive himself, Magyar's policies nevertheless are more centrist than Orbán’s more hardline right-wing policies. Winning the election, however, is just the beginning. As Scheppele argues, elections can remove autocrats from office seemingly against all odds, but rebuilding democratic institutions can be a years-long challenge. 

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She studies the sociology of law and specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She has published over thirty articles (find them here) and her book, Legal Secrets, won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association as well as the Corwin Prize of the American Political Science Association. 

Transcript

Narrator 0:12

Welcome to the History Politics Podcast, putting the past to work from UCLA's Latin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week, we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

Rose Campbell 0:39

Welcome to the History Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work. I'm Rose Campbell, Assistant Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, which hosts this podcast. Right-wing populist Victor Orbán led Hungary for 16 years, and his authoritarian regime was largely regarded as a blueprint for aspiring authoritarians around the world, including U.S. President Donald Trump. Orbán maintained power through a variety of methods, including rigging elections, attacking and dismantling institutions of higher learning like universities, and playing to populist ideas of the people versus the elite. In Hungary's national election in April 2026, the world was shocked when center-right candidate Peter Magyar Orbán handily. Now, while Magyar is by no means a progressive, Orbán's defeat after so many years and endorsements from world leaders such as President Trump revealed the flaws Orbán's autocratic system and presented a glimmer of what a post-autocratic future might look like. Joining me today to discuss this landmark election and what it means for Hungary as well as the U.S. is Professor Kim Lane Scheppele. Kim teaches international affairs at Princeton and is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is one of the country's leading experts on the rise and fall of constitutional government. For many years, she lived in Hungary as well as Russia, studying how new constitutions were enacted and how repressive regimes responded to threats of terrorism. For the past decade and a half, she has shifted her focus to the way that new populist autocrats use their power and system of law to undermine constitutional institutions. Kim, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kim Scheppele 2:29

Thanks for inviting me.

Rose Campbell 2:31

So let's get started with a little bit of background. How did you become interested in studying the rise and fall of constitutional governments around the world? And how did this lead to your study of populist autocrats in recent years?

Kim Scheppele 2:44

Well, I didn't start off studying the fall of constitutional governments. I started off studying their rise. And so I had come into academia from being a journalist. And when the Berlin Wall fell, I thought, this is the biggest event of my lifetime. I want to go see it. I want to go study it. So I went very shortly thereafter, started traveling around Eastern Europe, auditioning countries to figure out where I would want to go to see how you dismantle the Soviet regime that had been put in place in all these countries and how they would build, or we didn't know perhaps they wouldn't build, you know, constitutional government. So after auditioning a bunch of countries, I moved to Hungary because that was the country where they'd set up almost immediately a constitutional court that quickly took over the role of more or less running the country. So I thought, you know, we have systems that we've seen that have strong presidents, systems that are parliamentary systems. What about a governmental system where the court is the strongest actor? And so once I figured that out, I, with the help of a grant from the American National Science Foundation, I mentioned that because, by the way, Trump has just canceled this whole social sciences division of the National Science Foundation. So the grants that got me to Hungary and then to Russia are no longer going to be available. And I really think that's tragic, not because of my future, because I've I'm done with field work, I think, but more or less because I'm not sure who can do it after me. Anyway, I went with a National Science Foundation grant to work at the Hungarian Constitutional Court, went for one year, stayed for four years, met and married my husband, who was from Russia. So then I transferred my scot my um interests, scholarly interests to Russia. And in both cases, it was very optimistic in the 1990s and in the early 2000s, because everybody thought, you know, Hungary surely, even Russia, looked promising. So I didn't start off studying the fall of constitutional governments. I started off studying their rise.

Rose Campbell 4:46

Well, let's talk a little bit about your time in Hungary and living there under the rule of Viktor Orbán. What were his tactics and how did he stay in power for so long?

Kim Scheppele 4:55

Well, Viktor Orbán, and I might say also Vladimir Putin, um, they're both lawyers, you know, who came to power with an acute knowledge of how their legal systems worked and what were the strengths and weaknesses of those systems. So when Viktor Orbán came to power, um, he understood that the constitutional court was the main uh, you know, institution that kept the constitutional government in line. So as soon as he came to power, and he came to power in 2010 through a kind of trick of the legal system through which, if you could get a strong plurality, you would get bonus seats. And in Orbán's case, he won 53% of the vote and got 68% of the seats in the parliament in a system where a single two-thirds majority of this unicameral parliament could change anything about the constitution. So basically, this election put him above the law. And in his first year in office, he made uh what were 12 amendments covering 60 different provisions of the constitution. And a lot of it was aimed at capturing the constitutional court where I used to work. Um, so I took it kind of personally. That's why I sort of dove back in and tried to figure out what's going on. Um, and so what you could see was that they changed the appointments process, they expanded the number of judges, they changed the jurisdiction of the court. Within three years, they'd managed to capture the court. Within three years, they'd also managed to capture and defang essentially all the institutions that could have come after them. They captured, you know, everything from goodness, the competition office to the public prosecutor's office. And I mentioned the competition office and the procurement office because all of that regulated the flow of EU funds that came into Hungary to develop it. They were able to divert a lot of those monies into private pockets to kind of keep a kleptocracy going. So basically, they were not in it for the ideology, they were in it for the money. Um, that might sound a little familiar. You know, you come to power and you kind of flip the rules, you get to control the justice ministry and the justice department and the prosecutor's office, you get obedient courts, and then you're off to the races. So that was really what happened very much in the early years. I mean, it took really until when the court was captured, the constitutional court was captured, which was in spring of 2013, and then they enacted these new election laws that basically rigged the elections in their favor for the next several cycles. It was all over. But it took the rest of the world probably another six, seven, eight years before they caught on to how badly things had been, you know, diverted from a democracy into a dictatorship. And they they didn't pay attention because all of those changes were formally legal. And as long as things were legal, it didn't raise, you know, questions the way it should have.

Rose Campbell 7:54

Interesting. So you think it took so long for the world to notice because it was technically all done legally, kind of of course, at least for the most part. Exactly.

Kim Scheppele 8:02

And you know, Vladimir Putin did exactly the same thing a little bit earlier, so he might have been the model for Orbán, uh Vladimir Putin, again a lawyer, changed the election system, actually, allegedly in response to terrorist attacks. But you know, when Putin changed the election system, it meant that his party would dominate both houses of the Russian parliament. They've been in charge ever since. Um, he's been president, and then of course he hit a term limit. So, what did he do? He arranged to swap out his loyal prime minister, who then changed the rules about the presidency, and then he came back, changed the rules about terms of office again. You know, I think people underestimate how much what happened in Russia was legal as well. So this kind of, you know, creating a dictatorship in plain sight through legal changes, it's just one of those things the world didn't expect. You know, we all have those, you know, kind of 1930s, 1940s, black and white videos running in our head of tanks in the streets and, you know, the war and the people marching down the streets with swastikas or, you know, red stars or like whatever, right? That's that's our vision of how dictatorship happens, that it overthrows a government, that there's a radical break with legality as we knew it. And that's just not the way it's done anymore. And so what I think a lot of aspiring autocrats have learned is that if you can capture the levers of power and do so in a legal fashion, particularly if you're copying laws from other so-called good countries but putting them to bad uses, it takes a very long time before anybody really understands what's going on.

Rose Campbell 9:47

So, to follow up on that, where do you see evidence of other aspiring autocrats using this example from Orbán, but also from Putin, of operating within the legal system to enhance their own power?

Kim Scheppele 10:01

Yeah, so there's lots of examples. So when Hugo Chavez came to power in Venezuela, the first thing he did was to call for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. Then he rigged the rules of the constituent assembly so his people had this supermajority. They came out with a constitution that basically removed all the checks on presidential power. But, you know, that might have aroused some suspicions. So what they put into the constitution were a whole series of new labor rights, kind of social rights. And then they advertised, they put this thing to a referendum, advertised it to the public as look at all the new rights you get. So it passed the referendum because all of the capture stuff was done in the technical details of exactly how separation of powers works. And nobody gets excited about that part of the constitution unless they're a lawyer, right? So then Hugo Chavez did it in Venezuela, Rafael Correa copied that in Ecuador. Um, you then see someone like uh Mr. Erdogan in Turkey, again, completely legally changing how constitutional judges were appointed, enlarging the number of judges because he enlarged the jurisdiction of the court, said, Look, I'm so I'm so much of a fan of this court, let's give them more judges. This is how you pack the court. I mean, this is now the way that autocrats all over the world are doing. And I don't know how much how quickly you want to get to Trump, but you look at Project 2025, and there's a bunch of different strands of what Trump has done, but the Project 2025 strand is actually Orbán in action. And it's not just hypothetical that this Orbán in action. Actually, Victor Orbán started this thing called, you know, Project 20 called the Danube Institute. It's his English language think tank. And the Danube Institute was one of the partners with Heritage in writing Project 2025, which is why there's so many similarities between that particular strategy of what of what Trump has done. He's done a whole bunch of things that are off script for that. But that thing where you you kind of enact all these regulations, you roll out executive orders, you invite the legal challenges, which will then go up to a PAC court, which will then declare the executive orders to be the new constitution. This is exactly Orbán, Orbán's script, or how Chavez's script for that matter, you know, gets translated into US law. I've jumped a bit ahead, but that's just to say, you know, the US is completely now following in the track of these other aspirational autocrats.

Rose Campbell 12:40

No, I think the parallel do seem pretty clear. And I I would love to get your thoughts on whether you think the reaction from the populace is the same in the US and the world, if we're letting it happen because it does seem to be happening, happening legally, or if you think there are differences there.

Kim Scheppele 12:58

Yeah, so if we're gonna, you know, just move to Trump. So I think I I have this article that I'm almost done with called Trump is a they, not a he. And so we talk about this administration like it's all like born out of the head of Trump. But actually, there's several different strands that different people are in charge of. And so the Project 2025 strand is in the hands of Russell Vogt. And he's the one they've been enacting regulations. For example, um, that one of these regulations, it started off being called Schedule F, it has some other name now, but it basically legally allows the president to reclassify about 50,000 civil service jobs into political appointments so that the influence of the president cuts way down deep into what used to be a protected civil service, which enables you know easier control from the center. That went through as a regulation, that's already law. Okay, so there's a, and I can go on and on, but there's a whole bunch of things that have come out of Project 2025, which are following exactly the kind of Orbán legal angle. The thing about Trump, though, is that he wants entertainment, right? So he's got two strands of other things that Orbán or Erdogan or Chavez or the other autocrats tried it, would have immediately alerted people to danger. And so they didn't do that. So one strand is the cruelty strand. I think of this as the Stephen Miller strand. You see this in the absolutely performative violence of ICE. They could do what they're doing quietly. In fact, since the big Minneapolis pushback, they have been doing what they're doing much more quietly. But part of that was that Trump wants to see the videos, right? Of people who are, you know, grabbed off the streets and beaten up and whatever he wants to see, the detention facilities that are, you know, depriving people of the basic conditions of human dignity. He wants to see all that. The thing is, when you videotape all of that, it gets out, and then the public sees it. And the reaction against Trump has been really a reaction to the cruelty agenda more than it's been a reaction to the legal agenda, further proving Orbán's point that if you do it all by law, you can get away with a ton of stuff without much public objection, right? It's this other stuff that's really attracted the attention of a broader public. I mean, the lawyers are all excited about the law stuff, but the broader public has gone after the cruelty agenda. And then there's this third thing that Trump is doing that, you know, Orbán did a little bit of, but not very much, which is to, you know, which is the international chaos agenda, you know, like project the power beyond the borders. Orbán's done quite a lot of that in supporting right-wing parties across Europe and now cobbling together the third largest party in the European Parliament. But when Orbán does this stuff abroad, he plays more by the rules, he does it legally to find his way into the system and then try to blow it up from inside. Trump is just like, you know, international law. I haven't even heard of it. It's just an obstacle, right? And so bombing things, kidnapping leaders, I mean, starting wars with no provocation, that's also attracted a lot of opposition because that's not on this usual autocratic script. It's too visible. You're seeing, you know, people getting killed, snuff films, you know, of the guys in boats in the Caribbean being put up on the Defense Department or White House websites, right? That's what's actually attracting the opposition to Trump. The quiet, legalistic autocrat just does the Russell vote lane, right? And the rest of it is, you know, attracts too much attention and might actually divert the autocrat from being able to consolidate power before he's really done with all the legal changes. So that's how I think Trump has been actually quite different from Orbán. But we shouldn't take our eyes off the ball. The Project 2025 legalistic agenda, which is the unitary executive, it's presidential control over much more of the landscape. It's it's sidelining uh how much Congress can control the president. I mean, think of the immunity decision of the Supreme Court, which one way to understand that is to say Congress may not reign the president in with criminal laws. Okay, we're now on a track where the Supreme Court is almost surely going to say, and Parliament cannot rein the executive in on the structure of the executive branch. So Congress could set up agencies, but if the president doesn't want them, he can get rid of them. Yes, the Congress can set up, you know, term limits or terms, special terms of office for people whose terms should last longer than the appointment of a presidential term to insulate them from political control. Trump can't get rid of that because the Congress can't control that. Ditto with civil service law, ditto with appropriations. You see all this stuff kind of coming up to a Supreme Court that looks poised to enlarge presidential power and to cut the knees off, you know, cut Congress off of the knees. And also, by the way, the Supreme Court is cutting off the power of lower courts, too. I mean, they just, you know, you get a 150-page reasoned decision based on, you know, long evidentiary hearings by a district judge saying, this looks unlawful to me. Let's pause the action until we can assess the merits of the case. Goes up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court says, fine, go ahead and cut, you know, cut these plaintiffs off the knees, go ahead and dissolve the agency, mass fire people, don't spend the money, whatever. You know, so you see a court poised to turn this into such a presidential republic that it may cease to be a republic, you know, that it's just presidential power. So that's the lane that Victor Orbán modeled. That's the lane, you know, all these other autocrats have followed, the ones that were successful, you know. So I think we just have to see whether Trump has, you know, his his desire for political spectacle has overcome and generated the public resistance that may actually foil in the end the entrenchment of the purely legal program.

Rose Campbell 19:07

So that actually leads well to my next question. Let's jump back to Orbán for a second, because in a sense, then he did everything quote unquote right. He did it legally, he established himself in what seemed to be an impenetrable fortress, and yet he was defeated. So could you talk a little bit and and and defeated handily, actually? So could you talk a little bit about how you Orbán might have sowed the seeds for his own defeat and how and why his power crumbled after this very careful and seemingly thorough agenda for so many years?

Kim Scheppele 19:41

Yeah, so this is really the ray of hope, right, for the US, given that we've just talked about what's happening, you know, with Trump. Um, so here's the really interesting thing. It's almost always the case that autocrats, however clever they are at the beginning, they lose their edge. Okay, and they lose their edge because once you have all the power, it becomes very tempting, as it was tempting for Victor Orbán, to just steal whatever you can, right? To become as corrupt as possible. I think Orbán always had in mind that really what his regime was about was not really ideology. You know, he came out as Mr. Christian Europe, and I am defending, you know, traditional values and all that kind of stuff. Okay, so first of all, no one's ever seen Orbán in a church doing anything other than a photo up. Okay, the guy has zero religious background. Um, he also is someone who, you know, really hasn't believed um almost anything that he's preached. And and in fact, you know, if if you're really going after, you know, you have all these target groups you're going after and so on. He didn't change the law on, for example, same-sex civil unions, didn't change the law on abortion or like all the stuff that you know, somebody advocating the Christian Europe views that he might have had might have done. So, you know, it this was all the ideology was all for show. This was really a kleptocracy. So what happened was that Orban became more and more visibly corrupt. Um, the amount of wealth that he and his cronies piled up became way too visible to ignore. So, just to give you one example, because this was one of the things that kind of broke the dam, you know, on talking about Orbán's corruption, um, there was this guy, lone person. Okay, I want to emphasize this is not all the organized opposition parties got infiltrated, cut off at the hip, defunded, compromised. I mean, the political opposition in any organized form crumbled, right? So a lot of this that I'm going to talk about are solo actors, small groups of people, which means you can overthrow a government without a social movement till the last stages. Okay, so there's this one guy in parliament, his name is Aquush Hadhazi. He's an anti corruption campaigner. He also is, in his profession, a large animal veterinarian. This becomes crucial. Um, so what happens is that he goes around. And he's trying to find out, you know, Orbán's father is building this luxurious villa outside Hungary. Um, there's this train, little tiny tourist train paid for by European money that goes from Orbán's house to Orbán's football stadium. There's a so-called woodland canopy. You know, sometimes you see in theme parks that, you know, you get to climb upstairs and walk on a on a like an elevated platform through the forest where you get to see things. So they had one of those, except that it was built in a cornfield with no trees. Okay, so he's going around taking pictures of all this stuff and broadcasting Orbán's corruption with all these EU funds. And then he rents a drone and he flies the drone over Orbán's father's villa, which everybody understands is really Orbán's villa. Orbán never kept his wealth in his own name. So Hadhazi gets this drone, flies the drone over Orbán's father's villa, and then he spots a herd of zebra. Okay, so it turns out Orbán's father had this herd of zebra. So here you have this large animal veterinarian who files a complaint with the animal protection authorities with pictures, with documentation, with pictures of this is definitely a zebra. I have identified them officially as zebras. I am a large animal veterinarian, I know this stuff, right? So he files the complaint with the animal protection authorities and of course leaks it to, well, the press. We'll talk about what the press is, because there is no free press in Hungary. So how do they do that? Hold that thought. This gets out, and suddenly this becomes the symbol of Orbán's corruption. And this starts to generate a social movement in which people start to put little zebra icons on all their messages, in which they show up wearing zebra costumes. They start the zebra just unleashes and focuses public attention on corruption. Okay. Um, and so that's one big thing that happens. And so the zebra, like this regime is really corrupt. Um, and then another thing happened. You know, Orbán pretends to be Mr. Christian Europe. Okay. And so there was this secret thing that leaked, which was that the government of Victor Orbán had pardoned a guy who had been, who had, who had been the the um the principal of a kind of uh state school, state-like orphanage, where the kids in this orphanage had been abused for years by the staff. Really horrible pedophilia scandal. And the principal of this school had covered it up, and that he and the and the you know active you know abusers had all gone to jail. Word comes out that the head of the of this pedophilia scandal had been pardoned. And and so Victor Orbán says, well, the president who issues the pardon obviously has to go, and the justice minister who must have authorized the pardon also has to go. So he fires the justice minister and orders the president to step down. He can't fire the president, but the president in shame steps down. That's the trigger. Okay, what happens out of the woodwork, out of Orbán's political machine, pops this guy that nobody but his friends has heard of, a guy called Peter Magyar. Okay. Peter Magyar, he's the guy who just became the prime minister of Hungary. Okay, so follow along the story, right? He kind of jumps out of the woodwork. It turns out he's the ex-husband of the now ex-justice minister who was just fired by Orbán. And he pops out and chivalrously defends his ex-wife and says, Victor Orbán should not hide behind women's skirts. And then he discloses, and everybody knew that Yudith Farga, his wife, and Peter Magyar had had this acrimonious divorce that had been in the press. And apparently, during the acrimonious divorce, Peter Magyar had taped conversations with his wife over the dinner table in which she disclosed a lot of the corruption inside Orbán's system. So he says, I'm gonna go on television and disclose all of this. Okay, now here's where we get is. I hope this is not too much in the weeds. This is just individuals doing things. Okay, the point of this is it's just like one brave person can do a huge amount, right? So there's no television, Orbán controls all the TV. There's no radio, Orbán controls all the radio, Orban controls all the major newspapers. So what do they do? The opposition had set up a YouTube channel, and the YouTube channel would broadcast news every night, it broadcasts special features. They had a media outlet and it was YouTube. And Peter Magyar went onto YouTube with the tapes from his ex-wife and exposed corruption inside the Orbán government. This is how Peter Magyar became the focal point for everybody's anger at the Orbán system, and he leads off with more corruption allegations. Okay? You've got zebras, you've got this. Suddenly you've got people saying, wait a second, this is just a kleptocracy. This government does not represent us. And Peter Magyar starts going around giving speeches. By this time, he has no political party, it's just him solo. He has zip security, he puts out on Facebook, you know, like, hi, follow me on Facebook, and I'm going to be here giving a speech, right? And so, no infrastructure. He shows up and crowds start to gather. And there's a longer version of this, but the short version is this snowballs into the movement that became a political party called TISA. Three months after he appears out of the woodwork, he runs this new party. I don't think he even knows who the people are on this party ticket. In the European elections, um, they get one-third of the vote in Hungary. Suddenly it becomes evident that he's got traction. And from this, he begins this campaign to become prime minister. Okay, now, two last things before I take up the entire podcast telling you how he wins the election, you know. But the first thing is that he realizes he's a lawyer. Again, they're all lawyers. In Eastern Europe, somehow, all these guys are lawyers. One reason why I love studying them, it's like my thing. Um, but anyway, he understands the law and Orbán had rigged the election rules. And the election rules were so rigged that a vote in the countryside counted two to three times as much as a vote in the cities. And Hungary has the same issue that the US has, that you know, almost every country where you get these right-wing populists that pop up, it's because the cities vote left and the countryside votes right, or the cities vote cosmopolitan, the countryside votes nationalists, right? And so Peter Magyar realized the only way you can win a Hungarian election is to win the countryside. The cities he knew he had in his pocket, the left didn't have anywhere to go, right? But him. So he goes out in person. And I think he counted that he went to more than 700 personal appearances in villages all over the country. There's a wonderful election map. If this were all you know visual, I'd show you. There's a wonderful election map that shows you little dots on the map of every place that he campaigned in person, and then the color uh blue for his party, orange for Orbán's party of how they voted. And it's just a sea of dots surrounded by blue. I mean, it was in-person campaigning. It's that his followers got on Facebook and started multiplying his message. It's that Partizan, this YouTube channel, started broadcasting his rallies. Okay. Orbán controls the media. They had to get to work around absolute media control. Orbán had rigged the election rules. They had to figure out how did he rig them so that the campaign, the way it's organized, unrigs it, right? So on election, and his popularity keeps growing. He goes around. I mean, he's running his campaign on a shoestring because they have no funding as a party. You know, he's pulling into towns in a rented pickup truck, and he drives it. He's like by himself or with like one aid. He gets out, stands on the flatbed of the truck, and starts to give a speech in these towns. You know, he's really campaigning with no infrastructure and no security. And he says, Look, I am not afraid, and this should not be a country of fear, and you should not be afraid either. And then he develops the message: look at those corrupt autocrats and look at your life. Okay. Hungary had, after the pandemic, inflation that sometimes hit 20%, the highest inflation in the EU, stagnant economic growth, people were fed up. And so here you've got Orbán Circle living in luxury with zebras, right? And in the meantime, the hospitals were falling apart, the school systems falling apart, public transportation was in the shambles. And so he starts to do things, Peter Magyar starts to do things like he goes around with his camera crew to hospitals and just walks into a hospital and shows you the peeling paint on the wall. And there the meme was, and the hospitals don't even have toilet paper. Okay. And so toilet paper memes. Okay, so you got zebra memes, you got toilet paper memes. His young followers, because again, he's very youthful, he's very energetic. Um, you know, he's got just a lot of energy, and you know, it doesn't hurt these charismatic. Um, and so his youthful followers start to memify everything he does. So the toilet paper thing becomes like the symbol of, and you're, you know, they get zebras and you don't even get toilet paper, right? And so that's the link. You know, they've deprived you of all this stuff in order to make themselves wealthy. And the through line is it's because you lost your voice, because democracy has failed. So the only way to get it back is to turn out in numbers and vote the zebra-loving people out. Okay. And that's what did it, right? So he he sweeps the countryside, he flips the script, as it were. I mean, he wins all these regions that have voted for Orban for 30 years, you know. I mean, it's just astonishing how much that narrative flipped everything. And so on election night, you know, he's got this huge victory. I've already mentioned to you that, you know, if you get two-thirds of the seats in the parliament, you can change the constitution at will. You get 71% of the seats. Okay. And so when he goes like election night, he's got, again, he's so good at camera crews and staging, and what will this thing look like on video? They set up this like platform for him to come and you know acknowledge his great election victory on the banks of the Danube, with the beautiful Hungarian parliament framing him behind him. And there's this huge sign, which is like the slogan of the campaign. And it said, Mosh Vencilvatash, which means now system change or like regime change. Vensilvatash is what how the Hungarians referred to what happened in 8990, right? It's like we're completely changing the system out with dictatorship in with democracy. And so that's where we are all over again. And I must say, I haven't stopped smiling for the six weeks since we've had the election. Um, and in case you haven't seen it, you got to look up the video of the dancing health minister. And so there's this guy, he's 56 years old. His name is Joel Dagadush. He's a very distinguished orthopedic surgeon. Apparently, he had invented some new procedures in Hungary so that the British National Health Service invited him to move there and reorganize parts of the National Health Service. So he's been living in the UK for the last 10 years and he's agreed to come back and be health minister. And he just busts out into these dance moves on election night. And then they reprise it, you know, for with the actual singer who sang. They just had like a DJ doing the music on the on election night by the actual inauguration. The actual singer, I think her name is Sachira, um, came from London and actually sang that song. And Joel Pegadush dances on the stage and gets the entire new parliamentary fraction, like all the new MPs out on the stage dancing, which is the biggest change from like the Orbán people don't dance. Okay. So the point is if it's good to have a revolution, better when you're having fun.

Rose Campbell 34:38

I did see that video and I it filled me with joy as well. I loved it, uh, the dancing. So I I'd be curious to your thoughts about what the future holds. We've had this landmark election, it seems very promising. What do you think will happen now that Magar is in power and has made these sweeping changes, or at least promised to make these sweeping changes? And following up on that, what do you think the defeat of Orbán means for the future of other autocrats who have tried to follow this pattern? He seemed unassailable, and yet here we are. So, what do you think that means for other governments?

Kim Scheppele 35:13

Yeah, well, let me start with the second one, which is that one of the ways that you overcome these places, you know, these autocrats, is to do what Peter Magyar did. You have to reverse engineer the way the election system is rigged, recognize that that's what you're dealing with, and run your campaign to unrig the rules, right? Also, easy message with a through line and the corruption, which almost all these autocrats fall into, is something people really hate. And when you link it to the fact that your standard of living is going down because of their corruption, it's a very popular message. So I do think the Peter Magyar example is really useful for other opponents of autocrats to, you know, to use to just topple them in the election. But, you know, an election is only the first step. You know, we've had other countries where aspirational autocrats were defeated in elections. So, you know, Bolsonaro in Brazil was defeated in an election and he was convicted and sentenced to 37 years in prison for trying to overthrow the results of the election and launching a coup. In Poland, the aspirational autocrats in the in the Law and Justice Party were voted out. Um, and you know, now we have this government trying to operate in its shadows. You could even say that, you know, Joe Biden's victory in 2020, excuse me, was a victory, you know, that got rid of Trump when he showed aspirational autocratic symptoms. Although Trump was not organized enough in his first term to do anything other than pack the court, but that was still pretty important. Now he's much more organized, so he's much more dangerous. Um, so what do we know from all these examples? Well, they're all disappointing. Um, the peace government in Poland and the Lula government in Brazil have not won, and and Biden, you could say, also in the US, they did not win with big enough majorities to comfortably change and undo the autocratic capture that the autocrat had done. They can move a few things along. They get vetoed by the people supporting Bolsonaro and Kaczynski and and you know, and the Democrats here, but you know, they can't really, or the Republicans here rather. I'm sorry, I got the sides mixed, but you know, the autocratic side here, you can't do a lot unless you've got an overwhelming majority, right? I mean, it's not enough just to win. Because when autocrats operate, they capture institutions, they turn them inside out, they destroy the rule of law, they fire the experts, they leave rubble on the floor. You've got to rebuild. And a lot of that means changing the constitution, changing rules that are deeply entrenched, um, overcoming court packing. Um, you know, so it's very hard to do what are what political scientists call U terms, right? That's the biggest problem. So now we're going to see this the Hungarian example is okay, so suppose you win with these supermajorities that allow you to change the constitution at will. I told you Orbán was off to the races in 2010, and here we go again. So why can't Peter Magyar just undo everything Orbán did? And the answer is because there are veto points that are now in place that Orban didn't have to contend with, that Peter Magyar has to contend with, and it means that even with that overwhelming majority, it's going to be hard. So, for example, um, there's a there's a it's a parliamentary system, so the prime minister has all the power, but the president has to sign off on all the laws passed by the parliament. The president in Hungary is an Orbán loyalist. Laws can get challenged before the constitutional court there. That's where I used to work. Um, like our Supreme Court, they can declare, and they're totally packed with Orbán supporters. They can declare unconstitutional everything Magyar does. This is exactly what's happened in Poland with the government there. They have a thinner majority in the parliament, but they still have a veto-bearing president and a packed high court. They've been unable to do anything substantial because they keep getting foiled. And now in Poland, that government is sufficiently unpopular that it may lose the next election and the law and justice party will come back. Same is happening in Brazil. You know, the the Bolsonaro people, Bolsonaro's in jail that energized his base. Bolsonaro's put up his son now because he's been Bolsonaro is disqualified from running, so he's put up his son. There's an election later this year. People expect not only that the son may win, because he's young, energetic, Lula by now is old, but also, even if they don't win the presidency, it's almost certain that the Bolsonaro forces will win the Senate in Brazil. And under the Constitution of Brazil, a simple majority in the Senate allows them to impeach the judges of the Supreme Court. So the Supreme Court, which convicted Bolsonaro, might is almost surely all going to be gone by the end of the year, right? So, and I can go on about other places where you get these little bit of turnarounds. It's extremely hard, especially the more damage the autocrat does, the harder it is to undo it. And so this is why, you know, thinking ahead to, you know, and the other the good news is all dictatorships end eventually. It's just that a lot of them end in economic collapse or war, and you'd prefer to avoid that. But, you know, they all end. And so the question is, how do you rebuild? And it will depend on where the choke points are, how much of a majority you've got, whether the public is on board, and in particular, whether the autocrats stand down. You know, I hear so many comparisons to, well, Nazi Germany, look at how Germany behaved, or in, you know, Japan or Italy. Those were all unconditional surrenders. You know, those were the forces of dictatorship disappeared. Ditto with post-communist Europe. I mean, when I moved, my first trip to Poland was in 1990. So within a year of when the wall fell, already nobody had ever been a communist, right? They just disappeared. Everybody who had been, new identity, hid from public life. So all of those transitions were all the successful transitions, right? Those are all the successful ones we think of. They all happened in the context of the absolute surrender of the forces that brought you the dictatorship. And that is no longer true in these new autocratic systems. These autocrats have popular support and they dig in and they don't go away. So we have yet to see a single successful case where everything an autocrat did while in power can ever be restored by the Democrat once the Democrat comes in, because they just don't have enough time in an election cycle to do that, and they may not have the legal majorities to do it. And many of them have said, I don't want to break the law to remake the law. So they're kind of in this legal prison that is honorable, but ultimately means it's hard to restore democracy. So, you know, let's hope that Hungary is the good sample case. I mean, it's the great sample case on how to defeat the autocrat at the polls. Now we're seeing, you know, how do you defeat the autocrat with the structural changes that the autocrat made, and how do you prevent the autocrat from coming back? Those are the challenges that Peter Magyar now faces. And he's made some very good steps. I mean, the first law that the new parliament passed was a law ending the six-year state of emergency that Orbán had declared for COVID, continued through the Ukraine war, through which Orbán was just governing by decree. Okay, so Orbán, so Peter Magyar said, I don't want that power. Good move. Second, constitutional amendment limits the time a prime minister can be in office to eight years in a lifetime. Peter Magyar says, I'm only going to do this eight years. He's only 45. He could do it longer. Orbán did it for 20. Okay. But the eight-year limit means Orbán can't come back. Okay. And then they've done a few other things. But you know, those are that's the first week legislative uh agenda. And I think it's actually a really good one. Um, they've they've figured out if they only have the chance to do a few things before the backlash starts, what are the things they're doing? And I think they've got a pretty good handle on where they need to remove the veto points in order to be able to get up and running. But it's not easy. The election is necessary, but not sufficient.

Rose Campbell 43:49

So I wonder if you could close us out by coming back to the US then and talking a little bit about what you see for the future here, also considering that. I think you could argue that Trump 2.0 is in part a reaction to how ineffective many people viewed Biden's administration, perhaps for many of the reasons you've just discussed, right? They were trying to do things within the legal system, and that had already been stacked against them. And as you already said, Trump is more organized this time, and so he is able to enact more change. So what do you see for the US going forward?

Kim Scheppele 44:24

Yeah, so I mean, I think that what Trump has realized, or at least what the Project 2025 part of Trump, like I said, he's they, not he, but that strand is aimed at locking down power. That strand is very far along, and that's the one that's gonna hobble any new government that comes in, right? A new government that comes in can tell ICE not to do all that stuff. The new government that comes in can end foreign wars. Okay, that you can do. You know, what are you gonna so you can just sort of go through the corruption of the system and the destruction of expertise? And how is it that you build that up? I mean, one of the things I think we can see is that it will not be enough to just go back to how we were, because how we were was too vulnerable to this kind of takeover. So, what what I think everybody needs to start doing who wants to see the end of this government, is to start thinking about how we can rebuild in a different way. That's going to be a hugely heavy political lift. And that means that the next election that brings somebody else into power has got to be a wave election that is as big as the Magyar victory, right? Because if you don't have huge majorities, you will be constantly tripped up by the forces that, you know, want to go back to the autocrat. I mean, amazingly, autocrats are popular, right? So I think what we need to do now, I mean, I know that there are, I mean, being the Democratic Party, there's not one project 2029, but about a dozen of them that I've heard of. The Republicans did one because, you know, they're all much more organized to stand in, you know, one line and do things together. Somehow the Democrats, like everybody's got to have their own version. At some point, all that stuff is gonna have to get consolidated and the best ideas, you know, kind of pulled out from that. But it's also gonna be really crucial, like for the for the ordinary person, right? If you don't feel like you're one of the Democratic Party strategists that's doing one of these things, then what you really need to do is to keep things alive long enough to persist into a new government. So individuals say to me, like, what can I do? So one of the answers is subscribe to every publication that's in danger of going under because they need whatever bits of money you've got, right? So that's one thing you can do. Get together with your friends. I mean, go to these No Kings rallies, figure out who your allies are locally and try to start at local level. Can you get better mayors? Can you get better county officials? Can you get better state senators? Because a lot of this is going to be building from the bottom up. Um, because and then there's going to be this moment when suddenly the top will open. And I told you that long story about Hungary in part because Hungarians were just stunned. Um, there was a uh one of my friends is an anthropologist, uh, my husband's anthropologist too, but one of his friends is an anthropologist who studied the very end of the Soviet time. And there was this person who said to him, this quote that just rings with me as I watched this Hungarian election. This guy told our friend Alexei, he said, everything was forever until it was no more. Right? Like these things just fall. Um, and so that's kind of how these legalistic things collapse. They just fall. Okay. So then we got to pick up the pieces, right? And how do we do that? A lot of that is figuring out what I think of as the kind of dense infrastructure that will that where civil society will hold stuff up when the institutions can't. Okay, so the institutions are going to be needing to be rebuilt. It's like that old expression, I'm full of cliches today. Um, rebuilding the boat in the open sea, right? They're going to have to rebuild the government while what? While people hold up what governments used to do so that the whole system doesn't fall apart during the rebuild. So meeting your neighbors, figuring out local governments, figuring out state governments, trying to build a governance infrastructure to hold us all together while the top is rebuilt. That's something ordinary people can start doing. You know, finding out who are your friends and allies. I must say that I've been spending a lot of time now with my friends whom I call homeless Republicans, you know, people that I used to get into fights with because I was progressive and they were a conservative, it's like that's trivial compared to what we're going through now. Right. And so what we try to find, and the homeless Republicans are great because they lost their political party. So they understand what happened. They were often the first ones to figure it out. And they are really good allies in this process because when we get back to something that looks like a democracy again, there will need to be a constitutional law respecting the conservative party that's missing. You that's one of the pieces of infrastructure we need to rebuild. There's already sort of a Democratic Party, although on some days it feels like there isn't much, you know, that also needs work, but you need a party structure. You need these ideas about going forward. And the rebuild is going to be really tough. So people need to be paying attention, resilient, educate themselves, build the dense network of local ties that will hold everything together when we have instability at the top, you know? And it was it's gonna take much longer to rebuild than it took to destroy, is the other thing. And we've got to find a way to increase everybody's patience because the lessons we've learned from Biden, from I think the, I mean, law and justice, um not law and justice, but the you know, the Tusk Party and the Pacific platform, Tusk Party in Poland, um, you know, Lula's party in in Brazil is that, you know, one election cycle is not going to be enough to rebuild this. And people are gonna have to be patient with whoever's in charge. And they may have to hold their nose when that person who's in charge does one thing that they hate. Again, it's keep, I mean, rebuilding democracy has got to be the first and last priority, you know. And as I say to my homeless Republican friends, you know, I look forward to going back to the days where we argue about universal childcare again, right? It's not any less of an important issue, but you're not gonna get it in a dictatorship. And I I'm now a firm believer in the two-step process here, right? Which is first you get your democracy back and then you go back to having ordinary politics. So I, you know, Peter Morder built a big tent, and people keep saying to me, he's a conservative, right? Like, why do you like him? And the answer is we haven't gotten there yet. The things he's doing are not left-right things, they're democracy dictatorship things. And as long as he's on that path, I'm with him. My lefty friends in Hungary are still with him, and we all look forward to the day when left politics and right politics fight each other again, because that'll mean we have a normal democracy.

Rose Campbell 51:37

Sobering, but not without hope. We just have to think strategically long term instead of in the moment.

Kim Scheppele 51:42

Exactly. And you're a historian, so I can't quoting all these other people, but I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago where there was this famous bar called Jimmy's, where everybody would go for drinks, and so and it was famous for having the most educated graffiti in the bathrooms, and it was in one of the men's rooms. So I got this second hand. Some guy comes out and he says, you know, there's this graffito, of course, Chicago, everyone uses the correct. There's this graffito in the men's room, and it said, Um, time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once. And I always say, and that's why we need historians.

Rose Campbell 52:22

I love that. That's a very good quote. I like it a lot. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Kim, for joining us today and for sharing your thoughts. We really appreciate it.

Kim Scheppele 52:32

Thank you. Good questions, great prep. Lovely to talk to you.

Rose Campbell 52:36

Thank you so much for our audience for listening in. Please do remember that if you enjoyed this podcast, please make sure to like and follow us wherever you get your podcast. You can also find full episodes as well as curated playlists on our YouTube channel at Luskin Center for History Policy. And don't forget to check us out on TikTok at UCLA History Policy for short summaries of every news podcast episode.

Narrator 53:10

Thank you for listening to the History Politics Podcast, putting the past to work from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, luskincenter.history.ucla.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Roselyn Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.