Last week’s election-eve podcast with Ábel Bede and Gabriela Greilinger was meant to be the last in Twenty-Four Two’s special 15-episode series on Hungary. But, after the partying in Budapest and the incoming prime minister’s hilariously unforgiving first moves, we couldn’t resist a post mortem with political scientist Gábor Scheiring.

Among the hot and bad social-media takes on Péter Magyar’s landslide victory over Viktor Orbán, the winners have to be:

See how quickly Orbán conceded - this was never the dictatorship you said it was! (from the right). No one credible said it was.

Magyar isn’t the liberal you think he is (from the left). No one credible said he was.

“A competitive authoritarian regime is a competitive authoritarian regime,” Scheiring tells us. “As long as you have elections, it’s possible to beat the ruling party, but it’s just hard, right? It’s much harder than in a free and fair democracy with free and fair elections”. Orbán conceded quickly because his defeat was undeniable. “I’m pretty convinced they had multiple scenarios and multiple playbooks but the result was so overwhelming, they couldn’t really do anything. What do you do against a landslide? Your only option is to use the military and repress society, and the next question is: do you really want to enter Hungarian history books as the dictator despised by his own people who used the country’s security forces to stay in power?”

Formerly a left-wing MP who now teaches at Georgetown University in Qatar, Scheiring doesn’t share Magyar’s conservatism but he is optimistic that the new premier will restore liberal democracy and maybe even pluralism. “He has more than two-thirds majority and huge symbolic capital, and now he has the momentum. There’s a Hungarian political scientist Eszter Kováts and she used the term: he behaves ‘like a tank’, and he does indeed behave like a tank and he should go on with this impetus and momentum”.

Gábor Scheiring’s The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary was published in 2020. His next book with Benedek Jávor, How Democracracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning And What To Do About It, will be published in 2027.

Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.

This really is the last podcast in our Hungary series but we’ll be back soon to talk European politics from a (small-l, small-d) liberal-democratic perspective. We’ll cover national elections in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Slovakia and Bosnia, state elections in eastern Germany, Iceland’s referendum on EU accession negotiations, British reconvergence with the EU, and the geopolitical, military and economic settlement Ukraine when it comes. And more.

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