By mid-April, more than eight million Hungarians will vote in an election whose results will reverberate across Europe and the US.
For the first time in 15 years, the conservative Fidesz party and Viktor Orbán – a MAGA icon and standard-bearer for global “illiberalism” – look beatable. Hungary’s fractured opposition has rallied around Péter Magyar, an Orbánworld exile, and is holding a steady double-digit poll lead.
Have you been deranged by a decade of Trump? Do you want to tame your unhealthy interest in the Tennessee seventh or Pennsylvania supreme court special elections but keep your head in the liberalism-versus-authoritarianism game?
Then, this is the podcast series for you.
Dropping every Sunday between now and election night, the Twenty-Four Two Hungary Special will update you on the latest polling and campaign news, and host expert guests covering politics, economics, history and culture.
Kim Lane Scheppele is the perfect first guest to provide global context for the election. A Princeton professor and legal expert on democratic backsliding with a hands-on interest in Hungary, Kim was one of the first English-language public intellectuals to warn of Orbán’s stealthy formation of an autocratic “Frankenstate”.
“Hungary is to the American right what Sweden used to be to the American left,” she says. “Here’s a little country that does the thing we want to do on a larger scale in the US”. If Orbán loses, she has no doubt he will blame an international conspiracy. “The right will double down and say: ‘you see our enemies are everywhere and we have to circle the wagons’ … If anything, it will have a mobilising effect on the right”.
Twenty-Four Two is a new, regular podcast from 242.news, a newsletter devoted to reporting and analysing the remaking of Europe since Russian’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24-2-2022.
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