The Twenty-Four Two Podcast

Very soon, eight million Hungarians will vote in an election whose results will resound across Europe and the US. For the first time in 15 years, MAGA icons Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz movement look beatable - this time at the hands of a defector, Péter Magyar, and his Tisza party.

Have you been deranged by a decade of Trumpism? Do you need a nail-biting political battle over the future of liberal democracy but without Orange Man and his cult? If so, this is the podcast series for you. Dropping every Sunday between now and election night in Hungary, this special series will bring the latest campaign news and expert guests covering politics, economics, history and culture.

This week’s guest is Stefano Bottoni - an Italian-Hungarian historian and one-time Orbán admirer, whose critical biography of the prime minister sold more than 18,000 copies and topped Hungary’s best-seller lists despite ghosting from local publishers.

When opinion polls were tight in 2022, Stefano still expected Orbán’s re-election but now he’s not so sure. “The point here is not how strong Tisza is; Tisza is strong and won’t weaken. The point is how Orbán could react to a possible defeat, and we have heard every kind of rumour here from postponing the elections due to the ‘state of exception’ ... or switching to a presidential system ... allowing Orbán to become president of the republic”.

Aside from Fidesz’s perpetual gerrymandering and media dominance, the government is also throwing money at pensioners, who make up 30% of the electorate. The Fidesz “regime is not like the old communist regime in 1989 - accepting almost gladly that it’s over: ‘we can hand over the government, so now the ball is yours and do whatever you want. We are done with it’. Orbán is not this kind of guy ... and we also had very different international surroundings in 1989. The US president was called George Bush Senior and the last secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, we have Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin. Both of them, for very different reasons, are greatly interested in keeping Viktor Orbán in power”.

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

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

Since President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the national assembly in June 2024, France has been going through its most acute political crisis in more than 50 years.

The election that followed split the assembly into three factions - centrist parties previously loyal to the president (“Macronie”), left-wing parties grouped around La France Insoumise (LFI), and Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) - each accounting for a quarter of the seats. Bouncing between them are the two traditional but shrunken parties of government - the Parti Socialiste (PS) and Les Républicains (LR) - neither of which is large enough to any of the three a majority even if they wanted to. At any other time, this political quagmire would be inconvenient. Today, when France needs difficult decisions made to address chronic budgetary shortfalls and a rising public-debt stock, it’s a crisis.

Wally Bordas, Le Figaro’s parliamentary correspondent, has written a gripping account of the 2024-25 political crisis in his new book Palais Bourbier (Quagmire Palace). In it, he reveals why Macron took the reckless decision to dissolve the assembly against the advice of his prime minister. He would either restore his absolute majority or force the RN to govern, fail and lose the 2027 presidential election.

“Emmanuel Macron’s approach was to let nature take its course,” says Bordas. “If the voters, by choice, put the RN in power at that time, let them do it”.

The Twenty-Four Two podcast is hosted by Tim Gwynn Jones at www.242.news.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

Today, Caleb Zakarin from the New Books Network foolishly chose me and The Chair as the subject for his inaugural Substack Live interview.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com