I don’t understand the argument some folks have been making that Orbán lost and conceded and therefore he was never so bad from liberalism and democracy perspectives. He obviously and openly tried to stack the systemic deck in favor of his party/movement and succeeded in changing Hungary’s entire electoral model in a direction designed to lock his party into permanent power, to say nothing of his attacks on civil society and independent power centers. He expressed contempt for liberal institutions at every opportunity and proudly talked about how the goal of his project was to instantiate a particular and exclusive vision of the good life as the center of public policy. He was also so sloppy and corrupt that his opponents managed to beat him, harnessing the very supermajority-producing system he designed for a permanent Fidesz lock in the process. But the fact that he lost doesn’t mean his critics were wrong about the danger he posed or the anti-liberal, anti-democratic policies he actually enacted. By his own admission he worked to rig Hungarian politics in favor of his preferred (nationalist, Christian civilizationist, personalist) outcomes.
I don’t understand the argument some folks have been making that Orbán lost and conceded and therefore he was never so bad from liberalism and democracy perspectives. He obviously and openly tried to stack the systemic deck in favor of his party/movement and succeeded in changing Hungary’s entire electoral model in a direction designed to lock his party into permanent power, to say nothing of his attacks on civil society and independent power centers. He expressed contempt for liberal institutions at every opportunity and proudly talked about how the goal of his project was to instantiate a particular and exclusive vision of the good life as the center of public policy. He was also so sloppy and corrupt that his opponents managed to beat him, harnessing the very supermajority-producing system he designed for a permanent Fidesz lock in the process. But the fact that he lost doesn’t mean his critics were wrong about the danger he posed or the anti-liberal, anti-democratic policies he actually enacted. By his own admission he worked to rig Hungarian politics in favor of his preferred (nationalist, Christian civilizationist, personalist) outcomes.