A Slap in the Face for the Far Right
A landslide loss in Hungary sends a message
"Hungary's authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán offered a blueprint for the American right's vision of governance. Steve Bannon once called him "Trump before Trump."
On Sunday, Hungarians voted Orbán out in a historic landslide — the highest turnout since the fall of communism.
When asked about the result on Tuesday, Trump was characteristically unbothered and instantly pivoted. "I think the new man's going to do a good job — he's a good man," he told ABC News, adding he hadn't been "that involved in this one" — six days after calling into an Orbán campaign rally on speakerphone.
The defeat raises an uncomfortable question for Trump's administration, which has spent years studying, celebrating, and importing his playbook: what happens when the model fails at its source?"
On Sunday night, thousands of Hungarians — many of them young — crowded onto the banks of the Danube in Budapest. They waved flags. They chanted. Some of them wept. By the time Péter Magyar, leader of the victorious opposition party in Hungary’s national elections that day, appeared before them to declare that Hungary had been “liberated,” the result wa…
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