Last week, Hungarian voters delivered a decisive electoral upset to strongman Viktor Orbán, who spent 16 years consolidating power, capturing institutions, and portraying himself as the global template for illiberal democracy.
Discover #TheStakes here: bit.ly/4toZ3mz
🌎 South America: 📰 La Tercera, Chile (one of the country's two leading national dailies; link forthcoming)
🌏 Oceania: 🎙️ ABC Radio National Breakfast (Australia's national public broadcaster): www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...
🌎 North America: 🎙️ WBUR's Here & Now (US public radio news magazine, co-produced with NPR, syndicated nationwide): www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2...
🌎 North America: 📰 The Meteor (Boston-based feminist media collective): wearethemeteor.com/eric-swalwel...
🌍 Africa: 🎙️ Radio Islam (South African community broadcaster with international reach): radioislam.org.za/a/surprise-o...
🌍 Europe: 📰 Czech Radio Online / iROZHLAS (the Czech Republic's public broadcaster): www.irozhlas.cz/zpravy-svet/...
🌏 Asia: 📺 Al Jazeera's Inside Story (the network's flagship English-language current affairs debate): www.aljazeera.com/video/inside...
But this victory is the runway, not the destination. The new cabinet needs a strategic, long-term vision for sustainable democratization. Otherwise we might end up with another illiberal cycle.
That's roughly what I've been talking about
Political: The old opposition failed because it could never unite and innovate at once. #Magyar solved that by pushing the pre-2010 parties off the stage and campaigning with energy rarely seen.
Moral: Stagnant wages, rotting hospitals, neglected state institutions, and child abuse scandals on one side and the regime's inner circle laundering public money into lakeside estates and dynastic fortunes on the other.
The argument I kept returning to: This win was structural, then moral, then personal. Structural: Sixteen years of a cheap-labour growth model and jumping inequalities finally caught up with Fidesz.
The most thorough of these conversations was the half-hour @aljazeera.com segment, where I was onored to be the in-studio guest alongside Carl Bildt (Former Prime Minister of Sweden) and @kimlanelaw.bsky.social (Professor at Princeton). The Czech Radio Online in-depth interview is also good.
What a week. Since #Orbán's defeat I have been in and out of studios and phone calls with journalists trying to make sense of the elections in #Hungary, literally talking to each inhabited continent (Antarctica still pending), reflecting the gravity of this political change. Links below.
Most analyses of the elections in #Hungary focus on how Magyar won – @dfeher.bsky.social of #UBIE asks why it took sixteen years to bring down #Orbán. The answer reveals something fundamental about economic dependency and the case for #UBI as democratic infrastructure.
🔗 www.ubie.org/hu26
1/7
Hungary is Back. Orban is out. Constitutional majority in sight for opposition! 30% of votes counted; yet, it's almost 100% that the opposition Tisza party won, based on the current trajectory, new government might control at least 2/3 of seats. New era.
The failure of Orbánomics in one figure: before Orbán took power, net PPP household income placed Hungary in the upper third in Eastern Europe. By 2025, Hungary ranked lowest. Orbán was remarkably good at generating income for elites, cronies, and large corporations, while everyone else fell behind.
Yesterday, I spoke to il manifesto and @aljazeera.com (Inside Story, a 25-minute segment with @rdanielkelemen.bsky.social) about tomorrow's elections, focusing on the economic exhaustion of the regime.
🎦Al Jazeera: www.aljazeera.com/video/inside...
📰 Il Manifesto: ilmanifesto.it/la-piazza-gi...
📄 Read the analysis: www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-hormuz-shock-global-recession-update-g%C3%A1bor-scheiring-razef/
7/7
📺 Watch the interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXu4...
6/7
Add fertilizer shortages hitting spring planting right now, and you get something no previous energy crisis has delivered: oil, gas, chips, and food all under stress at once.
I’ve written up the full analysis with sources and data. 5/7
A ticking timebomb set for June. Three separate crises are converging on the same timeline around early summer, if Hormuz stays closed: oil reserves depleting below emergency minimums, European gas storage too low to refill before winter, and a third of the world’s helium blocked. 4/7
That’s the baseline. Painful, but manageable for wealthy countries. Already devastating across the Global South, where Pakistan has closed schools, Bangladesh is rationing fuel, and the Philippines has declared a state of emergency. But the real danger is what comes next. 3/7
The short version: Five weeks into the Hormuz closure, the global economy is still in what I call the linear phase, when inflation gradually inches up and economic growth projections down. At the moment, inflation is up a point, growth down half a point for the year. 2/7
I was back on @tvpworld.bsky.social to talk about the economic fallout of the Iran war. A 15-minute interview, plus link to the underlying analysis: where are we and why is June the month that might transform this crisis from painful to catastrophic. Interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXu4... 1/7
It did not come up. The focus was the US-Hungary ties and far-right ecosystem, and the IDU doesn't fit. It's also not particularly active. It might have helped Orban initially gain legitimacy but it didn't come up as campaign exchange platform. It's minor compared to the IRI or the EPP in Europe.
Three major new studies on democracy and freedom all find the U.S. is slipping further away from democracy. Leaders of two of those studies say President Trump's goal is to rule as an autocrat.
💥Not how one wants to be featured in the @nytimes.com, but I’m glad a US audience sees what’s happening in this small country’s wild election campaign. As with other Orbán-related news, here's my warning to US colleagues: Orbán's actions still serve as a blueprint for Trump/MAGA.
Read it here: feps-europe.eu/publication/laboratories-of-counter-hegemony/
