Your choice: an open thread

I’m Hungary for the new government to succeed, in the face of all the defenses that Orban put in place against the possibility of a loss. It’s going to be a major mountain to climb. Especially working with a coalition united by little more than hatred of Orban.

No offense, lj, but I’m having trouble seeing you as a Bud[dh]a either.

Who’s in on a GoFundMe for one-way tickets to Ruzzia for MAGAts?

nooneithinkisinmytree – Maybe headed for Russia

Well, I’m sure there is a window of opportunity there.

Look for him soon on the pavement below it.

Open thread… Filed federal and state income taxes. Made good estimates — between the two, wound up with a $32 refund. Always have to wait until pretty late to file, because we each get a K-1 form, and hers is always late. Made another admission about my wife’s condition. We’ve used the same online tax service for many years, going back to when she was in charge of things like paying bills and filing taxes. I’ve been putting it off, but went through all the extra steps this time to make me head of household and her the spouse.

For those reading who are not subject to the wonders of the US federal income tax system, just know that calculating the tax is not the hard part; the hard part is classifying money into all the different kinds of income so you know what rate to apply.

PS and that “large emergency loan” to Ukraine is from frozen Russian funds in Europe

You won’t find me linking to these ilk, but here ya go:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/yes-trump-might-use-nukes-in-iran/

He sez it. He means it. He’s one of those sincere ones 80 million who somehow are permitted to live among us find Christ- like.

Take your bets off the table.

There is no table.

Maybe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbeq_bDRMPw&list=RDmbeq_bDRMPw&start_radio=1

OK – from Comment is Freed on the Hungary election:

The fall of Orbán
What it means for the global battle against the radical right
Sam Freedman
Apr 14, 2026

There’s hasn’t been much for liberals to cheer recently, but Péter Magyar’s victory in Sunday’s Hungarian election has unleashed a wave of exuberance far beyond the streets of Budapest.

Magyar is not an obvious liberal saviour. He’s a social conservative and was a member of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party until 2024. By campaigning on corruption and the cost of living, while maintaining iron discipline over his newly formed Tisza party, he’s been able to hold together a broad enough coalition to win. Whether he can keep it together in power is yet to be seen. Some of his supporters are inevitably going to be disappointed. He will also face a demanding task dismantling Orbán’s network of cronies, though having a two thirds supermajority in parliament at least makes it plausible.

But while there may be trouble ahead, liberal excitement is justified. Orbán was a figurehead for the international radical right, creating a playbook for cementing executive power. He changed the constitution and electoral system; stacked the courts; took over much of the country’s media; filled the civil service with political appointees; and enriched his business associates. His willingness to fund populist parties and personalities in the US and Europe, and ally with Putin, made him a critical node in the global nationalist network.

If he can beaten, then so can the other parties in that network. But that doesn’t mean they will be. Because every election these days feels so existential there’s a danger in overreading results as signifying a broader trend. Every time a Georgia Meloni or Geert Wilders wins there are articles despairing at the inevitable victory of nationalism everywhere. When there’s a big loss, like Trump in 2020 or Orbán this week, it’s proof that populism has peaked.

Of course the reality is messier. In most democracies a radical right party is now firmly established as a major player. As voters will always eventually tire of incumbents, especially when the economic picture is so turbulent, they will continue to win elections some of the time. In the past year we’ve seen Wilders’s party in the Netherlands lose its way, Putin-backed candidates defeated in Moldova and Romania, and Orbán finally turfed out in Hungary.

But we’ve also seen Karol Nawrocki, the Law and Justice Party candidate, win the presidential election in Poland and the right-wing populist Andrej Babiš become Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. Looking ahead the AfD look set to win their first German state in Saxony-Anholt in September, and Reform will win another dozen or so councils in the UK next month. Radical right parties lead the polls in Britain, France, Germany and Italy.

The lack of a straightforward pattern doesn’t mean that Orbán’s defeat is just a one-off with no broader significance. His loss shows the limits of the radical right: that while the new wave of nationalists are not about to disappear, there are serious flaws in their approach to politics that can be used to halt their progress. In the rest of the post I’ll look at the three big lessons we can learn from Magyar’s victory.

International nationalism

One oddity of the modern radical right is that it’s simultaneously extremely nationalist and yet also operates as a global movement. There’s an obvious contradiction in claiming to represent national interests better than everyone else, while also being financed and supported by other countries.

Orbán benefited enormously from these relationships. He decided to tie himself to Putin in 2014 when the Kremlin agreed a €10 billion loan allowing Hungary to build two new reactors at its only nuclear plant. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Orbán has increased imports of Russian oil from 61% to 92% of the country’s total, getting a substantial discount which enabled him to finance his political network. In return he has blocked critical aid to Ukraine and created no end of headaches for the EU leadership.

His links to Trump were less about money and more about international status. In recent years he funded a succession of MAGA intellectuals like Rod Dreher, a leading postliberal, to live and work in Budapest. In 2023 he hired another big name in MAGA circles, Gladden Pappin, to run the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. One of Pappin’s jobs has been to build relationships with organisations in the US, and with other radical right parties around the world.

Developing these networks meant that Orbán was able to call on the Trump administration for favours, including participating in his battles with the EU, and limiting support for Ukraine. Pappin is an associate of Michael Anton, who wrote Trump’s national security strategy that, when it comes to Europe, essentially sets out Orbán’s talking points. It also allowed the Hungarian Prime Minister to position himself as a global figure, agreeing to host a summit last year with Trump and Putin.

But tying himself so strongly to the interests of other countries opened him up to accusations of selling out the national interest. When it emerged last month that Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, had been passing on details of European meetings to the Russians, Magyar accused him of betraying Hungary. In the days before the election, the opposition leader was given another easy hit when transcripts of calls with Putin were leaked in which Orbán obsequiously compared himself to a mouse helping the Russian lion and offered to help “in any matter where I can be of assistance.”

Watching young Hungarians celebrating Tisza’s victory by shouting “Russians, go home” indicated the value of this approach. In Magyar’s victory speech he said: “Hungarians said yesterday they will write their history, not in Moscow, not in Beijing, not in Washington.”

As for the relationship with the US, all that positive coverage in right-wing papers and newsletters may have boosted Hungary’s reputation in certain circles, but it turned out to be useless in a domestic political battle. The election was lost before J. D. Vance turned up to speak at campaign rallies. But it may have helped get Tisza a supermajority, given Trump’s rising global unpopularity. At very least it distracted Orbán from talking about issues people cared about. Tisza’s campaign was focused on economic hardship and corruption. Vance’s thoughts on the fight for western civilisation were irrelevant.

Radical right leaders in western Europe have had to distance themselves from Putin since the invasion of Ukraine, despite getting financial support from him in the past. Many are now trying to do the same with Trump, as he goes increasingly off the rails. Meloni gave a speech last week listing all the ways she’d disagreed with the American President. Here, Nigel Farage has been desperately briefing newspapers with a list of the times he’s pushed back against Trump. The AfD is having a public row about their association with him.

It won’t be so easy to pivot away though. There’s plentiful evidence of prior support for Trump that opposition parties can exploit. And the wider ecosystem around European nationalist parties is still financially dependent on the US, especially in Britain where right-wing papers and newsletters rely on MAGA subscriptions. So speaking out against Trump also carries risks. The dissonance is becoming a major problem for them.

Democratic resilience

Every election against radical right parties seem existential because a loss feels like it might never be recoverable. They all seek to undermine institutions and centralise power. Usually this is done legally, or at least with the pretence of legality. Orbán didn’t violate the Hungarian constitution, he rewrote it. Reform’s proposals to replace senior civil servants and judges with political appointees, while packing the Lords with cronies, could all be done without breaking any laws.

This democratic backsliding can feel irreversible, creating a kind of self-defeating nihilism amongst liberals. But, as Hungary shows, as long as the core right to vote is protected it’s always possible to defeat a government, however much they’ve gerrymandered the system. Attempts to rig things can even backfire. The “winner-takes-all” electoral model that Orbán designed allowed him to maximise gains against a divided opposition. But once the opposition unified it allowed Tisza to take enough seats for their own supermajority that will enable Magyar to rewrite the constitution and remove his predecessors’ cronies. The downside of centralising power is that if your opponents get their hands on it they can quickly reverse your decisions and take advantage of it to strengthen their own long-term position.

A key lesson for those pushing back against backsliding is to be creative in maximising whatever institutional levers are available, even as others are being eroded. Orbán’s opponents were able to make use of Hungary’s EU membership to gain some protection. He was never in a strong enough position to consider leaving the Union given the economic value of cohesion funds (Hungary has received around €50 billion over the past two decades – some has been frozen in recent years due to corruption, but €10bn was released in 2023 as part of a deal to secure aid for Ukraine).

Magyar used his position as an MEP to gain immunity from malicious prosecution, of the type common in Russia or Turkey. Orbán tried to do everything possible to skew the electoral system to his advantage but he was constrained in ways true totalitarian governments are not.

These institutional levers will look different in different countries. There’s no equivalent of the EU to act as a barrier to Trump, but it is much harder to change the US constitution than the Hungarian one. While the conservative Supreme Court has given the President plenty of leeway they have provided just enough of a block to prevent many of his madder plans. As I set out a few weeks ago, despite Trump’s obvious desire to rig the midterms, it’s practically impossible for him to do so without breaking the law or launching a full-blown coup.

Making the best use of whatever constitutional protections are available requires constant vigilance and determination. Fatalism – the belief the battle is already lost – is the enemy of successful opposition. For sixteen years the Hungarian opposition kept fighting, and kept winning small victories, even as Orbán seemed invincible. They also kept finding ways to disseminate evidence about his corruption, despite his control of newspapers and TV.

Social media is often seen as helping the radical right due to its value in disseminating disinformation, but it also prevents authoritarian governments from gatekeeping effectively. Magyar supplemented his effectiveness with modern media tools with old-fashioned campaigning, tirelessly travelling the country for two years giving endless speeches and setting up grassroots networks he called “Tisza islands”.

Democratic backsliding is a real phenomenon and an ongoing threat. The UK is particularly vulnerable due to our lack of codified constitution. But democracies also have a lot of inbuilt resilience, as long as people fight for them. Various indexes of democracy have seen global scores decline over the past two decades but, as yet, no country that was a strong democracy has ceased to be one, even if some (like the US) have seen their overall score decline.

The corruption factor

Magyar’s campaign was built around Orbán’s corruption. His rise to prominence began in February 2024, after it emerged that President Katalin Novák, an Orbán ally, had pardoned the deputy director of a children’s home who’d covered up multiple cases of sexual abuse. Novák was forced to resign alongside justice minister Judit Varga.

When this scandal broke Magyar quit Fidesz and launched an anti-corruption campaign that went viral, as it was so unusual to have someone from within the regime talk about its behaviour. His biggest bombshell was a secret audio recording he’d made of Varga, who happened to be his ex-wife, admitting to corruption in another case.

There was plenty of material for him to work with, Orbán is by far the most corrupt politician within the EU, siphoning funds to his business cronies and enriching friends and family members. His personal estate is far more lavish than anything than could be afforded on his salary. Hungary is at the bottom of Transparency International’s EU corruption league table and 76th globally. This is what allowed Magyar to build such a broad coalition.

It’s also a fundamental weakness for the radical right more broadly. Even in opposition, corruption scandals have dogged nationalist parties in Western Europe. Marine Le Pen has been barred from running in next year’s presidential election due to misuse of EU funds. AfD parliamentarians have been caught taking bribes from Russia, as was Reform’s leader in Wales.

In power the opportunities for graft are vastly greater. Trump is an extreme example, being utterly shameless in his determination to use his office for personal enrichment. But it’s a consistent pattern, Poland’s Law and Justice party lost the 2023 parliamentary elections in part because a corruption scandal related to selling visas for bribes, and further allegations around other schemes have emerged since they left office.

Of course, politicians from parties across the spectrum get caught up in scandals, especially in countries with more fragile democracies. But it’s endemic to radical right parties because of their ideological construction. They are typically opposed to institutions designed to protect the rule of law, as they are seen as controlled by the liberal establishment. They always seek to centralise power, which creates more opportunities to misuse that power. As insurgent parties they are typically run by strongmen (or women) whose prefer loyalty over competence and tend to reward that loyalty by granting favours.

If properly exposed corruption is electoral kryptonite. Even in genuinely totalitarian states it can be the trigger for revolution. There’s a reason why Xi Jinping keeps purging senior members of his regime for corruption. It’s a useful way to dispatch rivals but it also manages public anger about the grift that’s pervasive in Chinese society.

It sometimes takes time to happen. Orbán kept going a long time before someone was willing to blow the whistle loud enough to cut through. The Democrats still haven’t managed to fully capitalise on Trump’s venality, though his sheer brazenness about it is one reason his approval ratings are now falling, along with inflation and Iran. But openness to corruption is another limitation on the radical right’s ability to hold power.

Qualified hope

Perhaps in a decade’s time we’ll look back to 2026 as the turning point for liberal democracy, especially if Trump loses the midterms in November. But there’s no guarantee. It could just be a brief respite before the next wave of nationalist victories in the wake of yet more economic turmoil and another refugee crisis.

What should give us hope, though, is that, just as Orbán created a playbook for the global radical right, Magyar has given us one for those trying to defeat it. While local context matters there are generalisable lessons. The radical right’s relationships with Putin and Trump can be exploited against them and can form the basis for the kind of appeal to patriotism with which liberal parties typically struggle. New media, used alongside relentless grassroots campaigning, offers a way to circumvent authoritarianism. The populist’s tendency to corruption is a profound weakness when it can be properly exposed.

Most of all we should take hope from the resilience of democracy. Protecting it requires constant vigilance but it’s hard to kill. They’ll be more depressing days in the future, but if Orbán can be beaten then anyone can.

Open thread… View from the front porch, 10:00 MDT, April 17. Might do this off and on all day.

Line drawing to photorealistic image. The AI can’t resist filling empty spaces with details.

For those without a NYT subscription:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crl1441816po

(Of course the Brits here cite the NYT, while a Yank links to the BBC.)

“If the Democratic Party is to flourish in the future,” Mr. Platner told me, “it needs to be an antiwar party.” As talks to end the latest disastrous war focus on reopening a narrow strait of water that was open before the war began, this seems like an obvious conclusion. And yet many Democratic politicians would most likely be wary of embracing it.

The thing is, most of the Democrats’ leadership in Congress belong to my generation. They vividly remember their youth, where the Democratic Party being anti-war (or at least perceived so) led to a decade plus of Republican presidencies. It’s probably fair to say that they were traumatized by that experience.

So what’s obvious to those without that personal history is less obvious to them.

That Rhodes op ed about Graham Platner is a mixed bag for me of semi-cogent criticisms of US military power and the wishful, disconnected way in which most Americans envision this use of power, coupled with a list of policy and strategy recommendations that range from essential, concrete, and winnable (revoking the open-ended AUMF) to coalition rending (going after AIPAC). And packaging it all together like the piece does really gets in the way of progress because it starts fights and uncovers potential vulnerable places in the coalition before anyone has had a chance to accomplish the parts that will be broadly popular and productive. Rhodes leans towards the comprehensive when I think that being more narrowly focused on reducing the allure of militarism would shift the narrative in ways that could be built upon as more people start to buy into the idea of an America that is less hegemonic.

As for Platner himself, I like a lot of what he says and agree with a lot of what he says, but that’s how I felt about Fetterman at the beginning as well, and I see in Platner a lot of the same potential for maverick disruption and martyr complex stubbornness. Yes, he’s bringing in more people, and has a more dynamic message than does Mills, but part of that is just the generational difference. Mills is old and has been a Democrat forever, and her insistence that she knows how to win assumes that the old gameplan is still a winning one. Recent history argues otherwise. Mills being wrong and out of step doesn’t make Platner or Rhodes correct, just more timely.

Rather than anti-war, I’d say that the Dems need to be anti-militarist, and anti-adventurist. I think Buttigieg would be the ideal sort of messenger for something like this.

I wouldn’t want anyone to tangle people up in the difference between being anti-war and anti-militarist/adventurist. What I want is for the Dems to be clear that they think we should be spending less on big weapon platforms and an expansive footprint in the world and more on trying to take care of our domestic needs and keeping strong relations with our allies. That’s not anti-war or weak (which do get treated as equivalent in many Americans’ minds); that’s strength in unity and sharing the burden of a strong peace.

The best part of a message like this is that it’s already in line with the reality of our moment. Our allies are already preparing to take back some of their power because they no longer trust us. That’s going to reduce our military footprint. And Ukraine should be proving to everyone that our military doctrines of the last quarter-century-plus are as useful as a cavalry charge and a massive cost sink.

Best to put a positive spin on that, and one that matches the public mood.