More than a year ago I interviewed my old friend and colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, a constitutional scholar who speaks Hungarian and knows Hungary, about the march of autocracy. Now, suddenly, a much happier occasion. I found her account of how this happened startling — a lot I didn’t know, even though I’ve been following the news obsessively. And some of it is wild. Here’s a transcript:
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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Kim Lane Scheppele
(recorded 4/16/26)
Paul Krugman: Going back after a number of months to Kim Lane Scheppele, my former office neighbor at Princeton and I think we can safely say America’s leading constitutional scholar who also knows Hungary and speaks Magyar, although you’re probably the only one.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Sorry to interrupt you, but the language is Magyar nyelv, and Magyar, the name of the person we’re going to be talking about, who’s also the new prime minister, means Hungarian. That’s your Hungarian lesson for the day. Ha!
Krugman: Oh, wow. Thanks. I would have gotten that all wrong. All right. Well, anyway, as you say, it’s been quite a week. You were on this case on my blog starting in 2010, but I think we want to just talk about first reactions to this extraordinary election on Sunday.
Scheppele: Well, yeah. It’s been hard to even comprehend the magnitude of this. I mean, not only did Péter Magyar win this election, but he won the election overwhelmingly in a rigged system. And so that’s the miracle magic of it. It turns out that Viktor Orbán had rigged the election rules so that only he could win. And the shortcut of what he did was that essentially a vote in the countryside counted three times as much as a vote in the cities. And what he counted on was that usually, if you get a challenger to a right-wing autocrat, they’re all going to be liberals, right? They’re all going to get their votes from the cities, from the educated populations. And Orban had a lock on the countryside. And then he put all the weight of the system on counting his people more than others. So Peter Magyar spent the last two years going out to villages, just meeting all of these people in person and getting around the fact that Orban also controlled all the media. So the media was rigged, the election system was rigged. And when the vote came in on Sunday, he was at 15 to 20 points ahead in the polls.
Krugman: Right.
Scheppele: But that did not guarantee he was going to win. And it did not guarantee that he was going to win by the majority. And so when the numbers started piling up, like I was watching the early returns and the early returns were coming in from villages that should have been the Orban vote. And it was a Tisza vote, it was a Peter Magyar vote. And so you knew just from the first 2 or 3% of the vote that it was going to be overwhelming. And sure enough, the whole evening the results came in and Peter Magyar won. It might shift a little bit, 1 or 2 numbers now, but about 138 seats out of the 199 seats in the parliament, and Orban had to concede. There was just no way that he could even claim fraud or try to do anything to change it, because he just didn’t have votes come in from anywhere.
Krugman: Okay, it’s funny but that’s the first clear explanation I’ve gotten of how the rigging worked. Because the reporting has been pretty vague. And, you know, there’s still a fair number of people saying, “oh, it can’t really have been rigged, because after all, he lost.”
Scheppele: Yeah. No, it was so rigged. I mean, literally, Orban rewrote all the rules in 2015. And, Paul, I need to give you a shout out here because, you know, Americans didn’t know anything about this. And I live in my head in Hungary. And I would come in every day to campus and see you in my office next door and go on whining and complaining about how Orban had been building a dictatorship starting in 2010. And you said, “Well, how come The New York Times isn’t covering it?” And I said, “Well, no one’s covering it because no one can see it.” It was all legal. It was all technical. It was really hard to see how Orban was nailing things down.
And then you called me up on a Sunday and said, “Okay, I’m going to do tomorrow’s column on Hungary.” And so, remember, we scrambled around, I was translating documents. The fact checkers were calling me up, and you wrote that blog post on a Monday, and then you said to me, “Look, you know, it’s more complicated than I could say. You can put something up on my blog.” And then we did that for like 3 or 4 years. You were putting all my commentaries up on your blog, and I was the only one covering it in English at that time. So, you know, if it wasn’t for your venue, it would have been impossible to get this on the radar screen of Americans. So, Paul, it’s your victory, too.
Krugman: I hope it is. I mean, I feel like I was facilitating your victory, it’s obviously the Hungarian people’s victory. But actually one of the things that strikes me here is that, we talk a lot about how Orban muzzled and controlled the media in Hungary, but, effectively, there was an international muzzling coming out of a couple of things.
Scheppele: Yeah.
Krugman: I remember you saying that basically even big international news organizations sort of had one stringer in Budapest who often turned out to be somebody affiliated with Fidesz. So.
Scheppele: Right. Well, there were a whole bunch of ways that he muzzled the international press. So one was just that, if you were a domestic journalist reporting for the international press, you were under surveillance, you were under threat. The international news organizations, including, by the way, the New York Times, had to start providing physical security for the reporters because they were really being threatened with death threats and the whole nine yards. And, you know, I got death threats, too, sometimes through the comments section on your blog. Right? So, everybody commenting on it was really under threat in some sense.
But the other thing that happened was once the international press pulled out because they couldn’t pay for the security anymore, they’d hire Hungarian stringers and then the Hungarian stringers would have other things happen to them, like they’d get doxxed and there’d be mobs outside their apartment and they’d have to move out of their houses. And really, it was a huge campaign. And then the final thing, and maybe not the final thing, but at every single Hungarian embassy in the world, the ambassador was told, “Your job is to keep negative news about Hungary from appearing in the press.” So every time there was a story criticizing Orban, the embassy would call the editors and say, “You’ve got to give us equal time,” or “you can’t trust those journalists,” or “you should never use those sources again.” Going back, this was during your days at the Times, there was a Hungarian-American reporter who was writing for the Times, and the Hungarian government called the Times and said, “we don’t trust this guy.” And they stopped putting his byline on stories until they did a full check on him.
Krugman: Okay.
Scheppele: So that was happening to the international press. So it’s not just the domestic press that was muzzled, but the international press as well. And so it took a very long time. I mean, Orban had the whole system locked down in just three years, and it took until five, 6 or 7 years later before the rest of the world caught up to the fact that a dictatorship had been constructed in plain sight.
Krugman: What’s also extraordinary is that even now — I mean, this is the first time I’ve heard anyone, and I’ve been reading the news reporting obsessively, but the first time I’ve had as clear an explanation of how the rigging worked and how Magyar broke it. And, you know, the eyes of the world have been on Hungary a lot, if only because Hungary has been the star of CPAC for years now. And you would think that by now reporting would have gotten it right.
Scheppele: Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, part of the problem is that Orban and his circle are lawyers, and they pioneered this sort of 21st-century version of dictatorship where you don’t shut down the media. You just regulate them or you threaten them or whatever. Everything was done technically by law. And I think most Hungarians didn’t understand how the law was rigged. I wrote a quite detailed article about this in the Journal of Democracy after the last election, going in detail step by step through all the stages of exactly how Orban rigged things. So, it was gerrymandering. It was things like, the districts expected to vote for Orban had 30,000 voters, and the district expected to vote for the opposition had 90,000 voters.
Krugman: Right, right.
Scheppele: And then there were all kinds of other election tricks that Orban borrowed. For the 2014 election, I wrote about this on your blog in five parts. Remember? You put up five parts. “Election in Question, part one,” “Election in Question, part two.” There was just every single which way [they could change the rules].
So just another example. Orban said, “we have all these minority groups in Hungary. They should be represented in the parliament.” Everybody’s cheering, like minority representation—what a good thing. So there was this possibility of the Roma having a separate representative in parliament and the Germans and other ethnic groups. And it turns out if you registered to vote on that party list, you only needed 20,000 votes to get a seat. So all those seats got colonized by Orban’s people. The Roma guy was a Fidesz person. That’s Orban’s party. The German guy was a Fidesz person. So all these little things gave Orban one seat here, four seats there and so on. And if you look at Orban’s popularity in Hungarian opinion polls going back to 2010, he never got above 35% in his personal popularity. And in elections, he would struggle to get 45%. But then he would get 67% of the seats in the parliament, and that two-thirds threshold mattered because the Hungarian Constitution can be amended with a single two-thirds vote of the unicameral parliament. And if he could get two thirds, he put himself above the law. So it’s 199 seats in the Hungarian Parliament, 133 is two thirds larger. Magyar just got 138. That’s what’s so stunning.
Krugman: One immediate thought is thinking about the extreme unequal representations, rural versus urban. The closest equivalent I can think of is the US Senate.
Scheppele: Yeah. The Electoral College, too, right?
Krugman: The Electoral College somewhat. But the Senate, where California has two senators and Wyoming has two senators, exactly like that. It over-represents the rural areas. And when you get this urban-rural, educated-uneducated split, it guarantees that the right always has an advantage. And you said Magyar’s been campaigning about two years, right? He was in Fidesz. He had actually been part of Orban’s government.
Scheppele: Yeah. So here’s the good news and the bad news about Peter Magyar. So he came of age and was attracted to Orban’s party because he’s basically a center-right kind of guy and Orban’s is the center-right party. So he went into the party machine sort of right after school, and he stayed in the Orban machine for 20 years. He was posted to Brussels. He was in what’s called the Hungarian Perm Rep, which is the big embassy that every member state of the EU has in Brussels, which handles the state affairs with the EU. He was there. Then he came back and he held a variety of positions in the state-owned companies that Fidesz ran. So he was in the system. He benefited from the system. And then there was this really funny event that brought him to public attention. He had this acrimonious divorce.
Krugman: Okay.
Scheppele: And, like, you can’t make this stuff up. Wait till we get to zebras.
Krugman: Okay.
Scheppele: But his wife, who was always a trailing spouse with all of his appointments, and also a very clever lawyer, really smart. Orban had named her the justice minister of Hungary. Her name is Judit Varga. And she presided over, really defending Orban’s interests at the EU. And she’s kind of a pit bull like Orban. She and Peter had this acrimonious divorce. But it happened around the same time that —probably Orban, we don’t know for sure—but she approved a pardon of a guy who ran an orphanage in which the orphanage had had state employees who engaged in sexual abuse of children, in other words, a pedophilia scandal.
Krugman: Right.
Scheppele: And the principal had known about it and cooperated. She issued the pardon for this guy, and there was this huge firestorm of objection. A pedophilia scandal. I mean, you can think of the American parallels, right? And so Orban insisted that she be fired. So she left the cabinet. And that was the moment when Peter Magyar, having just divorced her, popped out of the woodwork and said, “How dare Orban hide behind women’s skirts?” And then he said, “And because I was married to her, I know where all the corruption happened, where all the bodies are buried.” And he had, it turns out, made audiotapes of his conversations with his ex-wife during the acrimonious divorce. I mean, that’s why you can’t make it up. I have to tell you this because this is something that’s not really making the headlines in the U.S. but he actually had the tapes through which she had talked about some of the corruption scandals inside the Orban government. And so he pops out, accuses Orban of hiding behind women’s skirts, then goes on this YouTube channel.
Krugman: Okay.
Scheppele: So by this time the opposition has no TV, no radio, hardly any major newspapers. The opposition started a YouTube channel. So Peter Magyar goes on the YouTube channel with the audiotapes from his ex-wife, and gives this big interview about how much corruption there is inside the Orban camp. This makes him an instant superstar, right? Because everybody kind of knew it, but nobody knew precisely how. And so he then starts going around the countryside and giving speeches about all the corruption. He attracts a crowd, then he attracts a bigger crowd. This is all a few months before the last European election. I think he begins to get the idea, like “maybe I could form a party and run for the European election.”
The European election rules require strict proportional representation, not rigged. So he had a much better chance of getting elected to the European Parliament than he would have getting elected to the Hungarian Parliament but it’s too late to register a party. Okay, so he looks around and he finds that there’s this little party called Tisza, which is the name of a river in eastern Hungary. And he goes to the people who took out the party name and said, essentially, “Can I kidnap your party?” And so that’s how he gets a party, cobbles together who knows who to run on the party list. And he gets actually a pretty big vote to put himself into the European Parliament. Okay, now that matters, because first of all, it’s a clap-a-meter that shows you the guy actually has a real chance of standing up to Orban. But second of all, he becomes a member of the European Parliament and that gives him parliamentary immunity.
Krugman: I was about to ask that.
Scheppele: And at first he said, I’m not going to take my seat. I’m going to give it to somebody else. I’m going to stay here and work for Hungarian liberation here. And then I think somebody said to him, yeah, but you get parliamentary immunity. So I’m not sure he ever showed up in Brussels, but he did get parliamentary immunity. And so when Orban came after him with sort of—pardon the expression—trumped-up charges to try to sideline him, the government technically had to go to the European Parliament and ask that his parliamentary immunity be lifted. And the European Parliament said, no.
Krugman: Right. Like you have to know he got a lot of help. But it’s just too complicated and too detailed. Right.
Scheppele: But it tells you how many things had to fall into place for him to overcome how rigged the system was. Okay, so then he figures out that if you don’t win the countryside, you can’t win at all. And he comes out of the countryside, actually, and he’s a center-right guy, which is to say that on left-right issues, he’s unlikely to be very different from Orban. You know, it’s fine. It’s a center-right country. On democracy-dictatorship issues, he’s entirely different from Orban. And that’s what we need, right? And that’s what he’s promised to do, is really restore democratic institutions.
Okay, so Peter Magyar has this acrimonious divorce. He was known for wearing these highly, shall we say, form-fitting clothes. He got the nickname “Slim Fit Jesus,” because, you know, he’s pretending to save the masses. But all of his clothes were so tight-fitting that, shall we say, it was almost embarrassing to look at him. And so he gets this kind of name, but of course, he’s also auditioning for girlfriends, right? Because he’s a 45-year-old guy who no longer is married. So the Orban intelligence services send him a girlfriend who then tapes all their recordings. Just what he did to his ex-wife, right? And she comes out with these recordings in which he calls members of his own party idiots because he doesn’t know them. I mean, he just sort of cobbled together the party. That doesn’t affect his popularity.
And then actually, during the election campaign, the government did this thing where—I mean, they didn’t say it came from the government, but where else? It goes to the government media. They release a still photograph of a bedroom with a rumpled bed and some white powder on the side table. And it’s got a camera, sort of from the ceiling angled down on the bed. And the media is told: “coming soon.” So you think it’s going to be a Peter Magyar sex tape. He comes out and he says, “I’m a healthy 45-year-old man who has consensual sex with women.” Like, so there.
Krugman: As in, regarding the tape.
Scheppele: And this is like the brilliant thing that starts happening. He’s got these crowds. He’s got people who are so thrilled to discover that they’re not alone in hating the Orban regime because they’d been threatening people. They’d been separating people. There was no public space in which to figure out that you weren’t the only one who hated Orban. And Magyar’s rallies had become the place where you could do that. So he’s got all these young people who have joined the campaign. And when this still photograph of the bedroom comes out, suddenly all these Hungarian computer whizzes start doing AI-generated videotapes of Orban in bed with Trump and Putin in bed with Orban. And like all of these things. So if they were going to drop a sex tape, it would be indistinguishable from, you know, two dozen or so of these AI fake videos of everything else that might have happened in the bedroom. And so the government never released the sex tape.
Krugman: By the way, one of the things that I didn’t really realize, actually, until the craziness of South Korea, is that we were all focused on X, formerly Twitter, and BlueSky was down this morning and I was quite upset—but YouTube is a tremendously important medium for political communication around the world.
Scheppele: Exactly. And that’s how the opposition has been communicating. So, for example, on election night, I couldn’t go there, but I was just watching the Partizán channel and they just had all these commentaries. They had good graphics and actually the funny thing was that they had in their studio a spinning head where one side of it had the face of Orban and the other side had the face of Magyar. And the whole evening it was spinning. And then when it became clear, it stopped and you saw only Magyar. So it was fun to watch Partizán this time. But the campaign had turned out to be fun. This was the thing we’ve all missed. Like the rallies were just occasions to find out that everybody didn’t want Orban. And they got bigger and bigger. There were rock bands, there were speeches, there was humor, and then there were the zebras. I promised you, zebras.
Krugman: So, the zebras. I know a little bit, but tell us about the zebras.
Scheppele: Yeah. So it turns out that Peter Magyar became this sort of rock star because of his exposure of corruption. There were some great investigative journalists and some anti-corruption campaigners. And one of the anti-corruption campaigners discovered this palace that was being built outside of Budapest, allegedly by Orban’s father. So we know his father and it was Orban’s money, right? And next door is the palatial estate of Orban’s best friend, the blue-collar worker who is now the richest man in Hungary. Everybody knows that’s Orban’s money, right? And somehow they got a picture over the fence of a little—I keep saying I’ve got to look up the collective noun for zebras.
Krugman: Okay.
Scheppele: But they found a gaggle, a flock, a herd of zebras, and took pictures of zebras. And suddenly this became the symbol of Orban’s corruption. So people are turning up at the rallies with zebra heads and zebra costumes and little zebra pins wearing black-and-white striped t-shirts and all this kind of stuff. So the zebra became the meme. But the reason why I mentioned the looking over the fence is that this anti-corruption campaigner, Ákos Hadházy is his name, sponsors tours where he takes a ladder and a bunch of people, and he puts up the ladder on the fence and everybody climbs up and looks over and sees for themselves. And that’s also been part of the anti-corruption campaign.
Krugman: Right. So I think the original picture may have come from drones, but then other people are climbing over the wall to look at the zebras. And just a quick thought, I mean, actually it reminds me a bit of the fall of communism when people were going on about the luxury in which the East German leadership lived. And I was thinking, yeah, that’s not luxury by US standards. Even then, with US inequality being what it was. I saw the photos of the Orban estate and it’s very nice, maybe particularly since we know it’s all stolen money. But my God, it’s not something that Mark Zuckerberg would find remotely impressive.
Scheppele: Exactly. It’s got one of those one-lane lap pools instead of a giant kind of private lake like Yanukovich had in Ukraine, which had his own yacht in his private lake. It’s not that kind of estate, right? But in Hungary, it’s shocking, because Hungary had one of the most egalitarian distributions of wealth after communism. Not so many visible oligarchs. So the oligarchs have only become that rich more recently and under Orban. That’s also what’s happened. And this is, like, “it’s the economy, stupid.” I mean, I’m sure you were watching this. The pandemic hit Hungary very hard because it exposed that the hospital system had been chronically underfunded for years. So another meme that Peter Magyar used very effectively was toilet paper. The hospitals don’t have toilet paper.
Krugman: My God.
Scheppele: And of course, when I lived there in the ‘90s, the hospitals also didn’t have toilet paper, but never mind. But he would go into hospitals with a camera crew and look for the toilet paper. Just look at the peeling paint on the walls and stuff like that. So the pandemic exposed the underfunding of the health care system, and the death rate from Covid in Hungary was actually quite high. And they put the military in charge of the hospitals so that the information wouldn’t leak out about how bad things were. That was, you know, 2020-2021. So then what happened, of course, was the post-pandemic inflation that hit the world. And you’ll know what that was in Hungary, right? It got to 20% a year.
Krugman: Yeah. I’m not quite sure I fully understand that. I mean, that’s supposed to be my department. But why inflation was so bad in Hungary was always a bit of a puzzle.
Scheppele: Yeah, I was hoping you’d explain that to me. But there were, I think, a couple of things going on. One was that Orban was both spending well beyond his means and spending corruptly. So it wasn’t actually benefiting the economy. Like, more and more money was going to private pockets. So the whole economy was sort of teetering on the brink. I think that’s part of it. And you’ll know better how that feeds into inflation. But I was trying to get the EU to cut their money ever since 2012.
Krugman: Right.
Scheppele: And so I got together with a group of wonderful friends, academic scholars. We first wrote the law review articles that explain why they could do it under EU law, then lobbied for the laws so they had a structure for doing it, then had to lobby the European Commission to actually do it in the courts to uphold it. And anyway, it was a ten-year process. And in December 2022, the EU cut almost all the funds to Hungary overnight. So this is cohesion and a lot of other funds. Remember, there was a big recovery fund where the EU had gone to the markets to make up for the budget hole caused by Covid and the UK departure. The total EU budget was sort of half the usual budget, and that was half the recovery fund. But they had built so-called conditionality into both those streams of funding. So Hungary lost about €36 billion in a sharp cut overnight. And that was on top of inflation creeping up. But I think the markets were also anticipating this was going to happen.
Krugman: Okay. And you know, Hungary has the same population as New Jersey, it turns out. And much poorer than New Jersey. So €36 billion is a lot of money for Hungary.
Scheppele: Right. Exactly. And Orban had been siphoning off about a quarter of that money just straight off the top into private pockets. And the EU knew that. So when the EU cut the funds, it was a huge hit. And it was the disposable income that Orban used to hold his party together. And, you know, frankly, I’d been saying, at least to you, I mean, we used to have these conversations. “If we can just cut Orban’s money, his crony system will fall apart because they’re all on the take. That’s what holds him together.” And if you cut off their source of funding, think of it as like a resource curse problem, right? Where the resource curse is EU money. It was the only money really coming in. So, yeah.
So sure enough, that happens in 2022. Peter Magyar jumps out of the woodwork in February 2023 or a little bit later that year. But it doesn’t take long for the inside of the Orban machine to start to crack. And I think that’s one of the things that gets Peter Magyar to jump out, because he can see that the ship is going to sink if it doesn’t have the EU funds. And the EU was pretty serious about all of that. So, I do think that was a contributing factor, but there were all these other things too. I mean, just the exposure of corruption. And it was the high inflation. It was “the economy, stupid.” You know, just everything. The growth rate had flatlined. So the economy was just in serious trouble.
And Peter Magyar’s through line was “Orban is corrupt. And that’s why public services are underfunded and that’s why the economy is mismanaged. And this is why your lives are miserable in the countryside.” And so that was his pitch. And I think that’s not a left or right pitch exactly. You know, that’s something everybody can get on board with. So as it became clear he was going to really be able to run in the Hungarian parliamentary election, all the small center and center-left parties just collapsed and stood behind him, even though they knew he was not one of them at one level. But the campaign was about the elimination of corruption and the restoration of democracy. It was not about the usual left-right issues.
Krugman: Yeah. I noticed a number of people were saying, “Well, Magyar will be Orbán-ism without Orbán,” but that is referring to more left-right issues.
Scheppele: That’s right. So for example, I think he’s going to carry on with most of Orban’s policies about things like immigration or about, you know, support for families as opposed to single people without kids. All these kind of center-right things. But he has already said he’s going to lift his veto on UN sanctions against Russia and on money for Ukraine.
Oh, by the way, I should mention one other thing that came out during the campaign, which was, again, not surprising, but it’s different when you hear the tapes. Probably European security services—that’s my guess about the source—were taping Putin and Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. Now, there are tapes that came out a couple weeks before the election of Viktor Orban, talking to Vladimir Putin and saying things like, “Well, you are the lion and we are the mouse.” Like, “How can we be helpful?”
Krugman: Wow, I hadn’t seen that.
Scheppele: Yeah. And so again it came out through the Hungarian investigative journalists, but they said they had been talking to European security services. And what also came out were these other tapes in which Peter Szijjarto, who was the foreign minister of Hungary, had been calling Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, after every European Council meeting and disclosing what happened behind closed doors as the EU was trying to decide how to counter Russian aggression in Ukraine. And those tapes came out too. And so the slogans then started to be, “Ruszkik, haza!” which means “Russians go home.”
And then actually, the final little bit of Russian intrigue here was that Orban’s campaign was floundering and failing. I mean, he was trying to run this as a foreign policy campaign but he just wasn’t getting any traction. He was sinking in the polls. So about a month and a half before the election, he invited in the Russian disinformation team that had rigged the Moldovan election by running Russian bots, by taking over Facebook feeds and just swamping the thing with disinformation. They had to move to Hungary because they can’t do it in Hungarian the way they can do it in Russian from Moldova. And so they were literally there. The investigative journalists figured it out and Orban didn’t deny it. And everybody could see their Facebook feed slowly getting taken over by Russian bots. So again, Hungarians take to this and they start labeling and flagging and making fun of and meme-ing the Russian bots.
It was just incredible how many people were online fighting this thing. I mean, maybe Peter Magyar organized some of it, but some of it was probably a spontaneous reaction. Like, “We’re fed up with Orban thinking we’re still part of the Soviet Union.” Right?
So, “Ruszkik, haza!“ was one of the main chants at the rallies and at Magyar’s election victory, because Orban had so tilted toward Russia and so far away from the EU. Peter Magyar’s slogan was, “We will rejoin Europe and I will get the money back.”
Krugman: This is something I was thinking a lot about. The role of the EU. If somebody tried to lean a ladder up against the fence at one of Putin’s estates to take a look, you know, I don’t think they’d come back to tell the tale. And then in general, just sort of the willingness to just plain use violence as opposed to legal stratagems.
Scheppele: Yeah. That surely has a lot to do with the fact that Hungary was still in the EU and under restraints.
Krugman: Yeah.
Scheppele: I think that the EU puts a floor underneath how far the government can sink to using coercive measures. And so they never really resorted to violence against Hungarians. Now of course immigrants—that was a different story, right? And that was sort of with a wink and nod from the EU, as well. But in terms of actually assaulting journalists, you’ll probably recall because this happened when I was guest blogging on your blog, but I had a source that was feeding me a lot of information from inside Hungarian institutions. And that person was beaten up and left for dead on one of the main streets of Budapest.
Krugman: Yeah.
Scheppele: And he went and reported this to the police. I think we talked about this at the time, and the police said to him, “Oh, it just so happens the CCTV cameras were turned off at that time.” And he and I both interpreted this as they knew he was the one feeding me a lot of sensitive information. And he was getting beaten up and I got death threats. And as you know, the last time I went to Hungary, which was before the pandemic, I was literally met at the plane door inside the jet bridge by six uniformed police. So it’s not that they were above using coercion, but they wouldn’t have shot someone on a ladder looking over the fence, right? They’d harass you. They’d arrest you. You’d suddenly discover that you needed a tax audit or, you know, it was that kind of stuff instead of overt violence.
Krugman: Given all that, it’s still kind of astonishingly brave that people were willing to stand up in this campaign.
Scheppele: Absolutely. And Peter Magyar developed into this role, right? Because he came out of Fidesz circles. I don’t think he imagined himself as the opposition. He spent 20 years in the shadows. This is not what most leaders do. So he kind of grew into the role as people projected onto him a role he should play. And so one of the things he started saying at his rallies is “We shall not live in fear ever again.” And so it was the fear thing. And he would travel. I mean, Peter Magyar never had security. I’m sure he had death threats. I’m sure that they had a target on his back. He was clearly bugged and wiretapped. They would occasionally release conversations between him and close associates. Like I said, they sent him a girlfriend from the security services. I mean, they had him on their radar but he never traveled with security. He’d dive into crowds to shake hands and so forth, and he would say, “This is our country. We cannot live in fear.” And then crowds were chanting like, “We shouldn’t live with fear!”
And today, actually, I was just in tears this morning reading this. One of my close friends wrote to me and was trying to make sense of everything. He’s also a sociologist, I might add. And he said, “What just happened can be expressed in the most beautiful way by the word “awakening.” I felt the country is waking up to self-consciousness as we wake up every morning. Hungarian society woke up from an unbearable world into a normal and livable world. It took time, but I feel like in the last two years, people’s attitude toward each other and toward politics has changed step by step. I just had to follow the events of the Tisza Party. [Magyar’s Party] Because whoever saw these events could testify that not only more and more people came out to the streets to listen to Peter Magyar, but people were smiling more and more and became more intimate, more joyful, more confident. And they were increasingly connected to the community with a sense of belonging. On the day after the election, Peter Magyar put it simply: ‘What happened was this is the end, and what lies ahead is change and creation.’”
I mean, that’s what those rallies were. More than what he actually said, you showed up and saw how many other people felt the same thing you did. And then the fear went away as the crowd expanded.
Krugman: That’s it. I mean, at one point I talked to Erica Chenoweth, who’s at Harvard, on the importance of the revelation that you are not alone being a very big deal. I mean, obviously it’s something that’s happening here.
Scheppele: Absolutely. All the “No Kings” demonstrations are meant to achieve that kind of sense, right? That it’s your neighbors, it’s people you know. You see who turns up at the demonstration, and then you realize who are your allies in this political fight.
Krugman: Yeah, but still extraordinary to see that happening when—it’s not quite a mailed fist inside the glove because they were restrained. I mean, none of this would have worked in Putin’s Russia, but it’s still kind of amazing.
Scheppele: Yeah, but now I think this week is euphoria week. And then we have to start looking ahead because even though Peter Magyar has this overwhelming supermajority, Orban’s system is still in place.
Krugman: Right.
Scheppele: I feel like you see the yellow brick road heading to the Emerald City, but between here and there is a swamp full of alligators, right? So, first of all, he met with the President of the Republic yesterday, who is sort of a figurehead but the President of the Republic has to sign all the laws. The President of the Republic is a Fidesz holdover. You can expect him to veto reform laws. And then the Constitutional Court is packed. And so you get a case to the Constitutional Court but it’s all packed with Orban people. They can veto whatever Peter Magyar does, right? And then it’s the audit office. It’s all these different things. And so he has to get rid of these people, and has to recover the offices. And he can change the offices by law, but not through this set of veto points, unless he finds a way to fire the people. And that won’t be a legal step, you know.
And so then how does he do that? So far, one of the disappointing things is that there’s a European advisory body called the Venice Commission which reviews laws for their compliance with European standards. And they were very important in a lot of these transitions. But in the last couple of years they’ve gotten hugely formalistic about things. So this problem recently came up in Poland, where the Tusk government came in, swept away the aspirational autocrats. They had a president who was a veto player associated with the past regime who vetoed all the laws, the Constitutional Court had been captured and declared everything else unconstitutional. The government can’t do anything. It may get voted out of power because it’s been ineffective, right? Because of the veto.
At Princeton we just had Adam Bodnar who was the justice minister in the Tusk government, who came out with a plan about how to sort of get rid of all the veto players. He sent it to the Venice Commission, which is usually the gold standard on legal advising. Basically, is it compliant with European norms? And the Venice Commission said, “No, all these people were lawfully appointed. You can’t fire them.” And I finally lost it. I’ve worked with the Venice Commission for 35 years. I’ve really appreciated their work. I broke with them and wrote an article called “Blinded by Legality.” And I said, look, the laws under which these people were appointed, that you’re now saying is a lawful appointment, were laws you told the Polish government they shouldn’t pass because they violated European standards. Right? So they passed the law that you told them not to pass, and now you’re telling them they have to follow the law you told them not to pass. What kind of advice is that?
Well, it was slightly embarrassing because I’d been invited to be the keynote speaker at their 35th anniversary, and that was after I’d come out with the broadside. So I had a very frosty reception for my keynote address. But they’re still doing that. So, you know, Peter Magyar is going to have to figure out a way through this. And it’s a little unclear how he’ll conquer the alligators before he gets to the clear path ahead.
Krugman: Well, I have to say, when I’m feeling down about the European idea, it’s that kind of thing. The Euro pettiness. Beyond the alligators, although that may be the big story, what do you think he’s going to try to do? I mean, again, this is no liberal.
Scheppele: Yeah. No, it’s true. But again, as I keep saying now, there’s a left-right political spectrum which is perfectly consistent with democracy, European values and everything else. And, you know, you and I would be on one part of the spectrum. Peter Magyar would be in another part of the spectrum, and I wouldn’t vote for him in an ordinary election, okay? But then there’s another political spectrum which runs from democracy to dictatorship.
Krugman: Yeah.
Scheppele: And on that, we’re all on the same side, right? And Peter Magyar has signaled, and I hope he follows through, that he is really in favor of restoring democratic institutions, fighting corruption. And he’s come up with two concrete proposals. The first two are pretty good. And this is where, again, the EU can be petty and it can be very helpful. So the European Union set up something called the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. And the European Public Prosecutor’s Office is just—for the EU law people in your audience—it’s an “enhanced cooperation mechanism.” That means that a number of states got together and said we want to integrate even more than the EU allows us to integrate. And so we want to do this thing. The EU says “Fine, as long as everyone can join it.” So a number of states got together, created the public prosecutor’s office. And the only two countries that hadn’t joined were Poland and Hungary. You know, they were the dictatorships, right?
So Peter Magyar promised—and he could do it by himself, actually—on day one, Hungary will join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. Members of the Hungarian Prosecution Service is like the current DOJ, right? It’s totally in the pocket of Orban. So now he has a spare set of prosecutors from the EU who can come in and investigate the mis-spending of EU funds. And since most of Orban’s corruption came out of EU funds, that will go a very long way, and that’s he’s already said “we’re doing this day one.” And then the second thing is, he said, “The first constitutional amendment we want to pass is to limit the Prime Minister to eight years in office, and no more, starting with me. Including me.” And if that passes, it also disqualifies Orban from coming back.
Krugman: That’s an interesting backdoor way of doing it.
Scheppele: Exactly. So that’s the first constitutional amendment, he says. So that’s not bad, right? For a start. I mean, I think he’s just getting his mind around it all. He knows because he’s been inside the system and he’s a good lawyer so he’ll know how many obstacles there are, and a lot is going to depend on timing. So, like yesterday, he had a meeting with the President of the Republic, Tamas Sulyok, who used to be President of the Constitutional Court. He’s a Fidesz guy. And they came out. They posed for pictures, both looking severe. Not the best pictures of either of them. They’re full of gloom because Peter Magyar called on the president to step down. And again, just since you love the legal detail, Paul, and you’ve listened to me for so long, let me tell you one more little legal detail. I could tell Orban knew he was going to lose the election back in December because he pushed through the Parliament an amendment to the Act on the Presidency, and they changed the system for impeaching the president to make it impossible for the Parliament to impeach the president.
Krugman: Okay.
Scheppele: So my thought was, okay, that’s the office they’re going to rely on if Peter Magyar wins the election and Orban loses. So here again, you’ve got this guy in power. And actually he said yesterday he might step down. But everything depends on when he steps down. If he steps down, even with Orban’s parliament, as a lame duck, his two-thirds Parliament is still there for another few weeks.
Krugman: I was wondering about that.
Scheppele: Yeah, if Sulyok steps down, Orban’s Parliament can elect somebody. And the reason why they might do it is because Sulyok’s term expires before Magyar’s term is over. And if they reset the clock, the presidency lasts five years, the government lasts four years, they would have somebody who would be there through the whole Magyar term. And I thought that was going to happen regardless. So that may still happen. But they came out and they said, “Well, look, maybe what we should do is change to an elected presidency, because right now the parliament elects the president.” And Peter Magyar said, “Well, maybe that’s a good idea.” And everyone listening is going to say, “Yeah, what a good idea.” And here’s the caution: we had the same debate in 1989. The outgoing communist parliament knew it was going to lose the election. And so they said in the new constitution, “what we want is an independently elected president,” because what they knew was that the only people that had public personas were all the communist guys. And the communist reformers, they were probably going to put up somebody like that, whereas the opposition had all these people who had been denied access to public media. Nobody knew who they were. And it was a ploy by the communists to keep control, even though they were going to lose the election. Here we go again, right? It’s the same thing. Who would run for president? It could be Orban, right?
Krugman: Wow.
Scheppele: He might be disqualified from being prime minister, but he’s not disqualified from being president. Who else do people know? It’s like this echo of 1989. It’s the same debate. So the way they solved it in early 1990 was that the Constitution left that space open, and the two sides agreed that it would be decided by a public referendum. And the public voted, having heard this was the debate, for the Parliament to elect the president to keep the communists out.
So it’s here we go again. And just one last thing while we’re on 1989 and the echoes of communism. I like the way Peter Magyar talked about the Hungarian government—not to say the “Orban kormany“ which would be the government or, like, administration, like we say, “Trump administration.” He would say it was the “Orban rendszer,” which means the Orban regime. And so his motto toward the end of the campaign and the big slogan behind him at the big rally where he declared victory on Sunday night was, “Most, Rendszervaltas,” which means NOW, SYSTEM CHANGE. And that was the slogan from 1989.
Krugman: Wow. I mean, I think it’s really important to understand this is not over. On the other hand, I have to say, it does sound, with the role of the Europeans and probably European security services—probably meaning the French and the British— in some ways the whole argument made by JD Vance that “the European globalists are plotting against us,” it was sort of true.
Scheppele: Well, they cut the money and the security service provided the information. They have this European public prosecutor’s office ready to go. And I think it was always aimed at Hungary. So that’s also ready to go. They’ve sort of recognized Peter Magyar. They may—and I have mixed feelings about this—but they may just give him all the money back now. I mean, there’s all these frozen funds. They haven’t made the changes yet that would deserve getting the money back, but theoretically, they could give at least some of this money back now, because Orban has overspent. Orban has spent 85% of the 2026 budget already.
Krugman: Yeah. So this could be a significant boost. They could have a “morning in Budapest” or whatever if these frozen EU funds are coming back.
Scheppele: Yeah, but since I know you follow the money, here’s one more money thing to follow. So in the last round of EU budgets, they had this recovery fund to overcome Covid. And this time they’ve got this huge amount of money that they’re raising on the markets to fund what’s called the SAFE fund, which is to fund the European defense build-up that’s coming.
Krugman: Okay.
Scheppele: So again, I think Orban’s known for a long time he would lose. I don’t think he thought he would lose this big, but he would lose. So what they’ve done is they’ve rapidly privatized the whole Hungarian defense sector. So if and when that money comes to Hungary, it’s going to go straight through the government into the pockets of Orban’s cronies, because all of the defense sector in Hungary is now privatized with his friends.
Krugman: Interesting.
Scheppele: Yeah. So, you know, it’s not over yet. You can’t get rid of 16 years of this with one election.
Krugman: But they got rid of at least some of it.
Scheppele: Oh yeah. It’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition, as the philosophers would say.
Krugman: Congratulations above all to the Hungarians. But to you. You’ve been on this case since the beginning, and at least some good has prevailed.
Scheppele: I couldn’t have done it without you, Paul, because you were the only one willing to post all the kind of legal detail about how this stuff was happening. And really, it was a team effort at the beginning, and I really appreciate all you did.
Krugman: Well, it’s trivial compared with this. Anyway, so great to talk to you. And we may come back on in a few months when hopefully we know a little bit more about how this is playing out. But wow, what a revolution.
Scheppele: I know. I mean, people were dancing in the streets. Just the euphoria and the number of young people. We didn’t lose that generation and they didn’t forget what democracy could be, even though they’d never experienced it. Right? I mean, it’s just amazing. And, you know, we could do that here, right? We can do that.
Krugman: Here’s hoping.
Scheppele: Okay, Paul. So we’ve got our next task cut out for us.
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