Letter From the Editors
This news cycle began and ended with political resets in two former Warsaw Pact countries. First, in Hungary, Peter Magyar’s Tisza party outpaced Viktor Orban’s Fidesz by 53% to 38%, gaining a parliamentary majority and unseating Orban after 16 years in the prime minister’s chair. Then, the Progressive Bulgaria party, led by ex-president Rumen Radev, won a landslide victory; its share of the vote was just 45%, but its closest competitor among the field of 24 garnered only 13%.
At first glance, these parliamentary upsets seem to balance each other out. After all, Magyar ran his campaign as a pro-Western candidate, and in his victory speech he even paraphrased John F. Kennedy: “Today, we won because Hungarians didn’t ask what their homeland could do for them – they asked what they could do for their homeland.” He also confirmed his pro-EU stance by adding that Hungary had “said yes to Europe.” Radev, by contrast, has a reputation as a Euroskeptic, and his party soundly defeated the pro-European We Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria. Igor Serebryany reports in Ekspert: “The Bulgarian elections have returned the European political pendulum to the position it was in before Hungary’s nationalist Fidesz was defeated just one week ago.”
However, political analyst Lyudmila Babynina sees a similarity in the two election outcomes: Voters in both countries wanted something new. “Hungarians were just tired of 16 years of nonstop rule by one party, while Bulgarians see Radev’s party as a new phenomenon that hasn’t had time to tarnish itself with anything unsavory.” She also perceives a difference in political style: Whereas Orban made a point of opposing Brussels on nearly every vote, “Radev probably won’t irritate the European bureaucracy as intensely as Orban did. His Euroskepticism is softer than Orban’s, if we take Euroskepticism to mean prioritizing national interests over pan-European ones.”
Magyar, as a former member of Fidesz, also retains the priority of national interests. Academic scholar Dmitry Ofitserov-Belsky contends: “Magyar is not the opposite of Orban. Actually, Magyar won because his rhetoric did not differ from Orban’s – the only difference is that he is younger.”
One might wonder: How did Orban stay in power so long in the first place? According to Russian political scientist in exile Yekaterina Shulman, regimes like Orban’s are the rule, not the exception: “A situation where power is concentrated in the hands of a leader and his associates is like a default setting in politics.” She explains in more detail: “Democracy and totalitarianism require effort. But autocracies spring up on their own, spontaneously, as long as people don’t oppose them.”
Why do people oppose them? Shulman alludes to the historical concept of a “long rule,” in which a seemingly perennial regime eventually turns into its opposite: A conservative system begins to radicalize; a stable system creates chaos. Eventually, these changes make life so difficult for ordinary people that they grow dissatisfied enough to resist.
What about the elephant (sorry, we meant “bear”) in the room? Well, Shulman acknowledges that the Russian regime is showing cracks typical of “long rule,” but it remains resilient to change because the simulations of democracy and a market economy “maintain the illusion of normalcy.”
Contrast this picture to Mikhail Shevchuk’s portrayal of the American regime: “Trump’s confrontation with the rest of the world is taking on a religious subtext: Unbridled power often leads to messianic ideas, and Trump has already begun deifying himself.” To wit, Donald and his top brass are trying to sell the Iran conflict as a holy war; when Pope Leo dared to criticize the bombings as unacceptable, Trump thundered on Truth Social: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the US!” So much for the separation of church and state.
By the way, Meduza reports that Viktor Orban conceded victory to Peter Magyar within three hours after the polls closed. Where is the beacon of democracy shining now?