The opposition’s monumental victory in Hungary has swept away the petty despotism that strangled the country’s dreams for over a decade and upended the myth of the far right’s inevitable momentum. The government to be sworn in on May 9 faces a historic opportunity that carries a profound burden of responsibility: neither illiberalism nor the liberal end of history is preordained. And for the first time since World War I, the Left is not represented in parliament. The risk is that we will fail to lay the foundations for a sustainable democratic turn.A Defeat, Not a VictoryThe moment calls for celebration, but not of the victory of liberal democracy. Viktor Orbán did not fall because Hungarian shopkeepers, truckers, and nurses suddenly took to reading John Locke. He fell because the economy collapsed, while the crony class was busy transforming itself — and the taxpayers’ billions — into a new aristocracy. Cumulative inflation since 2020 reached 50 percent. The “Eastern Opening,” staked on East Asian battery factories, underperformed. The freezing of EU funds cut off Orbánism’s clientelist redistribution. Morally and economically, the system had run out of breath.On the surface, Orbánism wasn’t always so shambolic. It rose as a political answer to the exhaustion of the pre-2010 liberal model dependent on foreign capital and cheap labor. It welded together three constituencies: it preserved the centrality of transnational manufacturing capital, emancipated the domestic bourgeoisie, and integrated workers through a mixture of statist-clientelist redistribution and nationalism.The aim was to accelerate accumulation at the top while buying quiescence at the bottom. Through the 2010s, this social contract delivered well enough to endure. But accumulation chases quick profits; development requires long-horizon planning and upgrading against short-term interests. Without quality bureaucracy, accumulation degenerates into cronyism.For all the talk…
