buns

Three key take aways for us from Orban's defeat. (1) Despite years of muzzling counter-majoritarian institutions, Orbán did not command the full authoritarian apparatus needed to overturn a comprehensive electoral defeat. He could not jail his political opponents at will, deploy the police or the military as a personal militia, etc. He's not Putin or Lukashenko. (2) Defeating an authoritarian government in a system rigged in its favour requires a multi-pronged effort. You need citizens to engage, organise, mobilise - but you also need parts of the security state and sections of the business elite to come over to your side. (3) The psychological impact of this for citizens in Western democracies is to pull their sense of keeping or losing their democracy out of the realm of magical thinking and into the realm of concrete action. It blasts away both magical optimism and magical doomism, and returns citizens to the realities of engaging in political conflict constructively.