Some comments to Robert Reich's "Orbán's playbook" article
Yesterday, Robert Reich’s Substack published a piece about Viktor Orbán. In it, he met John Shattuck, the former president of Central European University, a leading university ousted from Hungary by Orbán. Mr. Shattuck shared the 10 parts of Orbán’s playbook. I highly recommend reading the article; it is one of the few American articles that accurately explains what Orbán is really about.
I have some comments, though. Let’s have a look on the playbook:
One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all party dissent.
Check. It is important to remind ourselves that Orbán is not a leader; he is a Tsar. When you read “Finance Minister of Hungary,” don’t think about a guy with expertise and some political power helping to finance the government’s political agenda. Instead, think about a guy with some expertise, trying not to upset the boss.
Two: Build your base by appealing to fear and hate, branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.
Check. Also, tap into the ancient sources of hate.
Three: Use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.
Check. But this is not all. In other countries, they use “techniques” to spread disinformation. In Hungary, we have state propaganda almost the size of the North Korean one. Imagine Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Pete Hegseth boosted on bottomless budgets on social media. Imagine every small radio station in the US forced to broadcast an hourly news service written by Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s a constant pressure, like working 12-hour shifts on a very noisy machine, then sleeping next to it and hearing it in your sleep, too. That’s how the Hungarian media works.
Four: Use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate — especially if you don’t win a majority.
Also, alter the political party financing rules so that their only income comes from you. Make’em your dogs.
Five: Centralize your power by destroying the civil service.
Check. This will be his demise. After 15 years of dismantling the civil service, literally nothing works here. If something does, it’s because some people refuse to quit and keep things together, driven by their hearts. Few realize that this is the biggest restraint on Orbán’s power. He can win elections, but he can’t fix the smallest problems because all the experts are gone.
Six: Redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree. Weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Demonize anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.”
Actually, this should be number one. When he first won a 2/3 majority in 2010, Orbán instantly rewrote the legal framework. In his first four-year term, we had a new constitution, a new criminal code, a new civil code, new employment laws, and literally hundreds of new laws every year. When we talk about “restoring rule of law in Hungary”- a great and worthy cause- we must remind ourselves that even the laws we want to return to are written by him. And one more thing: in the last 15 years, there have been 15 amendments to the new constitution, and the election laws are rewritten before every election.
Seven: Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Target opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties such as denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, and criminal penalties like prosecution.
Check. Up until maybe 10 years ago, most of my work as a lawyer was to argue with the authorities. No longer. There is simply no point in doing it; they are not bound by law and execute orders regardless of what the law (again: their own laws) says about them.
Eight: Rely on your oligarchs — hugely wealthy business and financial leaders — to supervise the economy and reward them with special access to state resources, tax cuts, and subsidies.
This is an outdated point in the playbook. In the past, we had oligarchs with some power. By now, they are only names. When we hear “Lőrinc Mészáros” (a plumber who grew up with Orbán, made a billionaire overnight after the previous “oligarch” fell out of grace), we don’t hear “Lőrinc Mészáros. " We hear Orbán. Orbán personally owns about one-third of the Hungarian economy.
Nine: Ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.
Yeah, but why? This is the question we simply cannot answer. Other gangsters leading other EU member states can get by without selling out their countries to Putin.
Ten: Get the public to believe that all this is necessary, and that resistance is futile.
Oh yeah. The first thing you will hear from a Hungarian intellectual is that things are Fucked Up Beyond All Repair here. They are somewhat stunned that after the various FUBAR parties couldn’t even challenge Orbán, now we have a “Let’s Do Something About It” party that may actually have a chance…
I was struck by John’s optimism. He believes that the U.S. is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism. We are 30 times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and our diversity is the source of our economic and cultural strength. The U.S. has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.
Oh hell yes. I wish we had something like that.
These points are fine, but the starting point is that the electoral system and the structure of the state enabled Orbán to do all this.
He came to power during a political crisis, but formally, he gained a basically omnipotent authority in a system that was - and I believe still is - considered democratic at its core.
He had obtained a legal opportunity to play by his rules, and to destroy any and all checks and balances.
We have to face the fact that beyond a point we can only hope that our elected leaders are decent enough to not use their power abusively.
The main difference (other than the shear amount of damage Trump can do because of the resources available to him) between the two leaders is that Orban can still think clearly. He's been in power a long time and his policies are catching up with him, whereas Trump is clearly living in a parallel reality. He is an ageing, mentally declining mobster who somehow got elected president of the US and the people around him keep him in a kind of Truman show reality.