America’s Roadmap for Reviving Democracy

Hungary is showing America how to bring a country back from authoritarianism. We should learn their lessons.

Hey everyone, happy Good News Sunday. Let’s start the week right with some real hope.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it looks like when democracy actually wins. Not just survives. Wins. Last week, I watched it happen.

Let me start at the beginning. After his return to power in 2010, Viktor Orbán remade Hungary in his own image. He tilted elections in his favor, packed government agencies and democratic institutions with his loyalists, leaned on the press, and bent every rule he could reach. And while the economy struggled and families fell behind, Orbán’s elite circle only got richer and richer. Sound familiar?

But after sixteen long years, Hungarians finally had enough. Even with Orbán’s thumb on the democratic scale in elections this April, the people threw him out in a landslide, handing his opposition a legislative supermajority.

That opposition’s leader, a former Orbán insider named Péter Magyar, had a choice. He could take his new power and entrench himself, like his predecessor. Or he could do everything to make sure no one would have that control again.

He chose the latter. As soon as Magyar was elected, he announced an overhaul of Orbán’s state-owned propaganda machine.

Then earlier this month, his government amended Hungary’s constitution, adding an eight year term-limit that applies to Orbán and any other wannabe dictator looking to follow his path. And on Monday he announced new efforts to clear out the loyalists Orbán left behind, claw back public money lost to corruption, and initiate a comprehensive constitutional review before putting a new draft up for a public referendum.

With these reforms, Hungarians are taking their country back from the grips of the authoritarian right. And in doing so, they’re showing the rest of us that no matter the circumstances, we can do it too.

First you out-vote them, even when the scale is tilted, in numbers beyond any doubt. Then, crucially, you take back the institutions they captured. You drag the corruption into the daylight. And you write new guardrails into law, rules the next strongman cannot simply bend.

A “return to normalcy” is not enough. We cannot afford to go back to the status quo that brought us here in the first place. Win it back, then build it back, and make it stronger than before. That is the roadmap.

We talk a lot around here about the fight for democracy. It is a real fight, and often it feels like an uphill one. But look at what Hungarians just pulled off. For sixteen years Orbán looked permanent, untouchable, the kind of leader you simply learn to live with. But they beat him, and not because of one party or one savior. They beat him because Hungarians from left to right put politics aside to stand behind a single challenger, deciding together that saving their democracy mattered more than anything else. And now they’re making sure it could never happen again.

And if they can do it with an entire government working against them, so can we.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

— Adam