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- [00:01]
Andrew Marantz
If you're a fan of the political scene podcast from the New Yorker, I hope you'll join us for a special live taping of the show at 92 NY in Manhattan. We'll be talking about Donald Trump's falling approval numbers, the prospects of a comeback for the Democratic Party in the midterms, and the potential threats to the election
- [00:21]
Tyler Foggatt
that are coming directly from the President himself.
- [00:23]
Andrew Marantz
I hope you can join me, Evan Osnos and my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer on June 4th at 7:00pm Ticket information at92ny.org.
- [00:45]
Tyler Foggatt
Hey Andrew, welcome back.
- [00:46]
Andrew Marantz
Thank you, Tyler. Still a little jet lagged, but glad to be back.
- [00:49]
Tyler Foggatt
No, I appreciate you taking the time. So you recently managed to get one of the few foreign interviews with Peter Magyar, the man who just won an election over Viktor Orban in Hungary and was just sworn in as prime minister a few days ago. What were your impressions of him? Does it seem as though Hungary is now entering a completely new era? Like, are they out of the woods?
- [01:13]
Andrew Marantz
So they're definitely entering a new era. Not sure they're out of the woods. Yeah, it was interesting. I put a bunch of this in the piece, the kind of machinations and negotiations behind how I got the interview. Cause I think it's relevant to this precise question, like, how much are things changing? He is very much unlike Viktor Orban in ways we can get into. He comes out of the old Orban machinery and kind of became an internal whistleblower and kind of led this movement out of that era, which was an incredibly formidable, difficult task. And kind of no one thought he could do it. He won in this landslide victory. He now has a super majority in Parliament and he has accomplished all that stuff. And it is a definite milestone and definitely worthy of marking and celebrating for people who were, you know, sort of worried about or oppressed by Orban's regime. That said, the whether we're out of the woods yet question continues to be vexing. The fact that he has a two thirds majority means he can kind of do whatever he wants with it. And the reason I wanted to go all the way over to Europe to look him in the eye and ask him these questions is basically to be like, okay, what are you gonna do with that mandate? And I don't know that there's any perfectly satisfying answer he could have given me. But what he didn't say was there is a structural boundary in place that prevents me from being able to use my power in abusive ways. He was not able to say that because that's not true.
- [02:40]
Tyler Foggatt
That's Andrew Marantz, a staff writer at the New Yorker, who just interviewed Peter Magyar, the newly elected prime minister of Hungary. Magyar was elected in April in a landslide victory, defeating Viktor Orban, whose tenure was marked by allegations of corruption and authoritarianism, as well as a close relationship with Donald Trump and the Maga movement. Magyar campaigned on promises of populist reform, but so far he stopped short of explaining just how far he intends to go in undoing the democratic backsliding of the Orban era. I wanted to talk with Andrew about what may lie ahead for Hungary under Magyar's leadership, how Trump allies attempted and failed to intervene in the election on Orban's behalf, and whether there are lessons here for other democrats democracies that might be trying to push back against authoritarianism and kleptocracy. This is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. So we've spoken a bunch on this show in the last year about Orban and the competitive authoritarian system that he set up in Hungary and how that was a model for right wing movements around the globe. Before we talk more about Magyar, I'm wondering if you can just remind listeners, or, you know, explain to them for the first time if they haven't been listening to the show, what that system looked like in practice.
- [03:57]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah. And you know, as we've talked about a bunch and as, as, as we've published a bunch of pieces about like, the reason we keep going to this model is not only so we can understand Hungary, but obviously so we can understand what's happening here or what's.
- [04:09]
Tyler Foggatt
We're narcissists.
- [04:10]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah, we, we Americans tend to be and you know, Hungary punches way above its weight in terms of ink spilled over a central European country with fewer than 10 million people in it. And the reason for that is American solipsism. It is like to the extent that there is a model for what the Trumpian regime may be trying to do here, in large part, it seems to have been modeled on Orban's regime and he and Trump are good friends. But it goes beyond the political, personal relationships. It goes to this kind of systemic thing. So basically, in short, instead of the tanks in the streets and military coups that we may think of in a kind of dystopian film version of a democracy falling, what a lot of scholars say is that's a very 20th century old fashioned way to take down democracy, the more newfangled way the more bloodless clinical way is the way that Orban perfected. And it's happened in other places like Brazil and India, Turkey, and is, you know, you use kind of lawfare, you use constitutional reforms, you do things, you kind of change where the lines on the playing field are, and then you play within those new lines. And so Orban was kind of known worldwide as a pioneer of this. He came to power in 2010, he had a two thirds constitutional supermajority which allowed him to rewrite the constitution. And he also had this immense both political and sort of social capital through his power to be able to reshape private markets, to be able to grow this kind of new class of Hungarian oligarchs who would kind of do his bidding through media companies, through universities, which he sort of privatized and put in the hands of his loyalists. He made the courts less independent and more loyalist. So sector by sector, and then of course, the electoral system itself, through heavy gerrymandering and a few other sort of technocratic maneuvers. So the sum total of this after his first four years and then eight years and then 12 years and then 16 years in power, is just kind of perennially tilting the playing field in his advantage. So when Magyar won this election, it wasn't just a big deal, cuz it was a big deal as an election. It was a big deal because these elections had turned into something that people call free but not fair elections. You can go vote and the vote tally is real, but the system is rigged in all these ways against an opposition candidate winning. So the fact that he did was a huge deal.
- [06:36]
Tyler Foggatt
I mean, is that true though, that the election was free but unfair if Magyar was able to win? I mean, what did that actually look like in terms of the election being rigged if in this case it resulted in Orban conceding?
- [06:49]
Andrew Marantz
So basically it's not a total rigging in, you know, so it's not like the Harlem Globetrotters versus the Washington Generals or whatever. It's more like, you know, a ref call fixing scandal, like a Pete Rose kind of thing. So it's not a total rigging. Orban either wasn't capable of that according to some people, or just wasn't willing to go that far according to other people. And you see this here too, right? You see the extreme, you know, I'm sure listeners are aware of these very extreme partisan gerrymandering fights and these Supreme Court cases about can we have partisan gerrymanders, can we have racial gerrymanders? When you talk about that as a kind of rigging of the system, it doesn't mean that it's impossible for any one Democrat or Republican to win. It just makes it structurally much harder when you change the district and you take all the, you know, liberal voters out of your district and make it an R+20 district, okay, the Democrat could win, but it's just structurally way harder. And so I think roughly, that's the kind of analogy we should be thinking about. You know, when Peter Magyar goes, you know, he's basically not allowed on television because the television is essentially state controlled. You know, one person told me it was like fox news times 100, and that's all that's on the air, you know, and he. So he just. There was a, basically a blackout on Peter Magyar being allowed to be on television. And so he's not in jail, he's not, you know, being legally prevented from running. But if you're an old person in the countryside who only gets your news from tv, you're not really going to hear much about this guy except for however the state TV wants to frame him. And that's just one example. So, yeah, it's totally right that he could and did win, and that that rules out these systems being a certain type of autocracy. It's not Putin's Russia, it's not Xi's China, it's not Venezuela, it's not Iran. But it is this system that I think the more you look closely at it sort of granularly at institution by institution, the more I think you'd be hard pressed to honestly say that it's, you know, just a good old liberal democracy.
- [08:57]
Tyler Foggatt
What exactly did Magyar run on? Or what was it about Orban that finally turned so many people against him? Because I feel like there was a lot of anticipation just like in the lead up to this election. And, you know, there was a lot of speculation that Magyar was going to win. But I think the general kind of consensus was that like, there was likely going to be a situation where he wins, but just barely, and then that kind of sets off its own crisis, especially if Orban refuses to concede. And so it just is kind of crazy to me that not only does he, despite everything kind of being stacked against him, but he wins quite overwhelmingly with this also, you know, super majority.
- [09:33]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah, yeah. So that was one scenario where there would be a close election and then Orban would contest it, which Americans may have a tough time imagining such a scenario, but, yeah, that would be one, you know, and that was Another thing that, to your point, people said when that, when that didn't happen, when Orban simply called and conceded, a lot of people said, okay, well, here's your, you know, competitive authoritarian guy suddenly just democratically conceding an election. Like, doesn't that make him more democratic than Donald Trump, for example? And, you know, I think maybe, yeah, I think more democratic than Trump. Certainly you could make the case. I think it's harder to make the case that that means he was a Democrat with a small D the entire time. But, you know, this is kind of part of the post election discourse to your question of how he got such a huge landslide victory. I mean, what he told me when I asked him this was because I asked, what should we be taking from your election? You know, everyone's watching and you read takes, right? There's the kind of left populist take which says what the Magyar election shows is we need, you know, an American set of candidates who will run against Trump as a corrupt oligarch. We need people taking the Bernie Aoc line of fight oligarchy. And you see people like Jon Ossoff kind of moving in that direction, calling out the Epstein class and the corruption of the elites. There's a more center right populist read of Madhyar that says, no, actually, it shows that you need to be able to moderate on issues like immigration and LGBT rights. And, you know, because Magyar is fundamentally a center right guy, he ran to Orban's left on certain things, like getting back in good graces with the EU and stuff, but he kept Orban's hard line on immigration. So some people took that lesson that, you know, no, we need a kind of heterodox Democrat to beat Trump by being tough on those social issues. And then there's a kind of third read, which is, no, you don't need a populist at all. You need someone who runs as Madhyar did on returning to the global liberal international order on things like Ukraine and rejoining the eu. And I put this to him, like, which of those is the correct take? And he basically was like a. The last thing I want to do is give you a quote about Donald Trump because that, you know, I want to stay clear of that. When we spoke, he was three days from being inaugurated. We ran the piece on the day of his inauguration. So he doesn't want to start his term in office by having any kind of reaction, I think, from Donald Trump. But he also made the broader point that what I did, and there is truth to this is walk across the country, shake as many hands and look into as many people's eyes as I could. Basically, like really old fashioned door to door, town to town retail politics. And that's what he did. I mean, he went to some 700 something villages and towns in Hungary. You can see footage of him basically driving a flatbed truck, you know, sort of spray painted in the Hungarian flag colors, getting into the town, getting up on the back of the flatbed truck and giving a speech and reciting these old folk poems and folk songs and like really kind of making it a movement and kind of saying to people, his tagline or one of them was we are not afraid. Basically showing like we can show our faces as opponents of this regime and we'll still be here. I don't know how replicable that is in a much bigger country like ours. To the last part of your question about why now? Why were people fed up now with Orban? And why did it reach the breaking point now? Some of it is structural, materialist, economic stuff the Hungarian economy was able to coast along on. Ironically, for, you know, Orban, being this anti globalist guy, he took a lot of Audi factories and, you know, car manufacturing jobs from Germany and stuff into the Hungarian economy. So some of that sugar high economically had worn off. And as the economy stopped growing and as inflation and prices rose and stuff, suddenly these things that people had noticed, like the corruption within the Orban family and the Orban regime, started to grate on people more and started to kind of break through and stick more in the independent media, such as it, such as it is in the country. And, you know, it wasn't like shocking to people that Orban and his cronies had reappropriated a lot of the national wealth, but it sort of started just landing for people in a new way. It became kind of consonant with their lived experience. And that was combined with this feeling that, okay, there is something that can be done about it. There's an opposition movement that is growing and unified and not fragmented in the way that the opposition has been in the past. And those two things combined lit a spark, basically.
- [14:05]
Tyler Foggatt
Let's take a quick break and then when we come back, I want to get into the question that you ended your interview with Magyar on. This is the Political Scene from the New Yorker.
- [14:20]
Andrew Marantz
We are in uncharted territory. Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very Many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to the New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world.
- [14:45]
Tyler Foggatt
And I hope you'll join us for
- [14:46]
Andrew Marantz
the New Yorker Radio Hour.
- [14:57]
Tyler Foggatt
So at one point in your interview with Mazzar, you asked him why it was so important to certain members of the Trump administration that they intervene in the election and basically try to ensure Orban's victory. And he answered by saying that you should ask Trump World or that you should ask Orban. And so instead I'm gonna ask you, cuz I can't ask those people. Why do you think that J.D. vance, for example, spent two days in Budapest campaigning for Orban? Like, that just seems so insane to me that you have, like, American political figures, not even political figures, like literal members of the administration, going to a foreign country and campaigning in their election. Like, regardless of who that person is, it just seems like really kind of nuts.
- [15:38]
Andrew Marantz
It is a little weird. And in some of his speeches, he kind of tried to massage it to be like, I'm not here telling you who to vote for, cuz that's not my role as the American Vice President. But I'm just saying, like, but I'm here, I'm here and freedom is good. And like, down with the globalists or whatever, or down with George Soros. And then other times he kind of just blew right through that red line and just said, victor's a good guy, you should vote for him. So there are a few possibilities here. One is, you know, a lot of Hungarians felt, okay, Donald Trump doesn't want to make this trip because he doesn't feel like flying over to Europe. And he also doesn't want to associate himself with potential losers. I mean, there were polls before this election showing that Orban was significantly down in the polls. And in fact, I watched from Hungary when JD Vance went on Fox News the day after the election and said, well, we could all see the polls. We knew that Orban probably wasn't gonna win. So, you know, he was asked the day after, why'd you go over there? And then this guy suffered this humiliating defeat and he was like, well, sometimes you just gotta stick by your friends, cuz it's the right thing to do. Now, there may be some truth to that in the sense that Vance, especially of all the prominent members of the Trump administration, really comes out of this school. This kind of post liberal school of the contemporary right that, you know, he's not Rubio, who kind of, you know, is always smeared with the term neocon. He's not, you know, this kind of foreign interventionist, you know, let's sort of take over the Western hemisphere. Or at least that was not how he presented himself on the campaign trail. What J.D. vance was always supposed to be was coming from this more Tucker Carlson, neo isolationist, post liberal wing of the party. And as we remember, the tucker Carlsons and J.D. vance's and Patrick Dineen's of the world are really, really interested in Hungary. I mean, the reason I started covering Hungary for the New Yorker is that in 2022, when CPAC, the flagship conservative conference, announced its first European conference, its first CPAC ever on European soil, it was in Budapest. And at the time, and I think still the reasoning seemed to be these people are not, you know, Budapest is not Hungary is not the economic powerhouse of Europe. It's not the seat of power in Brussels. It's the ideological center of where we're looking for inspiration if we want to move past the old ways of doing liberal democracy and into what Viktor Orban called illiberal democracy. So I think there was a real ideological component for Vance. I think he really saw it as a beacon. I mean, I've quoted various things in past pieces where Vance, you know, gives interviews to Hungarian publications saying Orban's way has to be a model for us. You know, the way he went after the universities really should be inspiring to us. And then of course, they get into power and one of the first things they do is go after Columbia and other universities. So I really do think there was a kind of, if not a one to one roadmap. I mean, it wasn't like Project 2025 was just like, do whatever Viktor Orban does. But there was a real strategic and ideological affinity there. And politically just sort of the raw politics of it, that may have been Vance signaling to that part of his base. Like, I have not forgotten about these values, even though I've gone along with Iran and Venezuela and all these things that seem like they're undercutting those values that I campaigned on, Orban's still my guy, and I still think there's a way to build an ideological regime that has, you know, post liberal components to it.
- [19:13]
Tyler Foggatt
So, I mean, would you say that it's more about the kind of structure of government that Orban set up than his actual viewpoints? Just given that Magyar himself is pretty right of center as you said. And so it's not like, you know, going and campaigning for the conservative over the liberal. Like, it wasn't, you know, as clean cut as that.
- [19:28]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah, I think the main thing. So, yes, on many issues, there's not a lot of daylight, immigration being a big one. Magyar definitely wrapped himself in the Hungarian flag pretty literally. I mean, he was very. And, you know, as I've pointed out in a previous piece, like Peter Magyar means like pd. Hungarian, basically, like Magyar means Hungarian. So it's like Joe America, you know, running for the leader of Hungary. And so he was presenting himself as a nationalist, as in multiple respects he presented himself as a nationalist. And yeah, he was basically saying, I can do nationalism better than Orban can. There was policy daylight on other things. So they're now changing in their first few days. They're changing abortion policy, they're changing. Hungary is an outlier in some ways on how asylum seekers are treated. So there are things that are going to change. And another thing that we should say is that Madyar went to great lengths during the campaign to avoid getting into policy differences whenever he could. And this was why a lot of times he didn't do a lot of interviews with the press. This is partly why I had to chase him around Italy for a few days to get even. The time I got with him, even though he didn't answer all my questions, that was still more than he tended to do on the campaign trail. Often what he did on the campaign trail was just make a very broad statement on his Facebook page and try not to get into anything that would be divisive. So last year's Pride parade in Budapest was canceled by the Orban regime. This, a lot of political analysts thought was a way of trapping Magyar into picking a side. Like, are you with the urban Pride, you know, gay pride people, or are you with the countryside nationalists who, you know, might be freaked out by that? And he really tried to sidestep it and say, people have a right to assemble. Good luck with that. I'm not gonna be there. You know, tried to. And that kind of thing worked. Like, he really tried to stay away from those, you know, sort of more divisive cultural issues. Now that leaves a whole blank space in terms of his intentions. Now what will he do? So we can feel pretty confident that he won't ban Pride next year, but is he gonna change the law in Hungary that forbids same sex couples from adopting a child? Is he going to? Right, so this is where you always campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But he often campaigned in large blocks of silence. And now he's gonna have to make these decisions. And those decisions are going to, at some level, divide this incredibly diverse coalition he's built, whether he likes it or not.
- [22:12]
Tyler Foggatt
I mean, in that case, can you see Magyar having a pretty friendly relationship with America and with Trump? I mean, do you think that there's a world in which the conservative movement in Americ continues to embrace Hungary as an example of something positive if Magyar goes and continues to embrace a bunch of conservative policies? Or is it really just about the illiberal democracy thing and that being like a blueprint that people were interested in?
- [22:39]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah, I mean, I don't think so. One of the things J.D. vance did in his speech, one of his speeches in Budapest was, you know, draw this long historical lineage of U.S. hungarian friendship. And, you know, when Laios Kossuth went to Ohio in the 1850s, and like, yes, that's all true, and like, he maybe met Lincoln or he maybe met Whitman or whatever, like, that's all real. But at the same time, like, I think with Viktor Orban off the stage, the American administration just won't be that interested in Hungary. Like, there's no, you know, there are other places in Europe or elsewhere in the world for that matter, where there are a kind of new breed of conservative or right wing leaders. Giorgia Meloni, who's the prime minister of Italy, her party came out of this kind of, you know, ambiguous fascist lineage, but now she's kind of this new face of it, and she's kind of turned toward Ukraine and toward the eu. I mean, there are many examples of places. I mean, you have Mile and Argentina, right? There are lots of places where there's a kind of new face being put on these old right wing impulses. I think Orban was useful to the American intellectual and political classes on the right in ways that the new guy just won't be. And you can kind of see that because a lot of the expats, the British and American expats who were there for the past few years, you know, treating Budapest as this kind of right wing, reactionary, illiberal city on a hill, they mostly seem like they're going to be packing up and leaving, or that's their early indications of that.
- [24:12]
Tyler Foggatt
So next I want to talk about the big question, which is how we can kind of imagine Magyar kind of operating in Hungary and whether it's possible for him to unwind Urbanism without taking Orban, like Power himself. This is a political scene from the New Yorker. We'll be right back. I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today we have more incentives for market solutions than ever. And emissions are rising. On this season of drilled carbon cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding
- [24:50]
Andrew Marantz
in one multinational boondoggle. Gotta give Bruce and the guys credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a about any of that.
- [24:58]
Tyler Foggatt
Listen anywhere you get podcasts. So we've been circling this already, Andrew, but just given that Mazar is coming into office, he has this two thirds super majority. And you know, even in your interview with him, he could not say that there was anything structurally kind of stopping him from exploiting power. I guess. How are we supposed to be consoled by the situation there? I feel like a lot of pieces, I mean, you even said in your interview with him that like you wrote a piece right after he was elected that kind of talked about how he represented something very hopeful. But I'm wondering whether we should actually be hopeful or whether the temptation is just going to be too much.
- [25:48]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah, I think if he is self aware, he's wondering the same thing. I mean, look, basically when you really get down to it, his answer to this question was I can't. And no leader can really fully be constrained by words on a piece of paper. So I have to constrain myself. That was basically what he told me. And in a way I found that uncomfortable because it's like, okay, I hope you do that. You know, on the other hand, there is something really honest about that. It was a surprising and I think surprisingly candid answer for him to say. Yeah, I mean, Orban also had a pretty good constitution if you just read it word by word. The problem wasn't the constitution, the problem was the guy. Now, I don't tend to read history in this very like, great man of history way. So I don't think the problem is just the guy. I think the problem is, you know, the structures that the guy sets up around him and all that stuff. And again, the reason that I'm interested in Hungary, I mean, Hungary is a very interesting place and I'm interested in it for its own sake. But also I'm interested in what these different cases can teach us about, you know, what we should learn here and what we should learn anywhere where we're worried about, you know, checks on autocratic power, which is everywhere. I think there is a lot of truth to this idea that any checks can be gamed or, you know, subverted and we're seeing that with the American Constitution. You know, we can critique the way the Constitution was framed or how hard it is to amend, or the fact that parties weren't anticipated. I mean, those are all deeply worthy of critique. But I think another strain of it, which people often point out is whatever the thing is, you can probably find a way around it if you have enough strength as a political movement, if you have enough force on your side, if you have the people on your side. And so look, I mean, I think he could have given a more comforting answer. And in a way, I kind of give him credit for not doing that. There is a particular quirk to the Hungarian system, which is if you have 2/3 of the Parliament, you can rewrite the Constitution. Like, we don't have that. And it may be good that we don't have that. Although I just said 10 seconds ago how it's also really bad that it's so hard to amend our Constitution. Right? So there is no. I'm not enough of a kind of technocrat bureaucrat person to think that if we could just come up with exactly the right fix of design, the perfect system, even if men weren't angels, we could constrain their worst impulses. I don't think there's a perfect solution. Some are clearly better than others, just sort of on paper. Now, the structural hope, I think, in a case like Magyar's, and I think hopefully there are some parallels here, too, is, and he did point to this also, that he's kind of constrained by his own coalition, basically. I don't think he came out and said this, but he basically was like, if I become too much of a strongman, I'll lose the support of the people who brought me here. And I think there is some truth to that, too. And you see that with Trump's numbers, I mean, there was this idea that nothing could shake Trump's approval ratings, no matter what he did. And we've seen that change in the past few months. And as we've talked about you and I on this series before, approval ratings still really matter. Even if we want to say that we're in competitive authoritarianism or democratic backsliding or whatever the would be autocrats, approval ratings still really matter, perhaps even more than in a more democratic situation. So all. Which is to say, like, there are checks. Like, I don't think that if he just came out tomorrow and said, okay, you know, I'm putting my brother in charge of the Supreme Court and my, you know, mother in law in Charge of the TV studio, you know, that people would just go with him.
- [29:46]
Tyler Foggatt
Like, I mean, there even was that thing with his brother in law.
- [29:48]
Andrew Marantz
Right.
- [29:48]
Tyler Foggatt
Do you want to explain that?
- [29:49]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah. I mean, just basically when I was there interviewing him, one of the questions I wanted to ask, which I didn't have time to get to, was, okay, you say we're turning this new leaf into, you know, less cronyism, but you just nominated your brother in law to be the incoming justice minister. Like, what's the deal with that? And I wrote that on the plane home in the piece. And then when I landed, I got the news that the brother in law had rescinded his own. He had turned down the nomination because people were mad.
- [30:16]
Tyler Foggatt
Right.
- [30:16]
Andrew Marantz
Popular pushback.
- [30:17]
Tyler Foggatt
So, so there are checks, sort of
- [30:19]
Andrew Marantz
popular opinion still matters. And frankly, like you just can't pull a lot of this stuff in the era of the Internet, sort of, you know, word of mouth, people going out and talking to each other. Like, you can't. You would have to create such a North Korea, like, informational state to prevent people from being mad about things like appointing your brother in law to a cabinet post. Like it's. Yes, you know, we started by talking about the control that Orban was able to wield in the system, the ways he was able to tilt the playing field. But as we were also saying, he was not able to do it in a totalitarian, totalizing way. He was never able, you know, he just wasn't able to suppress eventually people being fed up with how he had abused his power. And so Peter Magyar is going to be subject to the same forces. And as he seemed to be very aware of, those forces can always turn on you. You know, he said, like, my honeymoon period may not last that long.
- [31:20]
Tyler Foggatt
So there's this idea of power being corrupting, which I think, you know, can maybe lead to a situation where you're very tempted to appoint your brother in law or to nominate your brother in law to be justice minister or some, you know, high ranking position. But then there's like the other thing which I feel like is maybe more demonstrative of what we might see in America if there happens to be a Democrat who wins the next presidential election, which is that there are certain undemocratic things or things that toe that line that you might have to do in order to undo the abuses of the person who came before you, even if you have very good intentions and you don't want to abuse your power. And so just thinking about like, you know, like what Trump has done to the federal government and, you know, like firing all of these independent bureaucrats and appointing people who are not very neutral to lead agencies. And one would assume that if you have a Democrat who replaces him, that that person will probably get rid of those people who were appointed. And so I guess I'm wondering to the extent that Magyar talked about that with you, like, kind of what he's planning on doing to, you know, like how he's going to unwind Orbanism in that way, like where he's going to start, like with changes to the judiciary or to the media, just like things that Orban kind of destroyed or corrupted that he is going to fix. And then he might, like be kind of using a lot of power in order to do that, but it's not necessarily like him basically going off and doing something super corrupt.
- [32:46]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah. I think this is such a crucial question, and the fact is there is no perfect answer. So what he says is, we will not break the rule of law to reestablish the rule of law. Which sounds great.
- [33:00]
Tyler Foggatt
Yeah, I love it.
- [33:02]
Andrew Marantz
If it's what you say, I love it. But like, how do you do that? And I would kind of try to press him on how you do that. And the honest answer is we're still figuring it out. There are only so many examples. You can count them on one hand. Basically Poland, Brazil, now Hungary, places where this democratic backsliding, this competitive authoritarianism has taken hold and then has been broken through. And we're sort of starting to come out the other side and there is no perfect. You look at Poland and Brazil, neither of those is a perfect case study at all. Poland, you have a lot of stagnation because they didn't get a clean super majority. So there's still sort of a lot of loggerheads, you know, that not a lot is easy to get done there. Some is getting done, but not a lot. But then when you do get stuff done, a lot of that, as you say, could be perceived perhaps rightly, as being a kind of overreach or overreaction, pushing back in the other direction. And yeah, it's totally. You just have to think through, like you say, okay, if a Democrat with a big D comes in, in the American context, do you keep Brendan Carr at the FCC or do you replace him? If you replace him, are you replacing him with a loyalist or with someone you picked off the street? Even the thing about the appointing your brother in law, which seems sort of more nakedly cronyist, JFK did that, you know, and we don't. And so there's no one. It's not like there's one red line that you cross and you say, okay, if you appoint someone from your family to a cabinet position, you're automatically not Democratic anymore. It's a subjective mix of things where people will and do disagree. And, you know, I don't know if Rahm Emanuel became president, which I don't think will happen, but let's say he did and he appointed his brother Zeke to be Surgeon General. That wouldn't necessarily be corrupt, that he seems qualified for the job. Right. So. And then, yeah, you're still left with this question of how do you repair the damage that has come before. I think here we're already. It's already clear that we're stuck in this sort of cyclical thing. Either way, you have the Justice Department going after James Comey and Tish James. If there's a, you know, Democrat appointed Justice Department, they're not gonna keep all the Trump people there, but who do they replace them with? And do you replace all of them? And who do you replace and how do you do it in a way that doesn't seem like you're just reacting or being vindictive. If you don't go after Trump affiliated people who may have broken the law, then you're just being Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon or Merrick Garland kind of mulling over charges, but not bringing them. And the Democratic base will not be happy with that. If you do go after people, then how are you not just engaging in the same lawfare that you're criticizing the other side for doing? So? Yeah, I really think that this is where things get interesting. Like Madra said, the dance is just beginning. And I think that's kind of like a line that he's saying. And I think he knows it's true, but it maybe hasn't. This is totally me projecting, but I'm not sure it's really sunk in yet exactly how true that is for him or for the rest of us. Watching like this is where the. As hard as it was, as herculean as the effort was to win this landslide victory on such a tilted playing field against this free but not fair system, that was really only the first step, and now the hard work begins of governing, cleaning up the detritus. You know, every day on social media, you see Peter Magyar walking through, you know, the halls of his new offices and saying, oh, they have this, you know, treasure that they reappropriated from the National Museum, you know, stuck in Viktor Orban's office. Do I put that back in? You know, where it belongs in the National Museum. Okay. We have this loyalist in this part of the government. Like, who do I replace that person with? I mean, maybe the cleanest example of this that I asked him about was cleaning up the national media. One big thing he ran on was, you guys are being fed lies. You, the Hungarian people, are being fed propaganda by the state controlled media. When I come in, I'm gonna fix that. And he gave this very sort of confrontational, explosive interview on the tv. It was kind of very exciting to watch. Like, I'm shutting you guys down. You're a factory of lies. Okay? And I asked him, how do you do that? Do you fire everyone? He said, no, well, we're not gonna fire everyone. You know, there's like camera guys and, you know, boom operators. You know, I don't wanna fire them. I said, okay, who do you fire? And it's not his fault, but it's just we, this is kind of a new precipice of history. We haven't really been here yet. You know, we've had revolutions that come in in a kind of 1789 way, or, you know, like, you know, where you sweep everything out and start again. But in this, in this system where you've had the kind of democratic institutions hollowed out from within, but they still seem sort of democratic facing to the rest of the world. How do you do reform within that? It's really still, there's no real roadmap for that.
- [38:08]
Tyler Foggatt
What is his stance in particular on prosecuting members of the outgoing regime? Given that so much of what he did was run on the fact that the Orban regime was corrupt. And it doesn't seem like he's necessarily gonna go after Orban himself, but I'm wondering about his allies and other people who were implicated.
- [38:25]
Andrew Marantz
I wouldn't be totally shocked. I mean, Orban, I don't know if this was some weird projection thing or whatever, but he spent his last night as Prime Minister going on a Hungarian podcast called Dopranos Dop Ranos. Like the. So like the dope.
- [38:41]
Tyler Foggatt
Was it really like the Sopranos, but dopes?
- [38:43]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah, like, well, no, I gotta move to Hungary. I hope it's not word dopes. I think it's like, we're dope. Oh, that's my assumption. Maybe I'm being too generous. But it's also like the iconography is all messed up. Cause it's Sopranos, but then it has the Godfather finger puppet string. So it's just like a lot of mafia stuff. So he's going on a mafia podcast on his last night in office. Maybe he knows that he's about to get ricoed or something. But like, yeah, Madhya did say, you know, his line on this was we won't be a country without consequences anymore. He pretty clearly implied, like, these people are criminals and there's going to be consequences. To my knowledge, he didn't give specific plans of who was going to be prosecuted when. And I think when pressed on this, he sort of said, well, that's not up to me. That's up to the independent investigators and judiciary. But he definitely said, even in my interview with him, we are now a free country. And the way you know that is that the investigations are starting to happen. So again, this is something that I understand why Hungarians want that and I understand why you want to. You know, it's both good, both a good campaign line and maybe it feels like justice to say there will be consequences for these actions and if they really were criminal actions, there may be criminal consequences. On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that that is worrisome if you, you know, I don't know, it makes me uneasy to think about prosecuting your political enemies. And it makes me uneasy here, too. And so, I don't know, I don't have a solid answer on this. I do think that it just feels weird to me either way. It feels weird to me to use the levers of the state to go after the people you just beat democratically. It also feels weird to me to say these people were criminals and they stole your money for 16 years and then not do anything about it.
- [40:32]
Tyler Foggatt
Yeah, I mean, it's the exact same question that we dealt with here. I mean, maybe it's like the one time that Hungary can learn from us rather than the opposite way around. Thank you so much for your time, Andrew. This has been incredibly helpful.
- [40:45]
Andrew Marantz
Awesome.
- [40:49]
Tyler Foggatt
Andrew Marantz is a staff writer for the New Yorker. You can find his interview with Hungarian Prime Minister Peter magyar@new yorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggit. This episode is produced by John Lemay with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday. Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is Doge finally over. Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, Internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [42:17]
Andrew Marantz
From prx.