Orbán gets a proper shellacking – a reminder that the lovely thing about democracy is its penchant for change

Greeting a massive crowd, cheering alongside River Danube, Péter Magyar said, “We did it.” He is set to be Hungary’s next PM. Viktor Orbán, after four consecutive terms, didn’t just lose his majority, but took a shellacking. It was a high 78% turnout that proved the ‘kryptonite’ to his strongman playbook. He had packed courts, rewritten electoral laws, handed media to oligarchs, embedded loyalists across the civil service, and his party Fidesz had built powerful financial dependencies, aka corruption. Yet, a projected 138/199 parliamentary seats have gone to Magyar’s Tisza party. It was feared that, even if he was defeated, Orbán wouldn’t accept defeat peaceably. That’s a fear with much debt to US’s Jan 6 Capitol riots. But the sheer mathematical magnitude of Hungarians’ vote put paid to any ‘stolen election’ nonsense.

For the world, the Hungary story is a graphic reminder of the brightest side of electoral democracy. Every political movement, be it in the main right-wingly or left-wingly, Rino or Dino, nationalist or globalist, centrist or opportunist, each and every what-have-you, has a shelf life. No winning coalition coheres forever. Because competing interests, demographics, culture all shift under a country’s feet. Even manufactured nostalgia has a shelf life. Movements built on ‘return’ to some imagined golden age, eventually have to answer for not generating good jobs. In US, the post-1945 Keynesian welfare state, the Reaganesque neoliberal turn, the post-2008 populist bump, illustrate how the seemingly unchangeable, does change. India, you could say, has gone from Congress era to BJP era, and these formations themselves have seen massive shifts, eg from Nehru to Indira, or Vajpayee to Modi.

With Orbán, an unusual thing was how both the Russian and American dispensations supported his re-election. To no avail. The overall, historical track record of electoral politics defies cynicism. It is a restless, impatient, tetchy system, which likes correcting mistakes, as much as making them. Illiberal democracy can make way for a liberal one.

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