Much has been written about how Viktor Orbán supposedly engineered a political system tailored to his own advantage—only for it to ultimately turn against him. I cannot claim insight into Orbán’s thinking. Yet the Hungarian system has features that deserve a more sober assessment.
Hungary may well be the only country in the Western world where governing, in the traditional sense of the word, remains possible. An electoral victor can advance a coherent program and actually implement it. In that respect, Hungary stands apart. But such governability comes at a price: it requires a decisive electoral mandate—an outright majority of votes, coupled with broad territorial support.
This marks a stark contrast with political systems where power is effectively exercised by diffuse oligarchic networks, and where electoral winners gain little more than the right to struggle against those networks while delivering speeches that generate media attention but change very little.
From this perspective, even for Hungary it may be preferable to endure four years of erratic leadership—Péter Magyar currently projects, at least to some observers, the traits of an unstable and impulsive figure—than to slide into prolonged stagnation. That latter outcome is precisely what pressure from the European Union increasingly seems to encourage, by conditioning the lifting of sanctions on a transfer of authority toward transnational power structures.
This is likely what Elon Musk had in mind when he remarked that a “Soros organization” had taken over Hungary—a reference, however imprecise, to networks associated with George Soros. Whether such a trajectory will fully materialize, however, remains far from certain.