This week I again had the opportunity to attend a gathering featuring a sociologist who specializes in Hungarian society and occasionally teaches seminars at my university.
Since we both studied around the same time, we found ourselves reminiscing about Ralph Dahrendorf’s now largely forgotten book on modern social conflict. Dahrendorf observed that the overwhelming majority of revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution, occurred after periods of rapid improvement in living conditions. People breathe easier, they are treated better, their standard of living rises, and an expectation takes hold that such rapid progress will continue indefinitely. Yet every growth impulse eventually runs its course. Improvement slows, and people begin to see the very person who lifted them up as an obstacle to further advancement. According to Dahrendorf, that is the moment when political regimes are most vulnerable.
Hungary is a textbook example. Living standards rose dramatically between 2010 and 2018, followed by a period of relative stagnation. The country weathered a series of shocks better than almost any other economy—COVID, the war, EU sanctions—but growth nonetheless came to a halt. New initiatives also failed to deliver results as quickly as Orbán’s government had promised, including the ambitious plan to make Hungary the world’s third-largest producer of electric vehicle batteries after China and the United States. A growing sense emerged that, rather than an aging prime minister, the country needed a new Orbán. Péter Magyar, who emerged from Orbán’s own Fidesz movement while projecting the image of a relentless and unsentimental operator, was in many ways the ideal candidate for this year.
Of course, hindsight is easy. I had bet on Orbán. I assumed that over the years he had built such a formidable political machine that he would be able to manage popular discontent. He could not. In the end, he appeared almost like a naïve democrat in a world of power-hungry wolves.
Despite Orbán’s defeat, there are as yet few signs that Hungarian society is about to change in any fundamental way or that the country’s economic model is headed for a major transformation. More likely, the system Orbán built will continue largely on its own momentum—perhaps until, four years from now, an heir to Orbán takes up the project once again.