'There’s no time': Citizens of former democracy run by far-right leader urge Americans to act
President Donald Trump's election to a second term and his wave of executive actions in the early weeks of his return to power have a lot in common with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's consolidation of power. Now, Hungarians are urging Americans to act quickly before Trump carries out a similar power grab.
On Wednesday, Vox's Zack Beauchamp compared Hungary under Orbán to the United States under Trump, and documented the numerous similarities that Trump's second term has with the Hungarian leader's tenure. Several Hungarians who live under the Orbán regime said that while the United States has more tools at its disposal to stop authoritarian tactics, it's important for civil society and the media to take action.
“There’s no time for waiting and watching,” one Hungarian said anonymously out of fear of retribution. “They can do so much — so much — counting on the fact that everyone is paralyzed.”
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Like Trump, Orbán's power grab didn't begin until after he took office for a second time in 2010. And like Trump's relationship with billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Orbán also got help early on from a wealthy businessman named Lajos Simicska. Just as Musk spent weeks at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in the aftermath of the 2024 election, Simicska "many weeks at Viktor Orbán’s country house" following the Hungarian leader's 2010 victory.
While Musk's allies have since taken operational control of the Office of Personnel Management and the U.S. Treasury Department's internal systems that handle trillions of dollars of payments each year, Simicska likewise took over Hungary's National Development Agency, which oversees the distribution of funds from the European Union. And just like Musk, Simicska managed to do this without having to undergo any public vetting process.
There are, however, several structural advantages Americans in 2025 have that Hungarians didn't have in 2010. The U.S. is a much larger country and has been a democracy for longer than Hungary, and there are numerous powers the U.S. Constitution delegates to states, whereas Hungary's system is more centralized. And while Orbán passed several constitutional amendments through a compliant legislature, the U.S. Constitution is much harder to amend, and Trump does not yet have the Congressional majorities needed to ram through policies via statute. Hungarian scholar Zsuzsanna Végh expressed hope that the federal judiciary could rein in the Trump administration's worst abuses of power, while Americans at large can maintain visible opposition in the streets and the media.
“Whenever there is a power to constitutional practices, the judiciary needs to step in,” Végh told Vox. “Civil society and the general public [need] to call out unconstitutional and undemocratic practices … to not shy away from speaking truth to power and drawing attention to what’s going on.”
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Click here to read Beauchamp's article in Vox (subscription required).
