vox--2020-08-10--The American right’s favorite strongman

The American right’s favorite strongman

At dawn on a Tuesday in May , the police took a man named András from his home in northeastern Hungary .
His alleged crime ?
Writing a Facebook post that called the country ’ s prime minister , Viktor Orbán , a “ dictator.
” András has a point .
After winning Hungary ’ s 2010 election , the prime minister systematically dismantled the country ’ s democracy — undermining the basic fairness of elections , packing the courts with cronies , and taking control of more than 90 percent of the country ’ s media outlets .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as “ illiberal democracy , ” half of which is accurate .
Since the coronavirus , Orbán ’ s authoritarian tendencies have only grown more pronounced .
His allies in parliament passed a new law giving him the power to rule by decree and creating a new crime , “ spreading a falsehood , ” punishable by up to five years in prison .
The Hungarian government recently seized public funding that opposing political parties depend on ; through an ally , they took financial control of one of the few remaining anti-Orbán @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pro-democracy group Freedom House officially announced that it no longer considered Hungary a democracy .
András was detained for hours for daring to criticize this authoritarian drift .
The 64-year-old was ultimately released , but the police ’ s official statement on the arrest noted that “ a malicious or ill-considered share on the internet could constitute a crime.
” András , for one , got the message .
“ I told [ the cops ] their task had achieved its result and would probably shut me up , ” he told the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrest is an unusually naked display of what Hungary has become — a cautionary tale for what a certain kind of right-wing populist will do when given unchecked political power .
Yet among a certain segment of American conservatives , Orbán is not viewed as a warning .
Orbán ’ s fans in the West include notable writers at major conservative and right-leaning publications like National Review , the American Conservative , and the New York Post .
Christopher Caldwell , a journalist widely respected on the right , wrote a lengthy feature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blessed with almost every political gift.
” Patrick Deneen , perhaps the most prominent conservative political theorist in America , met with Orbán in his office during a trip to Budapest .
He has described the Hungarian government as a “ model ” for some American conservatives .
( Responding to a request for comment after this piece was published , Deneen clarified : “ I have not endorsed the Orbán government ... mainly because I do not know Hungarian politics well enough to praise or condemn.
” ) Jordan Peterson , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made a pilgrimage to the prime minister ’ s office .
Chris DeMuth , the former head of the American Enterprise Institute , interviewed Orbán onstage at a conference , praising the prime minister in opening remarks as “ not only a political but an intellectual leader.
” The event was organized by Yoram Hazony , an Israeli intellectual widely influential on the American right and another vocal Orbán fan .
The Hungarian government has actively cultivated support from such international conservatives .
John O ’ Sullivan , an Anglo-American contributor to National @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Danube Institute — a think tank in Budapest that O ’ Sullivan admits receives funding from the Hungarian government .
Pro-Orbán Westerners tend to come from one of two overlapping camps in modern conservatism : religiously minded social conservatives and conservative nationalists .
Religious conservatives find Orbán ’ s social policies to be a breath of fresh air .
Orbán has given significant state support to Hungary ’ s churches , officially labeling his government a “ Christian democracy.
” He provided generous subsidies to families in an effort to get Hungarian women @ @ @ @ @ @ @ babies .
He launched a legal assault on progressive social ideals , prohibiting the teaching of gender studies in Hungarian universities and banning transgender people from legally identifying as anything other than their biological sex at birth .
Conservative nationalists focus on the Hungarian approach to immigration and the European Union .
During the 2015 migrant crisis , Orbán was the most prominent opponent of German Chancellor Angela Merkel ’ s open borders approach ; he built a wall on Hungary ’ s southern border with Serbia to keep refugees from entering .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ EU has on its member states , describing one of his governing aims as preserving Hungary ’ s national character in the face of a globalist onslaught led by Brussels and philanthropist George Soros .
For Western conservatives of a religious and/or nationalist bent , Orbán is the leader they wish Donald Trump could be — smart , politically savvy , and genuinely devoted to their ideals .
Hungary is , for them , the equivalent of what Nordic countries are for the American left : proof of concept that their ideas could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Yet while the Nordic countries are among the world ’ s freest democracies , Hungary has fallen into a form of autocracy .
This presents a problem for Hungary ’ s Western apostles , as they do not see themselves as advocates of American authoritarianism .
Their encomia to Orbán tend to either overlook his authoritarian tendencies or deny them altogether , claiming that biased Western reporters and NGOs are unfairly demonizing Budapest for its cultural and nationalist beliefs .
“ Hungary ’ s leadership ... is more democratic than most of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Catholic conservative Sohrab Ahmari writes in the New York Post .
“ Hungary ’ s leaders have had it with Western liberal condescension and tutelage.
” In reality , it ’ s not the Orbán regime that ’ s being persecuted : It ’ s ordinary Hungarian citizens like András .
The Western defenders of Orbán are so preoccupied by the culture wars over gender and immigration that they ’ re overlooking who , exactly , they ’ ve gotten in bed with .
Rod Dreher , a senior editor at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a handful of influential Western writers courted by the Hungarian government .
He ’ s met with Orbán and even had plans to take up a fellowship in Budapest before the coronavirus scrambled everyone ’ s lives .
While Dreher has a number of views that liberals find either kooky or reprehensible , he ’ s a talented writer who ’ s hugely influential on the religious and nationalist right .
When I asked Dreher for the strongest possible version of the conservative case for Orbán , he sent me a series of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ I want to be clear that I don ’ t want to be understood as approving of everything Orbán does , ” he told me .
“ My approval of Orbán is general , not specific , in the same way that there are people who don ’ t agree with everything Trump does , but who generally endorse him.
” This “ general endorsement ” is rooted in a sense that the Hungarian leader challenges the liberal elite in a way few others do .
In Dreher ’ s analysis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the West is secular and liberal — a political style that suffocates traditional religious observance and crushes specific national identities in favor of a homogenizing , cosmopolitan ideal .
“ He [ Orbán ] knew that in 2015 , to allow all the Middle Eastern immigrants to settle in Hungary would have been surrendering a Hungarian future for the Hungarian people ... and all the traditions and cultural memories they carry with them , ” Dreher told me .
“ Broadly speaking , the ideology of globalism presumes that those traditions and those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world .
That they are problems to be solved rather than a heritage to be cherished.
” This sense of persecution at the hands of secular globalist elites is at the center of the mindset held by Dreher and much of the modern intellectual right .
The contemporary fusion of religious and nationalist ideas has created a unified field theory of global cultural politics , defined by a sense that cosmopolitan liberal forces are threatening the very survival of traditional Christian communities .
This line of thinking animates many prominent Trump supporters and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Attorney General Bill Barr .
For people like Dreher , who has written that “ my politics are driven entirely by fear [ of ] the woke left , ” Orbán is Trump ’ s more admirable twin .
The American president is , as Dreher once argued , “ a small , ugly , godless and graceless man ” — though one he ’ d rather have in office than a progressive Democrat .
The Hungarian leader , by contrast , is in his view both a true believer and a much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What I see in Orbán is one of the few major politicians in the West who seems to understand the importance of Christianity , and the importance of culture , and who is willing to defend these things against a very rich and powerful international establishment , ” he tells me .
“ I find myself saying of Orbán what I hear conservatives say when they explain why they instinctively love Trump : because he fights .
The thing about Orbán is that unlike Trump , he fights , and he wins , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I find fascinating about Dreher ’ s take — which largely typifies the pro-Orbán arguments among both religious conservatives and conservative nationalists — is that the issue of democracy plays a secondary role in the conversation .
Dreher doesn ’ t admire Orbán ’ s more authoritarian tendencies ; indeed , he admits that the man has made mistakes , including in András ’ s case .
“ I have no doubt that Viktor Orban is not the philosopher-king of my Christian conservative dreams , ” he tells me .
But whatever his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like freedom of the press and fair elections , they don ’ t play a primary role in his thinking .
His evaluation of Orbán centers culture war issues like immigration and religion in public life , an ideologically driven view that obscures the damning democratic deficit in Hungary .
In our exchange , Dreher compared his admiration for Orbán to the way Hungarian conservatives he ’ s met admired Trump .
When he told his Hungarian acquaintances that he liked what Trump stood for in theory , but had serious issues with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ governs , they were incredulous : What ’ s not to like about someone who ’ s so willing to stick it to the globalist liberal elites ?
They read Trump through Hungarian ideological categories , not American reality — and it showed .
“ Maybe I ’ m seeing Orbán in the same way my Hungarian interlocutors see Trump .
...
If I lived in Hungary , perhaps I would find a lot to dislike in his everyday governance , ” Dreher told me .
“ But he and other European politicians @ @ @ @ @ @ @ desires , and beliefs about religion , tradition , and national identity , that the center-right politicians have ignored.
” Yet when it comes to modern Hungary , the authoritarian devil is truly in the everyday details .
Orbán ’ s effort to cultivate Western intellectuals — funding their work , inviting them to meet with him as honored guests in Budapest , speaking at their glitzy conferences — is part of a much more ambitious ideological campaign .
He describes himself as the avatar of a new political model spreading across the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ democracy ” or “ Christian democracy.
” Advocates of illiberal democracy , like Trump and European far-right parties , aim to protect and deepen the specificity of each European country ’ s religious and ethnic makeup — Hungary for the Hungarians , France for the French , and Germany for the Germans .
Orbán frames this goal in precisely the culture war terms people like Dreher find so appealing .
“ Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism , while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture , ” he said in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pro-immigration , while Christian democracy is anti-immigration.
” This language is at once incendiary and misleading .
The rejection of “ liberalism ” infuriates mainstream European and Western intellectuals , thus further convincing the right that Orbán is the enemy of their primary enemy .
But by framing his struggle as a conflict between two subspecies of democracy — between “ liberal ” and “ Christian ” democracy — Orbán obscures the fact that his regime is not any kind of democracy at all .
This insistence on falsely referring to his authoritarian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both its domestic and international project .
Orbán and much of his inner circle are lawyers by training ; they have used this expertise to set up a political system that looks very much like a democracy , with elections and a theoretically free press , but isn ’ t one .
This gives intellectually sympathetic Westerners some room for self-delusion .
They can examine Hungary , a country whose cultural politics they admire , and see a place that looks on the surface like a functioning democracy .
When such observers travel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a democracy in action , it becomes easier to dismiss concerns about authoritarian drift from journalists , pro-democracy NGOs , and academic experts as mere cultural prejudice : the liberal elite smearing a right-leaning elected leader as an authoritarian because they don ’ t like his cultural politics .
Orbán isn ’ t an authoritarian , in this view , but the avatar of what the silent majority of Americans and Europeans really want .
A staple of these arguments is to make the point that Orbán ’ s Fidesz party has won @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the strange things about modern political rhetoric is that Viktor Orbán should so often be described as a threat to ‘ democracy , ’ although his power had been won in free elections , ” Caldwell , the eminent conservative Europe reporter , writes in the Claremont Review of Books .
But after coming to power in 2010 , Orbán rewrote Hungary ’ s constitution and electoral rules to make it nigh impossible for the opposition to win power through elections .
Tactics including extreme gerrymandering , rewriting campaign finance rules to give @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cronies to the country ’ s constitutional court and election bureaucracy , and seizing control of nearly all media outlets have combined to render elections functionally non-competitive .
The mechanisms of control here are so subtle ( who outside of Hungary cares about staffing choices at its electoral administration ? )
that it ’ s easy for an intellectually sympathetic observer to dismiss them as overblown .
In Caldwell ’ s Claremont piece , for example , he challenges concerns about press freedom by pointing to Lajos Simicska — a media magnate and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him in 2015 and campaigned against him in the 2018 election .
“ When Orbán ’ s friend Simicska broke with him , he used his newspaper Magyar Nemzet to attack Orbán in the most vulgar terms , comparing him to an ejaculation , ” Caldwell writes .
“ Orbán ’ s powerful mandate , his two-thirds majority , gave him power to amend the country ’ s constitution at will .
This was not the same thing as authoritarianism — there aren ’ t a lot of reporters in Beijing likening Xi @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t that many left in Hungary , either .
After 2015 , Orbán used his unfettered powers to demolish Simicska ’ s business empire , cutting off government contracts not only for his old friend ’ s media holdings but also for his construction and advertising firms .
Simicska ’ s businesses shrank and his personal fortune declined ; the 2018 electioneering was a last-ditch effort to challenge a system that he himself described as a “ dictatorship.
” After Orbán ’ s unfairly won 2018 victory , Simicska told allies that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fidesz ] can not be defeated through democratic elections.
” He shut down Magyar Nemzet ; a government mouthpiece currently publishes under its name .
Simicska eventually sold his entire media empire to a Fidesz ally , including the popular television station Hír TV — which , after the sale , openly proclaimed it would adopting a pro-government line .
Today , Simicska lives in an isolated village in western Hungary .
His only remaining business interest is an agricultural firm owned by his wife .
This is obviously not a story about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s an instructive tale in the precise and subtle ways Orbán uses political patronage and the powers of the state to maintain political control .
The Hungarian government is a species of authoritarianism — just a less coercive and more elusive version of its Chinese cousin .
“ Clearly , Hungary is not a democracy .
But understanding why requires a nuanced understanding of the line between democracy and autocracy , ” Lucan Ahmad Way and Steven Levitsky , two leading academic experts on democracy , write in the Washington Post .
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ club in the West to operate with a clean conscience .
It ’ s also what makes it so disturbing .
There are examples throughout history of people on both left and right blinding themselves to the faults of their ideological allies .
The great British playwright George Bernard Shaw saw Josef Stalin as a shining example of Shaw ’ s own egalitarian values .
Friedrich von Hayek , arguably the defining libertarian economist , defended Augusto Pinochet ’ s murderous dictatorship in Chile on grounds that the dictator was friendly to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , of course , pale in comparison to Stalin ’ s or Pinochet ’ s .
If such great thinkers in history can trick themselves into forgiving much more egregious assaults on human rights and democracy , it ’ s understandable that modern conservatives might fall prey to the same tendency to see the best in ideologically simpatico authoritarians .
But the fact that this tendency is understandable doesn ’ t mean it ’ s excusable — or without its own set of dangers .
In the United States , the Republican Party @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Fidesz-like tactics to undermine the fairness of the political process .
The two parties evolved independently , for their own domestic reasons , but seem to have converged on a similar willingness to undermine the fairness of elections behind the scenes .
Extreme gerrymandering , voter ID laws , purging nonvoters from the voting rolls , seizing power from duly elected Democratic governors , packing courts with partisan judges , creating a media propaganda network that its partisans consume to the exclusion of other sources — all Republican approaches that , with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fidesz ’ s techniques for hollowing out from democracy from within .
In this respect , Hungary really is a model for America .
It ’ s not a blueprint anyone is consciously aping , but proof that a ruthless party with less-than-majority support in the public can take durable control of political institutions while still successfully maintaining a democratic veneer .
Conservative intellectuals bear a special obligation to call attention to this dangerous process .
It ’ s always easier for writers and intellectuals to criticize the opposing side precisely because it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ already don ’ t pay attention to you , and your audience already agrees with your critique .
When your “ team ” is crossing lines , criticizing it is much more likely to ruffle feathers — but also more likely to change minds .
The Hungary situation has been a trial in this regard , a way of assessing conservative intellectuals ’ ability to perform this vital form of self-policing .
I find Orban ’ s attack on trans rights and treatment of migrants reprehensible , but I don ’ t expect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with me .
I do , however , believe they ought to have a baseline commitment to democratic norms : a sense that disagreement itself is not illegitimate , and that governments that use their powers to crush their opponents can never be fundamentally admirable .
Yet that ’ s not what has happened .
Much of the conservative leadership can not break out of their sense of victimhood ; the world is a struggle between righteous conservatives and oppressive secular progressives .
It does not compute , to them , that a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mistreating its opponents and attacking democracy ; they come up with excuses for whatever Orbán is doing , offering misleading half-truths that at times literally echo government propaganda .
If these thinkers continue to insist that Hungary is just another democracy — despite copious evidence to the contrary — how can we expect them to call out the same , more embryonic process of authoritarianism happening at home ?
If American conservatives won ’ t turn on a foreign country ’ s leadership after it crosses the line , what reason would we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be capable of doing the same thing when the stakes for them are higher and the enemies more deeply hated ?
The admiration for Orbán has convinced me that , no matter how far down the Fidesz path the GOP goes , many conservative intellectuals will use the same culture war uber alles logic to justify its trampling over American democracy .
Hungary is a test for these American thinkers .
And they flunked it .
Clarification , August 10 : An earlier version of this article reported political theorist Patrick Deneen as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ ‘ model ’ for American conservatives.
” After publication , Deneen responded to Vox ’ s request for comment to explain that he was referring to the views of “ some conservatives who view the Orbán regime as a model , ” but did not see himself as part of that group .
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At dawn on a Tuesday in May, the police took a man named András from his home in northeastern Hungary. His alleged crime? Writing a Facebook post that called the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a “dictator.”
András has a point. After winning Hungary’s 2010 election, the prime minister systematically dismantled the country’s democracy — undermining the basic fairness of elections, packing the courts with cronies, and taking control of more than 90 percent of the country’s media outlets. He has openly described his form of government as “illiberal democracy,” half of which is accurate.
Since the coronavirus, Orbán’s authoritarian tendencies have only grown more pronounced. His allies in parliament passed a new law giving him the power to rule by decree and creating a new crime, “spreading a falsehood,” punishable by up to five years in prison. The Hungarian government recently seized public funding that opposing political parties depend on; through an ally, they took financial control of one of the few remaining anti-Orbán media outlets. In May, the pro-democracy group Freedom House officially announced that it no longer considered Hungary a democracy.
András was detained for hours for daring to criticize this authoritarian drift. The 64-year-old was ultimately released, but the police’s official statement on the arrest noted that “a malicious or ill-considered share on the internet could constitute a crime.” András, for one, got the message.
“I told [the cops] their task had achieved its result and would probably shut me up,” he told the news site 444.
András’s arrest is an unusually naked display of what Hungary has become — a cautionary tale for what a certain kind of right-wing populist will do when given unchecked political power. Yet among a certain segment of American conservatives, Orbán is not viewed as a warning.
He’s viewed as a role model.
Orbán’s fans in the West include notable writers at major conservative and right-leaning publications like National Review, the American Conservative, and the New York Post. Christopher Caldwell, a journalist widely respected on the right, wrote a lengthy feature praising the strongman as a leader “blessed with almost every political gift.”
Patrick Deneen, perhaps the most prominent conservative political theorist in America, met with Orbán in his office during a trip to Budapest. He has described the Hungarian government as a “model” for some American conservatives. (Responding to a request for comment after this piece was published, Deneen clarified: “I have not endorsed the Orbán government ... mainly because I do not know Hungarian politics well enough to praise or condemn.”)
Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and right-wing cultural icon, made a pilgrimage to the prime minister’s office. Chris DeMuth, the former head of the American Enterprise Institute, interviewed Orbán onstage at a conference, praising the prime minister in opening remarks as “not only a political but an intellectual leader.” The event was organized by Yoram Hazony, an Israeli intellectual widely influential on the American right and another vocal Orbán fan.
The Hungarian government has actively cultivated support from such international conservatives. John O’Sullivan, an Anglo-American contributor to National Review, is currently based at the Danube Institute — a think tank in Budapest that O’Sullivan admits receives funding from the Hungarian government.
Pro-Orbán Westerners tend to come from one of two overlapping camps in modern conservatism: religiously minded social conservatives and conservative nationalists.
Religious conservatives find Orbán’s social policies to be a breath of fresh air. Orbán has given significant state support to Hungary’s churches, officially labeling his government a “Christian democracy.” He provided generous subsidies to families in an effort to get Hungarian women to stay at home and have more babies. He launched a legal assault on progressive social ideals, prohibiting the teaching of gender studies in Hungarian universities and banning transgender people from legally identifying as anything other than their biological sex at birth.
Conservative nationalists focus on the Hungarian approach to immigration and the European Union. During the 2015 migrant crisis, Orbán was the most prominent opponent of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open borders approach; he built a wall on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia to keep refugees from entering. He has repeatedly denounced the influence the EU has on its member states, describing one of his governing aims as preserving Hungary’s national character in the face of a globalist onslaught led by Brussels and philanthropist George Soros.
For Western conservatives of a religious and/or nationalist bent, Orbán is the leader they wish Donald Trump could be — smart, politically savvy, and genuinely devoted to their ideals. Hungary is, for them, the equivalent of what Nordic countries are for the American left: proof of concept that their ideas could make the United States a better place.
Yet while the Nordic countries are among the world’s freest democracies, Hungary has fallen into a form of autocracy. This presents a problem for Hungary’s Western apostles, as they do not see themselves as advocates of American authoritarianism. Their encomia to Orbán tend to either overlook his authoritarian tendencies or deny them altogether, claiming that biased Western reporters and NGOs are unfairly demonizing Budapest for its cultural and nationalist beliefs.
“Hungary’s leadership ... is more democratic than most of the countries that lecture Budapest about democracy,” Catholic conservative Sohrab Ahmari writes in the New York Post. “Hungary’s leaders have had it with Western liberal condescension and tutelage.”
In reality, it’s not the Orbán regime that’s being persecuted: It’s ordinary Hungarian citizens like András. The Western defenders of Orbán are so preoccupied by the culture wars over gender and immigration that they’re overlooking who, exactly, they’ve gotten in bed with.
Understanding the conservative case for Orbán
Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative, is one of a handful of influential Western writers courted by the Hungarian government. He’s met with Orbán and even had plans to take up a fellowship in Budapest before the coronavirus scrambled everyone’s lives.
While Dreher has a number of views that liberals find either kooky or reprehensible, he’s a talented writer who’s hugely influential on the religious and nationalist right. When I asked Dreher for the strongest possible version of the conservative case for Orbán, he sent me a series of lengthy and reflective notes on the subject.
“I want to be clear that I don’t want to be understood as approving of everything Orbán does,” he told me. “My approval of Orbán is general, not specific, in the same way that there are people who don’t agree with everything Trump does, but who generally endorse him.”
This “general endorsement” is rooted in a sense that the Hungarian leader challenges the liberal elite in a way few others do. In Dreher’s analysis, the dominant mode of thinking in the West is secular and liberal — a political style that suffocates traditional religious observance and crushes specific national identities in favor of a homogenizing, cosmopolitan ideal.
“He [Orbán] knew that in 2015, to allow all the Middle Eastern immigrants to settle in Hungary would have been surrendering a Hungarian future for the Hungarian people...and all the traditions and cultural memories they carry with them,” Dreher told me. “Broadly speaking, the ideology of globalism presumes that those traditions and those memories are obstacles to creating an ideal world. That they are problems to be solved rather than a heritage to be cherished.”
This sense of persecution at the hands of secular globalist elites is at the center of the mindset held by Dreher and much of the modern intellectual right. The contemporary fusion of religious and nationalist ideas has created a unified field theory of global cultural politics, defined by a sense that cosmopolitan liberal forces are threatening the very survival of traditional Christian communities. This line of thinking animates many prominent Trump supporters and allies who are Christian conservatives, including Attorney General Bill Barr.
For people like Dreher, who has written that “my politics are driven entirely by fear [of] the woke left,” Orbán is Trump’s more admirable twin. The American president is, as Dreher once argued, “a small, ugly, godless and graceless man” — though one he’d rather have in office than a progressive Democrat. The Hungarian leader, by contrast, is in his view both a true believer and a much more effective head of state.
“What I see in Orbán is one of the few major politicians in the West who seems to understand the importance of Christianity, and the importance of culture, and who is willing to defend these things against a very rich and powerful international establishment,” he tells me. “I find myself saying of Orbán what I hear conservatives say when they explain why they instinctively love Trump: because he fights. The thing about Orbán is that unlike Trump, he fights, and he wins, and his victories are substantive.”
What I find fascinating about Dreher’s take — which largely typifies the pro-Orbán arguments among both religious conservatives and conservative nationalists — is that the issue of democracy plays a secondary role in the conversation.
Dreher doesn’t admire Orbán’s more authoritarian tendencies; indeed, he admits that the man has made mistakes, including in András’s case. “I have no doubt that Viktor Orban is not the philosopher-king of my Christian conservative dreams,” he tells me.
But whatever his concerns about threats to basic democratic principles like freedom of the press and fair elections, they don’t play a primary role in his thinking. His evaluation of Orbán centers culture war issues like immigration and religion in public life, an ideologically driven view that obscures the damning democratic deficit in Hungary.
In our exchange, Dreher compared his admiration for Orbán to the way Hungarian conservatives he’s met admired Trump. When he told his Hungarian acquaintances that he liked what Trump stood for in theory, but had serious issues with the man himself and the way he governs, they were incredulous: What’s not to like about someone who’s so willing to stick it to the globalist liberal elites?
They read Trump through Hungarian ideological categories, not American reality — and it showed.
“Maybe I’m seeing Orbán in the same way my Hungarian interlocutors see Trump. ... If I lived in Hungary, perhaps I would find a lot to dislike in his everyday governance,” Dreher told me. “But he and other European politicians like him are speaking to needs, desires, and beliefs about religion, tradition, and national identity, that the center-right politicians have ignored.”
Yet when it comes to modern Hungary, the authoritarian devil is truly in the everyday details.
The authoritarian strategy of plausible deniability
Orbán’s effort to cultivate Western intellectuals — funding their work, inviting them to meet with him as honored guests in Budapest, speaking at their glitzy conferences — is part of a much more ambitious ideological campaign. He describes himself as the avatar of a new political model spreading across the West, which he terms “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.”
Advocates of illiberal democracy, like Trump and European far-right parties, aim to protect and deepen the specificity of each European country’s religious and ethnic makeup — Hungary for the Hungarians, France for the French, and Germany for the Germans. Orbán frames this goal in precisely the culture war terms people like Dreher find so appealing.
“Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture,” he said in a 2018 speech. “Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration.”
This language is at once incendiary and misleading. The rejection of “liberalism” infuriates mainstream European and Western intellectuals, thus further convincing the right that Orbán is the enemy of their primary enemy. But by framing his struggle as a conflict between two subspecies of democracy — between “liberal” and “Christian” democracy — Orbán obscures the fact that his regime is not any kind of democracy at all.
This insistence on falsely referring to his authoritarian regime as a democracy is vital to both its domestic and international project.
Orbán and much of his inner circle are lawyers by training; they have used this expertise to set up a political system that looks very much like a democracy, with elections and a theoretically free press, but isn’t one. This gives intellectually sympathetic Westerners some room for self-delusion. They can examine Hungary, a country whose cultural politics they admire, and see a place that looks on the surface like a functioning democracy.
When such observers travel to Budapest and see what looks like a democracy in action, it becomes easier to dismiss concerns about authoritarian drift from journalists, pro-democracy NGOs, and academic experts as mere cultural prejudice: the liberal elite smearing a right-leaning elected leader as an authoritarian because they don’t like his cultural politics. Orbán isn’t an authoritarian, in this view, but the avatar of what the silent majority of Americans and Europeans really want.
A staple of these arguments is to make the point that Orbán’s Fidesz party has won three consecutive elections.
“One of the strange things about modern political rhetoric is that Viktor Orbán should so often be described as a threat to ‘democracy,’ although his power had been won in free elections,” Caldwell, the eminent conservative Europe reporter, writes in the Claremont Review of Books.
But after coming to power in 2010, Orbán rewrote Hungary’s constitution and electoral rules to make it nigh impossible for the opposition to win power through elections. Tactics including extreme gerrymandering, rewriting campaign finance rules to give Fidesz a major leg up, appointing cronies to the country’s constitutional court and election bureaucracy, and seizing control of nearly all media outlets have combined to render elections functionally non-competitive.
The mechanisms of control here are so subtle (who outside of Hungary cares about staffing choices at its electoral administration?) that it’s easy for an intellectually sympathetic observer to dismiss them as overblown. In Caldwell’s Claremont piece, for example, he challenges concerns about press freedom by pointing to Lajos Simicska — a media magnate and former Orbán right-hand man who turned on him in 2015 and campaigned against him in the 2018 election.
“When Orbán’s friend Simicska broke with him, he used his newspaper Magyar Nemzet to attack Orbán in the most vulgar terms, comparing him to an ejaculation,” Caldwell writes. “Orbán’s powerful mandate, his two-thirds majority, gave him power to amend the country’s constitution at will. This was not the same thing as authoritarianism — there aren’t a lot of reporters in Beijing likening Xi Jinping to an ejaculation.”
There aren’t that many left in Hungary, either. After 2015, Orbán used his unfettered powers to demolish Simicska’s business empire, cutting off government contracts not only for his old friend’s media holdings but also for his construction and advertising firms. Simicska’s businesses shrank and his personal fortune declined; the 2018 electioneering was a last-ditch effort to challenge a system that he himself described as a “dictatorship.”
After Orbán’s unfairly won 2018 victory, Simicska told allies that “it is clear that they [Fidesz] cannot be defeated through democratic elections.” He shut down Magyar Nemzet; a government mouthpiece currently publishes under its name. Simicska eventually sold his entire media empire to a Fidesz ally, including the popular television station Hír TV — which, after the sale, openly proclaimed it would adopting a pro-government line.
Today, Simicska lives in an isolated village in western Hungary. His only remaining business interest is an agricultural firm owned by his wife.
This is obviously not a story about democratic resilience in Hungary: It’s an instructive tale in the precise and subtle ways Orbán uses political patronage and the powers of the state to maintain political control. The Hungarian government is a species of authoritarianism — just a less coercive and more elusive version of its Chinese cousin.
“Clearly, Hungary is not a democracy. But understanding why requires a nuanced understanding of the line between democracy and autocracy,” Lucan Ahmad Way and Steven Levitsky, two leading academic experts on democracy, write in the Washington Post.
This subtlety is what allows his conservative fan club in the West to operate with a clean conscience. It’s also what makes it so disturbing.
The Hungary model for America
There are examples throughout history of people on both left and right blinding themselves to the faults of their ideological allies. The great British playwright George Bernard Shaw saw Josef Stalin as a shining example of Shaw’s own egalitarian values. Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the defining libertarian economist, defended Augusto Pinochet’s murderous dictatorship in Chile on grounds that the dictator was friendly to the free market.
Orbán’s crimes, of course, pale in comparison to Stalin’s or Pinochet’s. If such great thinkers in history can trick themselves into forgiving much more egregious assaults on human rights and democracy, it’s understandable that modern conservatives might fall prey to the same tendency to see the best in ideologically simpatico authoritarians.
But the fact that this tendency is understandable doesn’t mean it’s excusable — or without its own set of dangers.
In the United States, the Republican Party has shown a disturbing willingness to engage in Fidesz-like tactics to undermine the fairness of the political process. The two parties evolved independently, for their own domestic reasons, but seem to have converged on a similar willingness to undermine the fairness of elections behind the scenes.
Extreme gerrymandering, voter ID laws, purging nonvoters from the voting rolls, seizing power from duly elected Democratic governors, packing courts with partisan judges, creating a media propaganda network that its partisans consume to the exclusion of other sources — all Republican approaches that, with some nouns changed, could easily describe Fidesz’s techniques for hollowing out from democracy from within.
In this respect, Hungary really is a model for America. It’s not a blueprint anyone is consciously aping, but proof that a ruthless party with less-than-majority support in the public can take durable control of political institutions while still successfully maintaining a democratic veneer.
Conservative intellectuals bear a special obligation to call attention to this dangerous process. It’s always easier for writers and intellectuals to criticize the opposing side precisely because it’s less effectual: Your targets already don’t pay attention to you, and your audience already agrees with your critique. When your “team” is crossing lines, criticizing it is much more likely to ruffle feathers — but also more likely to change minds.
The Hungary situation has been a trial in this regard, a way of assessing conservative intellectuals’ ability to perform this vital form of self-policing.
I find Orban’s attack on trans rights and treatment of migrants reprehensible, but I don’t expect those on the broader right to agree with me. I do, however, believe they ought to have a baseline commitment to democratic norms: a sense that disagreement itself is not illegitimate, and that governments that use their powers to crush their opponents can never be fundamentally admirable.
Yet that’s not what has happened. Much of the conservative leadership cannot break out of their sense of victimhood; the world is a struggle between righteous conservatives and oppressive secular progressives. It does not compute, to them, that a traditionalist regime might actually be the one mistreating its opponents and attacking democracy; they come up with excuses for whatever Orbán is doing, offering misleading half-truths that at times literally echo government propaganda.
If these thinkers continue to insist that Hungary is just another democracy — despite copious evidence to the contrary — how can we expect them to call out the same, more embryonic process of authoritarianism happening at home? If American conservatives won’t turn on a foreign country’s leadership after it crosses the line, what reason would we have to believe that they’d be capable of doing the same thing when the stakes for them are higher and the enemies more deeply hated?
The admiration for Orbán has convinced me that, no matter how far down the Fidesz path the GOP goes, many conservative intellectuals will use the same culture war uber alles logic to justify its trampling over American democracy.
Hungary is a test for these American thinkers. And they flunked it.
Clarification, August 10: An earlier version of this article reported political theorist Patrick Deneen as saying that the Orban government was a “‘model’ for American conservatives.” After publication, Deneen responded to Vox’s request for comment to explain that he was referring to the views of “some conservatives who view the Orbán regime as a model,” but did not see himself as part of that group.
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vox--2020-08-11--How a homemaker with no political experience took on Europe’s longest-serving dictator

One of Europe ’ s last remaining dictators held onto power after facing his greatest political challenge in decades — and rigged an election to do so .
Alexander Lukashenko has served as Belarus ’ s president since 1994 , when he won the presidency in the country ’ s last national democratic election since gaining independence from the Soviet Union .
That ’ s because Lukashenko has remained in power ever since thanks to a combination of brutal repression and rigged elections .
He ’ s now Europe ’ s longest-serving leader .
But after 26 years , many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hundreds of thousands of people have rallied for weeks against him in the largest protests of the country ’ s post-Soviet history .
A government-backed poll from April found only a third of Belarusians trusted him — one of the lowest ratings of his rule .
While good polling is hard to come by in Belarus , that one made sense : The dictator both minimized and mishandled his nation ’ s coronavirus outbreak , oversaw a collapsing economy , and struggled to keep an encroaching Russia at bay .
With such dismal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would ’ ve lost a free and fair vote .
Which is why Lukashenko did everything in his power to make sure Sunday ’ s election was anything but free and fair .
And sure enough , Lukashenko won Sunday ’ s election in a landslide , receiving over 80 percent of the vote .
“ I don ’ t know who voted for him , how could he get 80 percent ?
” a Belarusian named Dmitri , who wouldn ’ t divulge his last name for security reasons , told the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ victory ” came down to a tried-and-true autocratic method : brutality .
“ That [ was ] the strategy for Lukashenko for this election , ” said Ryhor Astapenia , a Belarus expert at the Chatham House think tank in Britain .
“ No sweeteners , only repression.
” The 65-year-old former collective farm director jailed two of the three top opposition candidates and barred the third from running ; he also detained journalists and even alleged Russian mercenaries the regime claimed were trying to disrupt the election prior to the vote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quell people ’ s aspirations for democracy .
It lit them on fire thanks in part to the efforts of one determined stay-at-home mom — who just had to flee the country for the safety of her children .
One of Lukashenko ’ s main opponents in this year ’ s election was Sergei Tikhanovsky , a famous YouTuber who made his name highlighting Belarus ’ s many problems .
Two days after he announced his candidacy for president , he was arrested by the regime on charges of violating public order and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been the end of the story .
But it wasn ’ t : That ’ s because his wife , a 37-year-old former English translator turned homemaker named Svetlana Tikhanovskaya , stepped in to run for president instead .
She proved wildly successful , coalescing a nationwide movement to defeat the longtime leader and then hold actually fair elections .
That she did so despite having no political experience , acknowledging she didn ’ t want to be president , and reminding crowds she ’ d prefer to be making cutlets for her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surprising .
That energy persisted even after the election results were announced Sunday .
The regime-run election commission said the challenger only received about 10 percent of the vote , far less than the 80 percent she garnered in some unbiased exit polls .
Thousands poured into the streets of Minsk , Belarus ’ s capital , on Sunday to protest the election ’ s results .
Demonstrators have been met with tear gas , stun grenades , and rubber bullets shot by regime forces , even though observers on the scene have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by anti-Lukashenko protesters .
Reports indicate at least one protester has died .
Viasna , a Belarusian human rights group , says they know of about 140 people among thousands detained by authorities while many more sustained injuries .
The Trump administration on Monday proclaimed support for the democratic movement .
Tikhanovskaya made clear she rejected the regime-announced results .
“ I will believe my own eyes — the majority was for us , ” she said during a Monday press conference in Minsk .
“ The authorities should think about how to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” she continued .
“ I consider myself the winner of this election.
” But the next day , state-run media showed a video of Tikhanovskaya reading a statement calling for an end to protests .
Internet sleuths believe the couch from which she read the statement was the same one in Belarus ’ s election commission office .
( Her team had said the opposition leader couldn ’ t be reached on Monday after she visited that office . )
If true , it could signal Tikhanovskaya was forced to call for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regime .
She has since fled to Lithuania , according to that country ’ s foreign minister , and it ’ s unclear how long she ’ ll be there or what , exactly , she ’ ll do .
In the meantime , the Tikhanovskaya-led opposition aims for the pressure to stay on the dictator long term , hoping to sustain a historic call for change .
Some believe it could work .
“ This is the beginning of the end of his era , ” Valiantsin Stefanovic , Viasna ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This is a new reality for him , because nobody loves him anymore .
People want to be free.
” Others don ’ t believe the remarkable scenes of the past few weeks mean Belarus has moved much closer to a post-Lukashenko future .
“ There ’ s definitely something different about this now , ” said Matthew Rojansky , an expert on Eastern Europe at the Woodrow Wilson Center think tank in Washington , “ but that doesn ’ t mean this is the breakthrough moment.
” Which means , depressingly enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ greatest threat yet to his rule — though he won ’ t come out of it completely unscathed .
How Lukashenko saw his control slip When Lukashenko became Belarus ’ s president in 1994 — after receiving 80 percent of the vote in Belarus ’ s last fair election — he entered office with a staunch anti-corruption message .
His right-wing populism resonated with citizens seeking to improve their lives after the fall of the Soviet Union and who blamed the nation ’ s woes on its sclerotic and incompetent run by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Belarus .
He would tax the rich , steer the economy in the right direction , and root out the corruption which he claimed , “ like an all-devouring octopus has ensnared all government organs with its tentacles.
” But , over the years , Lukashenko became the exact enemy he set out to fight .
“ He moved from good governance to embracing and not denying iron-fistedness , ” said Rojansky .
Namely , he resisted needed economic reforms , stayed cozy with Russia , and cracked down on dissenters .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Belarus continued to harass and pressure civil society activists and independent media , ” including denying journalists entry to official events and arresting peaceful protesters .
It ’ s also widely believed that Lukashenko ordered the kidnappings and killings of at least four political opponents .
For those and other reasons , opposition figures boycotted or rarely entered recent elections to dethrone the autocrat .
Despite all that , Lukashenko maintained a semblance of popularity because the economy didn ’ t nosedive on his watch .
That minimal success had less to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ though , and more to do with loans coming in from Russia to keep the country afloat and secure its fealty to Moscow .
As of last summer , Belarus owed Russia about $ 7.5 billion , causing tensions between the two countries .
In an effort to signal his independence and that he hadn ’ t mismanaged the economy , Lukashenko said his country would give Russia $ 1 billion per year until the debt was repaid .
Further , Belarus would no longer request more funds .
“ Stop yelling that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he said in a speech last year , clearly directing his comments at the Kremlin .
Such bravado may also have been a cover .
Russia had mostly stopped injecting cash into Belarus , and Minsk struggled to get financial support from other capitals ( though Beijing did provide a $ 500 million loan last year ) .
As a result , Belarus ’ s GDP has basically been flat since 2012 , forcing thousands to seek work in nearby countries like Poland , work multiple jobs , or gain employment in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That has long spelled trouble for Lukashenko .
“ An authoritarian system can maintain its popularity as long as it can provide the goods for the population , ” said Eleanor Bindman , an expert on post-Soviet states and authoritarian regimes at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK .
“ Once that social and economic side of the bargain goes away , people start thinking : ‘ What are we getting out of this ?
’ ” That thought clearly crept up more and more as Lukashenko failed to handle his nation ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about an outbreak a mass “ psychosis ” and claimed all it took to kill the virus was a little vodka or a quick trip to the sauna .
“ No one in the country will die from coronavirus , ” he said in April , acknowledging two months later that he contracted the disease but had no symptoms .
His lack of alarm kept the regime from imposing any social restrictions or offering any help to those on the front lines of the national response .
“ The state completely withdrew without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Maryia Rohava , a Belarus expert at the University of Oslo in Norway , told me .
They gave no guidelines and barely provided information at all , she continued , and led Belarusians to take matters into their own hands .
The country has an educated and highly tech-savvy population , and they used that know-how to crowdfund support for medical professionals .
One campaign , # bycovid19 , provided around $ 130,000 and 27,000 respirators in April alone .
“ Our goal is to make sure this system doesn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group ’ s cofounder , told the Guardian at the time .
Such a collapse was possible , as cases increased while just one mask sold on the country ’ s black market for nearly $ 16 .
Those kinds of campaigns brought hundreds of thousands of Belarusians together online — mostly on Telegram — to both form a movement and realize together that the country was in dire straits with Lukashenko at the helm .
Any support the leader had quickly eroded .
“ We saw many people flip because of Covid-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ current problems , ” Franak Viacorka , an independent journalist in Belarus , told me .
The longstanding opposition to Lukashenko finally had its greatest opening — the dictator was weak .
But the person who would soon lead the opposition was still taking care of her two kids at home , unaware she was about to become the most effective politician to challenge Lukashenko in decades .
How Tikhanovskaya rose to her unlikely moment Initially three men looked to take the mantle of Lukashenko ’ s top challenger .
But one by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to brush them aside before the election — a move experts said was rare because he usually waits to put down the opposition after the vote .
Victor Babariko , widely seen as the most likely opposition candidate , was barred by the regime from running .
Valery Tsepkalo , the country ’ s former ambassador to the US , also couldn ’ t register for the election and subsequently fled to Russia fearing for his life .
The third man was Sergei Tikhanovsky , the popular YouTuber and fierce Lukashenko critic , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get in the race .
In response , Tikhanovsky in May pushed for his wife Svetlana to run in his stead , an idea experts told me gained support among thousands connected on Telegram .
She collected the requisite 100,000 signatures which allowed her to register with regime-controlled election authorities .
Somewhat surprisingly , they approved her registration .
Experts told me Lukashenko usually allows some opposition candidates to run against him .
Doing so lets the regime keep the appearance of a fair election and also allows those with grievances to express @ @ @ @ @ @ @ complaints die down soon after the vote .
That seems to have happened in this case , but the president also didn ’ t seem too threatened by Tikhanovskaya ’ s candidacy .
One reason was Tikhanovskaya had no political experience at all .
In fact , she had never spoken at a political rally before .
The other was Lukashenko holds sexist , outdated views of women .
“ Society is not mature enough to vote for a woman , ” Lukashenko said in July , adding that the weight of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , poor thing.
” But Tikhanovskaya didn ’ t collapse under pressure .
Instead , she united the opposition and brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in support .
Tsepkalo ’ s wife and Babariko ’ s campaign manager , also a woman , backed her campaign during a July announcement that went viral after each made a sign with their hands : a heart , a fist in a fist-pump position , and a “ V ” for victory .
The moment provided immense momentum to her candidacy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a youth movement against the old dictator .
“ This was a surprising and brilliant move by the opposition , ” Tatyana Margolin , the regional director for Open Society ’ s Eurasia program , told me .
“ They undoubtedly saw that together they [ would ] be stronger , so they joined forces rather quickly.
” But Tikhanovskaya ’ s story was compelling in its own right : To take on the role of political leader , she sent her kids away to an undisclosed location to keep them out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also made clear that in the unlikely event she actually won , she would quickly hold free elections to let someone who actually wanted to be president to take over .
“ I don ’ t need power , but my husband is behind bars , ” Tikhanovskaya told a large Minsk crowd in July .
“ I ’ m tired of putting up with it .
I ’ m tired of being silent .
I ’ m tired of being afraid.
” She outlined some reforms , namely her husband ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poor by taking cash away from the corrupt elite .
But it ’ s what she and her female backers represented — a country without an entrenched , corrupt , dangerous regime in charge — that garnered her immense support .
Ironically , it was similar to the message the dictator offered back in 1994 .
“ She ’ s trying to out-Lukashenko Lukashenko , ” the Wilson Center ’ s Rojansky told me .
That play worked , as she drew hundreds of thousands across the country — not just in cities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ historically been Lukashenko strongholds — into the opposition .
“ She ’ s mostly a symbol of the grievances that people are trying to express , ” said the University of Oslo ’ s Rohava .
Those grievances are now being expressed by many on Belarus ’ s streets .
The likelihood that they ’ ll change anything in the short term , though , is unlikely .
Lukashenko is likely to hold on to power — for now Belarus has long seen anti-Lukashenko protests like the ones on Minsk ’ s streets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for example , the regime imposed a tax on part-time or unemployed workers , leading thousands to demonstrate against the government .
In the end , Lukashenko cracked down on that movement like he had on others in previous years .
Some experts I spoke to said that given enough repression and time , it ’ s likely the current movement will fizzle out despite its unprecedented size and scope .
“ The regime is durable , ” said Konstantin Ash , an expert on protests in Belarus at the University of Central @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a sky-is-falling situation .
He ’ s still very much in charge.
” The only way to tell his grip on power is slipping , Ash added , was if members of the country ’ s security forces — which receive an inordinate amount of funding and authority from the autocrat — start to defect .
“ That ’ s the crucial element.
” So far that hasn ’ t happened .
Instead , security forces have arrested 3,000 people in Minsk and 2,000 others around the country .
Lukashenko has vowed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called “ sheep ” under foreign control on Monday .
“ People need to settle down , calm down.
” But others are convinced Lukashenko ’ s increased repression , deadly failings , and the size of the democratic movement — now well-connected online — means the dictator ’ s days are numbered .
“ This is the best opportunity for this to be the beginning of the end for Lukashenko , ” Manchester Metropolitan University ’ s Bindman told me .
“ I ’ d be very surprised if he made it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ troubles.
” Stefanovic , the human rights leader in Belarus , said what ’ s also changed is the nation ’ s attitudes toward female leadership .
That could sustain the movement far longer than Lukashenko might think .
“ Our society is ready to have a woman as the leader of the country , ” he told me .
“ What matters is what a leader says , not if they ’ re a woman or man.
” The wild card in all of this , though , is Russia .
Moscow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Belarus , mainly in an effort to ensure it doesn ’ t lean westward and away from the Kremlin ’ s grip .
That has some worried Russian President Vladimir Putin may launch a Ukraine-like invasion into the Eastern European nation .
Stephen Sestanovich , a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank , though , isn ’ t so concerned .
“ The Russians can ’ t like their choices much , ” he said .
“ Lukashenko has been an ornery partner for years , extremely hard to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ d be brought low by a popular outpouring of opposition to dictatorship and bad management ?
From Putin ’ s point of view , that ’ s pretty awful too.
” What ’ s more , he added , it ’ s not like Belarus ’ s people are clamoring for a more Soviet-like future .
Belarus “ may look like a poor , unreformed Soviet backwater , but it ’ s been a nominally independent country now for close to 30 years , ” Sestanovich said .
“ If there ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Russian fold , Putin hasn ’ t found it.
” Anti-Lukashenko activists , then , may not have to contend with the complication of a Russian invasion .
What they have to deal with — a weakened dictator who still wields immense power — will be tough enough .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
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One of Europe’s last remaining dictators held onto power after facing his greatest political challenge in decades — and rigged an election to do so.
Alexander Lukashenko has served as Belarus’s president since 1994, when he won the presidency in the country’s last national democratic election since gaining independence from the Soviet Union. That’s because Lukashenko has remained in power ever since thanks to a combination of brutal repression and rigged elections. He’s now Europe’s longest-serving leader.
But after 26 years, many Belarusians have had enough of Lukashenko. Hundreds of thousands of people have rallied for weeks against him in the largest protests of the country’s post-Soviet history.
A government-backed poll from April found only a third of Belarusians trusted him — one of the lowest ratings of his rule. While good polling is hard to come by in Belarus, that one made sense: The dictator both minimized and mishandled his nation’s coronavirus outbreak, oversaw a collapsing economy, and struggled to keep an encroaching Russia at bay.
With such dismal approval ratings, most experts believe Lukashenko would’ve lost a free and fair vote. Which is why Lukashenko did everything in his power to make sure Sunday’s election was anything but free and fair.
And sure enough, Lukashenko won Sunday’s election in a landslide, receiving over 80 percent of the vote. “I don’t know who voted for him, how could he get 80 percent?” a Belarusian named Dmitri, who wouldn’t divulge his last name for security reasons, told the New York Times on Sunday.
His “victory” came down to a tried-and-true autocratic method: brutality. “That [was] the strategy for Lukashenko for this election,” said Ryhor Astapenia, a Belarus expert at the Chatham House think tank in Britain. “No sweeteners, only repression.”
The 65-year-old former collective farm director jailed two of the three top opposition candidates and barred the third from running; he also detained journalists and even alleged Russian mercenaries the regime claimed were trying to disrupt the election prior to the vote.
But his tactics didn’t quell people’s aspirations for democracy. It lit them on fire thanks in part to the efforts of one determined stay-at-home mom — who just had to flee the country for the safety of her children.
The homemaker versus the dictator
One of Lukashenko’s main opponents in this year’s election was Sergei Tikhanovsky, a famous YouTuber who made his name highlighting Belarus’s many problems. Two days after he announced his candidacy for president, he was arrested by the regime on charges of violating public order and election laws.
That might’ve been the end of the story. But it wasn’t: That’s because his wife, a 37-year-old former English translator turned homemaker named Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, stepped in to run for president instead.
She proved wildly successful, coalescing a nationwide movement to defeat the longtime leader and then hold actually fair elections. That she did so despite having no political experience, acknowledging she didn’t want to be president, and reminding crowds she’d prefer to be making cutlets for her children made her rise all the more surprising.
That energy persisted even after the election results were announced Sunday. The regime-run election commission said the challenger only received about 10 percent of the vote, far less than the 80 percent she garnered in some unbiased exit polls. Thousands poured into the streets of Minsk, Belarus’s capital, on Sunday to protest the election’s results.
Demonstrators have been met with tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets shot by regime forces, even though observers on the scene have yet to report one instance of violence by anti-Lukashenko protesters. Reports indicate at least one protester has died.
Viasna, a Belarusian human rights group, says they know of about 140 people among thousands detained by authorities while many more sustained injuries. The Trump administration on Monday proclaimed support for the democratic movement.
Tikhanovskaya made clear she rejected the regime-announced results. “I will believe my own eyes — the majority was for us,” she said during a Monday press conference in Minsk. “The authorities should think about how to peacefully hand over power to us,” she continued. “I consider myself the winner of this election.”
But the next day, state-run media showed a video of Tikhanovskaya reading a statement calling for an end to protests. Internet sleuths believe the couch from which she read the statement was the same one in Belarus’s election commission office. (Her team had said the opposition leader couldn’t be reached on Monday after she visited that office.) If true, it could signal Tikhanovskaya was forced to call for an end to anti-Lukashenko demonstrations by the regime.
She has since fled to Lithuania, according to that country’s foreign minister, and it’s unclear how long she’ll be there or what, exactly, she’ll do.
> Belarusians! I urge you to be prudent and respect the law. I don’t want blood and violence. I ask you not to confront the police, not to go out to the square, so as not to endanger your life. Take care of yourself and your loved ones. " — Franak Viačorka (@franakviacorka) August 11, 2020
Internet users identified the room by the sofa. It's the office of Central Electoral Commission, where God knows what Tsikhanouskaya has seen or heard. Pro-government media were first published and distributed this video. They believe people are stupid. pic.twitter.com/Wt4FawXEQW — Franak Viačorka (@franakviacorka) August 11, 2020
In the meantime, the Tikhanovskaya-led opposition aims for the pressure to stay on the dictator long term, hoping to sustain a historic call for change. Some believe it could work. “This is the beginning of the end of his era,” Valiantsin Stefanovic, Viasna’s deputy chairman, told me. “This is a new reality for him, because nobody loves him anymore. People want to be free.”
Others don’t believe the remarkable scenes of the past few weeks mean Belarus has moved much closer to a post-Lukashenko future. “There’s definitely something different about this now,” said Matthew Rojansky, an expert on Eastern Europe at the Woodrow Wilson Center think tank in Washington, “but that doesn’t mean this is the breakthrough moment.”
Which means, depressingly enough, Lukashenko most likely will survive the greatest threat yet to his rule — though he won’t come out of it completely unscathed.
How Lukashenko saw his control slip
When Lukashenko became Belarus’s president in 1994 — after receiving 80 percent of the vote in Belarus’s last fair election — he entered office with a staunch anti-corruption message. His right-wing populism resonated with citizens seeking to improve their lives after the fall of the Soviet Union and who blamed the nation’s woes on its sclerotic and incompetent run by the communist-era establishment.
Lukashenko promised to save Belarus. He would tax the rich, steer the economy in the right direction, and root out the corruption which he claimed, “like an all-devouring octopus has ensnared all government organs with its tentacles.”
But, over the years, Lukashenko became the exact enemy he set out to fight. “He moved from good governance to embracing and not denying iron-fistedness,” said Rojansky. Namely, he resisted needed economic reforms, stayed cozy with Russia, and cracked down on dissenters.
As Human Rights Watch noted in 2019, “Belarus continued to harass and pressure civil society activists and independent media,” including denying journalists entry to official events and arresting peaceful protesters. It’s also widely believed that Lukashenko ordered the kidnappings and killings of at least four political opponents. For those and other reasons, opposition figures boycotted or rarely entered recent elections to dethrone the autocrat.
Despite all that, Lukashenko maintained a semblance of popularity because the economy didn’t nosedive on his watch. That minimal success had less to do with Lukashenko’s management, though, and more to do with loans coming in from Russia to keep the country afloat and secure its fealty to Moscow.
As of last summer, Belarus owed Russia about $7.5 billion, causing tensions between the two countries. In an effort to signal his independence and that he hadn’t mismanaged the economy, Lukashenko said his country would give Russia $1 billion per year until the debt was repaid. Further, Belarus would no longer request more funds. “Stop yelling that you are providing for us,” he said in a speech last year, clearly directing his comments at the Kremlin.
Such bravado may also have been a cover. Russia had mostly stopped injecting cash into Belarus, and Minsk struggled to get financial support from other capitals (though Beijing did provide a $500 million loan last year).
As a result, Belarus’s GDP has basically been flat since 2012, forcing thousands to seek work in nearby countries like Poland, work multiple jobs, or gain employment in the country’s byzantine public sector.
That has long spelled trouble for Lukashenko. “An authoritarian system can maintain its popularity as long as it can provide the goods for the population,” said Eleanor Bindman, an expert on post-Soviet states and authoritarian regimes at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. “Once that social and economic side of the bargain goes away, people start thinking: ‘What are we getting out of this?’”
That thought clearly crept up more and more as Lukashenko failed to handle his nation’s coronavirus crisis. He called concerns about an outbreak a mass “psychosis” and claimed all it took to kill the virus was a little vodka or a quick trip to the sauna. “No one in the country will die from coronavirus,” he said in April, acknowledging two months later that he contracted the disease but had no symptoms.
His lack of alarm kept the regime from imposing any social restrictions or offering any help to those on the front lines of the national response. “The state completely withdrew without providing support for medical workers,” Maryia Rohava, a Belarus expert at the University of Oslo in Norway, told me. They gave no guidelines and barely provided information at all, she continued, and led Belarusians to take matters into their own hands.
The country has an educated and highly tech-savvy population, and they used that know-how to crowdfund support for medical professionals. One campaign, #bycovid19, provided around $130,000 and 27,000 respirators in April alone. “Our goal is to make sure this system doesn’t collapse,” Andrej Stryzhak, the group’s cofounder, told the Guardian at the time. Such a collapse was possible, as cases increased while just one mask sold on the country’s black market for nearly $16.
Those kinds of campaigns brought hundreds of thousands of Belarusians together online — mostly on Telegram — to both form a movement and realize together that the country was in dire straits with Lukashenko at the helm. Any support the leader had quickly eroded. “We saw many people flip because of Covid-19, poverty, and his attitude toward current problems,” Franak Viacorka, an independent journalist in Belarus, told me.
The longstanding opposition to Lukashenko finally had its greatest opening — the dictator was weak. But the person who would soon lead the opposition was still taking care of her two kids at home, unaware she was about to become the most effective politician to challenge Lukashenko in decades.
How Tikhanovskaya rose to her unlikely moment
Initially three men looked to take the mantle of Lukashenko’s top challenger. But one by one, the dictator found a way to brush them aside before the election — a move experts said was rare because he usually waits to put down the opposition after the vote.
Victor Babariko, widely seen as the most likely opposition candidate, was barred by the regime from running. Valery Tsepkalo, the country’s former ambassador to the US, also couldn’t register for the election and subsequently fled to Russia fearing for his life.
The third man was Sergei Tikhanovsky, the popular YouTuber and fierce Lukashenko critic, who was repeatedly arrested for trying to get in the race. In response, Tikhanovsky in May pushed for his wife Svetlana to run in his stead, an idea experts told me gained support among thousands connected on Telegram. She collected the requisite 100,000 signatures which allowed her to register with regime-controlled election authorities.
Somewhat surprisingly, they approved her registration.
Experts told me Lukashenko usually allows some opposition candidates to run against him. Doing so lets the regime keep the appearance of a fair election and also allows those with grievances to express them once in a while, hoping complaints die down soon after the vote. That seems to have happened in this case, but the president also didn’t seem too threatened by Tikhanovskaya’s candidacy.
One reason was Tikhanovskaya had no political experience at all. In fact, she had never spoken at a political rally before. The other was Lukashenko holds sexist, outdated views of women. “Society is not mature enough to vote for a woman,” Lukashenko said in July, adding that the weight of the presidency would lead her to “collapse, poor thing.”
But Tikhanovskaya didn’t collapse under pressure. Instead, she united the opposition and brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in support.
Tsepkalo’s wife and Babariko’s campaign manager, also a woman, backed her campaign during a July announcement that went viral after each made a sign with their hands: a heart, a fist in a fist-pump position, and a “V” for victory. The moment provided immense momentum to her candidacy, as it became clear three women symbolized a youth movement against the old dictator.
“This was a surprising and brilliant move by the opposition,” Tatyana Margolin, the regional director for Open Society’s Eurasia program, told me. “They undoubtedly saw that together they [would] be stronger, so they joined forces rather quickly.”
But Tikhanovskaya’s story was compelling in its own right: To take on the role of political leader, she sent her kids away to an undisclosed location to keep them out of the regime’s clutches. She also made clear that in the unlikely event she actually won, she would quickly hold free elections to let someone who actually wanted to be president to take over.
“I don’t need power, but my husband is behind bars,” Tikhanovskaya told a large Minsk crowd in July. “I’m tired of putting up with it. I’m tired of being silent. I’m tired of being afraid.”
She outlined some reforms, namely her husband’s platform of giving more money to the poor by taking cash away from the corrupt elite. But it’s what she and her female backers represented — a country without an entrenched, corrupt, dangerous regime in charge — that garnered her immense support.
Ironically, it was similar to the message the dictator offered back in 1994. “She’s trying to out-Lukashenko Lukashenko,” the Wilson Center’s Rojansky told me.
That play worked, as she drew hundreds of thousands across the country — not just in cities, but even small towns that have historically been Lukashenko strongholds — into the opposition. “She’s mostly a symbol of the grievances that people are trying to express,” said the University of Oslo’s Rohava.
Those grievances are now being expressed by many on Belarus’s streets. The likelihood that they’ll change anything in the short term, though, is unlikely.
Lukashenko is likely to hold on to power — for now
Belarus has long seen anti-Lukashenko protests like the ones on Minsk’s streets in recent weeks. In 2017, for example, the regime imposed a tax on part-time or unemployed workers, leading thousands to demonstrate against the government. In the end, Lukashenko cracked down on that movement like he had on others in previous years.
Some experts I spoke to said that given enough repression and time, it’s likely the current movement will fizzle out despite its unprecedented size and scope. “The regime is durable,” said Konstantin Ash, an expert on protests in Belarus at the University of Central Florida. “Lukashenko isn’t in a sky-is-falling situation. He’s still very much in charge.”
The only way to tell his grip on power is slipping, Ash added, was if members of the country’s security forces — which receive an inordinate amount of funding and authority from the autocrat — start to defect. “That’s the crucial element.”
So far that hasn’t happened. Instead, security forces have arrested 3,000 people in Minsk and 2,000 others around the country. Lukashenko has vowed to keep the pressure on protesters he called “sheep” under foreign control on Monday. “People need to settle down, calm down.”
But others are convinced Lukashenko’s increased repression, deadly failings, and the size of the democratic movement — now well-connected online — means the dictator’s days are numbered. “This is the best opportunity for this to be the beginning of the end for Lukashenko,” Manchester Metropolitan University’s Bindman told me. “I’d be very surprised if he made it through another five-year term without any other troubles.”
Stefanovic, the human rights leader in Belarus, said what’s also changed is the nation’s attitudes toward female leadership. That could sustain the movement far longer than Lukashenko might think. “Our society is ready to have a woman as the leader of the country,” he told me. “What matters is what a leader says, not if they’re a woman or man.”
The wild card in all of this, though, is Russia. Moscow wants deeper economic and political integration with Belarus, mainly in an effort to ensure it doesn’t lean westward and away from the Kremlin’s grip. That has some worried Russian President Vladimir Putin may launch a Ukraine-like invasion into the Eastern European nation.
Stephen Sestanovich, a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, though, isn’t so concerned. “The Russians can’t like their choices much,” he said. “Lukashenko has been an ornery partner for years, extremely hard to subdue. But the idea that he’d be brought low by a popular outpouring of opposition to dictatorship and bad management? From Putin’s point of view, that’s pretty awful too.”
What’s more, he added, it’s not like Belarus’s people are clamoring for a more Soviet-like future. Belarus “may look like a poor, unreformed Soviet backwater, but it’s been a nominally independent country now for close to 30 years,” Sestanovich said. “If there’s a constituency for returning to the Russian fold, Putin hasn’t found it.”
Anti-Lukashenko activists, then, may not have to contend with the complication of a Russian invasion. What they have to deal with — a weakened dictator who still wields immense power — will be tough enough.
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