Machen Sie Amerika wieder zu Ungarn

Zack Beauchamp: “At last week’s NATO summit, one allied leader distinguished himself from the pack of those anxious about the possibility that Joe Biden might lose the November presidential election to Donald Trump: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the leader of the European Union’s only authoritarian member state, accused his European peers of being ‘the people on the Titanic playing violins as the ship went down.’ Orbán left the conference early on Thursday to meet with Trump in Florida—his second visit to Mar-a-Lago this year, after he went there in March to endorse Trump’s presidential bid.

“This is no unrequited love affair. In the past several years, Orbán has become perhaps the most popular foreign leader in the Republican Party. Trump released a video in April calling Orbán a ‘great man,’ and vowing to work closely with him ‘once again when I take the oath of office.’ Senator J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has cited Orbán as a policy inspiration, saying that ‘he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.’

“Trump’s admiration for autocrats is no secret, but Orbán represents something particularly insidious. Hungary has become an authoritarian beachhead in the heart of Europe by custom-building its quasi-dictatorship to survive and even thrive in a place where most people believe in democracy. Orbán has created a system that can pull the wool over his citizens’ eyes, making them feel as though they have power over the state even as the state exerts power over them …”

“Orbán’s autocratic legalism is designed to create the appearance of democracy, supplying plausible deniability to the project of democratic dismantlement. This is the playbook to watch for when Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and many other prominent Republicans cite Hungary as a ‘model.’”

Read more here: [https://theatln.tc/1x0mzi8E](https://theatln.tc/1x0mzi8E)