Friday, May 29, 2026

Quote from "This Is How to Defeat an Autocrat"

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Hungary’s economy is a mess, but post-election polling by Median, an organization that had predicted election results with uncanny accuracy, shows that voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far. Asked why they thought Orban had lost, 49 percent cited corruption, and only 18 percent thought it was the “worsening economic situation, rising cost of living.” The next three reasons cited were “lies” (15 percent); “fearmongering, war rhetoric” (11 percent); and “people got fed up” (10 percent). In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage — “value choices,” as one person close to the incoming government described it to me.


--M. Gessen,  This Is How to Defeat an Autocrat, https://www.nytimes.com/by/m-gessen


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