Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. So delighted to welcome back to the show. A staff writer at The Atlantic. Her books include Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators who want to run the world increasingly relevant by the minute. Now it's out in paperback. It's Ann Applebaum. How are you? I'm fine. How are you? You know, I'm going on vacation. I'm going to Coachella this weekend. I'm going on vacation. So I'm pretty good. and if I have a little bit of senioritis on today's podcast, that's why. So you might have to carry me, but I'm going to do my best. I'll do my best too. Yeah.

You were recently in Hungary covering the campaign. You wrote about that for the Atlantic.

Before we get into your story, like give us the basics for people who have not been like following closely.

Like when is the election?

Talk to us about Peter Maggayar.

I kind of tried to describe his politics earlier this week, but I think it would be better for people just to give a full briefing from you.

So the election is soon.

It's this Sunday.

It's on the 12th of April.

I suppose the most important thing to know is that this is the first election in 16 years, where it feels like there's a really serious challenger to Victor Orban, and the

challenger, at least in the opinion polls that we've seen, is way ahead. Victor Orban is, in the grand

scheme of things, not important at all. He's the leader of a

very small country, less than 10 million people, but he has taken on an outsized importance to the

American and European far right because he has deliberately set himself up as a model. So he's somebody

who, just for those who want a little bit,

even deeper history, who was an anti-communist back in the days when I was also an anti-communist.

He spoke at an event in 1989, attracted a lot of attention, founded a youth party, was considered

a leading liberal in central and eastern Europe, was friendly with all the other leading liberals, had a scholarship to Oxford paid for by George Soros.

And over the years, he discarded that persona, and he decided that his political career would be better served by him moving to the right, and he moved first

to the center right and then to the far right. I actually wrote about him in a previous book

called Twilight of Democracy, where I talked about this process of radicalization in Europe and elsewhere.

The main thing to know about him is that when he took power 16 years ago, having he was in

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