Why Do Conservatives Love Hungary’s Viktor Orbán?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2022

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

When the New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz first heard that the Conservative Political Action Conference, the flagship event of the American conservative movement, was holding a meeting in Hungary, he thought it might be a joke. “A lot of people have worried for a few years now that the Republican Party is becoming more ambivalent about certain bedrock norms of American democracy,” Marantz told David Remnick. “To openly state, ‘We’re going to this semi-authoritarian country’ . . . I thought it was maybe a troll.” But C.P.A.C. Hungary was very real, and the event demonstrated an increasingly close relationship between American conservatives and authoritarians abroad. Viktor Orbán wins elections and claims a democratic mandate, but his legislative maneuvers and rewrites to the constitution have rendered political opposition increasingly powerless. Marantz finds the admiration for him by many in America unsettling. “I couldn’t really imagine a Putin-style takeover” of power in America, Marantz says; but “this kind of technical, legalistic Orbán model” seems all too plausible.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.1	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:12.1	The January 6th Committee has laid bare in withering detail Donald Trump's attempt to overturn
0:18.5	a free and fair election.
0:20.9	But Trump had been showing his contempt for the democratic process all along.
0:25.3	He made headlines again and again, praising strong men like Rodrigo de Terté in the Philippines.
0:31.9	And Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin, a genius, he recently called Putin, often
0:36.7	embarrassed Republicans.
0:38.8	But a much wider group of conservatives has come to admire another autocrat from the
0:44.1	former Soviet block, a leader who was done everything in his power to shut down free
0:49.1	media and keep immigrants out of his country.
0:52.2	Thank you very much, it's a great honor to have with us the Prime Minister of Hungary.
0:58.1	And Viktor Orbán has done a tremendous job in so many different ways, highly respected,
1:05.0	respected all over Europe.
1:08.6	Probably like me a little bit controversial, but that's okay.
1:11.8	That's okay.
1:12.8	You've done a good job and you've kept your country safe.
1:16.8	Many have called Viktor Orbán a despot.
1:19.2	An authoritarian who has changed Hungary's constitution several times now in order to get
1:24.6	his way.
1:26.0	But there was Orbán with Donald Trump in the White House in 2019.
1:31.4	So many changes are going on and we have some similar approaches.
	...

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