America’s MAGA Future Could Mirror Hungary’s Decline Under Orbán, Atlantic Warns

On 31 March 2025, The Atlantic pub­lished an opin­ion piece by Anne Apple­baum exam­in­ing Hun­gary’s eco­nom­ic decline under Vik­tor Orbán and warn­ing that Amer­i­ca could face a sim­i­lar future. The arti­cle begins:

Flashy hotels and upmar­ket restau­rants now dom­i­nate the cen­ter of Budapest, a city once bet­ter known for its shab­by facades. New mon­u­ments have sprung up in the cen­ter of town too. One of them, a pas­tiche of the Viet­nam War memo­r­i­al in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., mourns Hun­gary’s lost 19th-cen­tu­ry empire. Instead of war dead, the names of for­mer­ly “Hun­gar­i­an” places—cities and vil­lages that are now in Roma­nia, Slo­va­kia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long gran­ite walls, solemn­ly memo­ri­al­ized with an eter­nal flame. But the nation­al­ist kitsch and tourist traps hide a dif­fer­ent real­i­ty. Once wide­ly per­ceived to be the wealth­i­est coun­try in Cen­tral Europe (“the hap­pi­est bar­rack in the social­ist camp,” as it was known dur­ing the Cold War), and lat­er the Cen­tral Euro­pean coun­try that for­eign investors liked most, Hun­gary is now one of the poor­est coun­tries, and pos­si­bly the poor­est, in the Euro­pean Union…

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Key Points:

• Despite MAGA con­ser­v­a­tives cel­e­brat­ing Hun­gary as “the mod­el” for gov­er­nance, the coun­try has fall­en to among the poor­est in the EU with declin­ing indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion and grow­ing unemployment.
• Orbán’s “auto­crat­ic takeover” involved replac­ing civ­il ser­vants with loy­al­ists, destroy­ing free press, politi­ciz­ing courts, and chang­ing the con­sti­tu­tion to gain elec­toral advantages.
• The Hun­gar­i­an econ­o­my suf­fers from wide­spread cor­rup­tion where approx­i­mate­ly 20% of com­pa­nies oper­ate based on loy­al­ty rather than mar­ket principles.
• Apple­baum warns that Amer­i­ca is “spin­ning quick­ly” toward Hun­gar­i­an-style gov­er­nance as civ­il ser­vice pro­tec­tions erode and par­ti­san con­trol of insti­tu­tions increases.

Orbán and Hun­gary have fig­ured promi­nent­ly in a devel­op­ing alliance between US con­ser­v­a­tives and Euro­pean nation­al­ists, a poten­tial means for Rus­sia to exert covert influ­ence in Europe and the US using Hun­gary as a plat­form. GIOR has pub­lished a report on this alliance titled “The Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Alliance: An Oppor­tu­ni­ty for Russ­ian Influ­ence?” The GIOR report details the role that Vik­tor Orbán and the Hun­gar­i­an gov­ern­ment have been play­ing in the Glob­al Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance (GNCA).

The full report can be down­loaded here.

Dis­claimer: The GIOR uti­lizes AI to gen­er­ate sum­maries of news items, includ­ing the intro­duc­tion and the key points that fol­low. Any text fol­low­ing the key points is con­text added by GIOR edi­tors. Please ver­i­fy all infor­ma­tion before using. Images are also AI-gen­er­at­ed and are for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es only—they are meant to rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als con­cerned but should not be under­stood as “real-world” photography.