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…
Read more [paywall]
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.
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