Fidesz

So like in In Brussels, for example, everyone's doing favors for each other because that's called politics and nobody ever exposes those favors because it would destroy trust in the system.

So the trick is you come into it and you hack emails and you send spies into places and stuff and you collect all the information on that guy's I saw in Hungarian parliament today, they were talking about one of the Fidesz guys, his family runs the tobacco shops, right? Because they're nationally mandated tobacco shops in Hungary.

They still do.

And, you know, like that happens all the time in politics, but highlighting it constantly and convincing the public that like there's some sort of a mafia in control of your state.

When Orban took power in 2010, Hungary was considered free.

But by 2017, 90% of the media was owned by people allied to Orban's political party, Fidesz.

Money from the state went to pro-government media, while opposition media faced extreme regulatory pressures.

And by 2019, 80% of public affairs programming was financed by people connected to Orban's party.

Same is the case in Turkey, where Erdogan's friends own 90% of the nation's media.

And they use it blatantly to favour... and to disadvantage his opponents.

But, you know, Glenn, I think after eight years of frustration with Democrats and their their liberal allies in the media during the Obama years.

where they were supporting all this war on terror stuff.

And I can tell you from my own research, from my own surveys, I've done surveys in Poland and Hungary and Serbia, I would say paradigmatic cases of backsliding.

Even the, the supporters of Fidesz, of Po- of Polish PiS and Serbian SNS are very much in favor of, of democracy.

So we have between 80 and 90% of them saying that democracy is the best form of the government.

And then the question was then maybe, you know, they don't understand what democracy is because if they keep, ke- keep re-electing guys like Orbán, Vučić, and, and Kaczynski, and you know, you know also this, that, that democracy is a, a, a concept that is, uh, al- also ve- very, very much unclear, I would say.

There are different v- visions of democracy, different definitions, so maybe they didn't know that these guys were doing something undemocratic in the first place.

And then what my co- co-authors and I have done is also we measured so-called democratic competence.

And then when we realized that the majority of Fidesz, PiS, uh, and SNS voters are actually democratically competent.

So they know what democracy is, and they value democracy, but still, you know, on many occasions, they re-elected those politicians who subverted democracy.

And some dominant parties are very corrupt.

So Fidesz in Hungary was sort of an example of a dominant party that ended up eating itself to some degree.

You can look at Russia today.

Russia has a dominant party and the dominant party really doesn't matter.

The BBC published this and they said when Orban was reelected in 2010, Hungary's fertility rate was among the lowest in Europe.

His party, Fidesz, promised to tackle population decline.

Quote, in the West, the answer to this is immigration.

You bring in as many as you're missing.

But I just got to say it's there is a lot of complications in the Republican Party that I've never seen before in Texas.

And the Democratic side in Texas is working.

There is a maturity to this party.

They are working together.

But that is much more to ask if you essentially ask them to pool sovereignty with a dictator in Budapest rather than a truly democratically elected government.

Angela Merkel tolerated Fidesz, the party of the Hungarian leader, as part of the same political family in the European Parliament, as part of the same faction in the European Parliament.

She indirectly opposed real steps to sanction Orban for his attacks on democratic institutions.

And as a result, the EU, I think, now has an existential crisis.