The humiliating demise of Viktor Orban’s authoritarian regime is bracing news for endangered democracies, including our own, but America isn’t Hungary.
Of the parallels that can be drawn between their despot and ours, the most salient may have been commented on the least — the overwhelming and unprecedented Mafia-style corruption that enriched the ruling family and entrenched their power.
It was the corruption that motivated Peter Magyar, a lifelong loyal appartchik until two years ago, to break with Orban’s Fidesz party and inaugurate the campaign to overthrow the regime.
It was the corruption that forced the European Union to act against Budapest by withholding billions in funding and isolating its government.
And it was the corruption — so pervasive in Hungary’s media, judiciary and business institutions — that finally drove otherwise conservative Hungarian voters to reject the crooked outfit that had ruled them for 16 years.
Liberals in Hungary celebrated Magyar’s election victory, not necessarily because they agree with the new prime minister on every issue — they don’t — but because he vowed to clean up Orban’s legacy of outrageous theft, to enforce accountability and to strengthen the nation’s frayed ties with Europe.
Relying on his long experience inside the Fidesz machine, Magyar was able to expose its sleazy deals, including a pardon scandal that embroiled his then-wife, who had served as Orban’s justice minister.
Like so much of the criminality perpetrated by Orban and his cronies, that pardon affair echoed a train of remarkably similar offenses in the Trump White House.
And as Magyar emphasized throughout his innovative grassroots campaign, the cost of Orban’s venality fell on ordinary Hungarians, whose national wealth was siphoned off to enrich the dictatorship’s cronies.
According to Akos Hadhazy, a leading voice against corruption as an independent member of Hungary’s parliament, the Mafia-style graft perpetrated by the Orban regime has looted more than 2.8 billion euros (over $3.2 billion) annually from public funds.
Much of that stolen money came from the EU itself, which played a role in the regime’s demise by withholding further funds from suspect projects.
Among the reasons to renew ties with Brussels, as Magyar often explained, was to facilitate prosecution of the “Orban Mafia” that stole those EU funds.
The details of the Fidesz government’s boodling might almost seem quaint in comparison with the high-tech crypto scams hatched in the Trump White House.
Viktor Orban’s son-in-law, an entrepreneur named Istvan Tiborcz, became wealthy by forming Elios, a company that won multimillion-euro contracts to....
