As a Hungarian, told my friends in November: "the election results, Project 2025, the newly elected president, etc... is the same old story we have already seen with Orban 10+y ago. But don't worry, the US has a much better established democracy, shit can't really go as wrong as in Eastern-Europe"
Well, I'm not so sure about that last part anymore.
As someone born just south of the Hungarian border, I feel it is important to point out just how quickly election integrity deteriorates afterwards.
Or to quote Serbian president's freudian slip (from just two days ago): "Every living soul in Kosjerić [small town that held municipal elections] came out to vote against us, but we still managed to win."
It is fucking bullshit how a country can spend decades building up its democratic institutions and all it takes is one opportunist to get elected once to undo it all and solidify himself into power for the next 15ish years. And then after they finally leave, you have to start all over again from scratch.
I'm Russian. We elected Putin fair and square back in 2000.
When it comes to consequences of such things, they take time to ramp up (during which time people are usually dismissive of any warnings). The trick is to get out of the country before it's too late.
At some point the "If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal" quote went popular among the leftists. At the same time the right wing were convinced that elections are rigged.
Turns out it's all BS. Unless it already deteriorated, and no it has not deteriorated in most of the world, votes do count and you live with the outcome which may include the eventual reality of vites stop counting. It's very weird, I can't form an opinion if its a psyop or just how the societies work.
To anyone who watched or lived through the ascension of Orbán and Erdogan in the 2000s it was very eerie how similar the playbook was for Trump.
The same steps, in the same direction, the competitive authoritarian[0] playbook was clearly in full play, during the first term Trump started to openly attack the free press, subjugate some democratic institutions, etc. but guardrails were still holding, some GOP Congress people could pushback, the VP wasn't entirely in the cult, the cabinet had some level-headed people.
Now in the second term there is nothing holding back, not the Congress nor Senate, not the Judiciary, not the cabinet, not the elites, not the press, and seemingly the people aren't able at all to comprehend and pushback on how authoritarian it all is.
The plan trudges along, crisis will keep being fabricated so Trump's grip on power increases, this one in LA is definitely going to be used to salami slice more and more power into the Executive, under the veil of "homeland security".
You're entering a new phase of Trump's authoritarianism, Americans, and there doesn't seem to have any power actually powerful enough to fight back.
I'm not from the US, so I may have get wrong, but didn't the Founding Fathers envision that people should be able to collectively rise up and overthrow a tyrant? Hence the right to keep and bear arms?
Of course, from a practical sense this does not seem possible, since the current US military, which a tyrant president would have direct control over, would be infinitely more powerful than a revolutionary group.
I don't know anything else apart from finding communities and mobilising with similar-minded people, there's power in numbers.
At the same time it feels pretty hopeless, even more when I noticed downvotes coming to my comment right after the day rose in the USA without any rebuttal, you're among people who actually support this and do not realise the path it's verging towards.
Maybe not that interesting for a non-Eastern-European, but Orbán went all mad when after his first term he lost the elections. He swore to come back and take revenge.
And then 2010-2025 happened, we saw what the revenge was.
Trump coming back feels very similar to this.
Project 2025 is just a collection of methods they used in E-Europe before. On one hand one could read and learn from history. On the other hand... It's a manual on how to do things, in case you wanna build a system like those in E-Europe.
Wikipedia says Gordon Bajnai, an entrepreneur aged about 41 at the time, who was in power for just one year, by choice:
> In his first speech as PM, he promised drastic measures to stop the negative spiral of the Hungarian economy, and to ease the burden of the international crisis. He also stated that he would remain in power until he had the solid majority of Parliament behind his austerity package, but will stay no longer than a year.
> The new cabinet formed on 29 May 2010. Bajnai was succeeded by Viktor Orbán. After that he retired from politics and returned to business life.
He was a temporary PM after the previous one (Gyurcsany) resigned after a motion of no confidence against him. Bajnai didn't do much, handled the 2008 crisis, and it was known he would not continue.
Funnily, Gyurcsany was removed after a leaked recording on which he said "we have fucked it up. Not just a bit, but much." [1] It's amazing that after 17 years, when Orban's huge lies and corruption is proven, people are fine with that, but when a former clown PM was complaining to his party members that "we should've done better", half the country was in riot.
Before his second term came, it was the Socialist party in coalition with the (left) Liberals[1] for 8 years. I don't recall to have an equivalent of Sleepy Joe, but one of the early left wing PM certainly seemed a bit dumb.
The "real" problem was that they had too many (Russia-influenced / supported?) ex-communists and some of them were doing corrupt business in the 100k USD range; Of course this is already forgotten, Orban's friends' 100M+ USD ranging businesses seem to be fine with the voters. Not to mention Orban's and the foreign minister's regular visit to Putin.
Relevant search keywords: "Hungary Orban" + any of the following: "stadium", "castle", "rich meszaros", "corruption"
Well, I'm not so sure about that last part anymore.