When Hungary votes on April 12, it will test whether Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power can finally be broken. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party consistently leads the governing Fidesz party in opinion polls.
But even if Orbán loses, the issues he has raised will not end — because systematic illiberalism was never Hungary’s alone. The playbook Orbán pioneered has become the default for ambitious politicians across Europe, from Lisbon to Bratislava, and from Madrid to Paris.
This is a complex tale about a political method spreading across the continent. The question is why the same template keeps working almost everywhere it is tried.
The 2026 report of the Swedish-based V-Dem Institute, released in March, finds 44 countries becoming more autocratic, with six of the 10 new cases in Europe and North America.
Central Europe has the dubious honor of being the place where this malware source code was written.
In Slovakia, Robert Fico’s government has dismantled the Whistleblower Protection Office, rewritten rules for cooperating witnesses, and restructured public broadcasting under a director tied to Fico’s campaign apparatus.
It has weakened criminal codes for financial crimes and pushed constitutional changes challenging EU legal primacy. Tens of thousands protested; the Constitutional Court suspended the whistleblower law. The government continued regardless.
Only when the European Commission froze recovery plan payments in March did Fico reverse course on the whistleblower office. Not because he accepted the principle, but because the money stopped.
This is not an ideological project. It is an incentive problem. Politicians across Europe are discovering that attacking courts, scapegoating opponents, and weaponizing grievance is a fast route to power, and that the costs are shrinking.
Economic insecurity makes voters willing to back leaders who promise to cut through constraints. Social media accelerates the cycle. A field experiment published in Nature this year found that Twitter/X’s algorithmic feed shifts users’ political attitudes, including toward pro-Kremlin positions on Ukraine, and that the effects persist even after users return to a chronological feed.
A separate experiment in Science showed that reranking hostile partisan content on X — changing the order in which posts appear, pushing hostile material lower without removing a single post — reversed three years of polarization in one week.
The fix exists. Platforms have no business incentive to deploy it.
Once in office, populist leaders weaken the institutions that might hold them accountable, reducing oversight, increasing corruption, and producing more insecurity. The cycle repeats, not because politicians are uniquely malicious, but because the incentives for moderation have collapsed. Backsliding spreads less through ideology than through technique, like malware running across different operating systems.
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Hungary wrote much of that source code a decade ago: media capture, judicial pressure, patronage networks, selective enforcement. Poland ran the program for eight years before a new government began the slow work of institutional repair — a project measured in decades, not election cycles.
Both countries have fallen sharply in the Freedom House index — Hungary from near-perfect in 2010 when Orbán took power, to a “partly free” ranking of 65 last year; Poland’s tumbled from 93 a decade ago to the low 80s before rising somewhat after the change of government in late 2023.
This, of course, does nothing to dissuade populists. They are incentivized and tantalized by the crude arithmetic of costs and benefits. The fact that the populist adoption cycle is accelerating across the continent is the best indicator of how that calculation is being made.
Major European populist parties now echo the language of Budapest and Bratislava when they run into legal trouble Spain’s Vox has openly aligned with Orbán’s network and is under investigation over €9.2m ($10.6m) in loans from a bank linked to Orbán’s inner circle. In Germany, the AfD accepted illegal donations and responded by accusing investigators of political bias. In France, Marine Le Pen responded to her March 2025 conviction for embezzlement by attacking the judiciary as politically motivated. Orbán posted “Je suis Marine.” Le Pen also has Russia ties — her party took a Russian-linked €9.4m loan in 2014 that it repaid only in 2023.
The real dividing line in European politics today is no longer left versus right. It is between leaders who accept constraints on their power and those who treat every check as something to dismantle.
When courts are politicized and prosecuting offices dissolved, citizens experience institutional failure as proof that the system does not work — even when that failure was engineered. Fico abolished the office investigating top-level corruption, then cited corruption as evidence that institutions are broken. The dysfunction becomes its own justification.
And when domestic capture is complete, the playbook graduates to strategic extortion. At a March 19 summit in Brussels, Orbán vetoed a €90bn loan Ukraine needs to avoid fiscal collapse, and Fico refused to back the summit’s Ukraine statement — both demanding resumed Russian oil flows through the Druzhba pipeline.
Twenty-five leaders approved the conclusions without them. This is no longer institutional capture. It is weaponizing membership in the Western alliance.
Europe’s rule-of-law mechanisms can only punish after capture has already happened. Article 7 — the EU’s only tool for suspending a member state’s voting rights — has been triggered against Hungary but requires unanimity, so just one country can block it. Funding conditions move too slowly.
Europe cannot regulate its way out of backsliding. But it can stop subsidizing it: safeguards for judicial appointments that governments cannot override, protected funding for independent media, anticorruption mandates that survive changes of power — and treating algorithmic transparency as democratic infrastructure.
The problem is not only that extremists are winning elections. The problem is that escalation has become the safest career strategy in democratic politics across the continent. If institutions and platforms continue to reward it, the process will continue and worsen.
It will become a business model.
Miro Sedlák is an Associate Research Fellow at Institute for Central Europe and a doctoral candidate in security and defense studies at the Armed Forces Academy of General M.R. Štefánik in Slovakia.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Europe’s Edge
CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.
