Avsnitt
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Last week’s election-eve podcast with Ábel Bede and Gabriela Greilinger was meant to be the last in Twenty-Four Two’s special 15-episode series on Hungary. But, after the partying in Budapest and the incoming prime minister’s hilariously unforgiving first moves, we couldn’t resist a post mortem with political scientist Gábor Scheiring.
Among the hot and bad social-media takes on Péter Magyar’s landslide victory over Viktor Orbán, the winners have to be:
See how quickly Orbán conceded - this was never the dictatorship you said it was! (from the right). No one credible said it was.
Magyar isn’t the liberal you think he is (from the left). No one credible said he was.
“A competitive authoritarian regime is a competitive authoritarian regime,” Scheiring tells us. “As long as you have elections, it’s possible to beat the ruling party, but it’s just hard, right? It’s much harder than in a free and fair democracy with free and fair elections”. Orbán conceded quickly because his defeat was undeniable. “I’m pretty convinced they had multiple scenarios and multiple playbooks but the result was so overwhelming, they couldn’t really do anything. What do you do against a landslide? Your only option is to use the military and repress society, and the next question is: do you really want to enter Hungarian history books as the dictator despised by his own people who used the country’s security forces to stay in power?”
Formerly a left-wing MP who now teaches at Georgetown University in Qatar, Scheiring doesn’t share Magyar’s conservatism but he is optimistic that the new premier will restore liberal democracy and maybe even pluralism. “He has more than two-thirds majority and huge symbolic capital, and now he has the momentum. There’s a Hungarian political scientist Eszter Kováts and she used the term: he behaves ‘like a tank’, and he does indeed behave like a tank and he should go on with this impetus and momentum”.
Gábor Scheiring’s The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary was published in 2020. His next book with Benedek Jávor, How Democracracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning And What To Do About It, will be published in 2027.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This really is the last podcast in our Hungary series but we’ll be back soon to talk European politics from a (small-l, small-d) liberal-democratic perspective. We’ll cover national elections in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Slovakia and Bosnia, state elections in eastern Germany, Iceland’s referendum on EU accession negotiations, British reconvergence with the EU, and the geopolitical, military and economic settlement Ukraine when it comes. And more.
Subscribe (free) to the podcast and to 242.news.
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This is it. On Sunday, Hungarians will vote to keep or kill Viktor Orbán’s 16-year “illiberal” electoral autocracy.
To talk about the last days of the election campaign and opposition activists’ tempered hopes for regime change, Tim and Pepijn are joined on the Twenty-Four Two Podcast by Ábel Bede and Gabriela Greilinger from the invaluable English-language Hungarian Observer.
Ábel, who is a freelance journalist, reports to us from the manic campaign trail of opposition Tisza leader Péter Magyar. Gabriela, a doctoral candidate in far-right politics and democratic backsliding at the University of Georgia, digs into the deep links between Orbánism and the American right.
With two days to go, hopes (and fears of hubris) are high. The latest independent polls suggest Tisza could even win a two-thirds majority that would allow a Magyar government to rewrite the constitution, purge Orbánism from the institutions and restore liberal democracy and political pluralism. But how trusted is he to do this?
Magyar is “not a leader who Hungarian opposition-minded individuals suddenly decided to follow,” says Ábel. “He’s more of a surfer. He’s riding the waves of huge, huge dissatisfaction with the Orbán regime”.
“The Tisza voting coalition is basically a lot of left-leaning and liberal voters, and then also a few right-wing voters, which is a very broad coalition that you need to hold together,” says Gabriela. “The fact of the matter is that you needed that in Hungary to unseat Viktor Orbán because of the way the electoral system is made … It only works that way. You need to have a big party, a big-tent party to unseat Viktor Orbán and from then on, and you can rebuild”.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is the last podcast on Hungary but we will be back soon to talk European politics from a liberal-democratic perspective and especially for 2027 and elections in France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Slovakia. So, subscribe (free) to the podcast and to 242.news.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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Fearing electoral defeat on April 12, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán begged for an endorsement visit from Donald Trump but will have to make do with an April 7-8 fly-by from vice-president JD Vance and his wife.
That Orbán believes Vance’s endorsement could push him over the line is in keeping with an election campaign in which the ruling Fidesz party has focused on nothing but their champion’s experience on the foreign stage and hysterical warnings that Péter Magyar, Orbán’s challenger, will follow the EU and Ukraine into war with Russia. No friend of Ukraine or Europe, Vance can be trusted to stick to this line but independent polling strongly suggests it’s not working.
“If the issue is that your wife wants to give birth in the local hospital and there’s no doctor to help her so you have to travel hundreds of kilometres to the more central hospital, I don’t think Vance makes a big difference,” says political scientist Miklós Sükösd on the latest Twenty-Four Two Podcast. “Diehard Fidesz fans? But even for them … the voting base of Orbán is older people in the countryside, especially in villages – it’s only in villages where he has a large constituency now and less-educated people including the Roma minority. Those people don’t care about Vance”.
Our 15-episode series on Hungary’s pivotal election has covered everything from Orbánism to economics to corruption and false-flag attacks but, until today, we hadn’t dissected Orbán’s rival. The perfectly named Magyar turned on Fideszworld only two years ago and built a mass movement from scratch. Who is he? Where did he come from? How different from Orbán is he? And can he be trusted to return liberal democracy to Hungary after 16 years of creeping autocracy and a “mafia state”?
To answer these questions, there’s no one better than Miklós Sükösd. A media scholar and associate professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Sükösd wrote The Challenge – an epic four-part (so far) study of Magyar for HVG – and will publish a book later this year on the man who may be Hungary’s next prime minister.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
It’s T-minus 14 days until an election that will decide whether Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010 and icon for global nativism, gets another four-year term for Fidesz or is ousted by Péter Magyar’s Tisza movement.
In the final days of the campaign, Fidesz is throwing everything - allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use, claims of interference by the Ukrainian “terrorist state”, intelligence-service surveillance, and a visit by US vice-president J.D. Vance - at Magyar. Yet the latest Median poll shows a growing lead for Tisza - a centre-right party founded only six years ago and repurposed in 2024 as a Magyar vehicle.
As an electoral coalition, Tisza - binding together urban liberals and disgruntled non-metropolitan conservatives - is proving uniquely difficult for Fidesz to kill. “This is a special opportunity to get rid of Orbán,” says László Andor, the secretary-general of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) - a Brussels-based think tank affiliated to the Party of European Socialists (PES).
“There are many people who now say they will vote for Tisza on April 12 but not because they’re enthusiastic, not because they would want to stay with them for a long time but in order to benefit from this joy: the person of the prime minister would change in Hungary after 16 years and this Fidesz gang could be sent into retirement or maybe worse. This is about one opportunity”.
This joy is tempered for Andor, an economist who advised Hungarian centre-left prime minister Péter Medgyessy (2002-24) and served as European commissioner for employment and social affairs (2010-2014) under president José Durão Barroso. It is “not good if Hungary, with all this jubilation, delivers a parliament without a centre-left or without a left at all,” he tells the Twenty-Four Two Podcast. “In all likelihood, Hungary ends up now with a parliament with the centre-right, the far-right and the extreme-right or maybe just the centre-right and the far-right. That’s not something people normally celebrate in the European Union. I would certainly not celebrate this”.
If Tisza wins the election, Andor hopes the left will quickly start preparing for municipal and European Parliament elections in 2029. “That’s a lot of time to prepare, to come forward with new initiatives … Normally, in order to have progressive parties, you need progressive movements. You need a trade union movement with more energy. You need environmentalist movements. You need a student movement. You need a feminist movement. You need a peace movement. You need all different type of movements … to uphold politically the progressive alternative in a country”.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
Open a history of Europe with “everything changed on the morning of Thursday 24th of February 2022” and you will have the undivided attention of the Twenty Four Two podcast.
Roderick Beaton’s Europe: A New History, published today by Penguin, reframes the last 2,500 years as the story of an idea. Starting with the Greek city states and Herodotus’s conjuring-up of “Europe” as the antithesis of “Asia”, he takes “Rome” all the way from the city republic via Constantinople to the demise of its namesake empire two millennia later. He examines Europe as both Christendom and competing Christianities, and covers invasions and assimilations, mass migrations, superstates and nation states all the way to the Ukrainian bulwark against Putinist “anti-Europe”.
Beaton fears that Europe in 2026 is too like the ancient Greek city states, who chose division in the face of a ruthless neighbour. “It reminds me so much of what’s in that ghastly US document that came out at the end of last year, the strategy document, where the current White House wants to see a Europe in which European states double down on their distinctive identity,” he tells Tim G. Jones on the podcast. “I mean, it’s classic divide and rule. You can see exactly why a large military power might want to see that happen. But, from the point of view of Europe … it’s a red flag. It’s an example from the past”.
Knighted in 2019, Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London.
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Just three Sundays from today, eight million Hungarians will decide whether to fire or re-hire prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz movement after 16 years in power.
If these MAGA darlings are driven from office, it will be in large part due to their increasingly flagrant corruption. Losing 15 points since 2012, Hungary’s slide in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) is the steepest ever recorded for an EU member state.
High-profile cases involving Orbán’s father, brother-in-law, close childhood friend and former chief economic adviser have dominated independent media since the 2022 election. What’s worse: this has been fed by EU transfers. The Corruption Research Center Budapest (CRCB) calculates that the net value of contracts awarded (often without competition) to 13 Orbán cronies since 2010 exceeds €19 billion.
“The luxury lifestyle, it’s extreme,” says Dávid Jancsics, author of the 2024 book Sociology of Corruption: Patterns of Illegal Association in Hungary. “It’s not like they have a nice car. No, they have five Ferraris so it’s a different level ... The luxury lifestyle of the political elite is visible. What people see is Ferraris, Lamborghinis, properties in fancy locations ... Dubai, New York City ... When you are struggling with your bills, it’s especially annoying to see this extreme wealth”.
Dávid Jancsics is a professor at San Diego State University. Before leaving the band in 1999 to start his career in sociology, Jancsics played bass guitar with Budapest thrash/hardcore punk trio Leukémia. A reunion two years ago led to a new single in December 2025.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
With less than a month to go until a make-or-break election in Hungary, consecutive four-term prime minister Viktor Orbán is desperate to distract voters from the dire state of the economy and his government’s finances.
He and his Fidesz party have turned the dial to 11 in their campaign against Péter Magyar’s Tisza movement, who - they claim - plan to sell-out Hungarians to the EU and to Woke globalists while forcing them into joining Ukraine’s war against Russia.
Independent polling suggests the demonisation of Ukraine and its president may be only working with voters at the margin. The electorate seems to be motivated more by Hungary’s stagflationary environment, which has not been helped by the surge in oil and natural-gas prices caused by the US-Israeli war with Iran.
The outlook for growth in Hungary “might be made a lot worse by ... the energy-price shock that Europe is being hit by now,” says Twenty-Four Two co-host Pepijn Bergsen. “If the suggestion is that Hungary would probably be hit harder than many others in the region, I don’t think that they have a good answer to that. Just trying to cap retail-energy prices is not going to work. It’s too costly, which is why you also get Orbán explicitly arguing for sanctions reductions, particularly on Russian energy. The rest of Europe isn’t going to go along with that anytime soon”.
In this episode, Pepijn and co-host Tim Jones discuss the latest polls, the vicious turn in the campaign, Volodymyr Zelensky as Emmanuel Goldstein, and the overdue fiscal and political bill from 16 years of Orbánomics.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
With just five weeks left before Hungary’s most nail-biting election in 20 years, independent polls show prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz movement trailing Péter Magyar’s Tisza party by an average nine points.
Yet, a system rigged in Fidesz’s favour by 16 years of unconstrained gerrymandering, media control and pre-election fiscal bribes could still see MAGA’s closest European ally returned to office.
“Hungary is trailing behind Russia by ten years and that’s true for almost everything,” Márton Schlanger, a political polling analyst at the Republikon Institute, tells the Twenty-Four Two Podcast. “It’s the same in ways of campaigning and how blatantly, outrageously confident the governing party can be in manipulating the public and manipulating the elections”.
Hungarian polling has become deeply politicised as independent firms like Republikon, Medián, 21, Závecz and Publicus publish surveys diverging radically from those released by government-aligned bodies including pop-up organisations claiming Fidesz leads. Medián, in particular, is accused by Orbán and allies of manipulating data to produce a bombshell poll, which calculated a 20-point Tisza lead among voters who had chosen a party and would definitely participate on April 12.
“I’m not sure if I’m flattered or scared about all of the attention that polls are receiving in this campaign, not just in the past months, but ever since the [2024] clemency scandal and Tisza appeared on the field, it has been immense,” says Schlanger.
The US-Israeli war with Iran and Fidesz’s intensified campaign against Ukraine has diverted attention from the incumbents’ economic mismanagement and corruption that has been driving support for Magyar and Tisza. “It could help Fidesz but, overall, I don’t think that this will turn the tide in itself,” says Schlanger.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
Six weeks from an election could see them defeated after 16 years of creeping authoritarianism, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party are pulling out all the stops - turning Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky into an outright enemy of Hungary and campaign mobiliser.
For weeks, billboards and digital publications have been flooded with AI-generated pictures of warmongering EU leaders and Péter Magyar, Orbán’s challenger, loading Zelensky with money. Now, Orbán has taken this a step further by blocking the release of €90 billion from the EU to Kyiv after Russian oil supplied via the Druzhba pipeline was suspended due to damage at a western Ukrainian pumping station.
To talk about this dispute and energy nationalism generally, Magyar’s increasing advantage and Fidesz’s growing panic, fears of a false flag operation and an election delay, Orbán’s miscalculations around “Peak Trump”, Ukraine’s European ambitions, and the EU’s wilful policy inertia, Twenty-Four Two’s co-hosts Tim Jones and Pepijn Bergsen are joined for a panel discussion by energy-geopolitics analyst Bill Farren-Price and veteran EU journalist Simon Taylor.
The latest EU-Hungary standoff over aiding Ukraine reveals the “learned helplessness of the leaders of one of the richest continents on earth being held back by the prime minister of a country of 10 million,” says Pepijn. “Guys, just throw together some guarantees, go to the markets, borrow some money, send it to the Ukrainians. It is literally that simple. Just set up a Zoom call without Viktor in it and get this done”.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
One of Orbánism’s greatest successes during its 16-year dominance of Hungarian politics has been its taming of the media.
Mainstream publications Népszava and HVG have held the line but today, directly or indirectly, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz controls 80% of Hungary’s media market and actively hinders the work of independent outlets. The country now languishes in 68th place out of 180 in Reporters Without Borders’ world press freedom index.
As they lost their freedom to report, journalists founded alternative outlets - Telex, 24.hu, 444.hu, Partizán, Átlátszó and Direkt36 - or, like Szabolcs Dull, attracted a paying audience on Substack. But they all struggle to survive faced with an official campaign of harassment including smears, SLAPP suits, surveillance and legislative threats. After using a 2023 “sovereignty law” to investigate Átlátszó for allegedly serving foreign interests, the government introduced a bill last year to facilitate broader inquiries. In his new year speech last weekend, Orbán promised his post-election cabinet would finish the job and “clear out” unsympathetic media.
To talk about 16 years of media capture, this week’s guest is András Pethő, a co-founder of investigative-journalism hub Direkt36. We discussed the founding of the company, reporting in a backsliding democracy, lessons from The Washington Post and Direkt36’s successful transition to film-making with The Dynasty and The Trap.
This is the eighth podcast in a special 242.news series on the April 12 Hungarian election that could see Trump ally Viktor Orbán removed from power and replaced with Fidesz defector Péter Magyar. András and his colleagues wrote an insiders’ account of the failure of the opposition at the last election in 2022. This time is different, he says. “Fidesz, of course, never acknowledge it officially that they are behind in the polls but they are behaving very, very differently. They are much less confident than I’ve ever seen them in the last 20 years. So it’s a very different … campaign. But I think we’ve also learned one thing in the last 20 or 30 years … You can never underestimate [Orbán] and, and his party … This is a really, really crucial election for them because the stakes are super-high”.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - newsletter focused on the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
In a little over 50 days, Hungarians will vote in a pivotal election that could remove Trump ally Viktor Orbán after 16 years as prime minister and replace him with Péter Magyar, a defector from Orbán’s Fidesz movement. If you want a respite from US politics but crave the battle between the open society and its enemies, subscribe to this weekly podcast covering a campaign that is rapidly turning into the dirtiest in the post-communist era - culminating in the threatened release of a illicitly filmed Magyar sex tape.
The tricks could get a lot dirtier, warns this week’s guest Géza Jeszenszky, Hungary’s first post-communist foreign minister. Together with prime minister József Antall, he began the process of Hungary’s accession to the EU and NATO and sought to repair the now century-long damage caused by the Trianon treaty that ceded more than 2 million ethnic Hungarians to modern-day Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine.
At every election since 2010, Orbán has created bogeymen like George Soros to motivate his base. In 2022, he stoked fears that Hungarians would be sucked into a western war against Russia. In the four years since, his peacenikery has since evolved into a full-on anti-Ukrainianism that is growing as election day approaches. In the past week alone, Orbán has described Ukraine as Hungary’s “enemy” and the EU’s plans to fast-track Kyiv’s accession as an “open declaration of war” against Budapest.
Jeszenszky fears this hysterical rhetoric is less about mobilising support and more about laying the groundwork for a constitutional coup - a fear that only grew after reports in the Fidesz-allied media of threats by a ‘Ukrainian soldier’ to bomb schools in Hajdú–Bihar county. “My fear is that the very opposite is in his mind or in the mind of people around him: to postpone the election, not to hold the election,” he says, pointing out that the Fidesz-dominated parliament recently extended Hungary’s Covid-era emergency laws until mid-May. “Many of us, many Hungarians who are not really too friendly to Orbán can imagine that a kind of false flag operation may be committed - obviously directly by Russians or with the help of Russia - and something may happen, which can be presented as an act of aggression against Hungary”.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - newsletter focused on the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
On April 12, Hungarians will vote in an election with ripple effects well beyond their borders. For the first time since 2010, MAGA icon Viktor Orbán looks beatable – at the hands of Péter Magyar, a defector from his Fidesz movement.
If you need a detox from US politics but still crave a nail-biting battle over the future of liberal democracy, this is the podcast series for you. Dropping every Sunday between now and Hungary’s election night, we bring you the latest campaign news plus expert guests covering politics, economics, history and culture.
This week, that guest is Zselyke Csaky from the Centre for European Reform in Brussels - author of a recent report on the election. A specialist in the EU’s institutions, elections, the rule of law and democratic backsliding, Zselyke was previously a researcher at EUI and Freedom House and is a graduate of the Central European University and Corvinus University Budapest.
We discuss how Magyar’s foreign policy would differ from Orbán’s, whether Magyar could form an eastern counterweight to the EU’s Franco-German axis, his chances of getting his hands on €18 billion of suspended EU funds for Hungary, and Donald Trump’s failure to provide meaningful support to Orbán.
“Trump hasn’t been the boon to Orban that many expected,” says Csaky. “Certainly he has received support rhetorically, and perhaps - although, at this point, it seems unlikely - Trump will visit Hungary before the vote. But, for Hungary itself, Trump hasn’t been that much of a success story - with the trade tariffs, with the uncertainty economically”.
Most EU countries and its Brussels institutions would welcome a change of government in April, she says, but “at the same time, I think there are expectations among some in Brussels that may be unrealistic. One expectation is that once Orbán is gone, everything will be fine. I would just like to dispel that myth, because it’s easy to point to Orbán as the person who blocks everything in Brussels right now. But we know that, behind him, there are other member states who like to hide, depending on interest. If Orbán is gone, these disagreements might come out into the open”.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - newsletter focused on the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
In April, eight million Hungarians will vote in an election whose results will resound across Europe and the US. For the first time in 15 years, MAGA icon Viktor Orbán looks beatable – at the hands of Orbánist defector Péter Magyar.
Have you been deranged by a decade of Trumpism? Do you need a nail-biting battle over the future of liberal democracy, but without Orange Man? If so, this is the podcast series for you. Dropping every Sunday between now and election night in Hungary, we bring you the latest campaign news plus expert guests covering politics, economics, history and culture.
This week’s guest is Gábor Bojár, one of Hungary’s richest men – a “red baron” who supports the opposition and welcomes a wealth tax. Under Orbán’s crony capitalism, “a lot of entrepreneurial spirit is killed or depressed,” he says. “So, a lot of energy can be freed and … it can happen easily because people are waiting for change, so there is a huge expectation, just like the expectation which happened at the time of the system changing in ‘89”.
“I do not feel that, from his soul, Péter Magyar would be a liberal democrat. He is not. But he will do what the people want, and we want liberal democracy,” says Bojár, reassured by Magyar’s choice of shadow ministers for finance, foreign affairs, and energy. But could he be just another Orbán? “There is a risk. No question, this risk is there, but at least there is a chance … If Orbán stays, it’s sure”.
Gábor Bojár founded Graphisoft as a two-man firm in 1982 under communism; by the time he sold it in 2007, it was a global leader in 3D building-modelling software. Worth more than €80 million today, according to Forbes, Bojár oversees the Aquincum Institute of Technology (AIT), which he founded.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - newsletter focused on the remaking of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
Donald Trump’s greatest success so far has been in bypassing Congress, packing the Supreme Court, and populating agencies and law enforcement with political loyalists.
He failed to do this in his first term and paid the price in 2020. But, by sticking to the Project 2025 programme inspired by Viktor Orbán’s 15-year-long capture of Hungary’s institutions, Trumpism has made itself harder to dislodge.
To Trump’s great frustration, however, the Federal Reserve has proved resilient despite his constant attacks on Chair (“Too Late”) Jerome Powell, attempts to remake the board of governors, and a criminal inquiry. Powell’s successor, who will be named next week, knows what to expect if he fails to deliver rapid interest-rate cuts.
Hungary has been here before. After Orbán returned to power in 2010 and tamed the media, universities, regulators and the judiciary, he turned on the central bank (MNB). In 2013, he imposed his right-hand man as governor, who cleaned house and imported heterodox policymaking. Orbán got his low interest rates but Hungary eventually paid a price in lost policy credibility, high inflation, weak growth and a devalued currency – factors threatening Orbán’s re-election in April.
As an MNB deputy governor from 2007-13, Júlia Király experienced this annexation of the central bank from the inside. Now a professor of finance and monetary economics at the International Business School in Budapest, Júlia talks about this, the bill that eventually came due and the huge fiscal challenges facing the next government.
“The way she talks about it, this was the central bank take over of MAGA dreams,” says Twenty-Four Two co-host Tim G. Jones. “Not only did they manage to get all their people in and get the people who were not aligned with Fidesz out but they also managed to carry out a discretionary monetary policy”.
Twenty-Four Two is hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen and is a podcast from 242.news - a newsletter focused on the remaking of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
When Hungarians voted in elections to the European Parliament in 2024, Dániel Róna was alone in predicting a 30% vote for the insurgent campaign of former regime insider Péter Magyar and his Tisza party.
Since then, Magyar’s support has only grown so that, as a national election approaches on April 12, Róna’s 21 Research Centre – in common with all independent pollsters – is convinced that Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz movement are at their most vulnerable since taking power in 2010.
“We conduct many polls – face-to-face polls, phone polls, hybrid surveys, online surveys – and all of them show the same tendency that Tisza has a sizeable lead over Fidesz, and other parties became more and more insignificant,” Róna tells the Twenty-Four Two podcast. Until now, Orbán’s opposition cannibalised each other’s votes and made little attempt to appeal to the soft Fidesz electorate. “Péter Magyar is the first one who has the priority to do that, and that matters a lot … That’s one of the reasons why Péter Magyar is a much more dangerous opponent for the government than any other former challenger”.
However, Róna still believes the April election is a toss-up. “I know it sounds strange because, in most democracies, with such a significant lead ... the chances shouldn’t be that close. But it’s Hungary. It’s not a liberal democracy. It’s an authoritarian regime or a hybrid regime or spin dictatorship”. Fidesz has a huge financial and media advantage and an electoral system that means Tisza needs at least a five-point popular lead to secure a one-seat parliamentary majority.
Twenty-Four Two is hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen and is a podcast from 242.news - a newsletter focused on the remaking of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
Very soon, eight million Hungarians will vote in an election whose results will resound across Europe and the US. For the first time in 15 years, MAGA icons Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz movement look beatable - this time at the hands of a defector, Péter Magyar, and his Tisza party.
Have you been deranged by a decade of Trumpism? Do you need a nail-biting political battle over the future of liberal democracy but without Orange Man and his cult? If so, this is the podcast series for you. Dropping every Sunday between now and election night in Hungary, this special series will bring the latest campaign news and expert guests covering politics, economics, history and culture.
This week’s guest is Stefano Bottoni - an Italian-Hungarian historian and one-time Orbán admirer, whose critical biography of the prime minister sold more than 18,000 copies and topped Hungary’s best-seller lists despite ghosting from local publishers.
When opinion polls were tight in 2022, Stefano still expected Orbán’s re-election but now he’s not so sure. “The point here is not how strong Tisza is; Tisza is strong and won’t weaken. The point is how Orbán could react to a possible defeat, and we have heard every kind of rumour here from postponing the elections due to the ‘state of exception’ ... or switching to a presidential system ... allowing Orbán to become president of the republic”.
Aside from Fidesz’s perpetual gerrymandering and media dominance, the government is also throwing money at pensioners, who make up 30% of the electorate. The Fidesz “regime is not like the old communist regime in 1989 - accepting almost gladly that it’s over: ‘we can hand over the government, so now the ball is yours and do whatever you want. We are done with it’. Orbán is not this kind of guy ... and we also had very different international surroundings in 1989. The US president was called George Bush Senior and the last secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, we have Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin. Both of them, for very different reasons, are greatly interested in keeping Viktor Orbán in power”.
Twenty-Four Two is hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen and is a podcast from 242.news - a newsletter focused on the remaking of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
By mid-April, more than eight million Hungarians will vote in an election whose results will reverberate across Europe and the US.
For the first time in 15 years, the conservative Fidesz party and Viktor Orbán – a MAGA icon and standard-bearer for global “illiberalism” – look beatable. Hungary’s fractured opposition has rallied around Péter Magyar, an Orbánworld exile, and is holding a steady double-digit poll lead.
Have you been deranged by a decade of Trump? Do you want to tame your unhealthy interest in the Tennessee seventh or Pennsylvania supreme court special elections but keep your head in the liberalism-versus-authoritarianism game?
Then, this is the podcast series for you.
Dropping every Sunday between now and election night, the Twenty-Four Two Hungary Special will update you on the latest polling and campaign news, and host expert guests covering politics, economics, history and culture.
Kim Lane Scheppele is the perfect first guest to provide global context for the election. A Princeton professor and legal expert on democratic backsliding with a hands-on interest in Hungary, Kim was one of the first English-language public intellectuals to warn of Orbán’s stealthy formation of an autocratic “Frankenstate”.
“Hungary is to the American right what Sweden used to be to the American left,” she says. “Here’s a little country that does the thing we want to do on a larger scale in the US”. If Orbán loses, she has no doubt he will blame an international conspiracy. “The right will double down and say: ‘you see our enemies are everywhere and we have to circle the wagons’ … If anything, it will have a mobilising effect on the right”.
Twenty-Four Two is a new, regular podcast from 242.news, a newsletter devoted to reporting and analysing the remaking of Europe since Russian’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24-2-2022.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
Since President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the national assembly in June 2024, France has been going through its most acute political crisis in more than 50 years.
The election that followed split the assembly into three factions - centrist parties previously loyal to the president (“Macronie”), left-wing parties grouped around La France Insoumise (LFI), and Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) - each accounting for a quarter of the seats. Bouncing between them are the two traditional but shrunken parties of government - the Parti Socialiste (PS) and Les Républicains (LR) - neither of which is large enough to any of the three a majority even if they wanted to. At any other time, this political quagmire would be inconvenient. Today, when France needs difficult decisions made to address chronic budgetary shortfalls and a rising public-debt stock, it’s a crisis.
Wally Bordas, Le Figaro’s parliamentary correspondent, has written a gripping account of the 2024-25 political crisis in his new book Palais Bourbier (Quagmire Palace). In it, he reveals why Macron took the reckless decision to dissolve the assembly against the advice of his prime minister. He would either restore his absolute majority or force the RN to govern, fail and lose the 2027 presidential election.
“Emmanuel Macron’s approach was to let nature take its course,” says Bordas. “If the voters, by choice, put the RN in power at that time, let them do it”.
The Twenty-Four Two podcast is hosted by Tim Gwynn Jones at www.242.news.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com -
Today, Caleb Zakarin from the New Books Network foolishly chose me and The Chair as the subject for his inaugural Substack Live interview.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com
