WASHINGTON – As President Donald Trump faces a perilous midterm election later this year with voters rebelling over the still-rising prices, his first priority is not an endangered Republican congressman or governor, but an eastern European leader 4,000 miles away whose autocratic style seems to have served as a template for Trump at home.
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has strong-armed his country’s judiciary, attacked its universities, muzzled its independent media, demonized LGBT people, and ushered in crony capitalism and rampant corruption cloaked in Christian nationalism — just as Trump is trying to implement, and to varying degrees succeeding, in the United States.
On Sunday, though, Orbán is facing his toughest election challenge to date in his 16-year rule, with polls showing he will likely not win a fifth consecutive term. What’s more, in a possible preview of America’s coming November midterms, if Orbán does lose, it likely will not be because of his autocratic impulses but something far more pedestrian: affordability.
Under Orbán’s leadership, life for ordinary Hungarians has gotten significantly more difficult in recent years, according to analysts and observers. And while voters seemed willing to tolerate losing their freedoms if their quality of life was simultaneously improving, they could well be ready to move on now that it is not.
