BUDAPEST, Hungary — This capital city doesn't have the trappings of an autocracy.
There are no tanks on the streets or intelligence agents stamping out whispers of dissent. While strolling through the streets it's easy to be captivated by the blend of architectural styles, the sprawling public transportation system and the vibrant cafe and restaurant scene where tourists sip wine under twinkling lights.
It's easy to miss what critics say lurks just beneath the surface.
"Budapest is a gorgeous city and you will never have any clue that this is really a dictatorship," says Kim Scheppele, who teaches sociology and international affairs at Princeton and worked in Hungary for years researching the Hungarian Constitutional Court.
Since the election of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2010 this once robust democracy that emerged from Soviet Communism in the 1990s has regressed into what members of the European Parliament now call an electoral autocracy, a hybrid political system that injects authoritarian methods into what appear to be democratic institutions and structures.
Orbán remade the courts through a series of reforms that critics say replaced experienced judges with younger more malleable figures. He's used state resources to financially starve independent press, changed the constitution to consolidate his power and passed laws and amendments to stifle civil society and minority groups, the latest an effective ban on pride celebrations, while fostering a culture of corruption that benefits a small clique of wealthy oligarchs. The moves have made Hungary somewhat of a pariah in the European Union.
Yet, the leader of this small central European country has captured the imagination of many U.S. conservatives who hold Orbán's rule up as a model for conservative populist leadership in liberal Western democracies.
There is perhaps no greater symbol of that cross-cultural cooperation and admiration than the Conservative Political Action Conference gathering of conservative, populist and far right activists and politicians now converging on Budapest for a fourth consecutive year.
"For a long time in the West you had folks on the center right who, let's say, they made excuses," said David Reaboi, a right wing media personality who once lobbied on behalf of Orbán's government in the U.S.
Reaboi says the Hungarian leader's unapologetic style when it comes to cracking down on mass migration and what some regard as "woke" policies inspired American conservatives' now confrontational approach under President Donald Trump when it comes to immigration, minority rights, civil society and academia.
"They were afraid of media backlash or something," Reaboi said. "Now I think what's the same about [the U.S. MAGA movement and Orbán's Hungary] is just this lack of fear of saying true things."
Reaboi bristles at Hungary being labeled a dictatorship. He calls the criticisms "fringe insanity" and adds that whatever one thinks about Orbán's policies and his party Fidesz he's "been unbelievably successful in putting Budapest and Hungary itself on the map."
Orbán's government has poured millions of dollars into creating that international presence through think tanks, like The Danube Institute.
At this research center that overlooks the river that divides Budapest, U.S. conservatives and nationalists have found an intellectual home inside Europe.
The government also funds the educational institution Mathius Corvinus Collegium which bills itself as an incubator for young talent in Hungary. Its critics see it as an incubator for future Fidesz-allied elites.
From his top floor apartment in a historic building in Budapest, Boris Kálnoky, a prominent German journalist of Hungarian descent who heads the journalism school at MCC, says Orbán's presence on the western stage as a populist leader that's inspired U.S. conservatives was a "conscious strategy."
"A thought process began here that we need to establish bridges towards the Anglo-Saxon conservative world," Kálnoky said.
The person who came up with this strategy to reach beyond Hungary's borders, was the head of MCC and the prime minister's political director, Balazs Orbán.
"He said, 'look to the left, they are globally allied.' They have their networks, they have conferences, they meet, and they have an ideology which unites them," Kálnoky said.
So Hungary began reaching out to other like-minded political groups including conservatives in the U.S. and inviting them to Budapest around 2014. They liked what they saw – a populist conservative government that was elected and re-elected using the resources of the state to support that goal.
Kálnoky said the pushback from the European Union against what it deems anti-democratic practices from the Fidesz party is its way of controlling a member state that won't fall in line with the majority.
He sees what critics point to as gerrymandering and taking control of the media and the courts as an elected party using its mandate to implement reforms and its program. Hungary, he said, is not falling into autocracy.
"There is only one thing that is needed to separate Fidesz and Viktor Orbán from power, and that is that a relative majority of Hungarians vote for someone else than him," he said. "That's all that's needed. And as long as that is the case, how can you speak of an autocracy?"
Autocracy or not, analysts like Scheppele, who was driven from Hungary as Orbán took control of the courts and higher education, are now warning that what came to pass in Hungary could come to be in the U.S.
How did Orbán transform Hungary?
He started as a more liberal politician when he first won the office in 1998. But after being voted out he morphed into the populist conservative he is today.
"He hadn't looked particularly dangerous when he had been prime minister once before. But in his eight years out of power, he had spent that time planning a comeback," Scheppele said. "And he came into power with a very detailed plan to remake the Constitution and remake the entire legal system in such a way that he could never be removed from power again."
In the three years after he was elected in 2010, she said he transformed Hungary from a post-communist democratic success story to an autocracy.
Now she said she recognizes the Orbán playbook in Project 2025, a blueprint for a Republican president written by a conservative think tank of Trump allies and loyalists, some of whom are now in the government. Trump's decisions in his first few months back in office mirror some of the decisions Orbán made in his early days back in power.
"The first thing [Orbán] did was to suspend the civil service law and fire huge numbers of public employees, particularly those in the public broadcast media, because they were the ones who, you know, were committed to truthful news," she said. "And the second move was that he weaponized the state budget."
He weaponized it, she said, by starving dissent economically, cutting state advertising to neutral and opposition media and cancelling subsidies to non-profits that would oppose him. Orbán's party, Fidesz, controlling a two-thirds majority in the parliament, pushed through election laws that gerrymandered districts so that Fidesz could control more seats with fewer votes with each election.
The party also passed a series of other laws and constitutional amendments to consolidate power, including one that revoked the tax exempt status and privileges of more than 300 religious organizations. That law gutted their finances and forced them to move out of the country to survive economically. By the time the country's constitutional court and the European Court of Human Rights weighed in and forced an amendment to the law, it was too late. The religious organizations that remained were consolidated under Orbán who now touts himself as the defender of Christian Europe.
He has proudly described himself as the leader of a Christian "illiberal democracy" fighting against the multiculturalism and pro- immigration stances of the liberal elite in the European Union.
But as President Trump and his supporters revel in his return to power, Orbán is facing his biggest political threat since taking office and consolidating power.
That threat emerged from inside his own party. Peter Magyar, the husband of the former justice minister and a party loyalist, broke with Orbán to lead an opposition party that could very well win the election next year and break Orbán's control of the state.
"It's the first time in the last 15 years that you have a real chance to change the situation," said Bálint Magyar, a former education minister and a leading Hungarian sociologist at the Democracy Institute at Central European University.
He's fiercely critical of what he calls a criminal mafia style autocracy under Orbán that enriches and empowers the prime minister and his closest allies.
"The situation is now different with this emerging new movement," Magyar said.
It's why he worries, as many Hungarians say they do, that somehow the government will find a way to stop Peter Magyar's party from running in the election next year.
Orbán still has the support of many Hungarians though. That becomes more and more visible the farther you go outside the capital where Orbán's policies have brought construction projects to these rural areas. Those created jobs and brought new infrastructure, like hospitals. His funding model uses money from the European Union to bolster his party's interests as he accuses the EU of meddling in Hungary's domestic affairs.
Meanwhile, the European Union is trying to pressure Orbán to reverse anti-democratic measures he's taken by withholding billions of dollars in grants allocated for Hungary's poorest regions. It's also been excluded from an EU-funded student exchange program with other European universities.
Hungary's future
All of this weighs on the minds of young Hungarians charting their futures.
And that's apparent as soon as you step into the classrooms at the Engame Academy in Budapest. It offers after school classes to students who are learning English and preparing to study abroad.
Rita Nadas is the head of education at the academy, which also does research on why Hungarian students choose to study abroad. In 2017, the main reason students went abroad was the quality of the universities and the quality of life that came with the degrees from higher education in other parts of Europe or the U.S. But that's changed now.
"These still are very important factors. But the most important factor that most students also chose in the study was politics in Hungary and life in Hungary in the public sphere," she said. "So the push factor has also appeared as getting away from this political era."
A political era that has grown more restrictive and less open, she said, under Orbán and one she senses might now feel somewhat familiar to Americans.
"We have been living in what you are living now since Trump for the past 15 years. Everything that is happening now in the U.S., we have been living it," she said. "So we are talking about the Orbán government, which is methodically trying to stifle criticism. We experience it day by day. This means a very heavy centralization of education, the scrapping of the Ministry of Education. I think this sounds very familiar to you?"
She doesn't see the Orbán model as one to emulate. Here, she said, she now lives with only the scaffolding of democracy.
"We can vote. Right? And there are no black cars pulling up outside at night like we used to have in the '50s," she said. "Compared to that, this is a democracy. But what we would call a liberal democracy, it's very far from it."
The stifling of dissent shows up in subtle ways.
"It's having your favorite newspaper shut down," she said.
"It's seeing people being afraid to post online if they are working in the public sphere. It's my son asking me if it's OK for him to wear a girlie T-shirt or something in pink and then go outside." she said. "What do I say?"
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