If you read our earlier piece, The Lion, the Mouse, and the American Quisling, you know the broad outlines. Orbán cozied up to Putin. American conservatives praised him. Trump endorsed him.
But it deserves a deeper look - we want to make a specific argument: that the people who praised Viktor Orbán weren’t making an excusable mistake or an ideological miscalculation. They were endorsing something they knew was rotten to the core.
So before we get to them - and we will - let’s spend a moment to review what the Orbán regime actually was.
It was corruption - as policy.
Not corruption as a side effect of weak institutions. Not a few bad actors skimming from the till.
One of Orbán’s own foundation presidents said the quiet part out loud: “What is called corruption is actually Fidesz’s supreme policy.” The goal, he explained, was to build a loyal class of Hungarian capitalists - eight to ten oligarchs, all tied to the prime minister.
It worked. By 2025, Hungary had become the most corrupt country in the European Union. Not second. Not close. Most corrupt. Roughly tied, on Transparency International’s index, with China and Cuba.
Here’s how it looked in practice.
István Tiborcz married Orbán’s eldest daughter in 2013. He quickly became Hungary’s 19th-wealthiest person - through public contracts, state subsidies, and suspiciously cheap credit. The EU’s anti-fraud office recommended investigation after his company won €40 million in rigged municipal lighting contracts. The same people, it turned out, had written both the tender requirements and the winning bid. Hungarian authorities found no wrongdoing.
Then there’s Lőrinc Mészáros - Orbán’s childhood friend, a former gas-fitter who became one of the richest men in Hungary. Entirely through state contracts. Everyone in Hungary knows whose money it actually is.
And then there’s the palace…
The palace with the zebras.
Constitutional scholar Kim Lane Scheppele - perhaps America’s leading expert on Hungarian democracy, who has tracked Orbán’s system since 2010 and has been something of a lonely English-language voice on this subject for years - told this story recently in a conversation with Paul Krugman that we’d encourage you to read in full. Anti-corruption campaigners discovered a palatial estate being built outside Budapest, attributed to Orbán’s father. Next door: the equally palatial home of the gas-fitter-turned-billionaire. One investigator got a ladder, climbed a fence, and took pictures over the top.
What he found grazing on the grounds were zebras.
It became the symbol of the whole regime. People showed up to opposition rallies in zebra costumes, zebra-striped shirts, with little zebra pins. Because sometimes one image captures what a corruption index cannot.
Meanwhile, the hospitals didn’t have toilet paper.
That’s not a metaphor. Opposition leader Péter Magyar would walk into hospitals with a camera crew and document the peeling paint, the empty supply closets. The pandemic exposed what years of looting had done to Hungary’s health system. The death rate was severe. Orbán put the military in charge of hospitals - not to help, but to prevent information from leaking out.
The money went somewhere. It just didn’t go there.
And, meanwhile, the favors flowed toward Moscow. A leaked recording revealed Orbán telling Vladimir Putin: “You are the lion and we are the mouse. In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”
His foreign minister had been calling Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov after every European Council meeting - disclosing what European leaders said behind closed doors as they tried to coordinate a response to the invasion of Ukraine.
The EU eventually cut approximately €36 billion in funds to Hungary overnight, once the misappropriation was formally documented. By then, Orbán had been siphoning roughly a quarter of all incoming EU funds directly into private pockets.
The Hungarians themselves delivered the final verdict. On April 12th, 2026, they turned out in record numbers - in a system deliberately rigged against them, with rural votes weighted to count three times as much as urban ones, with state media blanketing the airwaves, with Russian disinformation bots flooding Facebook - and threw him out in a landslide.
The first returns came in from villages that were supposed to be Orbán’s base.
They voted for the other guy.
Part Two Coming: Who in America was celebrating all of this - and calling it a model.