Hungary's nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban of the Fidesz party delivers a press statement in Budapest during a general election in Hungary, April 12. AFP-Yonhap
BUDAPEST—For 16 years, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary embodied a troubling idea: that “illiberal democracy” could be made stable and entrench itself in power. Combining electoral dominance with the systematic weakening of institutional checks and balances, Orbán appeared to solve a central dilemma of modern authoritarianism: how to win repeatedly at the ballot box while hollowing out liberal democracy. And because his model inspired admirers throughout the West (and beyond), helping to sustain a broader narrative of democratic decline, his humiliating election defeat carries implications far beyond Hungary.
The victory of Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, like the triumph of Poland’s Civic Coalition over the illiberal Law and Justice (PiS) party in 2023, represents not only a reversal of a seemingly consolidated system, but also signals that such regimes may be more fragile than they appear. The lesson is not simply that illiberal regimes can lose. It is that the very logic that sustains them can lead to their undoing.
Illiberal leaders have long justified their concentration of power by invoking the success of East Asia’s developmental states. By weakening institutional constraints, they argued, governments could act decisively, coordinate investment, and deliver economic growth.
But this analogy was always misleading. The regimes of South Korea’s Park Chung-hee or Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew were effective not because they faced fewer constraints, but because they faced more pressure. Geopolitical insecurity and the constant risk of domestic unrest forced them to deliver broad-based gains or risk collapse. Reduced accountability did not produce complacency; it produced discipline.
More generally, effective state capacity depends on constraints that discipline those in power. These can take different forms. In liberal democracies, constitutional checks and balances impose such discipline. In developmental autocracies, external and internal vulnerability provided it.
Contemporary illiberal regimes operate under very different conditions. In the absence of pressures comparable to those faced by Park and Lee, the weakening of accountability does not generate developmental capacity. Instead, it creates opportunities for rent-seeking. Power becomes a resource for maintaining political coalitions rather than for delivering public goods. A supposed strategy for strengthening state capacity turns into a system of selective distribution.
Over time, this logic erodes the economic foundations of illiberal rule. When political loyalty becomes the primary criterion for allocating resources, efficiency and innovation suffer. Public procurement rewards insiders, rather than the most productive firms. Domestic entrepreneurs face corruption, uncertainty, and limited opportunities for expansion. At the same time, growth strategies based on foreign direct investment generate employment but often fail to produce upgrading or sustained productivity gains.
That is what happened to Hungary under Orbán. As economic performance weakened, so did the regime’s capacity to sustain its supporting coalition. Slower growth narrowed the tax base and reduced the resources available for redistribution. Investment in education, health care, and social mobility stagnated. Hungarians increasingly experienced what had been presented as a system of stability as a system of closure. Large segments of the workforce faced declining prospects, stagnating wages, and limited opportunities for advancement.
At the start of Orbán’s long reign, these internal dynamics were partly masked by financial transfers from the European Union. But access to these resources became increasingly conditional on government transparency and judicial independence—precisely the forms of accountability Orbán resisted. The result was a self-imposed constraint: by rejecting external oversight, the regime limited its own access to funding.
Source: Korea Times News
