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Jennifer McCoy: Why Hungary Re-elected a Pro-Putin Regime—and What Factors May Shift That Support

“Orban faced his most serious challenge from a broad-spectrum opposition coalition,” still, he “won more popular votes than ever before,” our Research Affiliate Jennifer McCoy writes in her post for the Scholars Strategy Network.

As she argues, four reasons explain the result: “the government’s extreme media dominance, an electoral framework created to entrench the governing party’s advantage, steady economic growth and large European Union subsidies, and receptivity to Orban’s promise of safety and security spurred by fears of the nearby war.”

“Up to now, Orban has successfully threaded the needle between his EU and NATO membership and his decades-long pivot toward Putin, including an extreme dependence on Russian oil, gas and a planned nuclear power plant,” she writes, adding that “Orban is increasingly politically isolated in Europe, and now for the first time a real threat to cut Hungary’s access to subsidies under a new rule of law conditionality has emerged. With the war raging in Ukraine, however, it is unclear whether the European Council will garner the qualified majority required to punish Hungary.”

Read the full post here.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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