From Hungary to the US, Never Give Up on Elections. Reflections on the power and meaning of election
Posted by Sia on April 14, 2026, 4:42 am ADMIN
From Hungary to the US, Never Give Up on Elections. Reflections on the power and meaning of elections;
by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Jocelyn Benson - Apr 14 _______________ Reflections on Elections: Your Vote is Your Voice, and Your Voice can Change the World
Hungary made history on Sunday, with opposition politician Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party achieving support at the polls sufficient to cause strongman Viktor Orban to concede defeat. This is no small thing, given that losing an election and then refusing to leave office, declaring that the election results were marred by fraud, has been a favorite autocrat trick.
In the last decade, this trick has been tried by Yahya Jammeh (Gambia, 2016), Donald Trump (USA, 2020), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil, 2022), and Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela, 2024). Jammeh was eventually removed by force, and Bolsonaro was held accountable and is serving a long prison term.
Trump even incited a coup attempt to remain in power, but was allowed to run for President again. As for Maduro, he was removed from power, not by the Venezuelan people, but by Trump, who wanted Venezuela’s oil. Otherwise, Maduro would very likely still be in office.
When leaders become entrenched in power, having had time to bind elites to them through shared networks of illicit profits, and government institutions have been filled with loyalists and corrupt political operatives, it is hard to remove them.
Orban had been in office for 16 years, long enough to transform the Hungarian state into an illiberal entity that had the main goal —other than doing Putin’s bidding—of maintaining him in office so he and his family and cronies could profit while Hungarians suffered.
Orban: Made in Hungary, America, and Russia
Foiling Autocratic Media Capture
Hungary is an example of the effects of media capture on election results. In a spectacular 2018 mass genuflection, media luminaries in Orban’s Hungary “donated” almost 500 media properties to a government-allied foundation. In parliamentary elections in 2018 and in 2022, opposition politicians’ views did not even reach large groups of voters.
But Magyar found a way around people only hearing the news the government wanted them to hear: he went to them, and spoke to them directly. For two years he toured Hungary, visiting hundreds of towns, some repeatedly, and visiting almost all Hungarian parishes. Like Ekrem Imamlogu in his 2019 campaign, and Zohran Mamdani in 2025, Magyar practiced an embodied politics, walking with people, touching them, posing for photos, and bringing optimistic messages that bolstered confidence after years of uncaring government.
As a former politician in Orban’s party, Magyar knew from the inside those he had to now win over, and his conservative views probably helped him with the rural voters who voted for him in unexpectedly high numbers.
Magyar’s party Tisza translates as Respect and Freedom, and while autocrats are always appropriating the latter word, promising freedom from Communism or Jews or “the radical left” or immigrants, it is the former word they have trouble saying.
Hungary is the latest country to vote out an individual who showed with his thieving and lying that he did not respect the people. Whatever awaits Magyar’s government, which has a difficult task of rebuilding Hungary as a democratic nation, those who voted for Tisza did so with the hope they would be liberated from someone who scorned them and used them.
This is why we never give up on elections. This is why we must always have confidence that things can change —because we bring about that change with our votes.
America can do this too.
Americans are Registering to Vote in Record Numbers
Read this announcement from Vote.org, the nation’s largest nonpartisan, nonprofit voter registration and engagement platform:
Vote.org announced record-breaking registrations in the first quarter of 2026, helping 131,676 voters register to vote – the highest total in a midterm year in organization history. The figure is more than four times the total new registrations from the first quarter of 2022, the last comparable midterm year.
Nearly 40% of individuals who used the platform to register to vote were 18-years-old, and 82% were under the age of 35, underscoring the platform’s continued strength with younger voters and reflecting a growing wave of youth civic engagement heading into a pivotal election year.
We know that corruption, autocratic overreach, and economic hardship have fueled protests all over the world in recent years. All of this is likely fueling the surge in voter registration.
And we know that Democrats in the United States have to come up with platforms that make people feel respected and cared for as they also address the distress and difficulty that cuts to social assistance, corruption, brutality, and neglect by the Trump administration have created. My Conversation with Jocelyn Benson on elections and good governance
That’s why I was so pleased to hear Jocelyn Benson, who is Michigan’s Secretary of State and is now running for Governor there, talk about affordability as a central platform and also connect the dots between economic health and democracy.
We talked about how affordability agendas are enhanced and linked to accountability: incompetent governments that raise costs for businesses and cause shortages of professionals are not good for the economy. Corruption also drives up costs.
Voting out those who want to silence and impoverish us is the best thing we can do for our future. Voting out those who are taking away our benefits and using our tax dollars for repression at home and abroad is how we help our economy and our nation.
We talked about how to protect free and fair elections and counter authoritarian aggressions that have an impact on our daily lives. Today we are seeing with new eyes the value of government, what our elected officials can do for us, and the stakes of policies that those we have elected to represent us promulgate.
If you know someone who is not registered to vote, or has never voted, talk with them, telling them: your vote is your voice, and your voice can make a difference. Just look at Hungary.
THEY began the practice of outsourcing and offshoring, selling out the American worker for their profits.
You once heard it anytime you needed customer service, and waded through the accented English of an Indian national.
Now we get it from AI, that even undercut those foreign workers for even more profit to the American oligarchs. You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
on April 14, 2026, 4:42 am
