More Hungarian election fallout. Here’s a great analysis by Jeremy Carl, who spent five weeks in Budapest this spring on a research fellowship. Excerpts:

Simply put, Orbán offers the most prominent example in the world of a conservative politician who has unapologetically and effectively used the state for right-wing ends, something that the American Right has been almost wholly ineffective at accomplishing, and is often unsure it even wants to try.

While much of the GOP establishment (and establishment think tanks) talk airily of our high principles, the Left has run roughshod over us, subjecting traditionalist Americans to indignities that could never even have been imagined by our forefathers. If we are being brutally honest, we could not have imagined these indignities ourselves just 10 or 20 years ago.

As a result of his success, the Left and our left-wing media brands Orbán a “strongman” a “dictator” and an “authoritarian,” though Hungary regularly conducts free elections and Orbán is subject to scathing criticisms in many press outlets freely available in Hungary. The lists of the so-called abuses by Orbán from the Left are amusing because, for the most part, they amount to left-wing frustrations with being unable to achieve the things they have carried out so effectively elsewhere.

He points out, correctly, that what the Left sees as Orban’s hatred for democracy is just restoring some semblance of ideological balance to public life in a country whose cultural institutions and media were thoroughly dominated by the Left. When I was here last summer, I asked a public media reporter about the charge that Orban unfairly used his power to force conservatism on the media. He told me that if not for Orban, there would be zero chance that any conservative voices would ever be heard in media that is paid for by the Hungarian taxpayer. In his excellent election wrap, National Review‘s John Fund, who is definitely not an Orban fan, said:

Critics claim that coverage of the election campaign was dominated by a pliant media. Tortoise Media claims “80 per cent of (Hungary’s media) is controlled by the state or oligarchs close to Orban.” But opposition figures privately admitted to me that when one measures media influence by the size of its audience rather than the number of outlets, the opposition had plenty of access.

This is something you never see in the Western media reports: the anti-Orban media reach far more people than the pro-Orban media do. American liberals pull the same stunt when they act like the existence of Fox News somehow matches the media firepower of all three networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, and other national media.

More Carl:

Second, Orbán ran and won on an explicitly realist foreign policy that refuses to fall prey to the Ukraine mania that has afflicted so many other right-wing politicians in the West. Despite the fact that Hungary has welcomed 140,000 Ukrainian refugees, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had explicitly attacked Orbán for failing to go all-in with the most aggressive sanctions and military assistance to the Ukrainians. Orbán, in contrast, has counseled what he calls “strategic patience,” and accused his opposition of attempting to foment war with reckless rhetoric. Hungary has a long history with Russia, most notoriously a 1956 invasion by the Soviets that crushed democratizing forces. Orbán seems to have won heavily on the Ukraine issue, with voters appreciating his singular focus on Hungarian interests over and above the airy and simplified pieties of many U.S. and Western European leaders.

Today I received an e-mail from a Romanian friend I expect to see later this week on my trip there. He said he hopes I don’t get drawn into any conversations about the war when I’m in the country giving speeches. He wrote that there is a big gap between elites (identified by him as politicians, journalists, and social media influences) and the general public. The elites are promoting escalation of the conflicts, but the Romanian public is against amping up Romanian involvement. “We don’t want to go to World War III for Zelensky and NATO,” he said. He explained that Romanians favor NATO, but they are against “this hysteria, emotional idealism, and warmongering disguised as moral righteousness that we see in the media so much nowadays, that can lead to uncontrolled escalation.”

This is pretty much where the Hungarian public is — and Orban represents that. I talked to a Hungarian friend who knows Romania, and relayed my Romanian friend’s comments. Yes, he said, that’s how it is in Romania, “moreso than in Hungary. The Romanians are far more vulnerable to Russian military attack than we are.”

Carl goes on:

Fourth, Orbán unashamedly focused on delivering for his voters, overwhelmingly Hungary’s middle-class families and small-town denizens. Hungary’s pro-family policy is almost certainly the most aggressive of any advanced economy in at least a half-century, providing continuous benefits for Hungarian families far beyond those even contemplated in the United States. Family has been at the center of Orbán’s public policy efforts—not just talking a big game about social conservatism, but actually delivering it.

Further, a proposed child protection law appeared on the ballot at the same time as the parliamentary election, helping to drive more conservative voters to the polls. This proposed law, which has played out almost identically to Florida’s Parental Rights Education Bill in the United States, caused a firestorm of criticism and threats from Brussels—showing that the right to promote sodomy and transgenderism is more important to many European leaders than the Democratic rights of Hungarian voters to protect their children from adult-oriented content.

More:

In sum, Orbán won overwhelmingly with a campaign and record that was conservative, nationalist, anti-immigration, pro-traditional family, and firmly against military intervention in Ukraine. There is a lesson there for the GOP, should they be inclined to learn it.

Read all of Carl’s piece. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in the English language media about Hungary’s election.

I was hanging out talking to some Western reporters who are still in the city, but headed home soon, including TAC’s Bradley Devlin. They had not been to Hungary before, but told me that in their week or so here, they kept hearing from Hungarians that the Western media simply doesn’t know how to cover Hungary. That’s not a big surprise to me; the American media doesn’t really know how to cover Alabama. They struggle mightily with anything that doesn’t confirm their prior beliefs — such as, the concept that Hungarians really like Viktor Orban and his policies, and really don’t like the Left.

I was reminded today by a Hungarian friend of just how bad Peter Marki-Zay was as a candidate. Marki-Zay actually told this joke on a Facebook video (in Hungarian here). “Well, there’s a cute joke,” said the opposition standard bearer. “When they ask Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles, according to the joke, what it’s like to be blind, he says, ‘Well, it’s better than being black.'”

This is the kind of thing that made people think that Marki-Zay is not fit to run the country. But did you read about that in the US media coverage? No, you read about how the “pro-Putin” Orban won re-election — this, even though recently retired German Chancellor Angela Merkel was every bit as pro-Putin as Orban, and maybe even more. Germany has been Russia’s most important partner in Europe, with the past two German chancellors pushing for the Nordstream pipelines. Orban and Hungary are getting all the blame for not wanting to sanction Russia on energy, but Germany is the big kahuna on this policy. But it’s easier to blame Orban.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long:

The European Union executive started a new disciplinary procedure against Hungary on Tuesday in a step that could lead to freezing funding for Prime Minister Viktor Orban for undercutting liberal democratic rights.

Hungarians cannot be trusted with the ballot. The European Union must make them pay for not voting the correct way. This is called democracy.

Dear France, nice EU funding you have there. Sure would be a shame if you voted Marine Le Pen in as your next president.

UPDATE.2: My friend Gergely Szilvay, a Budapest journalist, shoots down the shibboleth about Orban controlling the media. Excerpt:

What, then, is the media market in Hungary, a country of 10 million?

According to media research, 6.8 million Hungarians turn to conservative outlets for information, 6.7 million to liberal sources, with 6 million reading both. Most major media companies across the political spectrum are profitable. It wasn’t always this way. When Orban and his conservative government came to power in 2010, there were 33 left-liberal media outlets, mostly foreign-owned. Now, there are 43, mostly Hungarian-owned. There are also five new, right-leaning, anti-Orban outlets. Together, they represent 45% growth of the anti-government, politically relevant media on Orban’s watch.

Is that what a government takeover of the media looks like?

All top media outlets are liberal. Out of 29 left-wing and 11 conservative online news portals, three liberal outlets — 24.hu, Telex, 444 — consistently rank highest in readership. There are three conservative and two liberal TV stations. As elsewhere in Europe, there is a major state-owned Hungarian television network, the MTVA (“Royal TV”), run by government appointees. The left-leaning RTL Klub TV attracts the most viewers. In radio news, five stations lean conservative, four are liberal, and one centrist. In print, there are five conservative and three liberal dailies on offer — left-leaning Blikk and Nepszava have the highest readership. Among the weeklies, out of four conservative and six liberal titles, anti-government HVG and Magyar Narancs enjoy the biggest audience.

Despite the Hungarian media market’s dynamic growth over the last 12 years, there have been losers, too. Before 2010, the ownership was predominantly foreign, mostly German. Following a flurry of domestic acquisitions, media companies are now 95% Hungarian-owned, although the 5% remaining in foreign hands represent one-third of the market by income and profit.

Ironically, the government-takeover-of-the-media narrative comes not from the oppressed Hungarians, but from foreign-owned outlets whose control over Hungary’s media market was successfully challenged by local players after Orban’s Fidesz came to power.

The result? In Hungary, you can criticize migration, Islam, or the LGBT-movement; you can question liberal pieties. And/or you can openly and loudly oppose the conservative government.