I know some of you are tired of reading about Viktor Orban and Hungary, but have faith: the election will be held on Sunday, after which there will be much less posting on the topic, probably. I’m headed home to the US on April 30.

I want to share this long Politico piece about the election with you, because it’s such a classic example of how the Western media simply do not get Hungary and Orban, and misinform their readership. Should Orban win on Sunday, people like this reporter will assume that it’s because Orban cheated, or something. Their worldview cannot abide any other explanation. The URL for the piece gives the game away: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/31/hungary-minority-parties-take-down-orban-00021897 — “Hungary Minority Parties Take Down Orban”. The election hasn’t even happened yet, and Politico has declared Orban taken down. Right.

To be sure, Orban and his ruling party face their toughest election since coming to power in 2010. As regular readers of this blog know, when I left here late last summer, almost everyone I knew in Fidesz was really anxious about the 2022 election. Twelve years is a very long time for a political party to be in power in a parliamentary democracy, and most Fidesz folks figured that they had had a good run, but things were coming to an end.

It’s been eye-rolling for me to read since then the standard speculation in the Western media that Orban The Autocrat would not leave office were he to be defeated. They simply cannot imagine that Orban really is a democrat, and if he were to lose the election, there would be no hesitation on his part to do his constitutional duty and step aside. In a true autocracy, leaders don’t worry about elections. I don’t know the prime minister, but I do know a lot of people around him, and last fall, they were sweating out the coming April 3 vote.

But when I returned in February, I found my Fidesz friends surprisingly hopeful. Why? The united opposition, led by Peter Marki-Zay, had proven to be characteristically inept at campaigning. People regaled me with stories of Marki-Zay’s campaign-trail missteps and gaffes, including saying once that Covid would give the opposition an advantage by killing off Fidesz’s elderly voters. It turns out that Marki-Zay, as mayor of a small Hungarian city, was fined multiple times by courts for shooting his mouth off in a libelous way. This is not a man who has control over what he says, and it was hurting the opposition in the polls.

Now, in the Politico piece, you get none of that. None. Trust me on this: you cannot understand this election campaign without understanding how bad the opposition has been. When Westerners like me get together, we talk about conversations we’ve had with ordinary Hungarians who go on and on about how much they hate Orban, and/or are sick of Fidesz, but who say they’re planning to vote for Fidesz because this opposition is incompetent. I had a conversation like that with a middle-aged woman on a train ride just this week back from the southern city of Szeged. It occurs to me that the Western media is missing what’s happening in this election in a similar was as they missed the 2016 Trump victory: the liberal candidate seems so obviously correct to them, and the conservative so obviously wicked, that they are blind to the serious flaws of the liberal.

In the Politico piece, you don’t find out until thirteen paragraphs in that the opposition is running significantly behind in opinion polls. Until then, it’s all been about what an awful man Viktor Orban is, and how heroic is Peter Marki-Zay. You can be forgiven for thinking: wait, what? You could also be forgiven for expecting after that point reporting on how the opposition is blowing it.

But you don’t get it. Instead, you get loads and loads of liberal hopium. Look at Orban, a Putin stooge! How can you expect liberals to fight a campaign when there are so many refugees coming in to distract our compassion?! Et cetera.

Nowhere do you see even a mention that polls show that Hungarian people overwhelmingly oppose Russia’s war on Ukraine, but also strongly back Orban’s policy of helping refugees but keeping Hungary out of the conflict as much as possible. One of the reasons the opposition hasn’t been able to capitalize much on Orban’s closeness to Putin is because most Hungarians fear that an inexperienced opposition government, one eager to please Brussels and other European capitals, would get them into a shooting war with Russia. Shouldn’t Politico‘s readers be told this fact?

You also read nothing about how heavily dependent Hungary is on Russian natural gas. They get between 80 and 85 percent of their natural gas from Russia. Hungarians aren’t fools. They don’t want to be left in the lurch because Russia has cut them off. They know that Orban knows this, and is looking out for them. Now, Westerners might think bad of the Hungarians for not being willing to freeze in the dark next winter for the Ukrainian cause, but things look a lot different from the country where people are actually going to vote on Sunday — especially given that there is no love lost for the Ukrainian government among Hungarians, given how the Zelensky government has treated the Hungarian ethnic minority in far western Ukraine.

Again: these details matter. They help explain why voters are likely to vote they way they are. But Politico ignores them. Know what you also don’t learn from the article? That the United Opposition includes the No. 2 party in the country, Jobbik, which until very recently was openly anti-Semitic. I get why the leftist parties agreed to ignore that for the sake of defeating Orban … but why does the Western media? You also get a line about how Orban “demonizes” LGBT people, without any explanation that the LGBT media and education law passed last summer is likely to be approved by national referendum on Sunday, and that many Hungarians, maybe a majority, resent the hell out of EU politicians condemning Hungary for exercising its moral right to decide how to educate its children.

You also don’t learn that the opposition is still dominated by Ferenc Gyurcsany, the unpopular former Socialist prime minister, who represents the former Communist ruling class. Gyurcsany was a Communist youth movement leader who got very, very rich in the 1990s, after his totalitarian party lost power. Orban beat Gyurcsany in 2010, with the Hungarian economy on the brink of collapse due to mismanagement. People’s living standards here have grown remarkably over the last decade. It is not surprising that Hungarians would be reluctant to hand power back over to the Gyurcsany-dominated Left — particularly since the Orban-Gyurcsany rivalry reminds voters who lived under Communism and its immediate aftermath what they hate about the way the well-connected former Communists not only failed to answer for their crimes, but did quite well in the aftermath of dictatorship’s fall.

Granted, a relatively short election piece can’t cover all the bases, but shouldn’t it at least try to cover some of those that help explain why Fidesz is doing remarkably well for a party so long in power? The only Fidesz-friendly voice in the whole piece is a pro forma quote from the top government spokesman. Take a look at this anecdote, which is a perfect example of how the Western media cover this country:

Bolla got involved with Nyomtass Te Is after spending Election Day 2018 as a poll worker in the countryside. After interacting with so many friendly voters, she was optimistic the opposition parties could make real gains — but when she counted the votes at the end of the day, nearly all the villagers had voted for Fidesz. “I thought, what’s happening with these people? We all live in the same country,” she told me as we drove toward Fehérvárcsurgó, stacks of newsletters nestled next to me in the back seat. The difference between her and them, she deduced, was in their lack of independent information.

Ah, of course! Stupid hicks who don’t know what’s good for them. What’s the matter with Fehérvárcsurgó, anyway? Bunch of bitter clingers, sounds to me like.

The final graf pre-absolves the opposition of failure:

Márki-Zay acknowledged the tough odds his movement faces, even as he said he was hopeful the voters would come through for him and his movement. “Obviously, there’s no level playing field for the two sides,” he told me after his campaign speech. “It’s very difficult to win under such circumstances, when people’s hearts are poisoned.”

Well, okay, I understand why a beleaguered opposition candidate would say and think such a thing. But why would a professional journalist — not an opinion journalist, but a reporter — be so willing to buy it? The answer is throughout the story: the writer, Emily Schultheis, knew the story she wanted to tell before she set foot in Hungary, and looked for facts to fit around the narrative. And so, should Fidesz win on Sunday, the liberal media already have their answer for why: Orban poisoned people’s hearts. Maybe they’ll even say it was Russian disinformation. Anything but facing the fact that the opposition has had twelve years to get its act together, and still can’t perform.

That’s the opposition’s problem. What’s the Western media’s excuse? It is really quite something that they keep misreading the world, and yet never, ever once seem to question their own biases. They think anybody who disagrees with them has to be illegitimate. They keep doing this and doing this, but never learn.