The end of history comes for Viktor Orbán
Hungary's landslide rejection of "illiberal democracy."
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Where be your populism now?
In Francis Fukuyama’s widely misunderstood but prescient “The End of History and the Last Man,” published in 1992, liberal democracy stood alone as the politics of the future. After the collapse of Soviet Communism, there was no plausible competitor for an internationally exportable ideology of more perfect governance. Radical local experiments would continue under regional pariahs like North Korea, Cuba or Iran. But even a major power like China was marketizing and headed toward membership in the World Trade Organization, a capitalist brother among brothers.
This new internationalist world of open governments, balancing ambitions of liberty and equality, resembled Hegel’s dream of the perfect freedom: citizenship under a free and rational state, heralding the end of human “History” as a philosophical progression. There were no more viable dreams of alternative world systems, other total options. Maybe humanity had woken up.
And yet. Fukuyama’s warning in 1992, borrowed from Nietzsche, was that something in human nature tended toward dissatisfaction, even under regimes of peace, prosperity and civil liberties. Someday liberal democracy itself could be seen again as the enemy of human satisfaction. But by who? Fukuyama predicted liberal democracy’s most dangerous challenger would be an inchoate but revitalized right-wing nationalist movement, a return to tribalism in the global village. Fukuyama was right.
The past two decades has indeed seen the rise of another transnational ideology vying to compete with liberal democracy, most perfectly embodied and aggressively exported by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party.
This paradoxically elite-led, global movement toward nationalist nativism — sometimes called “populism,” and which Orbán himself called “illiberal” democracy — tended to come to power through alliances with an increasingly resentful disempowered working class, for whom liberal democrats could not plausibly offer the heroic narratives and political power once promised by socialism.
Thanks to liberal capitalism’s miraculous ability to transport jobs, goods and capital across borders, unions were crushed, factory work exported, and the material foundations for working-class power were traded in for the racist consolations of blaming immigrants for problems caused by international capital flows. Investment capital gravitationally dragged toward Global South countries with lower wage standards and even lower rates of unionization, returning home in the form of increasingly untaxed capital income for elites, rather than wages or social welfare programs for postindustrial workers pushed toward lower-margin service sector jobs. Civic life hollowed out. Mass electoral participation declined either out of boredom or a sense of pointlessness.
These were ripe conditions for populist conflict entrepreneurs who could reconfigure the old class conflict along educational (and increasingly gender) lines. Liberals and their increasingly university-educated families, perceived by the right as the biggest domestic winners of this new global order alongside immigrants, were useful political punching bags. So was the “liberal” media. Told in any language, this message could travel anywhere the conditions of “end of History” liberalism had taken hold, which was basically everywhere. It even inspired some political tourism.
“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left,” Orbán told American Republicans in 2022, when the Conservative Political Action Conference made a notable choice to visit Budapest. “The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.” This was part of Viktor’s secret sauce and his story of more than a decade of increasingly illiberal domination: Allow allies to buy up and merge the independent media, turn domestic institutions into partisan puppets, consolidate power wherever possible into a dense mass of control concentrated around the leader. Thus Orbán had miraculously turned back the clock on the left’s indomitable narrative of global progress. Donald Trump’s 2016 election to the U.S. presidency, and most stunningly his 2024 re-election, seemed to ratify the Orbán agenda as an alternative future.
Yet if there’s anything 2026 has demonstrated, it’s that nationalist nativists are no better equipped to resolve the contradictions of modern consumer societies than the liberal democrats they wanted to replace. In a world of capital dominance, capitalist discipline will eventually come for us all, like they just did for Orbán, as Foreign Affairs recently detailed:
The economic foundation began to shake in December 2022, when the EU froze more than half of Hungary’s allocated funds over alleged violations of the rule of law. At the same time, the slow global recovery from the pandemic and the government’s anticompetitive policies pushed the economy into stagnation, and inflation surged into double digits. This strained the regime’s network of dependencies: as the budget tightened, low-level members lost access to resources as Orban channeled funds upward. In 2025, [Orban ally Lorinc] Meszaros’s fortune grew by approximately $1.5 billion; Hungary’s GDP increased by less than half that amount.
By the same mechanism that strongmen remove the checks on their power, they remove the guardrails against the political and economic crises that would be their own downfall. One of the basic tenets of Fukuyama Theory, as I would call it, is that autocracy makes you brittle, blind and ultimately vulnerable to democracy’s return: The strongman creates a skill issue for himself. When people yell at you about their problems, electoral democracy’s survival instinct is to fix the problems, not to stop the yelling.
Yet the story about Orbán up until now was that he had found some radical new path, a master of fracturing his opposition and erecting a permanent base of populist power, based on plebiscite and a kind of mind-control apparatus via party-controlled media. But the overwhelming plebiscitary victory by Peter Magyar’s opposition Tisza Party suggests, via a massive surge in turnout, that we’ve been getting the Orbán story wrong. His ideological successor Trump, too, is mired with ever-lower approval ratings and has wandered into a war with Iran that the U.S., remarkably, does not seem to be winning. Perhaps we blew the whistle too early on calling liberal democracy the End of History. But a smarter projection of our next 30 years will need to explain why Orbán now belongs to the past more than the future.
He's another right wing asshole and the European Nazis are thrilled.