From what I can see out there on the internet, it's more than just the media - Orban's cronies seem to have captured the judiciary as well, which helps shield them from investigation. He also seems to be trying various tactics to suppress political opposition - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/23/orban-accused-...
I think I'm going to stick by my evaluation of 'nascent dictatorship', though perhaps 'nascent autocracy' is more accurate if it's not all about the one man. And it does seem to be widely acknowledged that democracy has been undermined there, to the point it doesn't function.
> I can tell you that Orban and his cronies run a variety of misinformation campaigns [in Hungary], but nothing related to cryptography.
Yeah fair enough, it seems that a lot of other governments are all in on this sort of thing, and the headline is particularly misleading.
Yes, this is true unfortunately. On the other hand, most of our political opposition [1] was so lame that Orban's baseline tactic was pretty much to just let them do their thing, and that repeatedly led to these parties to self-destruct.
To be clear, the situation in Hungary is shit, but it's not a dictatorship..
[1] between 2010 to 2023, before the new 2024 wave with Peter Magyar and his new Tisza party
Yeah, exactly: in Hungary. The rest of the world is bigger than Hungary, so the terms used in the rest of the world are more wide-spread than those used in Hungary.
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[1]: And Hungarians in general as right-wing nutjobs for keeping re-electing him. The only thing the rest of us Europeans don't get is: Why don't you get rid of him while it's still legally possible to do so?
Having said that, Hungary is still not a dictatorship, inside or outside Hungary, per the Democracy_Index [1]. Your country, Finland, with 9.3, has one of the highest scores! Congrats, you have come a long way since the Cold War ended. Hungary has a significantly lower score at 6.7, which makes it a "Flawed democracy". If you check this list, you will find lots of other european countries in the "Flawed democracy" bucket, and with a lower score than Hungary.
"And Hungarians in general as right-wing nutjobs for keeping re-electing him" - I'm not offended by this, but surely you know that no country is a homogeneous set of people. Very roughly, Hungary has about 9.6M people, 8.2M in the voting age, in the 2022 election 5.7M voted, and about 3M of those voted for Orban, unfortunately [2]. (Among them was much of my family I'm afraid.) But you see, there are 5.2M people in the voting pool who did not vote for Orban, so it's not true that hungarians in general are "right-wing nutjobs".
Having said that I have a pretty low opinion of a significant portion of my Hungarian countrymen, but not specifically because they're all "right-wing nutjobs". I would say the root problem is that they (like Trump voters in the US) have access to an infinite stream of information on the Internet, some of it high-quality, some of it low-quality and misleading, and they should be smart enough to tell signal from the noise, inform themselves and have reasonable opinions.
"Why don't you get rid of him while it's still legally possible to do so?" - Naturally you don't follow Hungarian politics, but the way 2024 has been going so far, I strongly suspect that Orban will at a minimum lose his 2/3 majority in 2026, possibly the election. He and his cronies are making a lot of mistakes, there are scandals happening almost every week now. There is now a singular opposition party called "Tisza" which has about the same ~40% support as Orban today (so both are at roughly 40%). The only problem is, this new opposition party is so far a one-man show by a guy [3] who used to be in Orban's Fidesz party. So although he probably wouldn't be as bad as Orban, esp. at the beginning, he would still be right-wing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
[2] https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022-es_magyarorsz%C3%A1gi_ors...
[3] https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyar_P%C3%A9ter_(jog%C3%A1sz...
He has a 2/3 majority?!? And won't (possibly) lose it until 2026? How long has it been known that he's a raging nutjob and asshole -- one decade, or several? Possibly losing his huge majority in over a year from now... That's far too little, far too late.
> But you see, there are 5.2M people in the voting pool who did not vote for Orban, so it's not true that hungarians in general are "right-wing nutjobs".
Enough of them are indifferent enough to right-wing nutjobbery not to vote against Orban's right-wing nutjobbery, which makes them enablers of him and it.
Over time I've come to think that all peoples are in the end responsible for their own leadership: If a majority of the people is against oppression, then they should vote against it. If they can't vote, they should rise in revolution. If they don't, they're not sufficiently against it to warrant being called civilised.
That's why Germans carried (and to some extent still carry?) a collective responsibility for Nazism (and anew do so for the AfD and BSW nutjobs they're voting into power nowadays); why Russians carry a collective responsibility for Putin (and before him, for Stalin. And Ivan IV); and why Hungarians carry a collective responsibility for Orban.
IMO.
I'm Hungarian, I hate Orban [1], but your comment is not accurate. It's not "widely acknowledged" and nobody is seriously using the word "dictatorship" to describe Hungary or Orban's regime, including Orban's fiercest opponents [in Hungary]. We have had various forms of dictatorships in Hungary, and this isn't one of them.
What we have today is most commonly referred to as an authoritarian form of democracy. But we have elections every 4 years, and if people were to vote against Orban, he'd be gone. The last one, in 2022, there were 20k opposition observers in the voting offices and they certified that everything was legit. Having said that there are multiple aspects that make the elections unfair. As we say in Hungary, the "football field is tilted to favor one side". For example, the election map is heavily optimized to favor Orban. Or, state media and 100% of state funds has been captured by Orban to run his misinformation campaigns, which does mean that by the time elections come, a significant % of the population has been indoctrinated and brainwashed. And so on.. But still, it's not a dictatorship. It's just that people are stupid, just as in every country, and unfortunately in 2010 Orban received a 2/3 majority which he used to accomplish the initial "tilt", and he's masterfully kept it up ever since.
Why is Hungary not a dictatorship? Your personal freedoms are not in danger, nobody has ever been killed or even hurt for political reasons in Hungary (unlike Russia). We have freedom of speech, you can go in front of the parliament building and say the nastiest things about Orban, and you'll be fine (unlike in Russia). We have opposition parties, who according to their seats in parliament receive state funding. We have fairly conducted and counted elections (unlike in Russia). We have tons of opposition media and they are free to operate, eg. the biggest Hungarian language political Youtube channels are opposition.
However, Hungary is definitely not a healthy democracy. We have widespread corruption wrt state funds. We have a significant imbalance in media reach in favor Orban. Orban is more than willing to run toxis misinformation campaigns and seed division and hatred that will take many years, possibly generations, to weed out. And, for still unknown reasons, Orban is in bed with Putin and runs Russian misinformation campaigns in Hungary. And so on..
Related to the OP, I can tell you that Orban and his cronies run a variety of misinformation campaigns [in Hungary], but nothing related to cryptography.
[1] https://bytepawn.com/why-i-dont-live-in-hungary.html