Viktor Orban’s defeat has sparked a collective outcry across Europe and beyond. Following closely on the heels of the departure of former President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the death of the Hungarian hero appears to mark the beginning of the end of the latest era of strongmen.
This, however, would be a dangerous misreading of world trends.
The Hungarian specifics should already warn us against an overly optimistic reading. Peter Magyar was an insider who campaigned on a restricted message-There is still much, some might say a surprising amount, of what we do not know about his politics. Finally, it seems, cost of living topics were central and bring voters on board for change. It is questionable to what extent the Hungarian transition model can be replicated in other regions. Would Turkish voters, for example, flock to such a narrow platform?
Never mind that Magyar commands a majority in parliament and can now dismantle the Orbanist system—focusing too much on Hungarian mechanics can lull us into a false sense of security. First of all, there are still many countries with wannabe strongmen trying lessons from the playbook: Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Georgia are sometimes mentioned in this context.
And there are still many stable around. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the middle. But what’s more: the “freedom playbook” is not dead; it is revised and updated.
The powerful entrenched in power are no doubt thinking a lot about Orban these weeks. Instead of gently encouraging them to moderate, the collapse of Orban and Bolsonaro is likely pushing them towards more centralism and more extreme measures. There can be a feeling of fear, even.
At the heart of this fear is what I call the “exit crisis.”
Many articles and lessons are written and constantly updated in the genius playbook. One thing that is missing so far is the image of leaving power. It’s an exit problem, and it’s true enough: Once you’ve broken institutions, enriched yourself and your cronies, and bent the law to your will, you can’t just lose an election and retire to write your memoirs. If anything, Orban is the exception that proves the rule. For a powerful person, the threat of judicial torture exists.
By far, Russian President Vladimir Putin is the most prominent politician to attempt an easy exit. to give oneself up life seat in the Russian upper house and immunity. It sounds like a sensible solution to the exit problem, but as Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had copied Putin’s soft exit approach, recently discovered, it suffers from a fatal conceptual flaw. What if the next person in power just repeals the construction of life immunity? This happened to Nazarbayev in 2023, when his family was stripped of legal immunity and his own immunity and powers were reduced.
Finally, paper shields do not solve the exit problem. To understand how this trap is being passed in real time, we must look at the scene unfolding before our eyes right now.
More than Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Orban, or Bolsonaro, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan embodies the full range of transition from liberal reformer to nationalist and authoritarian. In power for 23 years, he is one of the pioneers of the 21st century populist wave. He has shown himself to be very flexible, rarely letting a good problem slip away as he continues to reorganize his voter base—and. Constitution of Turkeyfor that matter.
Early on, he dismissed his liberal and reform-minded supporters. Later, he alienated many of his Kurdish voters when he deliberately predicted a historic solution to the Kurdish conflict join forces with nationalists—perhaps known enough to be near-fascists—to obtain the necessary majority to install himself as an all-powerful “president.”
Erdogan has fully exploited the failed coup of 2016 against him by purging real and perceived enemies. Much better 100,000 people they have lost their jobs, and tens of thousands they have landed in prison. Charismatic leaders of the opposition and civil society such as Ekrem Imamoglu and Osman Kavala have also been isolation by isolation in the prison system.
Erdogan also regularly intimidates critics—from prominent journalists to young people on social media—in thousands of civil cases for what is called defamation. Government institutions, from the judiciary and civil administration to the military and police, have been filled with loyalists. And finally, the mediascape is completely dominated by pro-Erdogan outlets, many in the hands of his supporters.
However, despite the almost total arrest of this institution, Erdogan never gets what he wants and often even what he needs in national elections. He has never crossed the kind of invisible barrier that hovers above 50 percent support. Indeed, the share of his Justice and Development Party in the vote has been declining. In the parliamentary elections of 2023, Erdogan’s party received only 35.6 percent of the vote. It is a good testimony of the democratic courage of the Turkish society.
This resilience becomes an urgent issue for Erdogan. His presidential term ends in May 2028. According to the constitution he created, a person can serve only two terms as president—it was a key selling point of the system against those who questioned that Erdogan was planning for life.
There is a loophole: dissolve parliament before the current term ends, triggering early elections and allowing Erdogan to run for another term—in which case, the incomplete term won’t count. But here is the catch. For this, he needs a three-fifths vote in parliament—which he doesn’t have.
We don’t know enough about Erdogan’s personal finances to fully assess the opposition’s allegations of corruption and illicit wealth. However, leaked records and the mountain of circumstantial evidence they show that he is very afraid of being prosecuted if he falls from power.
Given that the loss of power could mean imprisonment or exile, Erdogan withdraws. If he can no longer rely on economic populism, he is building an alternative defense. On the one hand, he has SADAT, a private military contractor that operates as Erdogan’s version of Russia’s Wagner Group. On the other hand, there are new street militia networks like the Ottoman Base—a non-radical, unofficial militia fiercely loyal to Erdogan, willing to act as his political enforcers outside of traditional state institutions.
However the problems of Erdogan’s departure are resolved, he is already signaling that he is afraid. Imamoglu, the benevolent mayor of Istanbul, now he is in jail. After an earlier attempt to imprison him in 2022 failed to sideline him, he is now facing frivolous charges and faces a prison term of more than 2,000 years. As if that was not enough, the government authorities recently to be revoked his university diploma, and for this, he was deprived of the constitutional requirement to run for president.
The Republican People’s Party, Imamoglu’s party – which was also, of course, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s party – suffered a backlash in May after the court. he announced the results of his 2023 party congress are “completely invalid.” The fact that the recently appointed “repeated” leadership of the congress had made a strong showing of electoral strength was too great a threat to ignore.
The next phase of Erdogan’s direction is clear: He has a strong tendency toward increasingly dangerous solutions. He has long promoted the discourse on “game”—this refers to an international conspiracy against Turkey and is often powerful undertones of antisemitic. It is a very interesting structure that can include European countries and the United States as well as domestic opposition that acts as people who know or do not know in the “game.” It is a powerful tool that helps to recognize him as the only possible savior; it is also the basis of the debate not only to disparage any opposition but also to annul the results of the next election.
Erdogan has also been increasing his foreign policy rhetoric. It’s been a long time, it seems his days”zero problems with neighborsThese days, Erdogan repeatedly insists that Turkey is bigger than its borders and that Ankara has a legitimate role in shaping the fate of neighboring countries. His remarks on Israel have reached new levels of assertiveness, turning into open hostility. Israeli operations in Syria and Lebanon as existing threats to Turkey itself. Similarly, Ankara’s voice towards Greece is frequent gets into trouble. All this is mainly to meet the basis that he has been emphasizing on these topics for years. But it can be used for more.
None of these it means that Erdogan will use conflict and war as a way to stay in power. But given the way the Kurdish issue played out, it may not be off the table. His alliance with more extreme nationalists makes the situation even more volatile. Prolonged wars and conflicts have served Netanyahu to establish his hold over Israeli society. (Though his coalition, too, is banging its head against that imaginary wall of nearly 50 percent of the vote.) Perhaps Erdogan will take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook.
Whatever comes next, the world is just entering a new phase in the age of the mighty man.
