Keen On

“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn’t imagine it. And that person got more than 55% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbook — got booted out of office by the Hungarian electorate. His defeat, says Marc Loustau, Harvard PhD and fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, represents a playbook for defeating illiberalism. Orbán had rigged the electoral system so dramatically — giving the winner 1.5 votes for every vote the loser got — that when Péter Magyar got more than 55 percent of the vote, Orbán’s own system destroyed him. The gods must have their fun — Hungarian poetic justice. Orbán’s cronies, Loustau reports, are fleeing to Dubai with their hot rod car collections and ill-gotten gains from sixteen years in po