Episode Details

More than a year ago I interviewed my old friend and colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, a constitutional scholar who speaks Hungarian and knows Hungary, about the march of autocracy. Now, suddenly, a much happier occasion. I found her account of how this happened startling — a lot I didn’t know, even though I’ve been following the news obsessively. And some of it is wild. Here’s a transcript:

. . .

TRANSCRIPT: Paul Krugman in Conversation with Kim Lane Scheppele

(recorded 4/16/26)

Paul Krugman: Going back after a number of months to Kim Lane Scheppele, my former office neighbor at Princeton and I think we can safely say America’s leading constitutional scholar who also knows Hungary and speaks Magyar, although you’re probably the only one.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Sorry to interrupt you, but the language is Magyar nyelv, and Magyar, the name of the person we’re going to be talking about, who’s also the new prime minister, means Hungarian. That’s your Hungarian lesson for the day. Ha!

Krugman: Oh, wow. Thanks. I would have gotten that all wrong. All right. Well, anyway, as you say, it’s been quite a week. You were on this case on my blog starting in 2010, but I think we want to just talk about first reactions to this extraordinary election on Sunday.

Scheppele: Well, yeah. It’s been hard to even comprehend the magnitude of this. I mean, not only did Péter Magyar win this election, but he won the election overwhelmingly in a rigged system. And so that’s the miracle magic of it. It turns out that Viktor Orbán had rigged the election rules so that only he could win. And the shortcut of what he did was that essentially a vote in the countryside counted three times as much as a vote in the cities. And what he counted on was that usually, if you get a challenger to a right-wing autocrat, they’re all going to be liberals, right? They’re all going to get their votes from the cities, from the educated populations. And Orban had a lock on the countryside. And then he put all the weight of the system on counting his people more than others. So Peter Magyar spent the last two years going out to villages, just meeting all of these people in person and getting around the fact that Orban also controlled all the media. So the media was rigged, the election system was rigged. And when the vote came in on Sunday, he was at 15 to 20 points ahead in the polls.

Krugman: Right.

Scheppele: But that did not guarantee he was going to win. And it did not guarantee that he was going to win by the majority. And so when the numbers started piling up, like I was watching the early returns and the early returns were coming in from villages that should have been the Orban vote. And it was a Tisza vote, it was a Peter Magyar vote. And so you knew just from the first 2 or 3% of the vote that it was going to be overwhelming. And sure enough, the whole evening the results came in and Peter Magyar won. It might shift a little bit, 1 or 2 numbers now, but about 138 seats out of the 199 seats in the parliament, and Orban had to concede. There was just no way that he could even claim fraud or try to do anything to change it, because he just didn’t have votes come in from anywhere.

Krugman: Okay, it’s funny but that’s the first clear explanation I’ve gotten of how the rigging worked. Because the reporting has been pretty vague. And, you know, there’s still a fair number of people saying, “oh, it can’t really have been rigged, because after all, he lost.”

Scheppele: Yeah. No, it was so rigged. I mean, literally, Orban rewrote all the rules in 2015. And, Paul, I need to give you a shout out here because, you know, Americans didn’t