It's the Corruption, Stupid -- With Orban and Trump

Joe Conason
Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:38:57 -0700
Opinion

The humiliating demise of Viktor Orban's authoritarian regime is bracing news for endangered democracies, including our own, but America isn't Hungary. Of the parallels that can be drawn between their despot and ours, the most salient may have been commented on the least — the overwhelming and unprecedented Mafia-style corruption that enriched the ruling family and entrenched their power.

It was the corruption that motivated Peter Magyar, a lifelong loyal appartchik until two years ago, to break with Orban's Fidesz party and inaugurate the campaign to overthrow the regime. It was the corruption that forced the European Union to act against Budapest by withholding billions in funding and isolating its government. And it was the corruption — so pervasive in Hungary's media, judiciary and business institutions — that finally drove otherwise conservative Hungarian voters to reject the crooked outfit that had ruled them for 16 years.

Liberals in Hungary celebrated Magyar's election victory, not necessarily because they agree with the new prime minister on every issue — they don't — but because he vowed to clean up Orban's legacy of outrageous theft, to enforce accountability and to strengthen the nation's frayed ties with Europe. Relying on his long experience inside the Fidesz machine, Magyar was able to expose its sleazy deals, including a pardon scandal that embroiled his then-wife, who had served as Orban's justice minister.
Updated: Tue Apr 14, 2026

The humiliating demise of Viktor Orban's authoritarian regime is bracing news for endangered democracies, including our own, but America isn't Hungary. Of the parallels that can be drawn between their despot and ours, the most salient may have been commented on the least — the overwhelming and unprecedented Mafia-style corruption that enriched the ruling family and entrenched their power.

It was the corruption that motivated Peter Magyar, a lifelong loyal appartchik until two years ago, to break with Orban's Fidesz party and inaugurate the campaign to overthrow the regime. It was the corruption that forced the European Union to act against Budapest by withholding billions in funding and isolating its government. And it was the corruption — so pervasive in Hungary's media, judiciary and business institutions — that finally drove otherwise conservative Hungarian voters to reject the crooked outfit that had ruled them for 16 years.

Liberals in Hungary celebrated Magyar's election victory, not necessarily because they agree with the new prime minister on every issue — they don't — but because he vowed to clean up Orban's legacy of outrageous theft, to enforce accountability and to strengthen the nation's frayed ties with Europe. Relying on his long experience inside the Fidesz machine, Magyar was able to expose its sleazy deals, including a pardon scandal that embroiled his then-wife, who had served as Orban's justice minister.

Like so much of the criminality perpetrated by Orban and his cronies, that pardon affair echoed a train of remarkably similar offenses in the Trump White House. And as Magyar emphasized throughout his innovative grassroots campaign, the cost of Orban's venality fell on ordinary Hungarians, whose national wealth was siphoned off to enrich the dictatorship's cronies.

According to Akos Hadhazy, a leading voice against corruption as an independent member of Hungary's parliament, the Mafia-style graft perpetrated by the Orban regime has looted more than 2.8 billion euros (over $3.2 billion) annually from public funds. Much of that stolen money came from the EU itself, which played a role in the regime's demise by withholding further funds from suspect projects. Among the reasons to renew ties with Brussels, as Magyar often explained, was to facilitate prosecution of the "Orban Mafia" that stole those EU funds.

The details of the Fidesz government's boodling might almost seem quaint in comparison with the high-tech crypto scams hatched in the Trump White House. Viktor Orban's son-in-law, an entrepreneur named Istvan Tiborcz, became wealthy by forming Elios, a company that won multimillion-euro contracts to upgrade street lighting in cities and towns all over the country. Those contracts were financed by the EU, but as auditors later discovered, the project details were designed to favor Tiborcz's firm and eliminate any competition. In fact, the same officials who oversaw the lighting specifications also wrote the Elios bids.

EU investigators recommended that Hungary void those contracts, claw back the money, and commence legal action against the officials and business executives responsible for the scandal. The crooks in Budapest have been "investigating" that case for the past 11 years.

Meanwhile even more public millions flowed into the accounts of Orban's father, Gyozy, whose real estate development company swelled with government and EU contracts — and is suspected of serving as a front for Orban himself. This arrangement smacks of the millions in U.S. government funding and related payments that have flowed over the years to the Trump Organization.

Various other Orban cronies — notably including the chief of his cabinet, Antal Rogan, and his closest friend since childhood, Lorinc Meszaros — have walked away with enormous fortunes. So brazen was Rogan that the U.S. Treasury sanctioned him in January 2025, during the final weeks of the Biden administration.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control found that Rogan had "orchestrated Hungary's system for distributing public contracts and resources to cronies loyal to himself and the Fidesz political party, (including) schemes designed to control several strategic sectors of the Hungarian economy and to divert proceeds from those sectors to himself and to reward loyalists from his political party."

The Trump administration lifted the U.S. sanctions on Rogan within three months of taking office, as part of its broader abandonment of anticorruption agencies and measures throughout government.

As for Meszaros, he is the richest man in Hungary, sitting atop a fortune estimated at over $3 billion. Having started out as a gas-pipe fitter in 2006, with assets worth less than $42,000, his wealth grew exponentially through state energy and construction deals. When asked how this could have happened, Meszaros modestly attributed his wealth to "God, luck and Viktor Orban."

Americans have long seemed indifferent to the orgy of corruption that has characterized President Donald Trump's career and especially his return to power. Citizens whose news consumption is limited to Fox News, Newsmax and the MAGA media have heard little or nothing about the ways that Trump, his wife and offspring, and their circle of supporters have gorged themselves in one shady deal after another, often at risk to our national security.

Yet somehow, despite a state-controlled Hungarian media universe, Magyar's movement brought the truth about Orban's corruption to the people, who responded with appropriate fury. In this country, Democrats of every persuasion must convey to every American voter that same message about the decadent MAGA movement and its greedy overlord.