Viktor Orbán Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Should Universities Just Leave?

How can institutions fostering open inquiry survive authoritarian assaults?

October 23, 2025 • by Anastasija Mladenovska

Over the past year, I have tracked the journeys of five universities caught in the crosshairs of authoritarian pressure: Central European University (CEU) in Hungary; the Higher School of Economics (HSE) and the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP) in Russia; Nazarbayev University (NU) in Kazakhstan; and the American University ...

Democracy

Naked Oligarchy

How billionaires captured power and hollowed out democracy

June 19, 2025 • by Salvador Santino Regilme

The choice is stark: rule by the many, or rule by the billionaires who already act as if they own the world. Across the globe, extreme wealth has overpowered democracy. The world’s billionaires no longer merely influence politics; they dominate it. Behind the rhetoric of innovation and market efficiency lies a ...

Democracy

The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective

Or, why should ordinary citizens trust unelected experts anymore?

May 8, 2025 • by Mark Frazier, James Miller, Kim Lane Scheppele and Julia Sonnevend

Good evening, my name is Jim Miller. I am a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, and I have organized, and will be moderating tonight’s panel with the ungainly title, on bureaucracy and its discontents. To discuss the tensions created by professing democracy as ...

The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective

Education

All IU Faculty, Staff, and Students Are “Safe,” but Some Are Safer Than Others

The discursive stylings of an authoritarian campus administration

October 24, 2024 • by Jessica Storey-Nagy

Instead of grading papers and preparing final exams last April, I was at Dunn Meadow, a public gathering space on Indiana University (IU) Bloomington’s campus. My aim, and that of my colleagues, was to protect student protesters from the violence sanctioned by IU’s top administrators, another possible intrusion by the ...

All IU Faculty, Staff, and Students Are “Safe,” but Some Are Safer Than Others

North America

When Politicians Make Nice

A conversation with sociologist Julia Sonnevend about her new book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics

September 11, 2024 • by Claire Potter and Julia Sonnevend

When United States president Joe Biden stumbled on the debate stage on June 27, 2024, it wasn’t that he just seemed old, it was that a man who had charmed voters for half a century with his bright smile, kindness, and folksy quips seemed to have vanished. ...

Politics

Why Does the Far Right Love a Pompadour?

Big hair and bad ideas

December 20, 2023 • by Adriana Piatti-Crocker

Why do these politicians don big hair? Perhaps their inventively crafted manes serve to hide behind their bad ideas. Or maybe, like the pompadours of male entertainers, their big hair is the best way to be remembered by voters. Who can forget such hairdos?...

Why Does the Far Right Love a Pompadour?

Democracy

How Democracies Die, Fast and Slow

“The troubling truth is that democracy can be destroyed in multiple ways, in different tempos”

April 10, 2023 • by John Keane

Things are serious: the “great democratic revolution“ of modern times, as Tocqueville once called it, appears to be spluttering to a halt....

The Right

The Return of the Repressed

Poland has effectively abandoned antifascism

April 5, 2022 • by Irena Grudzińska-Gross

Was it only my generation—people born shortly after World War II—that believed fascism had been defeated? We were convinced that lessons had been learned and linear progress was ahead of us; it was unimaginable that anyone would defend such an ideology any longer. All European regimes (but for Franco’s) were ...

Democracy

Can The Republican Party Successfully Orbanify the U.S.?

Some comparative reflections on the exceptional vulnerability of American democracy

March 23, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

This past year the U.S. experienced a transfer of presidential power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. It was not a peaceful transfer of power. On January 6, a large and angry mob descended on the U.S. Capitol to “Stop the Steal” by obstructing the constitutionally mandated certification by Congress of the ...

Democracy

Fascism or Caesarism?

How Napoleon, not Hitler, exemplifies an enduring threat to modern democracies

August 27, 2020 • by David A. Bell

As a historian, my first reaction has been to answer the question with a resounding “no.” My professional training has led me to think of fascism as a specific historical phenomenon, largely limited to the period from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, and built around ...

Democracy

The Business of Disinformation

In Central and eastern Europe, political disinformation is highly profitable

May 7, 2020 • by Judit Szakács

Since February 2019, the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University has been mapping individuals and companies running or owning disinformation websites in five central and eastern European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Moldova, Romania and Slovakia. The goal is to collect data on independent (i.e. not ...

Europe & Central Asia

Hungary Is on the Edge of Dictatorship

Viktor Orbán’s coronavirus power grab

April 11, 2020 • by Kim Lane Scheppele

Orbán sought an expedited procedure to ram through this law when the parliament opened on Monday 24 March. The opposition united and denied Orbán the 4/5ths vote he needed to pass the law without the requisite parliamentary procedure. The coronavirus emergency law -- called by its critics the “Enabling Act” with ...