THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

This story was updated on Sunday, April 12 at 7:15pm ET. Friends danced on one another’s shoulders. Fathers embraced their children. A teenage girl wept. Beer flowed. After 16 years, Hungarians had voted their strongman leader, Viktor Orbán, out of office. “I knew it was possible,” Balázs Nagy, a warehouse worker, told me this evening in Budapest, on the banks of the Danube. “Hungarians are stubborn, and we don’t give up on each other.” To his wife, Szilvi, the evening’s results had reaffirmed a truth less geographic than metaphoric. “We’re in the heart of Europe, and that’s where we belong,” she said.The couple stood in a throng of people waiting for Péter Magyar, who led the opposition to victory. Three hours after the polls closed in national elections, they watched as he marched through the crowd holding a Hungarian flag. “Fellow Hungarians, countrymen: We have done it,” he said. “Together we have replaced the Orbán system. Together we have liberated Hungary.”He spoke opposite the river from the grand neo-Gothic Parliament. Power is about to change hands in that body, so decisively that Magyar’s new government will be able to undo elements of the “illiberal state” that made Orbán a model for populists all over the world. In losing control of his country, Orbán became an exemplar of a rare political breed: an autocrat ousted in an election.The prime minister’s loss is a crushing defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, who modeled their agenda in part on Orbán’s governance and staffed their movement with activists trained at his think tanks. As Trump alienated traditional U.S. partners, Washington looked to the like-minded leader in Budapest to represent its interests inside the European Union. The bond was so meaningful to Vance personally that he traveled to Budapest last week to campaign alongside Orbán as if they were running-mates.But voters rejected Orbán’s party, Fidesz, in favor of Magyar’s new faction, Tisza. In the process, they set a new national record for turnout. Magyar is a onetime Orbán loyalist who turned on the prime minister two years ago and managed to do what past opposition leaders couldn’t—overcome the incumbent’s enormous advantages. Since 2010, Orbán has rewritten election rules and removed independent checks on his power. He has suffocated civil society while extending his control over the media. And he has presided over patronage networks that have enriched his friends and family… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.When I first met Gretchen Whitmer last fall, she seemed to want to talk about anything except Donald Trump. She avoided using his name, referring to him, only sparingly, as “the president.” She came closest to criticizing him when she lamented that “this constant tariff chaos is really hurting our economy.”Our interview took place, at her team’s request, in a Marriott conference room in Ypsilanti. It lasted precisely 22 minutes. And the Michigan governor, who is formidable in person, with sharply arched eyebrows and dark hair streaked with gray, did not seem thrilled to be doing it. She smiled tightly and spoke with caution while, across from us, an anxious-looking staffer counted down our remaining time together. Whitmer was careful, in fact, to highlight her own carefulness. At a National Governors Association dinner that she had attended with Trump last year, “there was a lot of conversation that I did not agree with,” Whitmer told me. “But I just sat there and bit my tongue because I’m not going to win that debate in that moment, and it’s not going to serve Michigan well.”Had Whitmer gone soft on Trump? For more than half a decade, she’s been “Big Gretch,” the Bell’s-drinking, fuchsia-lipstick-wearing, sometimes-performative badass from up north. She became governor during the peak of the anti-Trump resistance. Then her clash with the president during the pandemic sent her rocket into orbit. When Trump dismissed her as “the woman in Michigan,” she put the insult on a T-shirt and wore it on television; Etsy artisans hawked prayer candles with her face on them. In 2020, Joe Biden almost chose her as his running mate. After his disastrous 2024 bid, many Democrats hoped that Whitmer, not Kamala Harris, would swoop in to replace him. Now Whitmer is on the list of potential presidential contenders for 2028.But if Democratic voters are looking for someone to confront Trump directly, Whitmer might not be their candidate. In his second term, she has instead looked for ways to collaborate with him; one of her visits to the White House last year resulted in a much-mocked photo of the governor hiding her face behind folders in the Oval Office. Contrast this approach with the likes of J. B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, who have spent the past year waging insult warfare… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Viktor Orbán is the closest thing in Europe to a prime minister for life. He has served four consecutive terms since 2010, perpetuating his power with the ruthlessness of a royal. But ruthlessness may not guarantee him reelection. That became clear to me recently in Székesfehérvár, a small city in central Hungary where Orbán was born.Székesfehérvár lacks Budapest’s grand boulevards and baroque extravagance, but the city is not without luster. Hungary’s first king, Stephen I, built a basilica in Székesfehérvár that served as the coronation site for later monarchs. Rain was lashing the city when I visited one evening last month. It was dark and cold. But close to 1,000 people had gathered in the town square, all of them waiting for Péter Magyar, a onetime Orbán loyalist who broke with the prime minister two years ago and is now trying to unseat him in elections on Sunday. Most polls have shown Magyar’s party, Tisza, with a comfortable lead over Orbán’s Fidesz Party. But it’s not a given that popular support will translate into a victory at the polls.Such is the state of Hungary’s democracy. Gerrymandered districts give lopsided influence to the rural countryside, traditionally fertile territory for Fidesz. Deceptive campaigning is rampant, in the form of billboards that dot Hungary’s highways, deepfakes that dominate the internet, and pro-government messaging that fills newspapers and television channels owned by the prime minister’s allies. Orbán enjoys the support of foreign governments, in both the United States and Russia. Donald Trump’s endorsements have been as forceful as any he has issued in this year’s domestic midterm elections, a sign of his personal stake in a regime revered by the MAGA movement. His vice president, J. D. Vance, traveled to Budapest this week to underline the political alliance and advance conspiracy theories about “bureaucrats in Brussels” meddling in the election, words that could have come from the lips of Kremlin spin doctors.It may not be obvious why an election in Hungary, a landlocked European country with a population roughly the size of Michigan’s, has commanded so much international attention. It’s not a nuclear power, a global media hub, or a center of innovation. Its language is a beast to learn. But Sunday’s vote may well be one of the most important elections in the history of postcommunist Europe. It will test the longevity of a regime that has deviated from principles of democracy and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Democrats in Virginia desperately want permission from voters to gerrymander the state beyond recognition. They also want Virginians to know how profoundly sorry they are to have to ask. “I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t choose their people,” State Senator Creigh Deeds declared on Friday, as he stood flanked by a dozen young Democrats at the University of Virginia.This is typically the main argument against gerrymandering, but for Deeds, it was just the windup to a pitch for his party to cast aside its highfalutin principles and start hurling spitballs back at Republicans. “We’ve been pushed,” he lamented, “into a situation not of our own choosing.”The situation to which Deeds so gravely alluded is the all-out redistricting war that Republicans started last summer in Texas. At President Trump’s behest, state lawmakers redrew congressional lines to bolster the GOP’s narrow House majority. Democrats, initially aghast but quickly emboldened, responded by matching Republicans with an equally aggressive gerrymander in California, which voters approved overwhelmingly in November. The battleground expanded from there, as Republicans added seats in North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri.With new opportunities to gain an edge dwindling, the two parties are waging an expensive campaign in Virginia that could prove decisive. The congressional map that Democrats have proposed is, in its ways, even more audacious than those enacted in either Texas or California. They’re asking voters to temporarily set aside a bipartisan redistricting system they approved just six years ago. Under their proposal, Democrats would be favored to win all but one of Virginia’s 11 House seats—a huge shift from the current districts, which are currently split between six Democrats and five Republicans. The boldness of Virginia’s plan stands out all the more in light of the reticence of neighboring Maryland, a stronger Democratic bastion where the senate president rebuffed a push from national leaders and Governor Wes Moore to draw a map that could have given Democrats the lone remaining House seat they don’t currently hold.Just how far Democrats would reach in Virginia was the subject of weeks of internal debate within the party. Some had pushed for a slightly more restrained proposal that would have given Democrats the upper hand in nine of the 11 House seats. But advocates of a maximalist approach prevailed, and now Virginia voters will decide in an April 21 referendum whether to use the new maps this fall. The party… [TheTopNews] Read More.

It sure feels like 1979 again. Iran is fighting the West. The price of gas has been rising for weeks. Moscow is aiming to take advantage of a distracted White House. The party in control of Washington is anxiously looking at the polls. Flared pants and jumpsuits are back! So are cigarettes. Steven Spielberg is riding high after doing a movie about humans encountering aliens. (Not to be outdone, actual space missions are back too.) U2 put out new music. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates are good.And if we do seem to have returned to that moment in time, then, well, Donald Trump would seem to be ready for whatever comes next, because the guy has lived his whole life like it’s the 1980s.He embraces the big-bigger-biggest ethos of the decade, with its gold-plated style and “greed is good” mantra. His views have been shaped by the brash era in which excess was the norm and ostentatious displays of wealth and power were celebrated in pop culture and in Trump’s Manhattan. (The pink-marbled lobby of his Trump Tower skyscraper looks just as it did when it opened in 1983.) It was also a moment when New York City was defined by extreme wealth stratification and racial unrest, a time of high crime and corruption. To this day, Trump’s touchstones almost seem preserved in amber from that decade: Sylvester Stallone, George Steinbrenner, Hulk Hogan, the musical Cats. This was an era of over-the-top displays of patriotism and even jingoism; the phrase Let’s make America great again was in. (It’s true—Ronald Reagan got there first.) This was when Trump became a celebrity, when he still had youth on his side. In his mind, at least, he hasn’t left.Smith Collection / Gado / GettyTrump’s favorite era may also be shaping his approach to the war with Iran. Back then was when Trump revealed himself to be an Iran hawk, one who believed that President Jimmy Carter’s failed efforts to rescue hostages at the U.S. embassy broadcast a sign of American weakness to the globe. In a series of remarks over the decade when he became a public figure, Trump said he’d punish Iran, and he began to float his now-familiar refrain of take the oil. Indeed, those 1980s discussions of foreign policy and Iran were when the media began speculating that Trump might someday run for president. The lessons he learned decades ago have… [TheTopNews] Read More.