CONTROL WITHOUT RESILIECE: THE COLLAPSE OF HUNGARY'S ELECTORAL AUTOCRACY, 2022–2026

Abstract

Between 2010 and 2022, Hungary's Fidesz government constructed one of the most durable electoral-authoritarian architectures in the European Union, combining electoral engineering, media capture, judicial capture, and an EU-funded patronage economy. In April 2026, that architecture collapsed at the ballot box. This paper argues that the regime's downfall was not the product of three unrelated shocks — a fiscal and EU-funding crisis, a domestic legitimacy scandal, and a foreign-policy crisis tied to the war in Ukraine — but of a single underlying mechanism: each pillar of the regime's institutional control had been built by displacing risk onto a resource the regime did not itself control, whether EU budgetary decisions, the credibility of an absolutist ideological claim, or the tolerance of a domestic electorate with a specific historical memory. When these external contingencies moved against the regime within a compressed window, control-based durability offered no protection. The paper develops this argument as a modification to existing accounts of electoral-authoritarian resilience, which explain institutional entrenchment well but say comparatively little about the conditions under which such entrenchment becomes brittle.