Allegations around funding and transparency have long followed Farage and his parties. Hungary suggests that even when such issues don’t immediately derail a political project, they have a habit of catching up with it.

When Nigel Farage talks about slashing welfare, railing against “the establishment,” and bypassing traditional media, it’s worth asking where that kind of politics can lead when it actually holds power.

Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule in Hungary offers a brutal lesson in both how would-be autocrats can consolidate power, and why such approaches ultimately fail as a model for governing a country.

Orbán’s recent defeat may bring an end to a system many described as “competitive authoritarianism,” where elections still happened, but the rules were rigged to keep one man and his allies in charge. Since the election, Orbán’s successor Peter Magyar has pledged to crack down on the corruption and cronyism that characterised Fidesz’s years in power.

“Our country has no time to waste. Hungary is in trouble in every respect. It has been plundered, looted, betrayed, indebted and ruined,” Magyar said. “We became the most impoverished and the most corrupt country in the EU.”

Since 2010, Orbán and his ruling alliance, Fidesz–KDNP, systematically reshaped Hungary’s political and legal framework. With four consecutive supermajorities, the government gained the ability to amend the constitution at will, passing more than 40 so-called “cardinal laws” that restructured key state institutions, electoral rules, and the media landscape.

The result was a state that looked democratic on paper but functioned very differently in practice. Human Rights Watch warned of a deepening “human rights crisis,” while the European Parliament called Hungary a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.”

This democratic erosion was coupled with Orbán’s pro-Putin position and racism-stoking rhetoric, further isolating Hungary from its European partners. In 2022, for example, he warned against Hungary becoming a “mixed-race” society, saying Europeans should not become “peoples of mixed race,” an ethnonationalist, anti-immigration agenda at odds with EU values of equality and non-discrimination.

Corruption and cronyism as a governing strategy

Orbán didn’t just centralise power, he concentrated wealth. Public money flowed towards a tight circle of loyalists.

Billions of euros in state contracts were awarded to firms linked to political insiders. Among the most prominent beneficiaries was Lőrinc Mészáros, a childhood friend of Orbán who rose from a gas fitter to Hungary’s richest man.

“When Mészáros bids for something, he almost always wins,” said Istvan Janos Toth, director at the Corruption Research Center in Budapest, who has analysed hundreds of thousands of public procurement contracts.

“That’s the essence of cronyism.”

This wasn’t just sleaze, it was structural. Markets were warped, competition shrank, and public money delivered poor results. Transparency International consistently ranked Hungary among the EU’s most corrupt member states.

But this environment of corruption and cronyism eventually created fertile ground for political opposition. Péter Magyar’s anti-corruption message gained traction quickly, drawing tens of thousands to protests and galvanising public frustration. As reported by Politico, widespread perceptions of a “kleptocratic ruling class” weakened Orbán’s popular support and served to strengthen Magyar’s hand.

It was the same, to a lesser extent, in the UK, where, under Boris Johnson, accusations of cronyism, from politically connected appointments to the awarding of lucrative Covid-era contracts, fed a growing sense that access and loyalty mattered more than competence.

Alongside this came warnings of “democratic backsliding,” the slow erosion of norms and institutions by leaders elected through democratic means.

But, as in Hungary, the cumulative effect proved politically corrosive. By late 2021, polling showed a majority of voters believed Johnson’s government was corrupt, and by mid-2022 the stream of scandals and allegations had drained support among both the public and his own MPs, ultimately forcing his resignation.

Which raises an obvious question for Nigel Farage. Allegations around funding, transparency, and political finance have long followed him and his parties. Hungary suggests that even when such issues don’t immediately derail a political project, they have a habit of catching up with it.
The economic cost

And in Hungary, corruption and institutional erosion carried economic costs. In December 2022, the EU began freezing billions in funding to Hungary, due to concerns over law violations and misuse of funds. These freezes contributed to economic stagnation.

Orbán promoted a “work-based society,” emphasising employment over welfare. While employment figures did rise, this came at a cost, including stricter welfare policies, reduced protections for vulnerable groups, and expansion of low-paid public work programmes. Living standards declined, and Hungary’s wages remained among the lowest in the EU and poverty deepened.

Just this week, Farage vowed to cut Britain’s rising benefits bill, even if it meant facing riots, claiming the nation’s biggest societal divide was not based on money, race or religion, but rather “those that work and those that don’t”.

It’s a familiar line among the populist radical-right, and one that suggests Farage hasn’t been paying much attention to how similar policy played out under Viktor Orbán.
The limits of media control

Media control was another pillar of Orbán’s political strategy. His government consolidated influence over major outlets, reshaped regulatory bodies, and restricted political advertising.

This system proved effective for years, helping Orbán secure repeated electoral victories. But independent outlets, including investigative journalism organisations like Direkt36, continued to expose corruption and abuses of power.

In the days following Orbán’s crushing defeat on April 12, social media was flooded with posts thanking independent journalists for their work. 

“Some even credited us for the seismic political change that had taken place,” wrote Andras Petho, co-founder and editor of Direkt36.

But Petho argues that crediting investigative journalists for the change would be a misunderstanding of their role, as they never pursued political goals with their reporting and were just “doing their job.”

“What we can take credit for, however, is that at least one democratic function – the watchdog role of investigative journalism – survived this crackdown. In this way, we continued to show the public how Orbán’s system was rotting from within because of enormous corruption, rampant abuses of power, and simple incompetence.”

In the final stretch before the election, even a tightly controlled media environment couldn’t prevent opposition momentum. Péter Magyar’s party surged in the polls despite limited access to state media, confirming the limits of information control in the digital age.

It’s a similar playbook in the United States, where Donald Trump has taken an adversarial approach to the media, weakening public-interest outlets, restricting journalist access to White House events, and using legal and political pressure against organisations he deems hostile.

A comparable tone can be heard from Nigel Farage. Seeking to position himself as a tribune of the people battling a hostile media class, he has repeatedly cast British broadcasters such as BBC and Channel 4 as part of a biased “establishment,” describing them as “partisan” and “rigged,” while favouring more receptive platforms like GB News.

Though, of course, critics point out the contradiction: for someone so critical of the mainstream media, he has hardly been absent from it, with frequent appearances on programmes like the BBC’s Question Time.

Orbán cronies rush to remove their wealth

Orbán’s downfall also shows how quickly the tide can turn on those enriched by political favour.

Independent journalists in Hungary, including the investigative outlet Vsquare, report that key figures connected to Orbán have been scrambling to protect their assets before Magyar’s government could potentially freeze, seize or nationalise them.

Reports claim that high-level figures close to Orbán have been looking at US visa options, hoping to find work at MAGA-linked institutions, while others are moving their wealth to places like Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE.

Magyar has called out those connected to Orbán fleeing the country to shield their assets from accountability before his government takes power in early May.

“Orbán-linked oligarchs are transferring tens of billions of forints to the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Uruguay and other distant countries,” he said on social media. He called on the chief prosecutor, the police chief and the head of the tax office to “detain the criminals” and “not to allow them to flee” to countries where extradition would be unlikely.

This pattern, of insiders leveraging political access and then scrambling when the tide turns, finds echoes in the UK. In Scotland, Todd Ferguson, who defected from the Tories to Reform UK last year, quit the party in March citing “infighting,” “secret meetings” and “amateurism.”

He later accused Reform of cronyism in its candidate selection process, claiming he was pushed from third to fourth place on the West Scotland regional list at the last minute.

“I saw no evidence of the professionalism or leadership expected of a serious political movement,” Ferguson wrote, describing a system marked by “inconsistency, lack of transparency, and clear cronyism.”

With opinion polls suggesting Nigel Farage’s party could win up to 20 MSPs on May 7, the episode offers an illustration of how accusations of insider dealings can surface even before power is secured, and how quickly they can erode trust.

Orbán’s Hungary is less a national story than a warning about a governing style: concentrate power, sideline scrutiny, reward loyalty over competence, and you may secure short-term control at the cost of long-term political, economic and institutional damage. It’s a lesson that should resonate in the UK ahead of May 7.

Right-Wing Watch is written by Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead

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