On Controlled Opposition

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (L) and Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon. Zoltán Fischer/Press Office of the Prime Minister/MTI

Controlled opposition is a term that gets used loosely enough that serious people tend to dismiss it. Political scientists don’t reach for it much either, though the phenomena it describes sit at the center of their work. Competitive authoritarianism, the term Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way coined, describes an entire regime type where democratic institutions exist but the playing field tilts so severely that calling the system democratic requires a straight face nobody has. Co-optation describes the mechanism inside those regimes, the specific ways power absorbs and neutralizes the people who are supposed to challenge it. The ambiguity lives in the popular label, not in the evidence. What all these frameworks share is a simple observation: the people who are supposed to represent the counter to power can be manipulated, coerced, or directly working for the interests of that power, whether they realize it or not.

That spectrum matters. At one end sits a party that a government built from scratch to channel dissent into approved outlets. In the middle sits the politician who knows the boundaries and stays inside them because crossing those boundaries carries consequences they’ve seen inflicted on someone else. And at the other end sits the leader who genuinely believes they are fighting, but the system shaped everything around them, the donors, the consultants, the media access, the career incentives, so carefully that their fighting never threatens the structure it’s supposed to challenge. All three can operate inside the same system at the same time. Levitsky and Way spent a decade studying 35 of these regimes across four continents, documenting how governments maintain democratic institutions as the accepted path to power while tilting the playing field through funding control, media capture, and legal harassment so severely that the system cannot honestly be called democratic.¹

Hungary under Viktor Orban is where political scientists go to study this mechanism in real time. It became the first EU member state that the V-Dem Institute downgraded to an electoral autocracy, and the European Parliament voted in 2022 to declare it no longer a full democracy.² What makes Hungary instructive is not that Orban banned the opposition or stuffed ballot boxes. He did something more sophisticated. He rebuilt every institution around his party so that opposition could continue to exist, continue to fight, and continue to lose.

The money is where it starts. Orban constructed a class of oligarchs whose wealth depends entirely on proximity to his government. His childhood friend Lorinc Meszaros fixed gas pipes in a village of 1,900 people before Fidesz took power in 2010. By 2024 he held the title of richest person in Hungary, worth roughly 3.2 billion dollars. In 2017, his companies won 299 billion forints in public procurement contracts, 83 percent of which came from European Union funds, according to the investigative outlet Atlatszo. By 2018 the EU share of his procurement winnings had risen to 93 percent.³ Meszaros told reporters in 2017 that his fortune came from three things: God, luck, and Viktor Orban.⁴ That kind of wealth creation sends a signal to every business in the country. Companies that align with Fidesz get government contracts, favorable regulatory treatment, and access to EU funds. Companies that fund opposition efforts get audited, frozen out of procurement, and find their permits delayed. So the money flows one direction, and the politicians it funds operate within boundaries they may not consciously recognize because everyone around them observes the same ones.

This is not corruption in the conventional sense of officials skimming from the system. It is the system. Hungary’s Transparency International score dropped from 55 out of 100 in 2012 to 41 out of 100 by 2024, the worst in the EU for three consecutive years.⁵

The media follows the same logic. In November 2018, the owners of roughly 500 media outlets, all aligned with Fidesz, transferred them on the same day into a single entity that Orban’s government immediately declared a matter of strategic national importance, exempting it from competition review: the Central European Press and Media Foundation. By 2020, according to the Mertek Media Monitor, the state or Orban’s allies controlled 80 percent of Hungary’s press.⁶ The government shut down the largest-circulation daily shortly after it published a Fidesz investigation. Fidesz allies captured the largest news portal in 2020, triggering mass resignations of its editorial staff. An independent radio station lost its broadcast license over allegedly late paperwork, a violation other broadcasters committed without consequence.

Lajos Simicska cofounded Fidesz with Orban, served as party treasurer, and built the original Fidesz media empire. When Orban introduced an advertising tax designed to clip Simicska’s independence in 2015, Simicska publicly called Orban a vulgar name on live radio. The response was total. State advertising revenue disappeared overnight. Government politicians boycotted every Simicska outlet. His daily newspaper went from three million euros in annual profits to millions in losses. His commercial radio lost its broadcast rights. By 2018 he surrendered his media outlets, and Fidesz allies folded them into the foundation.⁷ Every other oligarch in Hungary watched that happen. Nobody needed a second example.

Fidesz captured the courts through a straightforward exercise of parliamentary power. The party dismantled the consensus-based judicial nominations process, took unilateral control of appointments using its two-thirds supermajority, and expanded the Constitutional Court from 11 to 15 justices. The chief prosecutor, a founding Fidesz member, served for 25 years and consistently declined to investigate corruption involving the governing party. When he stepped down in 2025, he took a seat on the Constitutional Court, and his successor holds a nine-year term running through 2034.⁸ The courts exist. They function. They simply cannot touch the people who built the system.

Then there is the electoral architecture itself. After 2010, Fidesz cut parliament nearly in half, increased the proportion of winner-take-all districts, abolished the two-round voting system so that candidates could win with a simple plurality, and redrew constituency boundaries. Political Capital’s modeling found that if both sides received exactly 50 percent of the vote, Fidesz would still win a majority of single-member districts.⁹ Ethnic Hungarians abroad, who overwhelmingly support Fidesz, can vote by mail. Citizens who left Hungary and live in the EU must vote in person at embassies. OSCE’s international election monitors said the same thing after 2014, 2018, and 2022: elections ran well but lacked a level playing field.¹⁰ The government ignored all 26 of their recommendations from 2018 before the next election came around.

The result is that Fidesz won a constitutional supermajority in three consecutive elections without ever exceeding 54 percent of the popular vote. In 2022, after six opposition parties did something unprecedented and united behind a single candidate, running the most coordinated campaign in Hungarian history, Fidesz won its biggest victory ever.

And when opposition wins locally, the system moves to absorb it. After Budapest elected an opposition mayor in 2019, the central government’s financial extraction from Budapest grew twentyfold over the following years. Municipal revenues fell by 25 percent in real terms. When courts ruled in Budapest’s favor, the government issued a decree saying municipalities had no legal standing to bring such lawsuits.¹¹ On the scoreboard, this looks like a system that swallowed a victory whole. What happened next tells a different story.

Hungary’s version of retribution is quiet. In Russia and Turkey the mechanism is louder. When Mikhail Khodorkovsky used his oil fortune to fund opposition parties and civil society groups in Russia, Putin’s government put him in a cage in a courtroom and seized everything he owned.¹² Every oligarch in the country recalibrated overnight. In Turkey, Ekrem Imamoglu won the Istanbul mayoral election in 2019, and when Erdogan forced a rerun, Imamoglu won bigger the second time, by nine points. By March 2025, Imamoglu sat in prison on fabricated charges.¹³ These are the loud versions. Hungary’s is quieter, which is part of what makes it more transferable. Prison cells are not necessary if career destruction and financial ruin lead ambitious people to do the math themselves.

What makes controlled opposition so durable is what it feels like from inside. A 2010 Pew Research survey, conducted right as Fidesz consolidated its supermajority, found that 77 percent of Hungarians expressed dissatisfaction with how democracy functioned in their country, the highest rate in the region, while simultaneously rating democratic rights as very important at rates higher than their neighbors.¹⁴ They valued democracy. They experienced it as missing. That timing is significant because the gap Pew measured has only widened in the years since. The distance between how much people want the system to work and how clearly they can feel that it does not produces something worse than apathy. Christina Farhart’s research at the University of Minnesota on political learned helplessness describes it precisely: repeated experiences of failure lead people to feel they have no control, which then changes how they engage politically.¹⁵ This is not giving up. This is doing everything right, over and over, and watching it not matter.

After the 2022 defeat in Hungary, the opposition did what opposition always does in these systems. They blamed each other. One party leader blamed the candidate. Another blamed the coalition structure. Analysts blamed the lack of rural organizing. A Heinrich Boll Stiftung post-mortem noted that the opposition lacked organizational structure outside the cities and that Fidesz likely had allies embedded within opposition parties themselves.¹⁶ The system produced that result by design. The people who lived through it blamed themselves.

Gabor Scheiring, a political economist at Georgetown who served as a Hungarian MP from 2010 to 2014, captured what it feels like to enter this system believing you can change it. He wrote about the spring day he walked up the steps of the National Assembly in a new suit, full of hope, and the cold winter day a year and a half later when he and his colleagues chained themselves to the building.¹⁷ That arc, from hope to futile protest, is the emotional signature of controlled opposition experienced from within.

So what breaks it. There is no clean answer, because this is an asymmetric fight. They hold the institutions. We hold the public. In that kind of contest, nobody runs the table. But the scholarship points in a consistent direction, and the examples that exist share a common feature: someone crossed the approved boundary, took the hit, and in doing so changed the calculation for everyone watching. Not all of them won. Some paid a staggering price. What they share is that they fought in public, and the fighting itself altered what the people around them believed was possible.

In Serbia, a student movement called Otpor showed what that looks like at scale. When the group formed in 1998, Slobodan Milosevic had held power for a decade and used nationalism and four wars to make dissent look like treason. Previous opposition efforts had collapsed into infighting, the same pattern Hungary’s opposition would repeat years later. Otpor’s founders, veterans of failed student protests in 1996 and 1997, drew a critical lesson from those failures: large rallies where politicians gave speeches attracted only people who already agreed. They needed to reach the people who had given up.

So they built something different. They adopted a decentralized cell structure where local chapters operated independently, choosing their own tactics for their own contexts. They studied Gene Sharp’s writings on nonviolent action and the Slovak experience of get-out-the-vote campaigns, then adapted both to Serbian conditions. They branded opposition the way companies brand products, plastering the clenched-fist logo on T-shirts, mugs, umbrellas, and stickers, turning participation into an identity rather than an ideology. Ivan Marovic, one of the original organizers, described it plainly: “We wanted people to join us and live resistance so we promoted revolution like a fashion line.”

They weaponized humor to make repression backfire. When the regime set up collection boxes asking citizens to donate one dinar for agriculture, Otpor set up barrels with Milosevic’s face on them where people could donate a dinar and then hit the barrel with a stick. When police confiscated the barrel, Otpor issued a press release announcing that the police had arrested it. Every crackdown became a recruiting tool. When police beat and jailed Otpor members during the summer of 2000, public sympathy surged rather than receding, because the regime looked absurd punishing college students for pranks.

By May 2000, Otpor had organized in more than 100 towns. By the September elections, 70,000 people had joined. They pressured 18 fractious opposition parties to unite behind a single candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, leveraging the promise of half a million mobilized voters as the incentive for cooperation. They ran two propaganda campaigns simultaneously: “He’s Finished” to break the myth of Milosevic’s invincibility, and “It’s Time” to drive turnout. Eighty percent of the population voted. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, the turnout reached 86 percent. Milosevic tried to falsify the results. The people who had spent a year learning to act without permission did not accept it. On October 5, hundreds of thousands marched on Belgrade, and the regime fell.¹⁸

In Turkey, Erdogan spent two decades labeling the opposition as terrorists, traitors, and atheists. The CHP, the main opposition party, reinforced this dynamic for years by treating Erdogan voters with open contempt. Then in 2019 the CHP selected Ekrem Imamoglu to run for mayor of Istanbul, and he did something nobody expected. He ran on a strategy his party called “Radical Love,” developed by campaign director Ates Ilyas Bassoy in a 52-page manual that distilled a simple insight: stop attacking the autocrat and start loving the autocrat’s voters. The manual’s core instruction to candidates read: “If we start the conversation by insulting the party that others vote for or their leader, nothing we say later will have any effect.”

Imamoglu followed this to the letter. In his recorded campaign speeches between the annulment and the rerun, he used Erdogan’s name exactly twice, and both times with the formal honorific. He skipped large rallies in favor of visiting a different district every day, joining community dinners, and making house calls. He was an openly religious Muslim running for a traditionally secular party, and he leaned into the contradiction rather than hiding it. After the Christchurch mosque massacre, he went to a mosque and recited a full chapter of the Quran, an act no CHP politician would have considered a decade earlier. His wife publicly defended the AKP candidate’s wife when social media users mocked her headscarf. The campaign’s slogan was “Everything will be fine,” and its operating principle was to refuse every invitation to fight on the terrain Erdogan had built.

When Erdogan’s electoral council annulled the first result and ordered a rerun, Imamoglu’s team decided within hours to compete again. They did not boycott. They did not litigate. They went back to knocking on doors. In the rerun, Imamoglu multiplied his initial 13,700-vote margin 57-fold, winning 54 percent of the vote and carrying 28 of Istanbul’s 39 districts.¹⁹ By March 2025, as described earlier in this piece, Imamoglu sat in prison on fabricated charges. The man is in a cell. But his campaign manual is now studied by opposition movements across three continents, and the CHP ran his playbook in the 2024 local elections to win four of Turkey’s five biggest cities. The method outlived the moment. That is what the system cannot account for.

In Budapest, the opposition won the mayorship in 2019 and flipped eight other cities, cracking fifteen years of Fidesz invincibility at the local level.²⁰ And then the system did exactly what the first half of this article described. It tried to absorb the win. The Orban government moved immediately to make governing all but unworkable. Under the previous Fidesz-aligned mayor, Budapest paid 29,000 dollars in annual solidarity tax to the central government. Under the new opposition mayor, that figure climbed to 168 million dollars. The government cut the city’s share of the business tax, its primary revenue source, while simultaneously increasing the extraction. It declared parking free nationwide during the pandemic, eliminating another municipal income stream. It reallocated vehicle registration taxes into a central fund. Every move carried a plausible cover story, pandemic response, fiscal solidarity, national emergency, and every move landed squarely on opposition-held cities.²¹

This is where the story could end. The opposition won the battle, and the system stripped them of the ability to govern with the victory. That is exactly what this kind of regime is designed to do. But Mayor Gergely Karacsony refused to let the strangulation happen quietly. He launched a billboard campaign across Budapest reading “Looting our cities is no way to govern.” He stopped paying the solidarity tax and dared the government to take him to court, calculating that the legal fight itself would make the squeeze visible to the public. He signed the Free Cities Pact with the mayors of Prague, Warsaw, and Bratislava, presenting their coalition directly to EU institutions as alternative partners to their national governments, bypassing the very regimes trying to starve them. He ran a citizens’ assembly asking Budapest residents to authorize him to assert the city’s economic interests in court, turning a budget crisis into a mandate. The city teetered toward insolvency. The government offered a lifeline with strings attached. The fight continued.²²

A 2025 comparative study of Istanbul, Budapest, and Warsaw found that capturing a major city allows opposition to target key structural elements of an authoritarian regime.²³ But look at the scoreboard honestly. Otpor won. Imamoglu won twice and then went to prison. Karacsony’s city teeters toward insolvency. These are not three versions of the same success story. They are three versions of the same fight, and the outcomes range from total victory to ongoing siege to a cell in a Turkish prison. Anyone who promises a formula that ends in guaranteed triumph is selling something. This is asymmetric. They have the courts, the contracts, the prosecutors. We have each other and the stubborn fact that they need us to stop trying.

That is what connects these examples to the learned helplessness research earlier in this piece. The system’s most powerful weapon is not the rigged election or the captured court. It is the feeling those things produce, the conviction that nothing works, that fighting is pointless, that the smart move is to stop. Every fight that happens in public, whether it ends in Milosevic’s fall or Imamoglu’s imprisonment, pushes back against that feeling. Erdogan annulled an election and Imamoglu won bigger, and the annulment did more damage to the regime’s legitimacy than a decade of opposition speeches. Imamoglu went to prison, and his method swept the next election without him. Orban financially strangled Budapest and Karacsony made the strangulation visible, and the system’s pretense of democratic normalcy cracked for anyone paying attention. Even the losses produced something the system cannot tolerate: proof that people are still fighting.

Independent media funded by readers instead of state advertising has proven remarkably hard to kill in these systems, because it sits outside the financial architecture that makes commercial outlets vulnerable to the kind of warfare Simicska experienced. Atlatszo, the investigative outlet that tracks Meszaros’s procurement empire, runs on donations. It operates precisely because it has no advertising revenue for the government to redirect.

None of the people in these examples waited for permission. None of them operated through the approved channels the system had set up to absorb their energy. Otpor’s organizers did not petition Milosevic for reform. Imamoglu did not ask Erdogan for a fair election. Karacsony did not request that Orban stop looting his city’s budget. They found power wherever it existed, a student movement, a mayoral race, a city government, and they used it. Some of them won outright. Some of them lost and changed the landscape anyway. All of them made the next person’s fight a little less lonely.

At the individual level, the same principle holds. We can become an effective activist of one. We can stay that way if that’s what works, but the Educate, Activate, Recruit, Repeat model has the legs to build something lasting. Recruit does not mean hierarchy. It means invite and collaborate with others at will, share information when we feel like it, and keep moving. What Otpor understood, what Imamoglu’s campaign manual made explicit, and what Karacsony demonstrated under financial siege is that the system needs us to believe the boundaries it drew are walls. They are not walls. They are lines on a map that someone in power hopes we will not cross. The people who crossed them did not all end up in the same place. But every one of them proved that crossing was possible, and that proof is the thing authoritarianism cannot survive.

For readers who want the concrete methodology, the free booklet Grab Them By The EARR: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want walks through the whole framework. The Intro to Soft Secession Booklet covers the state-level policies that help fight back from where we actually are. And for the full picture, there is Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism. Everything mentioned here can be downloaded for free at buymeacoffee.com/TheER, where it is all listed in the shop for $0.00. Physical copies and pro-democracy merch are available at TheExistentialistRepublic.com.

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WORKS CITED

1. Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive authoritarianism: Hybrid regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge University Press.

2. European Parliament. (2022, September 15). MEPs: Hungary can no longer be considered a full democracy [Press release]. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220909IPR40137/meps-hungary-can-no-longer-be-considered-a-full-democracy

3. Atlatszo. (2019, January 17). The Meszaros empire won public tenders worth 826 million euros last year, 93 percent of which came from European Union funds. https://english.atlatszo.hu/2019/01/17/the-meszaros-empire-won-public-tenders-worth-e826-million-last-year-93-percent-of-which-came-from-european-union-funds/

4. BTI Blog. (2020, February 25). God, luck and politics: A brief history of graft in Hungary. Bertelsmann Stiftung Transformation Index.

5. Transparency International Hungary. (2025). Once more, Hungary takes last place in the EU on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

6. International Press Institute. (2019). The rise of KESMA: How Orban’s allies bought up Hungary’s media; Mertek Media Monitor reports cited in Eurozine. (2020). Viktor Orban’s war on the media.

7. Scheppele, K. L. (2022). How Viktor Orban wins. Journal of Democracy, 33(3), 45-61.

8. IntelliNews. (2025). Viktor Orban’s “bullet shield” and long-time chief prosecutor leaves post to secure job at Constitutional Court; Managing courts in competitive authoritarian regimes: Co-optation, repression and resistance in Hungary. (2025). PMC/NIH.

9. Laszlo, R. (2014). The new Hungarian election system’s beneficiaries. Political Capital Institute, Central European University.

10. OSCE/ODIHR. (2022). Hungary parliamentary elections and referendum 2022: Election observation mission final report.

11. Oxford Academic. (2023). Masking the strangulation of opposition parties as pandemic response: Austerity measures targeting the local level in Hungary. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 16(1), 105-121.

12. Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive authoritarianism: Hybrid regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge University Press.

13. Verfassungsblog. (2025). Judicial harassment in Turkey: The Imamoglu case and the ECtHR’s crucial role; Foreign Affairs. (2025). Turkey is now a full-blown autocracy.

14. Pew Research Center. (2010, April 7). Hungary dissatisfied with democracy, but not its ideals.

15. Farhart, C. (2017). Look who is disaffected now: Political causes and consequences of learned helplessness in the U.S. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota].

16. Heinrich Boll Stiftung. (2018, April 12). Hungary after the election: Continuing on Orban’s path.

17. Scheiring, G. (2024). I watched Hungary’s democracy dissolve into authoritarianism as a member of parliament. The Conversation.

18. Bunce, V., & Wolchik, S. (2011). Defeating authoritarian leaders in postcommunist countries. Cambridge University Press; International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. (n.d.). Otpor and the struggle for democracy in Serbia (1998-2000). https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/otpor-struggle-democracy-serbia-1998-2000/

19. Ingleby, M., & Wuthrich, F. M. (2020). The pushback against populism: Running on “radical love” in Turkey. Journal of Democracy, 31(2), 24-40.

20. Kovarek, D., & Littvay, L. (2022). The 2019 Hungarian local elections. East European Politics.

21. Foreign Policy. (2020, July 28). Viktor Orban has declared war on mayors; CGTN. (2023, May 30). Orban blamed by Budapest deputy mayor as city faces bankruptcy.

22. Heinrich Boll Stiftung. (2023, July 5). Remaining on the right side of history: An interview with Gergely Karacsony, the Green Mayor of Budapest.

23. Territory, Politics, Governance. (2025). How opposition cities successfully challenge illiberal populist regimes: Comparing Istanbul, Budapest and Warsaw.