On April 1 2026, Hungary held an election with roughly 80 percent turnout and threw Viktor Orbán out of power after sixteen years. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party, which ran on naming the Orbán government’s corruption openly and promising specific measures to dismantle it, won 53.6 percent of the vote and 138 of the 199 seats in parliament, a two-thirds supermajority, while Orbán’s Fidesz took 55 seats. Magyar’s 3.3 million votes were the most any party has ever received in democratic Hungary. The textbook case of a seemingly successfully captured regime ended at a ballot box the regime itself had spent over a decade engineering to be unloseable.
Americans watched Orbán fall and mostly filed it under good news from somewhere far away, without registering that the EU’s financial pressure was part of what made the defeat possible, and that the mechanism behind it can be built and used to address similar issues in the US.
Orbán lost because several conditions converged, and one of them was that the European Union, the supposedly toothless bureaucracy that conservatives spend their lives mocking, deployed a working soft-power apparatus that starved his patronage machine of the money it ran on. Over the course of the Orbán government’s standoff with Brussels, the EU froze tens of billions of euros earmarked for Hungary on rule-of-law grounds, with around 18 billion still frozen at the time of the election and over a billion permanently forfeited when the first tranche of suspended funds expired at the end of 2024. That money had been the lifeblood of the Fidesz network, much of it historically funneled to Orbán-connected oligarchs who in turn kept the regime’s coalition loyal. Cut off the money and the coalition gets fragile. When Tisza ran a credible challenge, the coalition broke. The collapse was not luck. It was policy doing exactly what it was designed to do.
We are in the position the EU has been building tools for since the 2000s. Hungary and Poland both spent the last decade testing what a member state could get away with on rule-of-law erosion, judicial capture, and the suppression of opposition. The EU built its toolkit in response to them, and the toolkit is both operational and proven. We do not have to invent any of it. We can read what they did and understand what we are looking at when we look at our own structural future.
There are five levers worth knowing by name as we explore ways to use to regional power of democratic cities and states to restore democracy at the federal level as well as in autocratic republican states.
Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union is the procedure that can suspend a member state’s voting rights in EU institutions when it persistently breaches the Union’s founding values, including the rule of law and democracy. It is the political mechanism. The Commission triggered it against Poland in December 2017, and the European Parliament triggered it against Hungary in September 2018. The procedure is hard to complete, because identifying a serious breach requires unanimous agreement among the other member states, which is why it has stalled at the hearing stage for years rather than actually stripping anyone’s vote. But its existence shapes what regimes are willing to attempt, because the threat is real and the proceedings build the formal record that other mechanisms rely on.
The Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation, in force since 2021, is the financial mechanism, and it is the lever that did the most concrete work against Hungary. The regulation lets the EU withhold funds from a member state when rule-of-law breaches put the Union’s budget at risk. The Commission triggered it against Hungary for the first time in late 2022, and the Council approved suspending billions in budget commitments over concerns about public procurement, corruption controls, and the capture of formerly public universities by government-aligned trusts. Orbán’s regime had been counting on that money. When it stopped, and stayed stopped, the machine that kept his coalition fed started to run dry. (After Magyar won, the Commission moved to release the remaining frozen billions, the same lever working in reverse to reward reform.)
The European Court of Justice is the judicial mechanism for EU law itself, and the European Court of Human Rights, technically a Council of Europe institution rather than an EU one but operating in tandem, is the human rights mechanism. Both provide judicial oversight that no single member state government can capture, because the judges are appointed through processes no single country controls. A Hungarian or Polish government can pack its own supreme court. It cannot pack the Strasbourg court. Citizens, NGOs, and other member states can bring cases there, and the rulings carry real legal weight inside the offending country.
The Copenhagen criteria are the membership and standing conditions. They were written in 1993 to govern accession, the requirements a country had to meet to join the EU in the first place: stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities. Over time those criteria have been understood to govern continued good standing too, not only entry. A country that drifts away from them loses leverage, loses funds, loses standing, and eventually loses the prosperity that came with membership.
The broader Union budget itself is the fifth lever, the one that ties the others together. Structural funds, cohesion funds, agricultural support, research and exchange programs like Horizon and Erasmus, all of it moves through compliance conditions that make authoritarian capture genuinely expensive for the regime building it. The mechanism is quieter than what the American imagination reaches for when it thinks about confronting authoritarianism. No troops, no conventional sanctions, no dramatic confrontation. Just conditions on the money that flows through the Union, calibrated so the cost of authoritarianism climbs above the cost of staying democratic. The financial gravity of belonging to a wealthy bloc does the rest.
The EU model runs on pooled financial and judicial mechanisms shared by countries that keep their own governments, their own laws, and their own constitutional authority, while binding themselves to standards no single member can dismantle alone.
That last clause is the part Americans most need to absorb, because it is the part that distinguishes the EU model from the federalism the right wing has been selling us for fifty years. Conservative decentralization is about removing the federal layer so states can become small fiefdoms answerable to the highest bidders. The EU model keeps the central layer small for most things while binding member states to shared democratic standards on the things that matter. Strong states, a lean center, and robust shared mechanisms for protecting voting rights, judicial independence, and human rights.
That is a different destination than the one the Federalist Society talks about, and it is the destination this publication has in mind when it imagines a future where America looks structurally more like the European Union than like the consolidated federal hegemony we have now.
When we talk about Tiers 1 through 4 and the architecture of state opposition to federal authoritarian capture, the same question keeps coming up. If states get more independent authority, isn’t this what the bad guys want? To tear us apart so the oligarchs can more easily exploit us?
The European Union is the answer. States with real autonomy can still bind each other to democratic standards through structured cooperation, and that cooperation can carry teeth. The American Reformation lands, ideally, in a federation where states hold more authority of their own than they have in living memory, where the central layer is smaller and more focused on coordination and common defense, and where shared democratic standards, voting rights, fair courts, human rights, protection of minorities, are enforced through pooled financial and judicial mechanisms that no single state can dismantle alone.
We already have the constitutional architecture for the first half of that. The interstate compact clause of Article I lets states bind themselves to shared rules with congressional consent. The Tenth Amendment, read as the affirmative grant it is, gives states the authority they need to act as equals. State attorneys general already coordinate enforcement across jurisdictions, filing joint suits by the dozen. State supreme courts already issue rulings that protect rights the federal courts have abandoned. The full constitutional case for this, the doctrine, the historical record, and the deployment surface, runs through the working paper this series is built on. The bones are there. What remains is the deliberate construction of the soft-power apparatus, the shared enforcement mechanisms, the conditional resource flows, the joint judicial standards. The EU spent twenty years building it. We have a head start on the legal architecture and a country full of state-level institutions ready to use it.
There is hope in this too. The most dangerous narrative running through American political life right now is the idea that authoritarian regimes consolidate and stay consolidated, that once Orbán wins he wins forever, that once Trump captures the courts and the agencies and the security services there is no way back. Hungary just disproved that narrative in real time. A regime built over sixteen years on patronage, judicial capture, media consolidation, and rigged electoral districts lost an election it had designed to be unloseable, because the opposition ran straight at the corruption and named it without flinching, made concrete promises about how it would tear that corruption out, drew credibility from a leader who had seen the machine from the inside, and pressed its case while international financial pressure starved the patronage network and the public turned out in numbers no one expected.
The American case is harder than Hungary’s, because we have no EU sitting outside our borders ready to apply financial pressure on a captured federal government. But we have something the EU member states do not have: fifty states with independent constitutional authority and the legal capacity, when they choose to use it, to coordinate among themselves outside the federal structure. That is what soft secession and the broader architecture of state-led opposition are about. That is what the rest of the Existentialist Republic’s American Reformation series has been mapping. The EU shows us the destination is real, the levers are real, and a regime built on what looked like permanent capture can fall in a single election if the soft-power apparatus around it has been doing its quiet work long enough.
We should know how that apparatus works. We should know what it is called and why each piece exists. And when we talk about where the American Reformation is headed, we should be able to point at Strasbourg and Brussels and say: that, but ours, and built on the constitutional bones we already have.
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We need to work positively on multiple fronts. Getting out the vote, pressuring state level da’s, state courts and legislators to adjudicate legal complaints all need adequate citizen participation. We can do this! Great job Christopher…
Inspiring. As usual.
Showing us the way forward using the powers we already posess.
Without a negative word.