You, Not the Government: What Hungary’s Recent Election Can Teach us at Dartmouth

John G. Kemeny, the thirteenth president of Dartmouth College and co-inventor of the BASIC programming language, was a product of a distinct intellectual heritage. He belonged to a generation of Hungarian scientists and mathematicians — among them John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller — whose cognitive outputs fundamentally altered the twentieth century. Observing this historical density of genius, one might reasonably conclude that the extreme caliber of Hungarian intellect translates into the selection of an equally rational government.
This assumption is demonstrably false. Instead of analytical rigor, the Hungarian electorate has cultivated a tolerance for systemic dysfunction. The modern Hungarian state provides a real time case study in how intelligence without agency leads to a state of government indistinguishable from that elected by a vacous electorate.
For over a decade, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has operated a government defined by institutionalized corruption. His ruling party functions as a centralized mechanism for redirecting state resources into the portfolios of political loyalists.
The ascent of Lőrinc Mészáros perfectly illustrates this dynamic. Mészáros is Orbán’s high school best friend. He began his career as a gas technician in the village of Felcsút, with only a high school diploma under his belt.
Despite his modest education he rapidly became a billionaire and the wealthiest man in the country, boasting a wealth of $5.2 billion in 2025. Over 85% of revenue for his holding company Opus Global comes from EU public tenders – non refundable aid awarded by the European Union to its member states where the local government awards the final contracts.
Mészáros is not the only exceptional business talent who has surfaced in the country in the last 16 years. He is one of the only central figures of NER (National System of Cooperation) – a term coined by the Orban administration referring to the national policy of “cultivating national businesses”. In reality, the National System of Cooperation operates more so as the National System of Corruption.
This patronage network operates openly, and has “stolen” a sum amounting to several percentage points of GDP each year according to economists. Recently, the government sold the revenue rights to the national highway system to a consortium linked to Mészáros for 75 years. While the exact amount has been classified, and upon inquiry by journalists the reason for classification was also classified, rumors hold that the entire highway system was handed over to Mészáros’s company for less than $100 million. The lead oligarch must have been reading the Art of the Deal, as independent estimates put the fair value north of $10 billion.
Mr. Mészáros wasn’t just blessed with an incredible business acumen but also with natural humbleness. When asked how his companies’ revenues grew faster in the last 10 years than Facebook did at its peak growth years, he simply replied: “Maybe I’m smarter [than Zuckerberg], don’t you think?”
The absurdity of the proposition that a gas technician could be smarter than Mark Zuckerberg was evident even to FIDESZ’s own voters, and the proverb quickly became a national meme. Public outrage did not follow, but rather “well, what can you do”-s were heard alongside heavy shoulder shrugging. A perfect example of how even the most outrageous scandals can be swept under the rug due to the lack of agency on the voters’ part.
The economic outcomes of this apparatus are stark. Inflation rates outpace the rest of the European Union. The national currency, the forint, suffers from chronic depreciation. Neighboring countries have surpassed Hungary in economic output. Yet, despite clear evidence of economic mismanagement, the ruling apparatus has maintained a 2/3 supermajority in parliament for years. While some twists were applied to the electoral system, the level of gerrymandering was pretty mundane by American standards, nothing close to what was being portrayed in the western liberal media. The voters clearly had the chance to vote them out in 2014, 2018, and 2022 yet many decided to just stay home on election day.
This political landscape recently experienced a disruption with the emergence of Péter Magyar. In early 2024, a scandal forced the resignation of the Minister of Justice, Judit Varga. In the vacuum left by this event, Varga’s ex-husband, Magyar, stepped into the public arena. He mobilized a frustrated opposition electorate.
Magyar’s ascent is rooted in calculated opportunism. He was entirely content with his life inside Orbán’s corruption apparatus. He held lucrative positions on the boards of state-owned enterprises and served as the CEO of the Student Loan Centre. He was markedly silent about corruption inside of government enterprises during his whole campaign. This silence is not a surprise, considering he was part of the exact same system just months ago.
His sudden pivot was not driven by moral urgency. It was driven by exclusion. Magyar wanted to be a minister, much like his wife. When he did not get what he wanted, and when his government connections evaporated following Varga’s resignation, he retaliated.
To cement his new political platform, he explicitly blackmailed his own wife using a secret audio recording he had made of her in their home. He released the tape to the public only when his career demanded it, exposing private conversations to secure public standing. Funnily enough, this demonstration of his “integrity” gained the immediate liking of the Hungarian people, who eagerly elevated him as a political challenger.
I argue his new political vehicle is simply “Blue Fidesz.” He has not deviated from Orbán on any substantive political points. It is a derivative of the ruling party, operating on similar populist rhetoric, merely fronted by a man whose primary grievance with the syndicate was that he was denied a seat at the table. Yet, hundreds of thousands of voters have rallied behind him.
This cycle forces a necessary question regarding accountability. If a man gives you a slap in the face that you did not know he would give, the fault is his. You lacked the data to anticipate the blow. However, if you keep going back to the same person for twelve more years, receiving the
same slap and learning nothing from past impacts, the allocation of blame shifts. At what point does it become the people’s fault for getting slapped, and not the fault of the person giving the slaps?
A government is the representation of its people. If the government is bad, one must pose the question whether it is not the people who are actually at fault. A corrupt state requires a complicit populace. The failure of the Hungarian state is a failure of the Hungarian citizen to enforce a standard of governance, and unfortunately, it seems like Hungary returned to the twin brother of the guy who was slapping it in the face for 16 years.
This dynamic scales directly to university governance. Here in Hanover, the Dartmouth College administration has consistently expanded its bureaucracy and engaged in several expensive virtue signalling projects, which we have covered extensively.
It is fine for the administration to bloat. That is what institutions do. They want to grow themselves. It is the biological imperative of a bureaucracy to expand its footprint and secure more funding. Administrators will hire consultants, launch redundant initiatives, and expand their payrolls because their organizational incentives reward expansion. It is not a vice if they misstep and spend our money on useless things. They are simply operating according to the mechanical laws of organizational behavior.
The real sin is if we do not step up and push back against it. Just as the Hungarian electorate fails by returning for the proverbial slap, the Dartmouth student body fails when we observe the administrative absorption of resources and remain silent. When a bureaucracy expands without friction, it is because the constituents have removed the friction. The fault for an inefficient administration does not lie solely with the administrators doing the growing. It lies with the students and stakeholders who watch the tuition dollars redirect into tertiary projects and do nothing.
That is why I believe The Dartmouth Review is the most important organization on campus. We are the only one willing to push back against the administration, and it is of utmost importance that we continue to do so. An institution will only respect boundaries that are actively defended. If we do not assert those boundaries, the administration will continue to expand. When the institution fails to serve its primary academic purpose, the fault lies with those who allowed it to happen.