Donald Trump is putting liberal democracy through its greatest test in 80 years.
None of it is original. His style of rule is straight from the democratic backsliders' playbook. To secure long-term power rather than short-term office, rulers must take over the institutions that check and balance majority rule and bend them to their will. Trump has tamed Congress and inserted his people into the Supreme Court, law enforcement, intelligence, and competition regulation but - to his great frustration - the Federal Reserve is holding out.
It was the same story in Hungary after Viktor Orbán returned to the premiership in 2010. Bound by EU law and the mandates of the governor and his deputies, Orbán had to wait three years to break the national bank. One of those deputy governors, Júlia Király, experienced state capture from the inside and resigned with a public protest at the loss of institutional independence.
Now an associate professor of finance and monetary economics at the International Business School in Budapest, she began her career under socialism at the statistics and planning offices. As deputy governor, she was part of the team that managed the Hungarian economy through the post-2007 financial crisis – an experience she chronicles in Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Turbulences to a Global Hurricane (Springer, 2020).
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at www.242.news on Substack.
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