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Dissenters Against European Autocrats Warn of 'Democratic Backsliding' in Trump's America
"Many Americans think this is something that only happens to others, and I think that mindset has to be fought," said Katalin Cseh, a member of Hungary's opposition Momentum Movement Party.
Jul 17, 2025
Eastern European dissidents are warning that the autocratic politics that took over their countries is in the process of taking over the United States as well.
At a web forum hosted Tuesday by the Center for American Progress, opposition politicians and journalists from Hungary, Serbia, and Turkey spoke about the tactics that strongman leaders used to rip up the foundations of their nations' democratic institutions. They urged Americans to resist President Donald Trump as he tries to do the same.
"I do believe that many Americans think this is something that only happens to others, and I think that mindset has to be fought," said Katalin Cseh, a member of Hungary's opposition Momentum Movement Party.
Her nation, under authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is often cited as a textbook example of "democratic backsliding" in the 21st century.
Since his election in 2010, with a supermajority in the parliament, Orbán has worked to steadily capture key political institutions like election authorities and the judiciary, and cultural ones like the media and universities to bend them toward a "nationalist conservative narrative."
Notably, Cseh says, Orbán did this not by formally abolishing institutions, but by purging dissent and taking them over:
The first month of the new government back in 2010 started with the complete overhaul of the Hungarian constitution without democratic discussion. Senior judges were forced into early retirement and a new judicial administration was created...
The freedom of the media is almost lost...The media authority was staffed by loyalists. A pro-government businessman acquired private media and later donated it to a foundation run by the government. This means that if you turn on almost any channel, it has Fox News running on it...
The electoral system is very heavily manipulated. The government, after they got into power, changed the electoral system to one that is more fitting to them and gerrymandering very heavily to disenfranchise more progressive voters and to change the districts to a more favorable one for them...
The universities' minds were centralized and now mostly run by foundations set up by the government. The curriculum was also centralized and was very heavily infused with nationalist and conservative theory, and minorities, LGBTQI+ and women's rights are almost obliterated.
Cseh noted that the so-called "Hungarian blueprint" is heavily influential among American conservatives, who have hosted Orbán at conventions like CPAC and consulted pro-Orbán think tanks to create the 'Project 2025' agenda Trump has used during his second term.
Trump, moreover, has been carrying out similar ideological purges of government through the mass firings of disloyal public servants, threats to defund universities that refuse to teach the MAGA worldview as doctrine, and attempts to legally erase the government's recognition of nonwhite and LGBTQ+ individuals.
"What if this is a blueprint for MAGA? What if this is something you will see in your country?" she asked.
Szabolcs Panyi, a journalist with the Hungarian website Direkt36, likewise raised comparisons between Orbán and Trump's assaults on the press.
"It's not a coincidence that Orbán went after the free media," Panyi said. "He understood for him to grab power it's essential that people just don't see behind the curtains and don't understand what's happening."
He pointed to Trump's attacks on the free press, including his use of lawsuits, FCC investigations, and threats of prosecution against critical media outlets.
"It's interesting to see how large outlets or media owners or conglomerates try to appease Trump by settling lawsuits, firing journalists and editors," Panyi said. "It reminds me of what happened in Hungary in the 2010s."
Dissidents from Serbia and Turkey have dealt with a similar backslide and raised similar parallels to the situation in America.
Ceylan Akça, a member of the pro-Kurdish People's Equality and Democracy Party in the Turkish parliament, discussed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's use of citizenship as a political weapon against minorities like the Kurds. He has moved to strip the citizenship of naturalized Kurds, who he says support "terrorism" by militant groups like the PKK.
"We'll see people with Turkish citizenship, who were naturalized, stripped of their citizenship and being deported," Akça said, "which is the example you're having in the U.S. where you're having a discussion about naturalized citizens losing citizenship."
"We have to be aware that they are using [tools that] are usually legal but misused, institutional but hollowed out, democratic in appearance but authoritarian in essence," said Tamara Tripic, the chair of the Democratic Dialogue Network in Serbia.
Tripic said that the recent youth-led anti-corruption protests against President Aleksandar Vučić in her country provide a roadmap for how to resist. She cited the importance of mobilizing young people.
"Students actually started the process. They were the most powerful resistance we saw in recent years," she said.
Cseh said that part of building that engagement needed to come from creating a viable alternative to the right that promises people "tangible change" in their lives.
"Autocrats are not always good at governing," she said, "so the cost of living crisis, cost of healthcare, education, everything. Everybody senses that."
She said that Americans have "a very good opportunity ahead" in the next elections to reassert power.
"Start preparing for the midterms like yesterday," said Cseh. "Go to every protest, go to every march, stand right beside everybody who is being attacked, no matter if it is a group you belong to, or something that you do not share personally. You have to stand side by side [with] each other and help and support those who might feel isolated and alone."
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ICC Demands Hungary Explain Why Netanyahu Wasn't Arrested During Visit
The head of Amnesty International in Europe said the court has done "what the E.U. should have: taken legal measures against Hungary for its failure to arrest a fugitive wanted for war crimes."
Apr 17, 2025
The International Criminal Court on Wednesday initiated proceedings against Hungary for failing to enforce the tribunal's arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent visit to the Central European nation.
The ICC is asking Hungary's far-right government to explain why it did not comply with its warrant for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Such compliance is required under the Rome Statute, the treaty governing the ICC to which Hungary is signatory.
The tribunal's request cites Article 87 of the Rome Statute, which authorizes legal action against state parties who don't cooperate with the court, and gives Hungary until May 23 to respond.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said shortly before Netanyahu's visit that Hungary would quit the ICC. Not only did Hungary reject the arrest warrant, Orbán literally rolled out the red carpet to welcome his far-right counterpart in Budapest earlier this month, prompting rebuke from the ICC and human rights groups.
In May 2021, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan applied for warrants to apprehend Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for "crimes of causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict."
Khan also sought warrants to arrest three Hamas leaders who have since been killed by Israel for alleged crimes committed during and after the October 7, 2023 attack, including "extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape, and sexual assault in detention."
The full 18-judge ICC approved the warrants in November, prompting Republicans and dozens of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives to pass legislation to sanction tribunal officials. Democrats subsequently blocked the measure in the Senate. Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order imposing sanctions on the ICC, prompting an ACLU-led lawsuit.
Israel and allies including the United States have either openly flouted the ICC warrant or offered dubious legal reasons for sidestepping the arrest order.
Italy and France, for example, have granted Netanyahu immunity on the grounds that he is the head of state of a country that is not an ICC member.
Trump welcomed Netanyahu to the White House a month before the Budapest trip, though the U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute.
Although Israel is not signatory to the Rome Statute, officials from non-state parties are still subject to ICC prosecution if they commit crimes inside nations that have ratified the treaty. Palestine became an ICC member in 2015.
Just two years ago France backed the ICC arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine war crimes charges—even though Moscow has not signed the Rome Statute—arguing that "no one responsible for crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, regardless of their status, should escape justice."
Last year, an ICC panel referred Mongolia to the court's oversight body after it failed to arrest Putin, who was warmly welcomed by Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh and other officials in Ulaanbaatar.
Luis Moreno Ocampo, who served as the ICC's first prosecutor,
told the Emirati newspaper The National on Wednesday that Netanyahu remains free thanks to the political influence of countries including the U.S. However, Ocampo said that "this protection is temporary" and accused Netanyahu of prolonging the Gaza war to delay his own domestic criminal corruption trial.
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Major Gaza Land Grab Underway as Israel's Ethnic Cleansing Escalates
Israeli forces also bombed an U.N. clinic in Jabalia, killing at least 22 Palestinians including elders, women, and children—one of them a newborn baby.
Apr 02, 2025
Israel's far-right government on Wednesday admitted to a major land grab in the embattled Gaza Strip, where the forced removal of Palestinians accelerated amid ongoing airstrikes that killed scores of civilians, including at least 22 people slain in the bombing of a health clinic run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) renewed assault is "expanding to crush and clean" Gaza while "seizing large areas that will be added to the security zones of the state of Israel for the protection of fighting forces and the settlements," a reference to plans by far-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government for the ethnic cleansing and Israeli recolonization of the Palestinian enclave.
"Did you decide that we are sacrificing hostages for capturing land?"
Israeli forces control what they call a buffer zone along Gaza's entire border and on Monday ordered a sweeping evacuatione that forced approximately 140,000 Palestinians to flee from Rafah and other areas. In scenes reminiscent of the Nakba—during which over 750,000 Arabs fled or were forced from Palestine during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948—Palestinian families were seen carrying their possessions or loading them atop vehicles and donkey carts as they sought ever-elusive safety.
Ihab Suliman, a former university professor forcibly expelled from Jabalia with his family, told The Associated Press on Monday that "there is no longer any taste to life. Life and death have become one and the same for us."
The fresh wave of expulsions follows last month's creation of a new IDF directorate tasked with ethnically cleansing northern Gaza under the guise of "voluntary emigration." Katz said the agency would be run "in accordance with the vision of U.S. President Donald Trump," who last month said that the United States would "take over" Gaza after emptying the strip of its over 2 million Palestinians and transform the coastal enclave into the "Riviera of the Middle East." Trump has since attempted to walk back some of his comments.
The renewed ethnic cleansing of southern Gaza came amid heavy IDF airstrikes throughout the strip, including the Wednesday bombing of a clinic-turned-shelter run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Jabalia that killed at least 22 civilians, including women, children, and elders and wounded dozens more, according to local officials. Graphic video of the strike's aftermath showed a man holding up the headless body of a newborn baby outside the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia.
Gaza's Government Media Office called the strike "a full-fledged war crime," while the Palestinian Foreign Ministry urged the international community to pressure Israel "to halt its genocide, displacement, and annexation, and impose a political settlement per international law."
Israel admitted to carrying out the strike, claiming it targeted "Hamas terrorists" hiding among the civilians. Israeli policy implemented after Hamas led the deadliest-ever attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 permits the IDF to knowingly kill an unlimited number of civilians in order to kill just one Hamas member, no matter their rank or role in the organization.
Katz called on Gaza residents to "expel Hamas and return all hostages" kidnapped from Israel on October 7.
However, the umbrella group representing families of some of the abductees—24 of whom are believed to still be alive—on Wednesday accused Netanyahu of "burying the hostages alive" by unilaterally abandoning aa cease-fire with Hamas last month.
"Did you decide that we are sacrificing hostages for capturing land?" the Hostages and Missing Families Forum asked following Katz's announcement. "Instead of getting the hostages out in a deal and ending the war, Israel's government is sending more soldiers to Gaza to fight in the same places that they already fought over and over again."
Since March 18, when Israel broke the cease-fire with Hamas and resumed its assault on Gaza, more than 1,000 Palestinians, including over 320 children, have been killed, and thousands more wounded, according to local and international officials.
Since Israel resumed its terror bombing of Gaza on March 18, every day we see images of small children with their heads or limbs blown off by U.S. weapons. Doctors having to cut holiday clothes off of children in a desperate attempt to save them. Amputations without anesthesia.
— Jeremy Scahill ( @jeremyscahill.com) April 2, 2025 at 3:51 AM
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 175,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, according the Gaza Health Ministry. That figure includes at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Almost all of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times. Meanwhile, Israel's "complete siege" of Gaza has exacerbated widespread and sometimes deadly starvation and illness.
On Monday, the Gaza Government Media Office said that at least 1,513 humanitarian workers have also been killed by Israeli forces since October 2023. It is uncertain whether that figure includes the 15 first responders—including eight Red Crescent workers and six Civil Defense personnel—whose bodies, some of them allegedly bound and shot, were found in a mass grave that day.
Israel is facing an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are fugitives from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which last year issued arrest warrants for the pair for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The ICC joined human rights groups on Wednesday in condemning Netanyahu trip to Hungary, a signatory to the Rome Statute governing the world's top war crimes tribunal. Hungarian President Viktor Orbán and other members of his far-right government are set to welcome Netanyahu for a four-day visit underscoring both countries' disdain for international law.
Meanwhile in the illegally occupied West Bank—where thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded by IDF troops and Jewish settler-colonists since October 2023—the UNRWA area director said this week that the scale of forced displacement is unprecedented during the 58 years of Israeli occupation.
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