On April 12, 2026, Viktor Orbán lost. After sixteen years in power, his Fidesz party was crushed by Péter Magyar’s Tisza party in the highest-turnout election Hungary has held since 1990, and Orbán conceded on election night. For a man who proudly spoke of building an “illiberal state,” it was a surprisingly democratic exit. 

Some would say the story ends there, with a win for democracy. But the real story began once the votes were counted. With a two-thirds supermajority, Magyar’s government amended the constitution to impose an eight-year term limit on prime ministers, which conveniently kept Orbán from returning. When President Tamás Sulyok, an Orbán ally, refused to resign, it passed another amendment ending his term early. Sound familiar? Isn’t using a supermajority to rewrite the rules exactly what Orbán did? 

I argue that it isn’t. Many theories pertaining to democratic erosion overlook a key question: what comes next? While it’s been said that forbearance is the right norm for protecting a democracy, it is the wrong one for rebuilding it. Once a regime has been built out of legal parts, restraint just keeps those parts in place. What matters instead is whether a reform makes it possible for those in power to lose. 

The Monster Outlives Its Maker

By the 2020s, Hungary was classified as a competitive authoritarian regime where elections were present, the playing field was tilted. This label tells us what Hungary was, but it doesn’t explain why Orbán’s system survived his defeat. Kim Lane Scheppele’s idea of the Frankenstate provides more insight into this phenomenon. Scheppele argues that Orbán built his regime by stitching together laws that each appear normal, but add up to something monstrous. Each part passes inspection; however, when put together, they create a Frankenstein of their own, or as Orbán would say an “illiberal state.”

To create such a state, Orbán carried out executive aggrandizement through legal channels. Orbán’s concession of power did little to undo this. Hungary’s constitution reserves more than 30 policy areas for “cardinal laws” that can only be changed by a two-thirds vote, and Orbán loyalists still held key offices. A new leader who governed the system as it stood would be subjected to the same legal mechanisms that protected the previous one. 

The Case for Restraint

This argument goes against the work of Levitsky and Ziblatt, who argue that democracies survive on two unwritten norms: mutual toleration, accepting rivals as legitimate, and forbearance, exercising restraint even when the law would allow more. It is the second norm that matters most here. Forbearance turns democracy into a repeated game, where once one side starts playing constitutional hardball, the other retaliates, and the cycle continues until the game eventually breaks.

Ozan Varol’s work on stealth authoritarianism makes this warning even sharper. Varol shows that modern autocrats rarely break the law outright. They use legal tools such as electoral rule changes and selective prosecutions, conflating abuse and “normal” governing. Seen through this lens, the line between Orbán and Magyar can start to blur. Both used a two-thirds majority to amend the constitution, and both used it in ways that hurt their opponents. If the tools are identical, Varol’s logic suggests that Magyar’s reforms are just as worrisome as Orbán’s. Critics have made exactly this case; Human Rights Watch, for example, warned that the rushed changes undermine the rule of law.

Why Restraint Fails Here 

The problem with forbearance is that it assumes both players are on a fair board; however, this is not the case for Hungary. In their 2026 report, OSCE election observers found that Hungary’s election laws had been changed without inclusive consultation, while Orbán sent voters letters through government channels, echoing Fidesz campaign messages. Rewriting the rules and using state resources to tilt the field toward the incumbent is textbook election manipulation.

In this situation, restraint isn’t neutral. If Magyar refuses to touch the cardinal laws or the Orbán-appointed officials, the Fidesz party keeps control despite losing the election. Forbearance would reward the side that broke the norms in the first place, demonstrating that it’s not actually a repeated game. It’s a game where one player gets to keep the extra pieces they stole. 

A Better Test 

If restraint cannot tell us what Magyar should do, we need to look towards another standard. Adam Przeworski’s bare-bones definition of a democracy provides an alternative view, showing that democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. He measures this by the alteration rule, which only counts a country as a democracy if an incumbent has lost an election and handed over power. Przeworski’s definition can be turned into a test for reforms that asks one simple question. How does this move impact the removal of those in power? 

That lets us separate two moves that look identical on paper. Orbán’s 2011 constitution, passed with Fidesz votes alone, made Fidesz harder to remove. That’s entrenching. Magyar’s term limit does the opposite. It caps how long any prime minister can stay in office, including Magyar himself. The tool may be the same, a supermajority amending the constitution, but the outcome is different. Answering Varol’s argument, stealth authoritarians use legal tools to close the exits, and reformers must use them to reopen them. 

This test also cuts against Magyar when it should. Retroactively targeting one named rival is still uncomfortable. So is the amendment that ended President Sulyok’s term early. These moves remove Orbán loyalists, but they pass the test only if Magyar’s government does not replace them with loyalists of its own. Magyar’s government has called these measures temporary and promised a new constitution written through broad public consultation. That promise is exactly what we should hold it to. 

Why This Matters for the U.S.

This problem is not limited to Hungary. Donald Trump endorsed Orbán for re-election, and parts of the American right have held up Hungary as a model for years. Levitsky and Ziblatt describe norms as democracy’s guardrails, but Hungary shows their limit. This case suggests that once guardrails are removed, instructing everyone to drive carefully won’t put them back. If American institutions are ever seriously eroded, reformers will stand in the same place as Magyar, and a return to restraint will not be enough. They will need a standard for telling rebuilding from retaliation, and the simplest one is whether their reforms make it easier for voters to remove them too.  

Forbearance may protect democracies, but it cannot rebuild them. The real test for Magyar isn’t whether he plays hardball. It’s whether, once his reforms are finished, Tisza can lose. If the next election is one his party could lose, he will have rebuilt the game. If it isn’t, Hungary will have simply traded one Frankenstate for another.