Hungary. Serbia. Brazil.
Election victories that overcame authoritarianism. Victories that prove the importance of showing up, marching, organizing, swimming upstream against amplified disinformation, and helping each other vote.
Each country faced state-controlled media or media manipulation. Each had powerful interests working against the rights of its own people. Yet in each case, voters won anyway.
Two of those victories happened yesterday.
Hungary: the propaganda machine stopped working
For 16 years, Viktor Orbán was the model for the modern strongman. American conservatives held conferences in his honor. Donald Trump endorsed him for this election.
He built the most advanced system of media capture in the European Union. By the time of the April 12 vote, his government controlled over 80% of Hungary’s media. Fidesz redrew the electoral map so the main opposition party needed to win by 4 to 5 points just to get a majority. Pro-government outlets even passed around an AI-generated fake of the opposition’s party platform.
Péter Magyar, a former regime insider, had no access to any of it. So he went around it. He toured town after town and village after village, handed out a free newspaper, and built his campaign on social media. The movement against Orbán began with students demanding better schools.
On Election Day, a record 79 percent of Hungarians voted. Magyar’s Tisza party won 138 seats to Fidesz’s 55, a two-thirds supermajority. Orbán called the result painful but clear and conceded the same night.
The margin was too big to argue with.
Serbia: the students who wouldn’t go home
On Nov. 1, 2024, a concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station collapsed and killed 16 people. Serbians saw the corruption and negligence behind it, and students took to the streets.
They stayed there for two years. They organized some of the largest protests in Serbia’s history, and the government answered with arrests and firings. Teachers who stood with the students lost their jobs.
Aleksandar Vučić had run Serbia since 2012, and he owned the airwaves. In this campaign, one analysis found his positive coverage ran eleven times higher than in 2022. Observers documented voter intimidation and vote-buying in local elections this spring.
So the students went door to door. They launched a nationwide door-to-door campaign, and some biked across the country. Thousands met them in Kragujevac. Their strategy was turnout, because Vučić had always won when turnout stayed low.
Yesterday, Serbia saw its highest turnout in more than 30 years. The Students’ List won about 2.2 million votes to Vučić’s 1.7 million. Vučić conceded, then blamed independent media, foreign governments, and an “American deep state” for his loss.
Brazil: the comeback, and the refusal
Brazil has already seen how this ends. After Jair Bolsonaro lost in 2022, his supporters stormed the country’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace on Jan. 8, 2023. Bolsonaro was later convicted and is in jail.
His son Flávio, a senator and Trump ally, ran in his place. Tech oligarchs had already chosen a side. When Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to block accounts spreading election disinformation, Elon Musk defied the court and X was banned in Brazil. When Brazil’s first lady pushed for tougher social media rules, Musk replied that Lula’s side was going to lose the next election.
For a while, that looked right. In the first round on Oct. 4, Flávio Bolsonaro led Lula 47 to 45 percent, and polls showed him ahead going into the runoff.
Yesterday, Lula won by nearly 4.4 million votes, about 51.8 to 48.2 percent.
Flávio Bolsonaro refuses to accept it. He says he will ask the courts to annul the election.
The playbook
The authoritarian playbook is universally transparent.
Repeat the big lies until they become a truth for those who are easily manipulated or who simply want to believe it. Attack vulnerable minorities. Call them garbage, as our president did when he described Somali immigrants that way four times in seven seconds. Blame them for problems that don’t even exist.
Never admit defeat. Double down on your missteps. Never show weakness. Claim that empathy is toxic.
And when the votes come in, blame the media, blame foreigners, blame the courts. Orbán’s machine ran on lies about a coming war. Vučić blamed a “deep state.” Bolsonaro wants the courts to throw out millions of votes.
Authoritarians are more afraid of your vote than anything else in this world.
Our Midterms
Here in the United States, our midterm elections are a week away. The presidency is not on the ballot, but democracy is. Our Constitution is. And so is our chance to stop the most corrupt and most authoritarian president we’ve seen in generations.
History is also universally transparent. Authoritarian regimes don’t end well, and they rarely go quietly. They claim a rigged system. They cry fraud without evidence. They storm the Capitol, in Washington and in Brasília.
But look at what beat them. Hungary had record turnout. Serbia had students knocking on doors and the highest turnout in 30 years. In Brazil, voters erased a first-round deficit of more than 2 million votes in three weeks.
None of them had a free press on their side, a fair map or a level playing field. They had each other, and they showed up in numbers too big to deny.
So at the risk of losing my humanity, let me borrow the president’s favorite word. Please vote, and help our country take out the garbage: the lies, the corruption and the contempt for the people this government is supposed to serve.
Be kind, feed your mind, and vote.
Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America, with recipes along the way.
Excellent and THANK YOU!