The fall of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary raises a question the celebrations have obscured: why did dismantling such a corrupt and inhuman system take sixteen years? The answer lies less in ideology than in the architecture of economic dependency the regime deliberately built. Drawing on the investigative documentary The Price of the Vote and comparative evidence from Mexico, Brazil, and Turkey, this article argues that basic income should be understood not only as a welfare instrument but as democratic infrastructure: the genuine power to say no to oppression.
By Dániel Fehér
When Péter Magyar’s Tisza party swept Viktor Orbán from power in Hungary’s elections last Sunday, the world celebrated a democratic restoration. After sixteen years of gerrymandering, court-packing, and the slow strangulation of independent media, the Hungarian electorate had managed to do what so many observers had doubted possible: it said no.
But the victory deserves closer scrutiny than the triumphant headlines allow. One has to ask why it took sixteen years – and an effort as extraordinary as that mounted by Péter Magyar and his supporters – to dislodge a system so blatantly corrupt, inefficient, and inhuman. The answer, at least in part, lies not in the resilience of Orbán’s ideology but in the architecture of dependency his regime had constructed. The weeks before the election offered a disturbing lesson not only about Orbán’s Hungary, but about the structural preconditions of democracy itself – and the fragility of those conditions wherever economic desperation and political power become entangled.
The Price of a Vote
Barely a fortnight before election day, an independent documentary made by the civil group De! Akcióközösség landed with extraordinary force. The Price of a Vote sent filmmakers across 14 of Hungary’s 19 counties, gathering testimony in dozens of villages. What they found was not primarily a story of corruption in the conventional sense. It was a story of dependency.
In Hungary’s poorest rural regions – hard-core Fidesz strongholds for reasons that turn out to be structural rather than ideological – local mayors loyal to the regime controlled daily life. Firewood was distributed to those who voted correctly; jobs on the public works programme were conditional on loyalty; prescriptions could reportedly be withheld. Cash changed hands, sometimes in quantities that represented weeks of income for families on the margins. In one documented case, a cheap synthetic drug was allegedly used as currency. And on election day, operatives transported voters to the polling stations, accompanied them inside, and ensured the ballot was cast before payment was made.
What made the filmmakers revise their initial assumptions was a single insight, offered by director Áron Tímár: “In the beginning, we thought the key piece of this process is vote-buying. But then we realised that the money is just the icing on the cake. The key word here is dependency and vulnerability.”
That distinction matters enormously. Vote-buying implies a transaction between equal parties. Dependency is something else entirely. It describes a condition in which one party’s basic survival – warmth, employment, medicine, the integrity of their family – is held in the hands of another. Under those conditions, the formal right to vote in secret does not translate into the real freedom to vote freely. The secret ballot protects against surveillance; it does not protect against hunger.
This was not a casual observation. It echoes a finding from one of the most rigorous field studies of electoral clientelism to date. In survey experiments conducted across 93 rural Hungarian villages during the 2014 elections, Isabela Mares and Lauren Young found that around five to seven per cent of respondents reported direct clientelistic pressure – vote buying, benefit allocation tied to electoral support, coercive threats of benefit revocation – with the public works programme functioning as the central mechanism of control. Their book Conditionality and Coercion (Oxford University Press, 2019) showed that workfare made rural communities structurally vulnerable to exactly the system the documentary would expose a decade later. At the level of individual behaviour, Gustavo Bobonis and colleagues provided the causal argument in “Vulnerability and Clientelism” (American Economic Review, 2022): it is not poverty alone but economic vulnerability combined with proximity to the political machine that creates susceptibility to coercion.
The Right to Say No
Philippe Van Parijs, the Belgian philosopher whose work has been central to the intellectual case for unconditional basic income, placed at the centre of his argument a deceptively simple idea: real freedom requires not only the absence of coercion but the material capacity to refuse. What distinguishes a free person from an unfree one is not the formal catalogue of rights they possess, but whether they can actually say no – to a bad employer, an exploitative relationship, a degrading condition of life.
In Real Freedom for All (Oxford University Press, 1995) and in his later work with Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2017), Van Parijs argued that a basic income paid unconditionally and at a level sufficient to sustain a dignified existence provides precisely this: a floor beneath which no one can be pushed, and from which the power to refuse becomes real rather than theoretical. Without that floor, formal freedoms are available in full only to those who can afford to exercise them. Karl Widerquist elaborated the same idea from a left-libertarian direction in Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), arguing that propertyless people lack what he calls “status freedom,” since the effective compulsion to accept employment or dependency in order to survive amounts to a structural form of unfreedom. David Casassas, drawing on the republican tradition, reinforces this in “Basic Income and the Republican Ideal” (Basic Income Studies, 2008): genuine non-domination – Philip Pettit’s republican standard of freedom – requires securing economic independence ex ante, not merely redistributing income after the fact.
The Hungarian documentary translates this abstract philosophical argument into something visible and visceral. The voters in those rural villages did not lack the formal right to vote freely. They lacked the material conditions that would have made that right meaningful. Their poverty – and the structures that managed and reproduced that poverty – had been weaponised. The regime had not needed to abolish the secret ballot; it had only needed to ensure that enough people could not afford to use it.
The Fuel of the Far Right
This dynamic did not emerge from nowhere, nor is it unique to Hungary. Speaking at a 2025 UBIE gathering, the historian Steven Forti identified three interlocking engines behind the global rise of far-right politics: deepening economic inequalities, a cultural backlash among those who feel left behind, and the crisis of liberal democratic institutions that were supposed to be immune to precisely this kind of erosion.
Forti’s diagnosis is increasingly well-supported empirically. Susan Stokes and Eli Rau, analysing V-Dem data across dozens of countries in “Income Inequality and the Erosion of Democracy in the Twenty-First Century” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024), find that wealth concentration is among the most consistent predictors of where and when democratic quality deteriorates. Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch, examining 800 elections across 20 advanced economies between 1870 and 2014, show in “Going to Extremes” (European Economic Review, 2016) that financial crises systematically and specifically boost far-right parties – an effect absent after ordinary recessions. More recently, Luigi Guiso and colleagues identified a “spiral of populism” in “Economic Insecurity and the Demand for Populism in Europe” (Economica, 2024): economic insecurity drives populist voting both directly and through eroded trust, with nearly forty per cent of the effect operating through differential turnout, as the economically insecure withdraw from democratic participation and leave the field to the enraged.
Forti argued that countering this requires, above all, putting equality back at the centre of progressive politics: rebuilding community networks, strengthening the intermediate institutions of civil society, and reclaiming the meaning of concepts – freedom, democracy – that the far right has been remarkably successful at appropriating. The parallel with Weimar Germany – and the role of economic inequality in creating the conditions for authoritarian politics – was raised more than once in the discussion that followed Forti’s presentation; the connection between precarity and democratic collapse is not new, but we are living through a new iteration of it, at scale, across continents.
The Pattern Beyond Hungary
Hungary is a particularly well-documented case, but it is far from unique. The systematic exploitation of economic dependency as a tool of political control appears across different regime types, regions, and historical periods – and the scholarly record is extensive.
Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party offers the longest-running example. In Voting for Autocracy (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Beatriz Magaloni showed how the PRI sustained seventy-one years of uninterrupted rule not through outright repression alone, but by making the economic survival of millions of poor citizens contingent on the regime’s continuation. Conditional access to land, credit, public employment, and social services made defection irrational even for those who privately opposed the party. The lesson from Mexico’s eventual democratisation is instructive in its own right: the transition accelerated when NAFTA’s integration disrupted the distributive networks on which the rural machine depended, reducing the effectiveness of economic coercion – a reminder that structural conditions, not only civic courage, shape democratic outcomes.
Brazil offers an illustration from the opposite direction – showing what happens when dependency is structurally reduced. When Bolsa Família expanded cash transfers to tens of millions of poor families in the 2000s, Anderson Frey demonstrated in “Cash Transfers, Clientelism, and Political Enfranchisement” (Journal of Public Economics, 2019) that the result was a measurable weakening of local clientelistic politics: incumbency advantage fell, electoral competition increased, and support for clientelistic parties declined. The mechanism was not gratitude for cash; it was that the transfers reduced the vulnerability that had previously made clientelistic exchange attractive to poor voters. Economic independence, even partial and conditional, changes the political calculus.
Turkey under Erdoğan’s AKP displays the same structural logic as Hungary, transposed to a different cultural register. Scheiring and Szombati, in their comparative analysis “From Neoliberal Disembedding to Authoritarian Re-embedding” (International Sociology, 2020), document how selective social protection – coal deliveries, food parcels, conditional public employment – constructed loyalty networks among marginalised communities in both countries, while independent institutions were simultaneously dismantled. Dorottya Szikra and Kerem Gabriel Öktem’s comparative study of Hungary and Turkey, “An Illiberal Welfare State Emerging?” (Journal of European Social Policy, 2023), shows that in both cases social policy was restructured not to reduce dependency but to redirect it: from universal entitlements towards politically administered conditionality, with the “deserving poor” defined by loyalty rather than need.
What unites these cases is the pattern identified by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way in Competitive Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2010): hybrid regimes that maintain the forms of electoral competition while systematically tilting the field through state resources, patronage, and coercion require precisely this substrate – enough people whose basic welfare is managed by the state, and whose welfare is made to feel like a gift from the party rather than a right of citizenship.
Democracy Requires a Floor
The implications for how we understand basic income are significant. UBI is most often debated as a welfare instrument: a tool for combating poverty, cushioning technological displacement, or simplifying bureaucratic benefit systems. These are genuine arguments. But the cases of Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, and Turkey invite us to recognise something more fundamental.
Democracy has infrastructure. It requires independent courts, free media, genuine electoral competition – the apparatus of formal institutional design. But it also requires something more diffuse and harder to legislate: a population that is not so materially precarious that its members cannot afford to exercise political judgment freely. Where enough people live in sufficient dependency – on employers, on local patrons, on political machines that control access to basic resources – the formal apparatus of democracy operates on a substrate that corrodes its meaning.
Frederick Solt showed cross-nationally in “Economic Inequality and Democratic Political Engagement” (American Journal of Political Science, 2008) that rising income inequality depresses political interest, discussion, and participation among all but the most affluent – a finding that holds even in established democracies, before any explicit coercion enters the picture. Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry Brady demonstrated in Voice and Equality (Harvard University Press, 1995) that political participation depends fundamentally on resources, and that socioeconomic stratification therefore produces systematic inequality in political voice. The secret ballot is necessary but not sufficient: it protects against surveillance, not against hunger.
An unconditional basic income addresses the substrate directly. A payment sufficient to sustain a dignified existence, received by right and not by grace, is precisely a form of structural independence from the kinds of dependency networks that The Price of the Vote documented so devastatingly. It does not require voters to be brave. It does not require communities to organise collectively in order to resist. It creates, quietly and automatically, the material floor from which Van Parijs’s power to say no becomes available to everyone – not merely to those fortunate enough to have resources of their own.
The empirical evidence on the political effects of unconditional income now supports this directly. Analysing Finland’s randomised basic income experiment of 2017–2019, Hirvonen, Schafer, and Tukiainen found that recipients showed significantly increased electoral participation: around three percentage points higher turnout in municipal elections, with effects of six to eight points among previously marginal voters, persisting into national elections after the experiment ended. Loeffler’s study of Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, published in Political Science Research and Methods (2023), demonstrates a significant positive effect on voter turnout sustained over nearly two decades. The mechanism in both cases appears to be what the Finnish researchers call “interpretive”: unconditional state-provided income communicates inclusion, builds political trust, and activates civic efficacy. It tells people they are citizens, not supplicants.
Looking Forward from Hungary
The documentary’s most striking finding was not the scale of the corruption but its mechanism: it was the ordinary poverty of ordinary people, systematically managed by a political machine, that made the whole edifice possible. Remove the dependency and the machine loses its leverage.
This said, it would be naïve to expect UBI to rise quickly to the top of Hungary’s post-election agenda. After sixteen years of Orbán’s rule, the country faces a formidable recovery task. The economy has been squeezed and distorted by crony capitalism; EU structural funds were misused or withheld; public services were stripped; independent institutions were dismantled; and a generation of civic infrastructure was deliberately eroded. The immediate priorities for any new government will be economic reconstruction, institutional repair, the restoration of judicial independence, and the rebuilding of a media ecosystem capable of sustaining democratic accountability. These are not small tasks.
But that is precisely why the medium term matters. As Hungary transitions back to something resembling a normal democracy – and the scale of Tisza’s supermajority provides grounds for cautious optimism – that transition should also open space for the kind of forward-looking policy debates that authoritarian atmospheres stifle. The question of how to structurally prevent a relapse is not only institutional. New electoral laws and independent courts are necessary; they are not sufficient. What Hungary also needs – and what its rural regions need with particular urgency – is a policy architecture that severs the link between material survival and political loyalty.
The semi-serfdom of the workfare system, in which access to employment, heating, and medicine was administered by local political agents, was not incidental to Fidesz’s grip on power: it was the mechanism. Dismantling it requires more than removing the operatives who ran it. It requires building something in its place that gives people in those regions genuine economic independence. A basic income – unconditional, individual, paid as a right rather than a favour – would accomplish exactly this. It would not solve Hungary’s economic problems overnight. But it would make a return to Orbán-style electoral manipulation structurally harder, by dissolving the dependency substrate on which such manipulation depends.
The Hungarian case, viewed from this angle, is not merely a cautionary tale about what happens when economic autonomy is absent. It is also a prospectus for what a genuinely democratic welfare architecture might look like: one that gives citizens not just the right to say no, but the material means to mean it.
The author is a board member of Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE).
Reading List
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