Viktor Orbán took fifteen years to construct what researchers today call the “Finkelstein formula”: a coherent system of political framing that transforms open elections into predictable victories. This system did not stop at Hungarian borders. The AUTHLIB project, funded by Horizon Europe and concluded in January 2026 after three years of research into European illiberal trajectories, documents its migration: from satellite think tanks to radical right parties, from the Identity and Democracy group to the European Conservatives and Reformists group, all the way to the corridors of government coalitions in Rome and other European capitals.
The threat is not a coup d’état. It has no shock moment to point to, no tank in front of a presidential palace. It resembles a convergence of practices: the same narratives about sovereignty, the same targeting of minorities as existential threat, the same pressure on independent institutions. What was a Hungarian exception in 2010 has become a shared repertoire.
The Essential Points
- Three years of research within the Horizon Europe program (AUTHLIB, concluded January 2026) document the transnational diffusion of illiberal practices in Europe based on the Hungarian model.
- The “Finkelstein formula” — named after American Republican consultant Arthur Finkelstein, Orbán’s adviser — rests on three pillars: a single designated enemy, a national survival narrative, and progressive control of institutional relays.
- This formula currently circulates through networks of political foundations, illiberal think tanks, and European parliamentary coalitions, well before national elections.
- The main identified lever of resistance remains the quality of intermediate institutions: independent judiciary, pluralistic media, funded civil society — three areas where the European Union has tools but lacks the political will to activate them.
Arthur Finkelstein Invented the Instruction Manual
Arthur Finkelstein died in 2017, relatively unknown to the general public. This discreet American had built the careers of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Jesse Helms by refining a simple technique: identify a single enemy, make it omnipresent in discourse, and structure all political communication around the threat it represents. George Soros, immigration, Brussels. The target can change depending on national contexts. The mechanics remain identical.
Orbán applied the formula starting in 2010 with systematic rigor. In two terms, independent media lost most of its public advertising revenue. The Constitutional Court was reformed and then filled with judges appointed by Fidesz. The electoral system was redesigned to maximize the incumbent party’s advantage — gerrymandering, reforms favoring Hungarian diaspora voting abroad at the expense of balanced representation. Universities, including the Central European University founded by Soros, were pushed into exile. Each measure, taken in isolation, could be justified by technical arguments. Their accumulation constituted a systematic reconfiguration of the balance of power between government and its counterweights.
What AUTHLIB researchers documented is that this succession was not improvised. It followed a sequencing logic — first media, then legal institutions, finally civil society — which proved exportable because it relies on levers available in any representative democracy.
From Budapest to Rome, a Repertoire That Travels Through Networks
Diffusion did not occur through direct imitation. It occurred through infrastructure. AUTHLIB mapped a dense network of political foundations, research centers, and international forums that allow illiberal parties to compare their experiences, refine their techniques, and coordinate their discourse well before electoral cycles.
The Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian foundation that received assets worth approximately 1.7 billion US dollars from the Hungarian state in 2020, opened offices in Brussels and Paris. Ordo Iuris in Poland, the Danube Institute in Vienna, the Tuscany Foundation in Italy, and several similar structures in Spain and France share experts, conferences, and arguments. These networks do not publish a common manifesto — that is not their logic. They construct a shared foundation of framing: the same formulations about “popular sovereignty,” the same arguments against “gender ideology,” the same narratives about “cultural replacement.”
In the European Parliament, convergence between the Identity and Democracy group and the European Conservatives and Reformists group strengthened after the June 2024 elections. On votes concerning the rule of law, press freedom, and budget conditionality mechanisms, the two groups voted coherently against European surveillance mechanisms. This parliamentary convergence precedes and prepares national government coalitions — it creates the political legitimacy that makes local arrangements easier to negotiate.
Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia illustrates this mechanism. Upon taking power in October 2022, the Italian coalition imported several elements of the illiberal repertoire — pressure on the public broadcaster RAI, judicial reforms aimed at reducing judicial independence, rhetoric of sovereignty against “interference” from Brussels — without ever crossing the thresholds that would trigger European sanctions. The formula works precisely because it stays below the coup d’état threshold.
Why European Tools Are Breaking Down
The European Union has not remained inert. The Article 7 procedure, the budget conditionality mechanism created in 2020, the Rule of Law Framework established in 2014: these mechanisms exist and have had measurable effects. Hungary saw 22 billion euros in structural funds frozen in 2022 for failure to meet conditions related to judicial independence and anti-corruption efforts. Poland, under PiS government, was subject to an Article 7 procedure starting in 2017.
But these mechanisms have structural limitations that illiberal governments have learned to exploit. Article 7 requires unanimity to establish a grave and persistent breach of Union values (art. 7.2) — Orbán and Kaczyński long protected each other at this stage — while eventual sanctions require only a qualified majority (art. 7.3). Budget conditionality triggers slowly and often negotiates partial concessions rather than real reforms. And above all, these tools react after the fact: they document democratic setbacks but do not prevent the progressive establishment of conditions that make them possible.
There is a fundamental asymmetry here. Illiberal governments operate over time — they build their control networks over multiple terms. European mechanisms react to identifiable violations, formal acts, threshold crossings. Faced with gradual erosion, they break down.
The other dimension, less discussed, concerns political ambiguity within European institutions themselves. The European People’s Party maintained Fidesz in its ranks until 2021, eleven years after the start of Hungary’s drift. This compromise decision legitimized the Orbánist model within the European Christian democratic space far more than external analyses measured.
Democracies That Resist Do Three Things Differently
The question AUTHLIB raises does not limit itself to diagnosis. It also concerns conditions of resistance. Why have certain countries facing similar illiberal surges held up better than others?
Researchers identify three factors that prove protective. The first is the solidity of media pluralism. Countries where the press remains financially independent from public advertisers and actors close to power have an early warning capacity that countries with concentrated media do not. Slovakia, which went through a democratic crisis after journalist Ján Kuciak’s assassination in 2018, saw the emergence of an independent media sector funded by citizen subscriptions — Denník N, Aktuality.sk — which helped maintain a space of pluralistic information despite government pressures.
The second factor is the anchoring of a strong constitutional culture. Countries with a long history of rule of law — Germany, Austria in certain domains, Nordic countries — develop institutional reflexes that slow the capture of judicial power. The resistance of the Polish Supreme Court to PiS reforms between 2018 and 2023, and the invalidation of several of these reforms after the change of government in 2023, illustrate this dynamic.
The third factor is the vitality of civil society. The massive demonstrations in Romania in 2017 against decrees weakening anti-corruption efforts, those in Serbia in 2025 following the collapse of a railway roof that killed 15 people, demonstrated that sustained citizen mobilization could force back governments engaged in institutional capture logic. The street is not a substitute for institutions, but it creates the political conditions in which institutions can hold.
These forms of resistance are not accidents. They result from earlier investments in intermediate institutions that tend to be taken for granted when they function. The article on digital democracy in Estonia and Switzerland showed how different institutional architectures produce different relationships with public trust — there is the same fundamental mechanism here: robust democracies are built over the long term.
What Europe Can Still Do
Pessimism about the Union’s capacity to defend the rule of law is understandable but not entirely justified. Several recent developments merit being documented with precision.
The European Media Freedom Act, adopted in March 2024, creates for the first time a common framework prohibiting political interference in editorial decisions, establishing transparency obligations regarding media ownership, and limiting government advertising to objective and proportional criteria. This is not a revolution: the law does not cover indirect pressures, financing of pro-power media through private intermediaries, or market effects that concentrate ownership. But it creates a reference point and signaling mechanisms that did not exist.
The reform of the budget conditionality mechanism, under discussion since 2023, aims to accelerate procedures and lower activation thresholds. If it succeeds, it will reduce the capacity of illiberal governments to negotiate half-measures in exchange for a temporary suspension of proceedings. Negotiations remain difficult — several member states are reluctant to strengthen a tool that could one day be applied to themselves.
More significant perhaps: the return of the Tusk government in Poland at the end of 2023 showed that illiberal drifts were not irreversible. Undoing institutional capture proves long and conflictual — PiS continues to control part of earlier judicial appointments, and appeals before courts it helped reshape create intractable situations. But Poland demonstrates that alternation remains possible and that institutions are not definitively confiscated after one or two illiberal terms.
This is where the true lesson of the AUTHLIB project lies. The diffusion of the illiberal repertoire is real and documented. But democracies are not fragile systems that collapse as soon as pressure is applied. They are political constructions that can defend themselves, reform, and regenerate — provided that actors who benefit from them accept actively defending them rather than taking them for granted.
The question is not whether the Finkelstein formula can take root elsewhere. It is already taking root, partially, in several countries. The question is what institutional investments, what political actors, and what collective will allow its scope to be limited. That answer remains open, and it belongs to Europeans.
Sources
- Sciences Po / AUTHLIB — Mapping the Illiberal Challenge: Findings from the AUTHLIB Project
- Regulation (EU) 2020/2092 of the European Parliament and of the Council on a general regime of conditionality for the protection of the Union budget — Official Journal of the EU
- European Media Freedom Act, adopted March 2024 — text available on EUR-Lex
- Mathias Corvinus Collegium — financing data, Hungarian law of 2021 on national assets
- AUTHLIB - Final Conference January 2026
- EUR-Lex - Regulation (EU) 2020/2092
- Council of the EU - EMFA adopted March 2024
- European Commission - Rule of Law Framework 2014
- Wikipedia - Mathias Corvinus Collegium
- Italian Government - Governo Meloni
- Council of the EU - Article 7, chronology
- Hungarian Helsinki Committee - Constitutional Court
- European Parliament - Frozen Hungarian Funds