The last institution
Developments
- How are the new authoritarians doing?
- What comes next in Budapest. … What have they done in San Salvador. … & A Roman god under the mosque in Homs.
Features
- What has the Iran war done to the global economy? Martin Wolf on what can happen when you shock a system defined by uncertainty.
- How is new technology reshaping the battlefield? Matthew Ford on why the most sophisticated weapons systems can’t overcome the oldest problems in warfare.
Books
- Why do some security services stay loyal—and others turn? Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf’s Making a Career in Dictatorship.
Music
- Everything but the Girl?
- & New tracks from Family Stereo, Fantastic Cat, Loukeman, Upsammy x Valentina Magaletti, & Clark.
+ Weather report
- La Niña is out, El Niño may be in—with the American South waiting for rain …
Developments
After Orbán
Last Sunday in Budapest, Hungarians voted Viktor Orbán out of office after 16 years, handing the opposition a parliamentary supermajority and a mandate to dismantle the authoritarian legal architecture he’d spent his tenure constructing. On Wednesday in San Salvador, Nayib Bukele signed constitutional reforms allowing life sentences for children as young as 12—his fourth year of emergency rule, with roughly 1 percent of the country’s population in detention and his approval ratings still above 80 percent. In the same week, two regimes of the populist anti-liberal right, moving in opposite directions.
Stepping back, the wider picture doesn’t seem any less mixed. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, lost his parliamentary majority last year and now governs in a coalition. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won another term and jailed his most plausible challenger. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has governed more conventionally than her critics expected. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, just won the country’s midterms decisively. And in the United States, Donald Trump’s administration has spent the year demolishing institutional norms at a pace that has surprised even its supporters. Prominent formerly pro-Trump voices, from Tucker Carlson to Megyn Kelly to Candace Owens, have publicly broken with the president over the war with Iran. And the ongoing release of files connected to Jeffrey Epstein keeps producing documents that contradict what the administration has said about Trump’s relationship with the late financier and convicted sex offender.
So while some evidence suggests populist anti-liberalism may be breaking, some suggests as much as the opposite.
Which is it?
- A phenomenon, not a wave. The decade-long habit of treating populist anti-liberalism as a single tide—rising together, cresting together, eventually receding together—was always more a rhetorical crutch than a considered analysis. Anti-liberal-populist regimes share a family resemblance, and they learn from each other—but each is its own case, shaped by its own conditions. Hungary in 2025 and El Salvador in 2025 aren’t two moments in the same arc. They’re two countries with big news in the same week. That’s the connection.
- The test, where it still runs. That’s the variable that actually moves. Hungarians turned Orbán out at the highest turnout in the country’s post-Communist history. Indians clipped Modi’s majority. Poles unseated Law and Justice in 2023 and are still, two years on, working out what dismantling institutional capture even looks like. Argentines just gave Milei a stronger hand. Salvadorans keep Bukele above 80 percent. What separates these cases isn’t any obvious direction—it seems to be whether a country’s democratic procedures still work well enough for voters to deliver a verdict.
- American exceptionalism. Trump’s second administration isn’t being voted out, as Orbán’s was; and there’s no reason to imagine it’s in the entrenchment phase of a long populist project, the way Bukele’s fourth year is. This administration has fired a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission—one of the independent regulatory agencies the U.S. Congress designed to be insulated from presidential control (the Supreme Court will rule on the issue by June). It’s rescinded the Endangerment Finding, the legal basis for federal climate regulation. It’s conducted more than 30 unilateral, lethal strikes on boats the administration says are smuggling drugs in the Caribbean. And now, it’s fighting a war on Iran that, so far, has lasted more than 40 days—and is fracturing Trump’s own coalition. The country’s congressional midterm elections are seven months away.
There’s going to be a temptation, perhaps especially among those who’ve spent a decade hoping the populist wave would crest, to read Hungary as the beginning of a return to something—to an order that existed before any of this began. But the conditions that produced Orbán, Bukele, Trump, and the rest haven’t gone anywhere. The economic dislocations, the loss of trust in established institutions, the fractured information environment, the sense among large electorates that the governing class no longer represented them—none of this has been resolved, and whatever governments come next will have to work amid those conditions.
What Hungary has shown may be narrower without being small: A fully constructed anti-liberal project, 16 years in the making, can still be ended by an election—where the society still treats the vote as binding, and the regime still has to. Where the opposition can organize and compete. Where voters can get information from more than one source. Where the count reflects what voters decided. Where a losing incumbent accepts the result. Orbán weakened each of these factors over 16 years. But he didn’t break any of them completely. And that margin broke his power.
Meanwhile
- A different Hungary. Péter Magyar spent his first week as prime minister-elect outlining what dismantling 16 years of Orbán’s government will look like. He’s pledged to restore judicial independence, rejoin the European Union’s mainstream, and unblock the €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine that Orbán had vetoed. He plans to travel first to Warsaw, then Vienna, then Brussels. The EU will release frozen funds once Magyar’s government delivers reforms. The harder work—pulling apart the captured courts, the state media, the constitutional rewrites—will take years. Poland is still at it. … See “The insider’s mandate.”
- The state of exception. Bukele’s new law takes effect on April 26. The United Nations Children’s Fund has called the measure incompatible with international standards on children’s rights; the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has urged El Salvador to reconsider. Last month, an international panel of legal experts published its final report on Bukele’s four-year emergency, finding "reasonable grounds" to conclude that the regime has committed crimes against humanity. The Salvadoran government rejects the findings. Roughly 91,650 people remain in detention, more than 1 percent of the country’s population, with at least 500 dead in custody. … See “The emergency goes on.”
- Layered ground. Beneath the floor of the Great Mosque of Homs in Syria—built over a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist—archaeologists have been studying a Greek inscription cut into a granite column base, comparing a ruler to wind, storm, and leopard. A new analysis published this month in the journal Shedet argues the inscription supports a long-suspected claim: The mosque sits atop the Temple of the Sun, where the cult of Elagabalus—whose teenage high priest became the emperor of Rome in 218—dominated the city’s religious and political life. Eighteen hundred years of holy sites—pagan, Christian, and Muslim—all on the same ground.
Your reading list for a changing world
Browse The Signal’s bookshop—organized into collections that track key themes in our investigations of current affairs: what’s driving the information wars, why societies are fracturing, how power keeps reinventing itself. Contributors’ titles alongside books we've featured in our coverage.
Features
‘Abruptly darkened’
What has the Iran war done to the global economy? Martin Wolf on what can happen when you shock a system defined by uncertainty.
