Will the first domino fall this Sunday? Will this weekend's Hungarian election presage the beginning of the end for the Trump-Orban-Netanyahu era? Buckle up!

Will Hungary bring us to that longed-for tipping point against autocracy? The polls are encouraging, but as Orban predictably pulls the terrorism card, the deck is already stacked in his favor.

Some thoughts while we await, at long last, Trump’s “Infrastructure Day.” Only in typical Trump fashion, he is promising to break things, not build them. But it’s not Iran’s bridges, refineries and water plants that he will break, if he follows though on his threats, it’s the whole region’s - and beyond. As we await Trump’s next spasm of wanton destruction, take a look at what Jewish sources have to say about wanton destruction. And then read below why the Iran War is not the most important thing happening this week.

Remember how in June of 2016, Brexit’s shocking win stunned the world and presaged a successful fall for a certain disruptive, populist isolationist in America?

Well, this week, the first domino just might fall, and it might mark the beginning of the end for Trumpism.

People are rising up to defeat the axis of autocracy, and Trump, Orban and Netanyahu are groping to deal with spontaneous bursts of people power, on the streets and at the ballot box. With the unending wars, financial collapse and rampant corruption, three electoral tsunamis are forming. All three elections are crucial, and the first, Hungary, is happening right now.

Should Orbán lose, as appears quite possible, according to current polls, the first autocratic domino will fall. Netanyahu and then MAGA will be next. And they know it. The freedom-loving people of all three countries are clearing their throats and courageously daring to be heard. We know that Putin and Trump will do anything to keep that from happening, but they might be powerless to stop a popular mass movement.

And right on cue, Orbán is playing the terrorism card. Here’s how it was reported on Yahoo News on Sunday:

Opposition leader Peter Magyar accuses Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of staging a gas pipeline sabotage in Serbia to influence the upcoming elections.

Magyar calls on Orbán to provide information on the incident and convene a security council, warning against using the provocation for campaign purposes.

Investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi suggests that the alleged sabotage looks like a staged “performance” to help Orbán avoid electoral defeat, with both Hungary and Serbia taking security measures in response.

Peter Magyar stated:

“I also want to stress that he will not succeed in disrupting next Sunday’s elections. He will not be able to prevent millions of Hungarians from putting an end to the two most corrupt decades in our country’s history. Hungarians have sufficient grounds to fear that a prime minister facing the loss of power, on the advice of Russian agents, is planning to instill fear in his fellow citizens through increasingly clumsy ‘false flag operations’. If Orbán’s propaganda machine uses this provocation for campaign purposes – that will be an open admission that this was a planned ‘false flag operation.”

Israelis and Americans should take good notes. Because Trump and Bibi certainly are. And so are democracy’s most vigilant defenders. Timothy Snyder is especially concerned¹ about the ramifications of Trump’s scorched earth threats in Iran, along with the likely false flag drummed up this past weekend by Hungary.

We need to recall that just as with gerrymandered districts in the US were redrawn to give Republicans a massive advantage (Democrats have since fought back), Orban’s party Fidesz cooked the books in Hungary so that, in the 2022 elections, Fidesz secured 68 percent of the parliamentary seats in 2022 while only receiving around 53 percent of the vote. That could happen again on Sunday. The prime opposition party, Tisza, needs to secure at least 6 percent more of the vote than Fidesz in order to win. And they need to do it despite having control of most of the machinery of the election - and the media covering it and the judiciary evaluating it - in its hands.

And then there’s the polling itself, which can be deceptive. According to Eva Mulholland of the Atlantic Council, while independent polling places Tisza in a comfortable lead (about 10 percentage points), government-aligned polling shows a different story, with Fidesz up 7 percent from Tisza. She adds, “Diaspora Hungarians, who historically vote overwhelmingly for Fidesz, are not captured in domestic polls but are counted in the national vote threshold.” And to add to that, who knows what Putin has in mind for this Sunday? All we know is that if his boy loses, it could trigger a cascade of good news for Ukraine and the EU, which is bad news for him.

Right now the streets of Budapest are awash in pro-government propaganda, including this poster of Volodymyr Zelensky, with the tag line, “Let’s not let Zelensky have the last laugh.”

Yes, it’s a dog whistle. The exact same poster was plastered all over the country when I was there before a prior election, except the face was of another Jew, George Soros. I took this photo below, right on the Hungarian border with Slovakia. It was literally the first thing I saw when I entered the country.

Even the smile looks exactly the same. The Jew is laughing at us! Every trick in the book….

For those who may not be aware, THE LAUGHING JEW IS A CLASSIC ANTISEMITIC TROPE.²

Whoever calls Orban a friend of the Jews is not worth a moment of my time.

But according to Jill Dougherty, Distinguished Fellow at The Wilson Center who is in Budapest now (and her new report is well worth reading), there are zero posters of Orban! That, my friends, is telling.

So buckle up! If that first domino does fall, it will fall a long way, and the crash will resound more than any bombs in Iran. It will change the face of Europe and, like the Brexit vote in 2016, send a signal that a new world order is at hand.

But Hungarians are courageous and resilient. I saw that personally when I visited the Jewish community of Budapest in 2017.³ The people of Hungary have been taking to the streets with increasing temerity, such as last December in Budapest, when over 50,000 people walked the streets of Budapest to demand the resignation of Orban’s government. It followed the publication of videos showing staff at a Budapest juvenile correction facility physically abusing children. Orban’s main challenger, Peter Magyar, led the march.

• In addition, massive rival rallies took place just a few weeks ago.

  We all will be on the edge of our seats this weekend to see if MAGA’s darling takes a massive fall - which will only put the wind at democracy’s back heading into the fall.

  • See also: What Happens After Hungary’s Election? Four Scenarios to Watch (Center for Strategic and International Studies)

  • See also: Feels like history is being made. Will young Hungarian voters oust Orbán? (The Guardian)

  • See also: Hungary’s Turning Point (Wilson Center)

  • Read my Yom Kippur 2017 sermons - Listen to it below (that section begins at about 18:30):

  The Second Domino: Israel

  Meanwhile, while Israel’s long national nightmare is far from over, their next election will be no later than October 27, which is exactly a week before America votes on November 3. Polling is complicated there, but most recent surveys show the opposition with the only realistic path to governing. Here’s the most recent, from Friday’s Ma’ariv newspaper, which shows a surprising and unmistakable trend. Israelis, while supporting the war against Iran, have not fallen in line behind the wartime leader, as usually happens, but instead have turned on Netanyahu. A Hebrew University political science professor explains on X:

For those who don’t read Hebrew, the red is the opposition bloc, and the blue is Netanyahu’s. With a majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats (meaning 61 seats), you can form a governing coalition. According to this poll, the current government, which now has 64 mandates, would shrink to 49. The opposition parties would be right at the precipice of being able to form a coalition, even without the Arab parties, who are represented in gray, with ten seats. If the opposition parties find a way to incorporate the Arab parties into a new government - which I hope happens and would not be unprecedented - they could easily form a coalition. Below is the complete breakdown, party by party. Netanyahu’s party has 25 mandates to lead the poll, but the strongest parties shown here are all opposing him and easily outnumber Likud. He’s in a polling pickle, and he knows it. Which is why he didn’t move up elections to June when the war began. He easily could have.

The headline states, “ “The Cost of Political Opportunism and Lack of Progress: The Opposition is Getting Stronger.” And the article states: “The majority of the public believes the (just-passed) budget serves the needs of the coalition and not those of the public.”

Unless some sort of major reversal takes place, allowing for a clear win in Iran, Netanyahu is going down to defeat.

And we know where the Republican Party is headed this fall. In a free and fair election, the House is gone and the Senate is in play. The world could look very different this coming winter.

But that partly depends on what happens this coming week.

People Power

What the three elections have in common is that they’ve been preceded by a massive show of grass-roots potency that took shape on the streets. In Israel, before the massacres of October 7, 2023, People Power was deployed at weekly, mass demonstrations to oppose reforms of the judicial system that would have effectively ended democracy in Israel. The mass movement then adapted to embrace the cause of the hostages held in Gaza and to support displaced Israelis in the north and south. And now, even though the population has spent so much time in protective shelters, those grass-roots sentiments remain, along with the threats. Once the missiles stop flying, the campaign will begin in earnest and the streets will again be filled with protesting Israelis.

Which is why Netanyahu wants to keep the wars going.

The Third Domino: America

We can recall this statement by Trump before the 2024 election. Was he talking to Americans? Or Hungarians? Or any of Putin’s other protectorates?

Here in America, if anything, polling places Trump in worse shape than either Orban or Netanyahu. And the movement to the streets has been massive. I had the pleasure of seeing that first-hand when I spoke at the local No Kings rally on March 28. National estimates indicate that it was the largest mass protest in US history, with over 8 million taking to the streets.

If you thought nail-biting time begins in the fall, think again. This Sunday will give us huge clues as to how the rest of the year will go.

Like the proverbial Maine of yore, so goes Hungary, so goes the world.

1. This from Timothy Snyder on X on Sunday. See point #10 in the thread.

2. Laughing Jew Trope, from the American Jewish Committee

3. Here’s what I wrote about the Jewish community of Budapest in a sermon delivered upon my return:

One of the real highlights of our trip last summer was our encounter with the Jewish community of Budapest. We joined the Frankel Synagogue, one of the city’s most active congregations for a Friday night service, and before that, we spent about a half hour conversing with the rabbi and his wife, an author and educator. The congregation comes from a branch of Judaism unique to central Europe – called Neolog. It’s sort of a fruit salad of Orthodoxy and Conservative. For example: there is separate seating, but the women get the better seats.

We came away from the conversation amazed at the vibrancy of the community – and we came away equally concerned for its future.

Before the Shoah, this was a thriving community - nearly a quarter of Budapest’s population was Jewish. But during the war, of the more than 800,000 Jews living in Hungary, nearly 620,000 died or were deported. In Budapest, Jews had a somewhat better chance of survival at first, until the notorious Arrow Cross – those rabid Hungarian nationalists who tried to out-Nazi the Nazis, took over, herded Jews into the ghetto beginning in December 1944, took as many as 20,000 out to the banks of the Danube, shot them and threw their bodies into the river. We saw the memorial that has been set up right by the riverbank, a sculpture depicting the shoes that were left behind. It’s incredibly moving, but equally problematic, because the memorial does not specify that the victims were Jewish.

The current Jewish population is about 100,000, they think – and that number is based on those who have received reparations for the Holocaust. But no one really knows, because the vast majority of Jews are afraid to be identified. They remain in the closet - literally, sometimes, because many still remember that proverbial knock on the door. While physical attacks are rare, anti-Semitism is plainly practiced by the extreme right-wing government and is embedded in the culture. I wrote about the anti-Semitic poster campaign that popped up all over the country when we were there. Vandalism of Jewish gravestones and synagogues is commonplace. I asked the rabbi whether he wears a kippah in public, and he said no. Most Jewish children encounter anti-Semitism in school from a young age. The word “Jewish” is often used as a curse word in the vernacular.

And then, to add to anti-Semitism, there is Jewish illiteracy. After the Nazis were defeated, the country was “liberated” into nearly half a century of communist rule, where anyone living an openly Jewish lifestyle was subject to ridicule and discrimination. After the horrors of Auschwitz, most Hungarian Jews had little place for God in their lives anyway, so while the practice of Judaism wasn’t expressly forbidden, it was for all intents and purposes forgotten.

Yet despite all this, what we saw this summer was remarkable: Jewish life is rising in Budapest like a phoenix from the ashes. Despite impossible odds.

There is thriving summer camp called Szarvas near Budapest, which serves Jewish communities all over Europe. Many campers recall being dropped off and asking their parents why they were being sent to a Jewish camp. At that point, the parents would tell them, while driving off, “By the way, you’re Jewish.”

The Shabbat service at the Frankel synagogue was one of our most cherished moments on the trip. There were a number of young families with kids there – well over a hundred people. The rabbi mentioned that very few Jewish groups visit them, so they were curious to meet their guests from America. I felt really good that we were there, as most Jewish heritage tours of Eastern Europe only visit the dead. We were determined to visit living Jewish communities too. It was another tearful moment. We were there to tell the Jews of Budapest that they are not alone. Like Evan Hansen’s tree in the forest, they had been found. And like those legendary gingko trees that somehow withstood the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the Jews of Hungary have survived.

And at the end of the service, we did the kiddish and ha-motzi all together, because, we were told, very few of the congregants know how to do Shabbat at home. And there is often no grandparent to ask, because Bubbe and Zayde were murdered by the Nazis or Iron Cross. If this congregation read from a yahrzeit list before the mourner’s kaddish, as we do, the list would have 1,000 names on it every week.

But even more to the point, they don’t do the rituals at home because so many are afraid to. Their Jewish lives are confined to their synagogue, a building so heavily barricaded that you almost expected Jean Valjean to make an appearance there too. The building is not visible from the street.

It is impossible for us to appreciate what they have had to overcome in order to rebuild their Jewish community. It is something that we all take for granted. We need to think about it the next time we are tempted to toss off our priceless Jewish heritage like Grandma Sophie’s closetful of plastic bags from Fairway. I know I’m preaching to the choir. You are here. But please send this sermon around to the 53 percent of American Jews who no longer observe Yom Kippur. Not as a guilt trip. But as a reminder of how fragile is our precious legacy... OK, maybe a bit of a guilt trip too.

The Hiroshima ginkgo are called survivor trees – and how did they manage to overcome the fallout of a nuclear blast? It’s because they have very deep roots. Our roots are unnaturally deep as well. Any other people would have given up after the Shoah. But we saw in Budapest that the Hungarian Jews have not.

These Jews have chosen life. They have chosen to see “Am Yisrael Chai” not as a song, but as a summons. That is the call of the Torah of Auschwitz – Choose life, collectively, because survival IS victory.