The Hybrid Regime Next Door
American democracy creaks and moans. What does that mean for the rest of us?
When Hungary met Greece on the pitch in November 2022, the Greeks dominated ownership: They spent nearly 60% of the match in possession of the ball. But the Hungarians dominated in shot attempts. With three minutes left in the second half, Hungary scored again and settled the match 2-1.
This game will probably not be recorded in the annals of football legend. Neither team had qualified for the World Cup that year, so the stakes were impossibly low. Still, the match garnered a huge amount of attention thanks to what hung around the neck of the game’s most famous attendee: Hungary’s rogue leader Viktor Orbán.
Orbán’s red, green, and white scarf, featuring a pixelated map of Hungary sewn into it, looked innocent enough.
Look closer, though, and it’s not Hungary at all. This Hungary stretches north into Slovakia, swallowing up Bratislava. It reaches far southeast, including all of Transylvania. Its rough edges clearly show this Hungary jutting into the Adriatic Sea, taking for itself a coastline that belongs to Croatia.
The Prime Minister of Hungary wasn’t sporting a map of his nation at all: He was festooned with the borders of Greater Hungary. This is a nation which, depending on your perspective, hasn’t existed since Croatia exited the Transleithanian kingdom of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; or, it is one which will exist again sometime soon.
Over his uninterrupted 15-year rule, Orbán has emphasized the principle of “national unity across state borders.” He has opened pathways to citizenship for ethnic Hungarians in neighboring Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, and Slovakia. (Bratislava has moved to block its citizens from becoming Hungarian.) He has supported ethnic minority parties in those countries, and has often threatened to block NATO and EU integration for countries deemed insufficiently deferential to their Hungarian minority populations.
Orbán’s territorial appetite is just one example of Hungary’s emergence as a hybrid regime: A state with some trappings of a liberal democracy, but which has hollowed out the checks and balances on state power. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Hungary has seen its constitution arbitrarily rewritten, its independent judiciary cowed, its media controlled, its schools brought to heel, its institutions assaulted, and its population brainwashed. It has used the specter of a nefarious global elite and an invasion of migrants as a pretext to give Orbán near-absolute control of the Hungarian state. His critics have been marginalized and sent abroad while his allies have become obscenely rich. He has maintained political control through propaganda and codependency with an emergent oligarch class. And in so doing, he is corrupting European democracy from the inside, while supporting reactionary populists the world over.
As researchers András Bozóki and Dániel Hegedűs noted in 2018: “Hungary has been the first — and so far only — state in Europe that had a consolidated Western-type liberal democracy, but which has abandoned this democratic regime by transforming its political system into a hybrid regime.”1
There is good reason to think that we are watching the same story play out in America right now. Whether that trend can be stopped or reversed will depend, ultimately, on the American people. For those of us living outside the United States, all we can do is react.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: What does the free world do when the leader of the free world decides to switch sides?
Before we get to the dispatch, this is just a little programming note to say that I’ve been firing off regular dispatches over at the Chaos Campaign, my section all about this Canadian election. I’ve broken down the difficult work of unplugging from the United States, dug into the Conservatives’ self-defeating stubbornness, written up my long-form interview with the Green Party co-leader, detailed the parties’ housing plans, and investigated Mark Carney’s conflicts-of-interest — real and imagined — and more.
For the last week of the campaign, I’ve been travelling with Liberal leader Mark Carney, ping-ponging across the country as he makes his last-minute pitch to voters — one that turns on responding to the threats posed by Donald Trump. It’s been dizzying, exhausting, fascinating, and a really interesting way to explore the country. (And it has been particularly cool to meet so many subscribers of this newsletter! Hello! I’m sorry I was deliriously tired!)
Once the election is over, expect the regular tempo of Bug-eyed and Shameless to resume.
So thanks to everyone for subscribing, and thanks to those who have taken out paid subscriptions. I hope I’m delivering bang for your buck. As always: I am happy to send out a complimentary subscription to whoever asks, no questions.
And thanks, as well, to the Michener Foundation, whose grant made this travel possible.
We return you now to the dystopia-in-progress.
The Growing American Empire
Earlier this month, Time magazine asked a pointed question to the president: “Do you want to grow the American empire?”
“I'd view it a little bit differently,” Trump responded. “If we had the right opportunity-” He continued to say that both Greenland and Canada would make good additions to the United States. “We don't want them to make cars for us,” Trump said of Canada. “We want to make our own cars. We don't need their lumber. We don't need their energy. We don't need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.”
Towards the end of the interview, Time returned to the question. “Do you want to be remembered as a president who expanded American territory?”
“Wouldn’t mind,” Trump replied.
The day that interview was published, news broke that the FBI had arrested of Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan, citing her “obstruction” for not allowing federal agents to abduct and deport defendants from her courthouse. FBI Director Kash Patel celebrated the arrest.
This was no accident. The Department of Justice now, as a matter of policy, allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to enter any premises, including private homes, without a real warrant in order to seize individuals with suspected gang affiliation — an impossibly nebulous standard that is not reviewable by the criminal courts. ICE now warns that any bystander who intervenes in their abductions will be prosecuted.
When families or civil liberties groups have contested these lawless deportations, judges have eviscerated government lawyers — finding “no evidence” of these supposed gang connections. The Trump administration has been entirely unmoved by those decisions.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, commenting on Dugan’s arrest, sent a clear message to judges across the country. “I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law,” she said. “They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today...if you are harboring a fugitive…we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you."
As all of this goes down, the White House is continuing its unconstitutional plan to axe birthright citizenship. Trump has ordered the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s fundraising arm. Partisan investigations continue into government researchers falsely accused of creating COVID-19. The White House has worked to shake down big law firms to obtain pro bono legal help for his chaotic administration. The Pentagon is trying to impose total loyalty through arbitrary firings and intimidating witch hunts. His administration has threatened higher education and demanded universities purge undesirable students and professors. A pervasive system of pay-for-play, cronyism, and self-enrichment permeates everything the administration does. All the while, Trump is hinting that he is uninterested in being held to the crystal-clear term limits enshrined in the constitution.
We are 100 days into this lawless administration, and it is clear that the domestic constraints of this constitutional democracy are being tested. Much as they were tested, and tested, and tested in Hungary — until, finally, they broke.
We don’t know what happens next in America. The system could bend, but not break. It could be damaged, but not irreparably so. Or this could be the start of a full hybridization of America.
Unless you have followed the degradation of democracy in Hungary, Turkey, El Salvador and elsewhere, this term may be new to you: Hybrid regime.
Scholars still argue about what, exactly, constitutes a hybrid regime. As political scientist Mariam Mufti explains: “Hybrid regimes are variably understood as diminished subtypes of democracy; diminished subtypes of authoritarianism; transitional ‘situations’ that are expected to revert back to either democracy or authoritarianism; a residual category of regimes that fit neither democracy nor authoritarianism; or as clear-cut instances of authoritarianism.”2
Said another way: Hybrid regimes are generally states which can claim the trappings of democracy even as they have undermined the core tenets of democracy itself. They are countries that generally still have elections, still usually allow legal challenges to government decisions, and which may still have some semblance of a free press, but which wield disproportionate power to taint those elections, ignore or subvert those legal orders, and bind or overwhelm journalists’ power to tell the truth. They, in that way, act like autocracies.
You’re likely to hear a lot more about this concept in the coming months and years. If other hybrid regimes are any indication, we are likely to see Trump’s popularity fall, prompting the president to pull out more and more audacious attempts to quell opposition and buy support. It will be during this period that America’s system will be really tested.
Which brings me all the way back to Trump’s comments about empire: If he is unshackled from the constraints of American law, why would he observe international law? If he doesn’t care about his own democracy, why would he give a fig about anyone else’s?
Franchising Illiberalism
“A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia,” writes
. “That world is the one we are living in right now.”3Applebaum was writing about the growing club of outright autocracies: States which have fully uninstalled democracy, or which never ran that operating system to begin with, cooperating to prolong their own existence.
This is a group she calls Autocracy, Inc.: Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Zimbabwe, and a rogues gallery of others.
We’ve paid more attention in recent years to the collaboration between some of those states. But Applebaum effectively argues that the ties run deeper and wider than we had thought. These autocracies are incubating and operationalizing new strategies to repress dissent, discourage activism, and undermine their adversaries.
Applebaum: Putin backs far-right and extremist movements in Europe and provides thugs and weapons to support African dictatorships. He pursues victory in Ukraine by creating food shortages and raising energy prices around the world. Iran maintains proxies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq. Iranian agents have also bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, carried out murders in Istanbul and Paris, plotted assassinations in the United States, and funded media throughout the Arab-speaking and Spanish-speaking worlds. The Belarusian dictator tried to destabilize his neighbors by luring refugees from the Middle East and helping them cross illegally into Europe. Cuban troops have gone to fight against Ukraine in Russia, while Cuban secret policemen help protect the Maduro regime in Venezuela. China, with deep economic and political interest across Africa and Latin America, has not thought of itself as an “Asian” power for many years.
If Autocracy, Inc. is the club of professional despots, we can think of these hybrid regimes like the farm teams. They are developing strange new relationships with Autocracy, Inc. to pioneer new strategies of repression, to attack liberal systems from new angles, and to spread the gospel of illiberalism.
Moscow is a role model in this regard. India has borrowed Putin’s penchant for hiring gangsters to whack their political opponents; Poland’s previous government aped Moscow’s anti-LGBTQ propaganda laws; whilst Serbia and Georgia mimed their foreign agent bill.
Venezuela’s kleptocratic petrostate, which has stayed in power through a mix of anti-American propaganda and slush-fund bribery of domestic power-players, has forged deeper bilateral ties with fellow strongman Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua — and both have expanded political and economic exchanges with Beijing. When Maduro moved to upgrade his state from hybrid regime to full dictatorship, by rigging the 2024 elections, Ortega offered military assistance to help squash the ensuing protests.
When Israel’s judiciary became a hindrance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly corrupt and bellicose government, he moved to smash their independence. In the years since, as the horrific war in Gaza has extended his lease on political life, he has finally achieved his mission. His effort mimics Orbán’s own successful campaign to leash the courts. As a sprawling Amnesty International investigation found:
Amnesty International: Judges are afraid of potential threats of disciplinary proceedings, disadvantageous case allocation, bad evaluation results, financial consequences, consequences related to family members, and repercussions on professional training and development. A good illustration of the chilling effect is that sometimes judges do not even know what they are afraid of: They are fearing an abstract potential future consequence, or they are fearing the unknown. Yet, this indirect and subtle consequence of the chilling effect may influence their thinking and decision making.
Russia has pioneered bold new strategies in information warfare, with its “firehose of falsehoods.” But China, too, has made advances: Such as its work to leverage local organizations and bloggers to spread its central message — borrowing boats to reach the sea.
Applebaum: Autocratic information operations exaggerate the divisions and anger that are normal in politics. They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself. […] [China] had thought hard about how to mock and undermine symbolic acts; how to smear and discredit charismatic leaders; how to use social media to spread false rumors and conspiracy theories; how to isolate and alienate people; how to break links between different social groups and social classes; how to eliminate influential exiles; and above all, how to turn the language of human rights, freedom, and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal. The rest of Autocracy, Inc. learned those lessons too.
Autocracies and hybrid regimes seek to grow their numbers by weakening and destroying multi-national institutions. They want international systems — trade relationships, diplomatic organizations, military alliances, and human rights bodies — to fail. They want to do this not because they want to abolish these structures, but because they want to replace them.
“Autocracy, Inc. hopes to rewrite the rules of the international system itself,” Applebaum writes.
Rather than a rules-based international order, these rogue states want global governance to be determined by strength, by the self-interest of their greedy leaders, by the maximum extraction of wealth regardless of the consequences, and by vengeance for perceived wrongs.
And, perhaps most importantly, they want a system which permits their revanchist tendencies. Much as Russia wants to reclaim its Soviet territories, China wants to complete its integration of Hong Kong and Taiwan, Turkey wants to pacify and control Kurdish territories, India wants to claim disputed Kashmir, Rwanda wants to impose control over its northern borderlands with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Azerbaijan wants control over the Armenian state of Artsakh, and so on. As they cannot achieve territorial conquest (or reconquest) through international law, they want to do it by force — and they want everyone else to stop interfering.
This illiberal bloc has not succeeded in remaking the world in their image thus far specifically because of those international systems they’ve sought to dismantle. These are the systems which constrain authoritarian and hybrid regime alike. The global sanctions system, the international criminal courts, tools of hard and soft power wielded by liberal states, and supra-national structures like the European Union have all helped to limit the impact of these authoritarian and hybrid regimes.
Orbán may dream of a Greater Hungary, but he is unlikely to achieve it while the European Union remains united. As Bozóki and Hegedűs argue, the EU and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have already succeeded in constraining Orbán’s most dangerous tendencies.
Bozóki & Hegedűs: In the absence of effective domestic forces, the EU and the ECtHR have become the most important systemic level obstacles to the curbing of basic human rights and the move towards a more authoritarian regime in Hungary. In general, Hungarian political leadership is externally constrained by European law and institutions.
Orbán may, one day, assault these institutions so consistently that they collapse. He may finally help other aspirants to a hybrid regime — like Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen, André Ventura — get elected, so they can work together to dismantle this system from within. He may simply leave the European Union and govern as the autocrat he wants to be.
But, as neighboring Poland shows, it is still possible to dislodge those who want to destroy democracy. Protesters in Georgia, Serbia, Turkey, and elsewhere are working incredibly hard to do the same. Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Scandinavia are all struggling against Russian imperialism — both because it is the right thing to do, and because they can reasonably fear that they may be next.
It’s a difficult fight, but it’s one that liberalism seems to be winning. Except, of course, that one of liberalism’s biggest defenders has turned heel.
Democracy, Inc.
There’s a line that Canada’s two main contenders to become prime minister have repeated daily for weeks:
“We're not going to be able to change President Trump.”
It’s exactly right. But the two men have profoundly different ideas of what that means.
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, has insisted that the way to “stand up” to Trump is to bunker down. By fixing the myriad problems at home and shipping more raw energy abroad, he says, Canada can get rich and counter Trump’s threats with strength. At the same time, Poilievre has proved deeply uncurious about the rest of the world, he has spoken little about building new international relationships, and he wants to put a virtual end of foreign aid — a critical tool of soft power.
In short, Poilievre either doesn’t understand the threat Canada — and the rest of the world — is facing, or he doesn’t care.
His main competitor, Mark Carney, has taken things more seriously. He talks pointedly about integrating into the European defense aparatus: A pledge which would make both Canada and Europe stronger. He wants more diplomatic relationships, a more coherent foreign policy, and, with these new alliances, to actively challenge America’s status as world superpower. While he doesn’t want to increase foreign aid, he at least isn’t talking about ending it completely.
On Saturday, in the final hours of the campaign, I asked Carney about whether America’s eroding rule of law worries him.
Carney: The U.S. system is one of checks and balances, famously. We have also seen a series of judgments in the US…with respect to certain forms of deportations that have been ruled — at least in this instance — as illegal, and that having force. So the American system has many checks and balances, at its core is the rule of law. I expect that to continue. Yes, I'm concerned about certain circumstances. Of course we continue to monitor the behavior in the US with respect to agreements that we have with them.
It was a careful answer, but one which does note the threat present. A minute later, a colleague asked Carney about an unnerving hypothetical on many Canadians’ — and Greenlanders, and Panamanians — minds right now: Military invasion.
Alex Ballingall: Is there a scenario where the U.S. uses — or tries to use — military force to accomplish those goals?
Carney: No, is the short answer…Look, the U.S. is trying to put economic pressure on us to gain major concessions. And to the extreme of an a level of integration of our countries that would impinge our sovereignty. We have to be clear-eyed about this. These aren't just words when I say: In a crisis you have to prepare for the worst. And the worst is that is the goal. Take what the president says literally. I take it literally, I always have. Others have said it's a joke. Others ignored it for months. Right from the start, I took it seriously. And that drives our actions. That drives the strength of our response. That's why we're one of the only countries that are retaliating with tariffs.
While Carney will need to sharpen his rhetoric if he is elected to continue serving as prime minister — and the polls suggest he will keep the job — he is nevertheless a realist about the threat in a way that few other leaders are. European and Asian leaders still seem to think they can get a deal and that they can preserve this old order.
We need to stop talking about dealing and start talking about constraining. And we already have the tools to do so: They’re the very systems that the autocrats have tried for so long to destroy.
The United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Telecommunications Union, the Arctic Council4, the Internet Governance Forum, the International Criminal Court, the European Union, ASEAN, the OAS, and a host of other bodies can still be used to promote liberal behavior, discourage illiberalism, and to marginalize states which break our international norms — like America.
This will be neither easy nor pleasant, but it is critically necessary.
To that end, voters around the world will go to the polls to elect their leaders in the coming months. Australia is next up, and facing a very similar conundrum to Canada. Germany just voted. Portugal votes (again) in May.
Increasingly, voters will need to choose between those who want to keep our systems working — the internationalists and institutionalist — and those who, for a variety of reasons good and bad, want to break them. The former group need to figure out how to achieve this plan whilst keeping voters onboard. The latter group are, wittingly or not, agents of Autocracy, Inc.
So vote smart.
That’s it for this week. I am off to catch as much sleep as possible before the polls close this evening.
If you want to catch more Canadian election content, I joined
from the campaign trail. (And looked both shiny and tired.) You can also catch my columns for the Toronto Star — and be sure to check out the Star liveblog later tonight, which I’ll be contributing to.And with that, the Chaos Campaign is officially over. (For now.)
An externally constrained hybrid regime: Hungary in the European Union, András Bozóki and Dániel Hegedűs. (2018)
What Do We Know about Hybrid Regimes after Two Decades of Scholarship?, Mariam Mufti (Politics and Governance, 2018)
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebeaum (2014)
Or the system that replaces it
This is worthy and important read. Thanks to Michener Foundation for making it possible for Justin Ling to travel during the election. Important to read Carney’s responses that take us beyond the sound bite lines we had from him via media coverage. Equally important to wrap our minds around the Applebaum takes on autocracy and “hybrid” regime. The comparison to Hungary is very apropos. The question is whether we have to be “takers” of what is meted out by the US regime, or whether we can “shape” a response that keeps democratic decay at bay for Canada. Well done Justin!
This is an extremely important topic all Canadians should be aware of. One issue you haven't yet mentioned in this slide to autocracy is the influence of the IDU, chaired by Stephen Harper and subscribed to by PP. Harper has endorsed both Orban and Trump. I suspect there is more influence (in the shadows) for this autocratic slide, especially in the US - influencing Canada.