America's Future Is Hungary

Well, nice story, sadly it is a lie.

Hungary enjoyed good GDP growth rates recently. It stumbled in the last two years because it's energy dependence on Russia used to be higher than that of other EU countries - so gaining bigger benefits from it earlier (cheap energy), it had higher losses recently when this dependence is being slowly broken.

https://tradingeconomics.com/hungary/full-year-gdp-growth - 2.7% average growth in the last 12 years, or 3% per capita corrected for population decline.

By comparison, U.S. GDP growth in the same period averaged only 1.75% per year per capita (which isn't bad, about average actually), so there's 15.9% accumulated catch-up over these years (while Hungary is still 1.8+x poorer so that is expectable).

It's neither poor nor there is mass political terror. There can't be because borders are open, everyone is free to emigrate and find employment in any nearby EU country having full rights as EU citizens. So the government is very, very limited in what it can do to it's people as voting with one's feet is way too easy and that is the untimate form of democracy.

Only way in which Hungary is different from other Eastern European states is major territory and population loss after WWI. Other Eastern European countries did not have any sort of statehood before WWI and then not until after 1989 when they were Nazi and then Commie colonies. Many of them don't even have history of their own, just ethnography - say Slovakia (ok there was Principality of Nitra that one can count for Slovak state but it was 1000 years ago and lasted one generation), they were owned by other countries/cultures and not even as a whole but piecemeal. By contrast, Hungary was a very real nation all the way from ~1000AD. Which then, lost 2/3 of it's territory and population, to the nations they consider their inferiors, and still can't get over it. It's sort of natural that they are kinda resentful and far right, they naturally feel that they have been historically wronged and have a much lower international position and weight than they naturally deserve.

Of course, there is another "very real" East European nation - Poland - but it currently enjoys a very prominent international political and economical position which probably matches their expectation, so while their politics is kinda right wing, it is so to a much lower degree. One could also name Lithuania, but GDL wasn't a nation of Lithuanians.