Viktor Orban’s defeat has triggered a collective sigh of relief across Europe and beyond. Following closely on the heels of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s exit in Brazil, the demise of the Hungarian strongman seems to signal the beginning of the end of the recent strongman era.
This, however, would be a dangerous misreading of the global trajectory.
The Hungarian specifics should already caution us against an overly optimistic reading. Peter Magyar was an insider who campaigned on a rather restricted message—there is still a lot, some would say a shocking amount, of what we do not know about his politics. Ultimately, it appears, cost-of-living topics were central and brought voters on board for a change. It is questionable just how much the Hungarian model of transition can be replicated in other places. Would Turkish voters, for example, flock to such a narrow platform?
Never mind that Magyar commands a supermajority in parliament and can now dismantle the Orbanist system—focusing too much on the Hungarian mechanics might lull us into a false sense of security. First of all, there are still lots of countries with wannabe strongmen testing out lessons from the playbook: Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Georgia are sometimes mentioned in this context.
And there are still many established ones around. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is somewhere in between. But what’s more: The “illiberal playbook” is not dying; it is adapting and being updated.
Those strongmen deeply entrenched in power are surely thinking a lot about Orban in these weeks. Rather than gently encouraging them to moderate, the falls of Orban and Bolsonaro are likely driving them toward further entrenchment and more extreme measures. There might be a sense of panic, even.
At the root of this panic is what I call the “exit dilemma.”
Lots of chapters and lessons have been written and are constantly being updated in the strongman playbook. The one thing that is missing so far is a chapter on the exit from power. It’s the exit dilemma, and it is real enough: Once you have dismantled institutions, enriched yourself and your cronies, and bent the law to your will, you cannot simply lose an election and retire to write your memoirs. If anything, Orban is the exception that proves the rule. For the strongman, the threat of judicial persecution is existential.
So far, Russian President Vladimir Putin is the most prominent strongman to attempt a soft exit, granting himself a lifelong seat in the Russian upper house of parliament with immunity. It sounds like an ingenious solution to the exit dilemma, but as Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had copied Putin’s soft exit stratagem, recently discovered, it suffers from a fatal conceptual flaw. What if the next person in power simply revokes the lifetime immunity construct? This duly happened to Nazarbayev in 2023, when his family was stripped of legal immunity and his own immunity and powers were reduced.
Ultimately, paper shields do not solve the exit dilemma. To understand how this trap is navigated in real time, we must look to a case unfolding before our eyes right now.
More than Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Orban, or Bolsonaro, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan embodies the full arc of transition from liberal reformer to nationalist hard-liner and autocrat. In power for 23 years, he is one of the pioneers of the 21st-century wave of strongmen. He has shown himself to be highly adaptive, rarely letting a good crisis go to waste while continuously reconfiguring his voter base—and the Turkish Constitution, for that matter.
Early on, he jettisoned his liberal and reform-oriented supporters. Later, he alienated many of his Kurdish voters when he deliberately forewent a historic solution to the Kurdish conflict to ally himself with hypernationalists—perhaps more adequately termed near-fascists—to secure the majority needed to install himself as an all-powerful “super president.”
Erdogan has made the fullest use of the failed 2016 coup against him by purging real and perceived enemies. Well over 100,000 people have lost their jobs, and tens of thousands have landed in prison. Charismatic leaders of the opposition and civil society such as Ekrem Imamoglu and Osman Kavala have also been neutralized by being stowed away in the prison system.
Erdogan also regularly intimidates critics—from prominent journalists to teenagers on social media—in thousands of civil lawsuits for so-called defamation. State institutions, from the courts and civil administration to the army and police, have been systematically packed with loyalists. And finally, the mediascape is utterly dominated by pro-Erdogan outlets, most in the hands of people who are dependent on him.
Yet, despite this near-total institutional capture, Erdogan never quite gets what he wants and often not even what he needs in national elections. He has never been able to break through a sort of invisible barrier that hovers just above 50 percent support. Indeed, his Justice and Development Party’s share of the votes has been dwindling. In the 2023 parliamentary elections, Erdogan’s party received just 35.6 percent of the vote. It is a stunning testament to the democratic resilience of Turkish society.
This resilience is becoming a rather urgent matter for Erdogan. His presidential term is ending in May 2028. According to the constitution that he has engineered, a person can serve only two terms as president—it was an important selling point of the system vis-à-vis those who argued that Erdogan was installing himself for life.
There is a loophole: dissolve parliament before the current term is over, thus triggering early elections and allowing Erdogan to run for another term—in that case, the incomplete term would not count. But here is the catch. For this, he needs a three-fifths majority in parliament—one that he does not have.
We do not know enough about Erdogan’s personal finances to fully assess the opposition’s allegations of corruption and illicit enrichment. However, leaked recordings and a mountain of circumstantial evidence strongly suggest that he is deeply afraid of being prosecuted should he fall from power.
Given that losing power likely means prison or exile, Erdogan is pulling out all the stops. If he can no longer rely on economic populism, he is building alternative safeguards. On the one hand, he has SADAT, a private military contractor that acts essentially as Erdogan’s own version of the Russian Wagner Group. On the other, there are new paramilitary street networks such as the Ottoman Hearths—an ultranationalist, informal militia intensely loyal to Erdogan, ready to act as his political enforcers outside the traditional state apparatus.
Whichever way Erdogan’s exit dilemma will play out, he is already signaling that he is panicking. Imamoglu, the charismatic Istanbul mayor, is now in jail. After an initial attempt to lock him away in 2022 failed to sideline him, he now faces an absurd potpourri of charges and is facing a potential sentence of more than 2,000 years. As if that were not enough, state authorities recently nullified his university diploma, and with this, he was stripped of the constitutional prerequisite to run for president.
The Republican People’s Party, Imamoglu’s party—which was also, of course, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s party—was thrown into turmoil in May after a court declared the results of its 2023 party congress “absolutely null.” The fact that the “nullified” leadership appointed at that congress had recently delivered strong electoral performances was apparently too great a threat to ignore.
The next phase of Erdogan’s trajectory seems clear: He is radicalizing toward increasingly dangerous solutions. He has long cultivated a discourse about “the game”—this alludes to an international conspiracy against Turkey and often has strong antisemitic undertones. It is such a catch-all construct that it can include European countries and the United States as well as domestic opposition acting as knowing or naïve stooges in “the game.” It is a powerful tool that helps identify him as the only possible savior; it is also the discursive groundwork to not only thoroughly discredit any opposition but also to invalidate future election results.
Erdogan has also been escalating his foreign-policy rhetoric. Long gone seem the days of his “zero problems with neighbors” policy. Nowadays, Erdogan stresses time and again that Turkey is bigger than its borders and that Ankara has a legitimate role in shaping the destinies of neighboring states. His rhetoric on Israel has reached new levels of assertiveness, veering into open hostility as he frames Israeli operations in Syria and Lebanon as existential threats to Turkey itself. Similarly, Ankara’s tone toward Greece frequently veers into the aggressive. All this is mainly to satisfy a base that he has been energizing on these topics for years. But it could be used for more.
None of this means that Erdogan will indeed use conflict and war as a means to stay in power. But given how the Kurdish topic has played out, it might not be off the table. His alliance with the extreme nationalists further makes the situation more volatile. War and protracted conflict have served Netanyahu to keep his hold over Israeli society. (Though his coalition, too, bangs its head against that imaginary wall at around 50 percent of the votes.) Perhaps Erdogan will take a page out of Netanyahu’s playbook.
Whatever comes next, the world is merely entering a new phase in the era of the strongman.
