Leaders such as Trump and Orbán could only be effectively opposed, she said, by ditching a “legalistic, technical, technocratic approach” in favor of “something for the electorate to be excited about”.
Leaders such as Trump and Orbán could only be effectively opposed, she said, by ditching a “legalistic, technical, technocratic approach” in favor of “something for the electorate to be excited about”.
If I got right what you’re saying (I might have misunderstood it), the situation is slightly different in Hungary. Instead of the media outlets and conglomerates trying to appease the governing party, it was actually an active takeover by direct and indirect government relationships/strawmen.
Slightly less relevant context:
spoiler
Back when the popularity of Internet was on the rise in Hungary, one of the biggest news media sites was origo.hu. It got later bought out by a company that kept getting funds from one of the organisations handled by the later minister of finance. Nothing to see here.
One of the largest and most popular independent media sites, index.hu got also taken over in a similar fashion by Orbán’s most infamous strawmen of the times, Lajos Simicska. Later on they had a falling out, and it was funny to see how suddenly his media took a 180, and in a phone call with a reporter he also called Orbán a scumbag (well, ‘geci’ /p.:~getsy/ was the actual term, which is a slur word for semen/cum, basically meaning scumbag, and the paraphrased ‘Orbán egy geci’ /Orbán is a ‘geci’/ became a meme, but I’m meandering off). However, his control over these portals was taken over, and for a short while there were only one or two significant news/media sites independent from the party’s control.
So the situation here is rather similar; the only difference was that we’re not the US, so let’s take the ‘us’ out of the above.