Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Comedy Festival: nothing to laugh at
Why are famous British and American comics such as Jimmy Carr and Dave Chappelle now performing in a country notorious for censoring and harassing its own comedians?
Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Comedy Festival: nothing to laugh at
Why are famous British and American comics such as Jimmy Carr and Dave Chappelle now performing in a country notorious for censoring and harassing its own comedians?
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Magazine
Volume 55, issue 1: Spring 2026
The monster unleashed: How Hungary's illiberal vision is seducing the western world
Hungary has been on our radar for a long time. The prime minister Viktor Orbán is not an autocrat like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but he has been slowly eroding his society’s democratic institutions and helping his Fidesz party allies take them over.
It’s meant not only that power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires, but that the public space for freedom of expression and pluralistic thought has been narrowed.
President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has been fascinated with the Orbán model and how Hungary became what Orbán himself has described as an illiberal democracy. Many powerful MAGA figures would not only like the USA but also other countries in Europe to follow suit. Orbán is an ally who wants to weaken the principles on which the European project was founded.