Hungary shows the way

This blog originally appeared in Alliance Magazine. 

(L – R): Graciela Hopstein, #ShiftThePower Fellow & Barry Knight, GFCF

There was an atmosphere of disbelief among crowds of first-time voters who danced through Budapest’s backstreets in the early hours of 13 April. Celebrations erupted across the city after opposition leader Peter Magyar defeated long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It was a rare moment that opened the door to a different future.

For 16 years, civil society had been squeezed by the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, with dissent constrained and solidarity recast as a threat. Yet Orbán’s defeat challenges the sense of inevitability surrounding illiberal rule. As history shows, power is never fixed: people tire, ideas falter, and renewal becomes possible. Change is always possible if people organize.

More than an electoral win, this was a victory rooted in civil society – but not in the narrow sense of organized NGOs leading from the front. Rather, it emerged from civil society as a living space where local people gather, argue, and act on the issues shaping their lives. Magyar and his team tapped into this deeper current, campaigning relentlessly beyond Budapest and reaching small towns and villages often ignored. By sidestepping Orbán’s focus on global conspiracies and war, and instead addressing everyday concerns – jobs, healthcare and schools – they reshaped the political terrain from the ground up.

“As history shows, power is never fixed: people tire, ideas falter, and renewal becomes possible. Change is always possible if people organize.”

Organized civil society played a quiet but vital role. NGOs and grassroots funders such as the Roots and Wings Foundation helped sustain hope during difficult years, supported courageous individuals and defended the rights of those targeted by those in power. But this was not their revolution to lead. It was carried by ordinary people – those outside the worlds of political consultancy, activism or institutional leadership – who simply wanted a more decent country. What emerged was a broad coalition with clear political intent: to win power and govern differently.

This points to a more demanding lesson for civil society elsewhere. When democracy itself is under threat, maintaining distance from politics may no longer suffice. Renewal may depend on stepping beyond institutional comfort zones, engaging in a wider civic arena, and adopting a broad view of civil society that includes citizens, community groups, trade associations, unions, social movements and political actors alike. The Hungarian experience suggests that democratic resistance is most powerful not when it is tightly organized from above, but when it is distributed, relational and woven through everyday life – less a single movement than a shared, society-wide refusal to accept the terms of oppression.

In a forthcoming book, A New World is Rising, Barry Knight shows that political progress has rarely been handed down from above, but has always required the collective courage of ordinary people demanding change.[1] In his address commemorating the anniversary of West Indian emancipation from slavery in 1853, Frederick Douglass said: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[2]

“Democratic resistance is most powerful not when it is tightly organized from above, but when it is distributed, relational and woven through everyday life – less a single movement than a shared, society-wide refusal to accept the terms of oppression.”

One of the first arenas in which this struggle unfolds is the reconstruction of democratic legitimacy. Far-right movements often draw strength from real grievances – economic precarity, cultural dislocation, institutional mistrust – but redirect these grievances toward exclusionary ends.

Civil society cannot respond merely by denouncing such movements; it must address the underlying conditions that make them plausible. This involves re-embedding democratic life in everyday experience: through local organizing, mutual aid and participatory forms of decision-making that restore a sense of agency and belonging. Community assemblies, independent media platforms and grassroots networks: these activities become part of the core democratic infrastructure.

Yet democratic renewal cannot occur in isolation. One of the defining strategies of the contemporary far right is to divide the opposition by carefully cultivating antagonisms between groups that might otherwise find common cause. Workers are set against migrants, environmentalists against rural communities, advocates of racial justice against those anxious about social change. In response, civil society must engage in the difficult, often fragile work of coalition-building across difference.

To be effective, such coalitions must be more than tactical alliances; they should aspire to Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community, which entails a “radical revolution of values” that recognizes one’s own struggle as bound up with others’. The language of intersectionality, developed in feminist contexts by Kimberlé Crenshaw, provides an analytical framework for this work, but its realization depends on practice: on cultivating relationships that can hold tension without collapsing into division.

Only then can a common narrative for systems change be developed and pursued. The far-right has developed a story of decline, threat and lost belonging that resonates with people’s lived anxieties. A “progressive” civil society that is constantly at war with itself cannot tell a story beyond competing self-interests, and such a story will never garner wide support from the wider population. The message is clear: “divide, and you will be ruled.”

The #ShiftThePower movement uses the concept of power to unify different interests. Instead of tackling racism, poverty, the environment, gender inequality or disability separately, it aims to overhaul the societal operating system that underpins all these injustices.

“A ‘progressive’ civil society that is constantly at war with itself cannot tell a story beyond competing self-interests, and such a story will never garner wide support from the wider population.”

These perspectives inform Graciela Hopstein’s recent paper, The Crisis of Democracy and Civil Society: Challenges and Perspectives for the #ShiftThePower Movement. The paper shows the central importance of civil society in consolidating democracy. For example, in Brazil, where the sector has faced reputational attacks, criminalization and challenges to their political and financial sustainability in recent years, organizations have shown historic resilience both in defending democracy and in seeking solutions.

The paper concludes that the path out of the processes of autocracy requires starting over from the bottom-up, that is, from communities, territories, dissidences and struggles. Without a doubt, this is the central perspective that guided the development of this work: to highlight community and decolonial philanthropies as strategic visions for imagining ways out of the crisis and for building possible futures.

This perspective gives new impetus to the #ShiftThePower movement. Building on what has been achieved in Hungary, we need to see what can be done elsewhere, starting in Brazil. Here, conservative and far-right actors have built dense organizational ecosystems. Religious networks have expanded their reach and influence. Narratives around family, nation and identity are being actively constructed and disseminated, often with significant resources and coordination.

At the same time, progressive civil society is under strain. Funding cuts, driven by both political retreat and economic pressure, are weakening institutions. Competition for resources is intensifying fragmentation. Donor practices, often unintentionally, have contributed to bureaucratisation and depoliticization. Collective mobilization has struggled to keep pace with the scale of the challenge. The question is how we develop a new strategy to deliver what many at the grassroots of our societies both want and need?

The experience of Hungary over the past 16 years provides important lessons. When democracy itself is at stake, funders and NGOs can no longer maintain distance from politics.  Rather than focusing on detached social goals, they should work quietly alongside a broader alliance of local people to help them to secure change.

Where Hungary leads, Brazil can follow, and so can other parts of the world.

By: Graciela Hopstein, 2024 / 2025 #ShiftThePower Fellow and Barry Knight, GFCF Adviser. The authors are grateful to Tamás Scsaurszki for his help with this article.

[1] Knight, B. (2026). A New World is Rising: Power, Consciousness and the Renewal of the Human Story. Palgrave, Macmillan. To be published in October 2026.

[2] Blassingame, J.W. (ed.) (1985). The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Vol. 3 (1855–63), Yale University Press, p. 204.