John Oliver explains why U.S. conservatives are so obsessed with Hungary

The reason for these figures’ interest becomes completely unsurprising after Oliver’s primer on Orbán’s life and rule, however. First elected after the fall of the Soviet Union, Orbán was supposed to help return the country to prosperity after a few decades. Now, he’s achieved what historians interviewed consider a coup, but one pulled off with lawyers and gerrymandering rather than tanks and guns. He has scapegoated immigrants and the queer community, and banned the inclusion of any content depicting LGBTQ+ people in Hungarian school. “If that sounds at all familiar to you, it may be because just nine months after that, Florida’s Ron DeSantis signed his version of it, focused on classroom instruction—the so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law,” says Oliver. 

As Oliver says toward the conclusion, there are signs that Orbán’s time might be coming to an end. Despite the heavily gerrymandered makeup of Hungary’s electoral map, Orbán still could be voted out. But his opponent, Péter Magyar, is not necessarily a candidate that people are especially psyched about, either, so it becomes a question of whether enough people are willing to hold their noses at the voting booth. Perhaps some Americans can relate to that, too. Check out the whole segment below.