The tea leaves we’ll be reading today, reader, are actually tealevél. That would be the Hungarian word for the symbolic remnants at the bottom of the cup. Hungary, as you may have heard, was the site of a world-shaking election over the weekend, as voters rose up, about as close to en masse as you can get, and said szia to Victor Orban, Hungary’s strongman prime minister for the past 16 years. There are lots of reasons to be heartened by the results, not the least of which is that the brand of ‘illiberal democracy’ Orban promoted across the globe seems to be running out of steam. But it is the role that education as an issue played in the stinging rebuke of Orban and his party that is the subject of this post. Because even if you don’t know your paprikash from your halászlé, the trajectory of education in Hungary—what voters there just rejected—will feel like familiar fare indeed.
First: a quick review for those of you who may not share my fascination with (or the American right’s obsessive interest in) Hungary. While Orban has often been referred to as ‘Trump before Trump,’ he was also doing education culture war long before the GOP in this country caught the fever. Here’s the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg on how Orban became a model for the likes of Ron DeSantis et al.
More than any other politician, Orban showed conservatives worldwide how to use government power to wage the culture wars. He crushed a prominent liberal university, banned “homosexual propaganda” in schools — a forerunner of Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law — and engineered the takeover of major media outlets by his allies.
While there are some very key differences—Hungary’s ruling party banned homeschooling, for example, under a controversial education reform law in 2019—the similarities are glaring. Just as the Trump-era GOP has imposed strict limits on what teachers can teach and students can learn, prioritizing so-called patriotic education, education under Orban became a propaganda tool. There’s even a voucher connection, as Hungary has diverted funds away from the country’s public schools and towards church schools. A full decade ahead of us on the ‘education freedom’ road, Hungary has ended up consigning its most vulnerable children to what remains of the public schools, starkling limiting their future options as a result.
But when voters had a chance to weigh in, they said nem köszönöm. As Peter Magyar, Orban’s opponent, astutely understood, the combination of stripping schools and teachers of funding while also turning education into a vehicle of propaganda is deeply unpopular. In rallies he held all over the country, including in deeply conservative rural regions, Magyar focused, not on abstract debates about authoritarianism, but on healthcare, education, infrastructure, and corruption. He also pledged a major investment in public schools, the decrepit state of which served as a handy reminder of what’s happened to Hungary’s economy during 16 years of Orbanism. As this gentleman, a one-time supporter of a far-right party who campaigned for Magyar, neatly summed it up: “They have stolen everything.”
From Tatabánya to Tulsa
Back in this country, something similar has been playing out. Last week, voters in Missouri, Wisconsin and Oklahoma went to the polls for local school district elections, handing defeats to several high-profile conservative slates and candidates.
In Missouri’s Francis Howell School District, three Democratic‑backed candidates swept school board races, removing the board’s last conservative member following a campaign centered on book bans and LGBTQ‑inclusive policies. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a conservative incumbent lost to a Democratic‑backed challenger following controversy over anti‑immigrant and anti‑LGBTQ remarks. Similar dynamics played out in suburban Wisconsin districts, including parts of Waukesha County, long considered a Republican stronghold.
“We got our butts kicked,” reflected one GOP official. True that, but I much preferred the reading of the electoral tea leaves provided by Jonathan Collins, co‑director of the Politics and Education Program at Columbia University. These elections provide a “clear signal that the American public wants to see real, material quality of life improvements,” Collins said in an interview with Newsweek. “Nothing better represents America’s aspirations for tomorrow than schools.”
If you’re wondering what a handful of local schoolboard races have to do with the ousting of a Hungarian strongman, the answer is ‘more than you might think.’ These particular races all belong to the category of what we might call the OG culture war takeover strategy. In Tulsa, for example, voters ousted the last Ryan Walters-aligned board member (remember him?), electing instead a candidate who pledged to “focus on strengthening public education, not tearing it down.” Tulsa voters, by the way, didn’t just reject the MAGA vision for schools, they approved a massive investment in the future. In Waukesha, Wisconsin, the GOP used the school culture wars to try to nationalize local elections, with the goal of turning a reddish county redder still. Not only were they stymied at the school board level but thanks to the backlash they inspired, the largest city in this Republican stronghold now has a Democratic mayor.
There are plenty of tea leaves for us to read here, including that voters are sick to death of the education culture wars and the candidates who continue to fan their flames. Another is that if your goal is to restore some sanity to our politics, organizing around local public schools is the ideal place to start. As I was reminded by my friend Ashley Daly, who has been part of a pro-public education coalition in Tulsa since 2022, this kind of organizing takes an immense amount of work, including convincing people to run for office, but the payoff is huge. “What’s really beautiful is that the people running are just our neighbors. They’re parents and they just want to show up for our community and for kids. They’re just normal people who were like, ‘this is needed. I’m gonna do it.’” If this feels familiar, by the way, it’s because this is precisely the path followed by the New Hampshire Democrat who recently flipped a seat in that state.
Perhaps the most important lesson, though, and one that holds true whether you’re in Tatabánya, Tulsa or Tarrant County, Texas, is that the ability to strongarm controversial policies into law is not the same as popular support for said policies. In Hungary, Orban proved extraordinarily effective at using the power of the state to wage culture war, including driving a top university campus into exile. On this side of the pond, red state governors have succeeded in enacting one unpopular education policy after another, most notably, redirecting funds for public schools to private religious schools. And as I’ve been pointing out relentlessly, the backlash to school vouchers keeps showing up at the polls, and is shaping up to be a major factor in the midterms. (See, for example, Iowa, where GOP candidates for governor, a race that’s now considered a toss-up, are sparring over whether private schools should have to accept all kids.)
Ultimately, gerrymandering and strong-man domination weren’t enough to keep Orban in power as Hungary’s economy foundered and the public rebelled against overt corruption and grift. Conservative pols in this country should read the Hungarian tea leaves as a cautionary tale. But it’s the results of last week’s school board races that should really make them sweat.
Thank you for connecting all these dots of good news!