The death of Hungary’s democracy is a worldwide press-freedom warning

On Friday—as concern spread internationally about Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, using the cover of the coronavirus to consolidate his personal power—Politico published an op-ed in which Judit Varga, Orbán’s justice minister, lashed out at the country’s critics. “False claims about a power grab in Hungary are spreading as quickly as the coronavirus,” Varga wrote; Orbán’s government, she argued, is being slandered by “Western European thinkers” who don’t like its...