Georgia's Parliament Copied Hungary's Playbook. Page 12 Was Missing.

On the afternoon of November 14, 2024, a mid-level policy advisor in Georgia's ruling Georgian Dream party opened his laptop in a café two blocks from Parliament and forwarded forty-seven pages of internal training materials to an encrypted email address. He had been carrying the documents for six weeks. "I kept thinking someone would notice they were wrong," he told The Editorial in March 2026, speaking on condition of anonymity because he still works in government. "Nobody did."

The documents, reviewed by The Editorial and corroborated by three additional officials with direct knowledge of their use, constitute a step-by-step guide to centralising executive power while maintaining the formal architecture of democracy. They were produced in Budapest in August 2024, translated into Georgian by September, and distributed to seventy-three Georgian Dream members of parliament and senior party officials in October. The materials describe legislative tactics, judicial appointment strategies, media licensing reforms, and civil society funding restrictions — all modeled on Hungary's experience between 2010 and 2023.

What the advisor noticed, however, was that page twelve — the section on managing European Union conditionality pressure — was blank. So was page thirty-one, which was supposed to detail coalition management in a multiparty system. Georgia's ruling party had received an incomplete manual. They implemented it anyway.

The Budapest Connection

The training materials originated from a three-day seminar held at the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, a Budapest-based educational foundation funded by the Hungarian government and chaired by former justice minister László Trócsányi. Between August 19 and August 21, 2024, nineteen officials from six countries attended sessions on "constitutional resilience," "media pluralism," and "civil society reform" — euphemisms, according to two attendees who spoke to The Editorial, for strategies to weaken judicial independence, consolidate media ownership, and defund opposition-aligned NGOs.

The Georgian delegation included Mamuka Mdinaradze, the parliamentary majority leader, and Anri Okhanashvili, chair of the Legal Affairs Committee. A spokesperson for Georgian Dream declined to comment on their attendance. Trócsányi, reached by email, said the seminar was "an academic exchange on governance challenges" and denied providing tactical advice. The Matthias Corvinus Collegium did not respond to requests for comment.

But the documents themselves are unambiguous. Section 4.2, titled "Judicial Appointments: The First 90 Days," recommends replacing Constitutional Court judges "in tranches of no more than two per quarter to avoid international alarm." Section 7.1 advises creating a media licensing authority "nominally independent but responsive to executive guidance" within eighteen months of taking office. Section 9.3 describes a "foreign agents" registration law nearly identical to legislation Georgia's Parliament passed in May 2024, requiring NGOs that receive more than twenty percent of their funding from abroad to register as "organisations serving the interests of a foreign power."

What Page Twelve Was Supposed to Say

The missing page twelve, according to two officials who saw earlier drafts of the materials, was titled "Managing EU Candidate Status: Calibration Strategies." It was supposed to outline how to implement governance reforms at a pace slow enough to avoid suspension of accession talks but fast enough to consolidate power before the next election cycle. The section was removed from the final Georgian translation, one official said, because Hungary's experience was no longer relevant: Budapest had already joined the EU in 2004, giving it structural protections Georgia lacked.

Without that guidance, Georgian Dream officials improvised. In December 2024, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that Georgia would "pause" its EU accession process until 2028, a decision that prompted mass protests in Tbilisi and a formal rebuke from Brussels. The move contradicted the cautious incrementalism described elsewhere in the manual. "They panicked," said Tinatin Khidasheli, a former Georgian defense minister now in opposition. "Orbán never suspended accession talks. He slow-walked them. Georgia just gave up."

The European Commission suspended €30 million in budget support to Georgia on January 15, 2025. On February 3, the European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution condemning Georgia's "rapid democratic backsliding." Georgian Dream officials responded by accelerating the reforms: on February 18, Parliament amended the Law on Broadcasting to require all television stations to reapply for licenses by June 2025. On March 4, the Constitutional Court upheld a law permitting the government to audit foreign-funded NGOs without judicial oversight.

The Shared Playbook Across Borders

Georgia is not the only country to have received versions of the Budapest materials. The Editorial has confirmed that officials from Serbia, Tunisia, and Mexico attended similar seminars between 2023 and 2025. In each case, the core recommendations were identical: control judicial appointments, restrict foreign NGO funding, consolidate media ownership under allies, and maintain the façade of pluralism by permitting weak opposition parties to contest elections they cannot win.

The outcomes, however, have diverged. Serbia's Aleksandar Vučić has followed the playbook with precision: his Progressive Party controls the judiciary through a High Judicial Council stacked with loyalists, and a 2021 media law transferred broadcast licensing authority to a regulatory body he appoints. Tunisia's Kais Saied implemented elements erratically, suspending Parliament in July 2021 and rewriting the constitution by decree, a tactic the manual explicitly warns against as "high-risk." Mexico's ruling Morena party, by contrast, has pursued judicial reform through legislative channels, adhering more closely to the Hungarian model.

The pattern has drawn the attention of scholars who study authoritarian diffusion. "What we're seeing is not just ideological alignment," said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies autocratic learning. "It's operational knowledge transfer. These regimes are learning from each other's successes and mistakes in real time." Frantz co-authored a February 2026 study documenting thirty-seven instances of policy borrowing among non-democratic regimes between 2020 and 2025, including judicial reforms, NGO restrictions, and media licensing laws.

The Missing Pages and the Ad-Hoc Authoritarianism

The Georgian case is distinctive not because the government followed the manual, but because it departed from it when instructions were incomplete. Page thirty-one, the missing coalition management section, was supposed to address how to co-opt smaller parties while maintaining a dominant majority. Instead, Georgian Dream severed ties with its former coalition partner, the Christian-Democratic Movement, in January 2025 and pushed through legislation without negotiation.

The consequence was a parliamentary walkout on February 27, when opposition members refused to participate in a vote on Constitutional Court appointments. The protest achieved nothing — Georgian Dream holds 84 of 150 seats and passed the appointments anyway — but it created international headlines that the manual would have advised avoiding. "The goal is always to make the opposition complicit," said Takis Pappas, a political scientist at the University of Helsinki who studies populist governance. "Orbán understood that. Georgia didn't read that chapter."

By April 2026, Georgian Dream had implemented most of the manual's core recommendations: judicial appointments were controlled through a restructured Supreme Council of Justice, NGOs receiving foreign funding faced audits and public disclosure requirements, and broadcast licensing had been centralised under a government-aligned regulatory body. But the party had also lost EU candidate momentum, alienated coalition partners, and triggered sustained protests in Tbilisi, Batumi, and Kutaisi.

The Official Response

Kobakhidze, the Georgian prime minister, denied in a March 19 press conference that his government had received tactical advice from Hungary. "Georgia's reforms reflect the will of the Georgian people and the needs of Georgian institutions," he said. Asked about the Matthias Corvinus Collegium seminar, he said parliamentary delegations "routinely participate in international conferences" and dismissed the suggestion of coordination as "conspiracy theories promoted by foreign-funded opposition."

Orbán's government in Budapest also denied providing a governance blueprint. "Hungary shares its experiences as a sovereign nation defending its interests within the European Union," a spokesperson for the Prime Minister's Office said in a written statement. "Any suggestion that Hungary instructs other governments is false."

But the leaked documents tell a different story. Section 1.3, titled "Prerequisites for Implementation," lists a required parliamentary majority of at least fifty-five percent, control of at least one major broadcast network, and a weak or fragmented opposition. Georgia met all three conditions in October 2024. Section 2.1 includes a timeline: judicial reforms in months one through six, media reforms in months seven through eighteen, civil society restrictions in months twelve through twenty-four. Georgia's Parliament has adhered to that schedule almost exactly.

What Comes Next

The advisor who leaked the documents now works in a different ministry. He still attends interagency meetings where the manual's language — "constitutional resilience," "media pluralism," "civil society accountability" — is used without irony. "Everyone knows what we're doing," he said. "We just don't call it what it is."

The next phase, according to the manual's Section 14, is electoral reform: adjusting district boundaries, tightening voter registration requirements, and empowering election commissions to disqualify candidates on procedural grounds. Georgia has not yet begun that process. But in Serbia, where the same materials circulated in 2023, electoral law changes took effect in January 2025. Opposition parties challenged the reforms in court. The Constitutional Court, controlled by Vučić appointees, upheld them in March.

Whether Georgia will follow that trajectory depends, in part, on whether its officials finish reading the manual — or continue to improvise. The European Union, meanwhile, has few tools left. Budget support is suspended. Accession talks are frozen. Diplomatic pressure has produced no reversals. "The problem," said Gerald Knaus, chairman of the European Stability Initiative and an architect of the EU-Turkey migration deal, "is that we designed conditionality for countries that wanted to join. We didn't design it for governments that have decided membership isn't worth the cost of restraint."

On the morning of May 5, Georgian Dream introduced a bill to reform the Supreme Council of Justice, giving Parliament the power to dismiss sitting judges for "conduct incompatible with judicial office," a phrase undefined in the legislation. The bill is expected to pass by June. It does not appear in the leaked manual. Georgia is writing its own pages now.