The most talked-about European politician in the US. (Akos Stiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Aside from the occasional rogue economics professor, conservatives have been thoroughly routed from American academia, and Britain is not far behind. In Hungary, however, higher education is still a contested ideological space. The Central European University, a liberal, American-style institution, was forced out of Budapest by government pressure in 2019. Last autumn, protesters marched through the capital to oppose the appointment of conservative partisans to the board of Színház és Filmművészeti Egyetem (SZFE), the national university of film and theatre. This June, thousands of Hungarians defied Covid restrictions to rally against a proposed Fudan University campus in downtown Budapest, a joint project of the Chinese and Hungarian governments.
Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Budapest has revived a longstanding debate over Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is, depending on your political sympathies, a would-be dictator or a conservative statesman of the first order. Whatever happens after Carlson’s visit, the battle for Hungarian higher education is a better guide to Orbán’s politics than the travel itinerary of a cable TV pundit.
Orbán and Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling conservative party, are often accused of building an authoritarian state. This overstates both the extent of their political control and their ideological ambitions. The Hungarian Prime Minister is best understood as a conservative institutionalist who seeks to seize the commanding heights of Hungarian society by influencing the country’s key organisations and cultural organs. In pursuit of this goal, Orbán is often opportunistic and unscrupulous, disregarding norms and playing political hardball with his opponents. Although these methods fall short of an authoritarian takeover, they will shape the playing field of Hungarian politics for years to come.
The Prime Minister’s critics typically conflate his take-no-prisoners political style with a more potent and far-reaching form of autocracy. This tendency is evident across the political spectrum, from President Joe Biden’s remarks lumping Orbán in with Belarussian Dictator Alexander Lukashenko to recent broadsides from neoconservative writer David Frum.
A recent post by the liberal pundit Heather Cox Richardson is typical of the genre. Richardson says Hungary is a “one-party state”. This would be news to Gergely Karácsony, the opposition Mayor of Budapest and an oft-mentioned candidate to succeed Orbán as prime minister in the 2022 parliamentary elections. Karácsony was elected in 2019, along with anti-Fidesz mayoral candidates in nine other cities and towns across Hungary. In a country of 10 million people, this counts as a significant political rebuke. One-party states do not allow opposition figures to run the capital, speak at protest rallies in front of Parliament, and lay the groundwork for a national campaign.
One senses that many of Fidesz’s foreign critics are motivated by something other than a sincere interest in Hungarian civil liberties. Once again, Richardson’s post is revealing. According to her, Orbán “wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture”.
This is a curious understanding of Hungarian democracy. Hungary has not been a multicultural society since the end of the First World War. The country has been remarkably homogeneous for the entirety of its post-1989 democratic period, and the same is true of most of its neighbours. The most recent example of a multicultural society in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, dissolved into sectarian violence over two decades ago.
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SubscribeIn short, the left screams blue murder when anything approaching its own strategy is attempted, and has a tantrum if attempted successfully. Behind that tantrum, which naturally involves flat lies – “one party state”, for example – is an increasingly blatant disregard for freedom. Turning directly to the management of opinion, in Hungary’s case it means entrenching views agreeable to the vast majority; views which protect the nation and ensure its ongoing life; in our case, by contrast, left wing dominion brings oligarchy, dissolution and despair. Pity the west, then, in which suicide is on the rise, crime endemic, tension palpable, terrorism imminent, borrowing beyond control and resettlement disguised as “immigration”. Like the Roman, we seem to see the Tiber, foaming with much blood – Nice, Bataclan, Nantes – and how much worse when growing populations press their way north? How many more times will Christmas markets turn to slaughterhouses before the Utopian bien pensants give up on their cruel, priggish, abstract moralism? And when will they realise that their moralism is predicated on a dated supremacy of the west, which they have done their best to undermine? One recalls that it was the left, in the thirties, which advocated pacifist levels of disarmament before shrieking at Britain and France that it was time to declare war on Germany. They have led us into the same dark valley yet again. Hungary is a consoling point of light.
This article on Orban is nicely balance. Indeed, if a population chooses their politicians that is their democratic right. It is just to hope that bullish leaders do not descent in too much corruption because that will guarantee to impoverish the society/country they lead. My main worry in relation to the likes of Orban (and many other politicians) is that is their modus operandi.
But, Simon, I cannot quite follow your rant. If our western style/morality/way of living is so good it surely will survive and be copied by others who come to live with us. Of course, in the short term it will not look like this, and there will be clashes, but in the long term, is cooperation between different thoughts and cultures not a normal thing (without calling it good or bad?)? In the mean time humanity, well leaders, will continue to make mistakes that will be judged by the past.
It may be interesting for you to read: https://www.marcluyckx.be/english
Complete nonsense. There is no “surely” about copying the ways of a civilisation – and since ours exhibits little confidence in itself, there is less likelihood of newcomers doing so than ever. They are also established in such numbers that the old incentive of assimilation has been poleaxed. As for “Cooperation between different thoughts and cultures” – a point raised in complete contradiction to your first proposition (no wonder you can’t follow me) – it is a pipe dream when the differences are so marked. Heard of women’s rights? Islamists haven’t. Free speech? Not if it touches the founder of a certain religion. In short, you are offering complacent, rose-tinted, inconsistent defences of an unsustainable situation. Your bland remark that “Of course, in the short term… there will be clashes” is a quite grotesque understatement, irresponsible in its imprecision. How short? Or rather, for how long are we to put up with violence and menace before your improbable nirvana is established?
You seem to have a rather simplistic view of the eternal nature of civilisations. Modern Europe may have evolved from, but is entirely unlike medieval Christendom, as one example. History is full of examples of cultures strongly influencing each other, though the self-defined purist definers of those cultures often strive to deny it. The modern West which you seem to hate so much probably has a majority of people who disagree with your apocalyptic warnings, or at least, care more about other issues, after all Trump was not re-elected.
The bad faith of so many (not all) people on the Right is that they have never been in the forefront of the battle for women’s rights, and certainly not gay rights, but now somehow decide these causes are their own because they are using these issues purely in a transactional way to attack Islam (not just political Islamism), with no nuance and little understanding. Islam was notably more tolerant than Christianity for hundreds of years. Islamism is a modern and political reaction to real and perceived decline, colonial domination, the weakness, illegitimacy and corruption of modern secular states in the Middle East etc.
You have a simplistic notion of my argument and through that loophole stitch several sophistries of your own. Yes, things change – but the question is for the better or the worse, to which the matter of speed is relevant. This, you dodge. Then “History is is full of examples of cultures strongly influencing each other” – yes, mostly by means of violence and invasion. True, Japan influenced French art in the nineteenth century, but this is not typical of the historical process. You also ignore – more suppressio veri – the fact that today western culture is not so much including something new from Islam as being hammered in its heart – viz freedom of expression, or rather its absence.
Your point about “bad faith” on the right is absurdly wide of the mark. In the first place, just because “you” – as a representative of the collective and oh-so-virtuous left – have “fought” for women’s rights, etcetera, does that now give you the option of crushing them completely by means of heavy Islamic immigration (see Ayaan Hirsi Ali)? And since the “right” involves classical Liberalism, by fighting for individual liberty in general, I put it to you that it has done more for women and other categories than the friction-generating class war approach of the left. As for the rights of all those caught up in same-sex attraction, I make no secret of my view that the process has gone too far. So-called “equal marriage” is a distortion of a fundamentally heterosexual institution. That said, the gay community would certainly be better off under the Christian Conservatism this represents than under any variety of Islamic regime you may care to mention. So we find ourselves in the odd position that I defend their vital interests, whilst refusing the modern dogma of equality; whilst you bow and scrape to them in principle, whilst letting in hundreds of thousands of people a year who are likely to approve of duffing them up. Who’s better for them in the end?
And here we come to the preposterous squirming of your approach to Islam. First, you stoop to that most contemptible recourse of the modern lib-Marxist, invoking the Islam of five hundred years ago. Totally irrelevant, so nul points. Then you stoop to another dodge, blaming the obvious shortcomings of modern Islamic society on the west. Do they then have no agency at all? Are they such passive puppets that some seventy years after the west lost its imperial dominance, Islamo-fascism (euphemised by you as “Islamism”) is somehow our fault? And it’s not just “Islamism”, is it? Are you aware of current, home grown Islamic reactions to modern PSHE lessons in British schools? Do you know how many Islamic countries are remotely democratic? In which one of them would you say that a woman enjoys the freedom she would have in a Conservative and Christian society, let alone the nihilistic self-abuse your sort would impose on her? Last of all and most important, there is a reason for this: Islam’s rigid imperviousness to reform, witnessed by many so-called apostates and winked at by left-liberals – and totally ignored by self-important narcissists who rejoice in the idea that “it’s all our fault”.
Why is it simply assumed that “multi-culturalism” is a natural good and something we all unquestioningly aspire to?
A few years ago I was chatting in a pub with some colleagues from Hungary and Poland about Brexit. They were mid-twenties, early-thirties, very-educated software developers for a famous American bank. To my surprise, to a man they were pro Orban and pro Brexit.
Why were you surprised?
“Big government conservatives?” Expecting your government to do the bare minimum required as a nation state means you are for big government? What the Hell is the author talking about? The problem American conservatives have is that the massive United States government has no problem doing everything but what it is constitutionally required to do and refusing to enforce laws that it is required to enforce.
Because Hungary does have in fact a pretty big government and welfare state (paid for by the EU!). It is often amusing seeing people lionise some foreign country, of which they know absolutely nothing, because they think it fits in with the side of the culture wars they are on.
As an American who visited Hungary a few years ago, I appreciate your report. Thanks for your report.
Agree. This is a good balanced report into the headlines behind the headlines of a fascinating country.
An excellent take. US commentators use Hungry to suit their own confirmation biases – a point explained quite well here. Their knowledge is thin but no one knows that and they need not care. The social conservatives like Hungarian social policies like pro child subsidies, immigration control, LGBT neutral school curriculum and so on. Like the 1990s. Others prefer hand wringing re violence done to ever evolving ‘EU values’ and the existential threat Orban poses to the cultural dominance these ‘values’ now enjoy in most Western nations. Thus Hungary and Poland are fascist adjacent for many. This is a huge overreach.
But as you point out, Orban runs the usual risks of all too dominant political figures in that corruption and media compliance/control may lead to a backlash as might selling out to China. There are many useful thoughts in this piece..
Good points, although it is difficult to see that Hungary at least with its small and declining population poses an ‘existential threat’ to modern western values, and least of all to the EU whose largesse it depends on.
Interesting article. The musing about how ‘sincere’ Orban is is a product of an ideological culture shared by both sides of the western culture war. I have just been reading about Bismarck who you could say was the ultimate successful exponent of cynical but largely successful policy making (maybe not in the long term in creating the German state. although ‘naturally’ a conservative, or even a reactionary, no-one was ultimately his ally. Orban may well be a similar case.