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.
If Orbán isn’t the illiberal bogeyman of Richardson’s nightmares, what is he? A common lament from American conservatives is that the Left’s dominant cultural position effectively nullifies Republican electoral victories. In Hungary it is the Right that exercises commanding influence over many vital cultural organs. Independent media exist but state news outlets dominate the airwaves. Universities are career-oriented and bereft of typically Left-wing departments. State-supported theatres produce rock operas about Hungary’s history and national heroes. The Hungarian cultural and political environment has been shaped by a conservative government that is comfortable wielding the levers of institutional power.
The recent government grant of $1.7 billion to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a residential college that offers conservative students fellowships, stipends and networking events, is characteristic of this strategy. The college was founded in the 1990s to train Hungary’s post-communist elite and is unabashedly patriotic and conservative in its emphasis. It now has access to a source of funding that exceeds Hungary’s annual higher education budget.
If you visited Budapest at any point last year, you probably noticed people wearing yellow “Free SZFE” masks on the streets. These are markers of another institutional battle, this time over the national academy of film and theatre. Like almost every university in Hungary, SZFE is a public institution. Last August, university management resigned en masse to protest the installation of a new government-appointed Board of Trustees, which they described as a threat to institutional autonomy and artistic freedom. Sporadic student protests have continued since the resignations.
From local theatres to national institutions like the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and SZFE, the Hungarian Government’s involvement in education, culture and the arts is extensive, at least by American standards. This gives the ruling party considerable powers of patronage to shape the country’s cultural output. Orbán has enthusiastically used these levers to push the Hungarian mainstream in a conservative direction.
A similar process can be observed in Hungarian media. Critical voices are not banned or suppressed, but Fidesz-friendly outlets receive a disproportionate share of revenue from government advertising. The staff of Index, a popular independent website often critical of Orbán, all resigned last summer to protest the ouster of a top editor under suspicious circumstances. Before the resignations, Index received almost no government advertising, despite having among the highest traffic of any news sites in Hungary.
Yet it would be wrong to describe Hungary as a reactionary monoculture. The Index resignations provoked a firestorm on social media, a sphere that remains unregulated, open and contentious. Former Index staffers quickly launched a subscription-based news outlet, Telex, to replace their old website. Hungary is also awash in Western media and cultural products. In 2018, the Luxembourg-based RTL Klub was the country’s second most popular television channel by audience share. The tens of thousands of Hungarian expatriates who live and work in Western Europe reliably transmit news, gossip and criticism to their friends and relatives back home.
Instead of throwing critics in jail, Orbán is attempting to create a conservative version of the “opinion corridor” of acceptable Left-wing views described by the writer Karl-Ove Knausgaard in Sweden, or the progressive environment at elite American media and academic institutions. Unlike in the United States, this environment did not emerge from non-state actors. It has been fostered from above by a ruling conservative party that is not constrained by small government nostrums or overly-concerned with procedural niceties.
Orbán’s critics may indulge in hyperbole, but there are real dangers to this approach. Creating a state-based network of patronage invites favouritism, corruption and the erosion of public confidence in government agencies. The declining credibility of Hungarian state media, which is widely viewed as pro-Fidesz, is just one example of this. Another is the well-founded allegation of corruption surrounding the Government’s purchase of Covid vaccines. A lack of concern for procedural fairness can bleed into a disregard for basic civil liberties. The recent Pegasus disclosure of state eavesdropping on independent journalists is a worrying sign that Orbán is open to more explicitly coercive measures to suppress his critics.
The Carlson visit to Budapest is a footnote in American politics, but the Fox TV host’s sudden interest in a small Central European country does signal an interesting transatlantic convergence. European conservatives have traditionally been more comfortable with big government than their American counterparts. Carlson’s meeting and related developments within the Republican Party suggest that American Right-wingers are getting over their aversion to state activism.
Carlson began his career as a libertarian-ish magazine writer and cable TV commentator before becoming the media standard-bearer for grassroots conservatism during the Trump era. Orbán was a young anti-Soviet dissident turned pro-Western political leader who later pivoted to a populist brand of conservatism after becoming prime minister again in 2010.
Whether these ideological shifts were motivated by sincere changes of opinion, new conditions, or canny opportunism is probably unknowable. However, they do reflect profound changes in their respective societies. Rapid cultural and economic upheaval since the 1990s have made many Hungarians skeptical of the EU, market capitalism and, more broadly, the liberal Western order.
In the United States, the Left’s cultural dominance, a widespread sense of economic precarity, and the rise of Donald Trump have given big government conservatives an opening. Orbán may lose the next election and Carlson may be forced off the air by his critics, but the underlying conditions that gave rise to both figures will be with us for some time. And if American conservatives do jettison their traditional attachment to small-government ideology, they may look to figures like Orbán for a new political blueprint.
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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.