The most consequential provision is without doubt the 16th Amendment to the constitution, which imposes a lifetime term limit of eight years (two parliamentary terms) on the prime minister. Effective retroactively, the measure is obviously targeted at Viktor Orbán. Given he’s already served for a total of 20 years, the new law bars him from ever returning to office. Quite apart from its nakedly ad hominem character, which critics have already dubbed the “Lex Orbán”, the provision has no defensible logic. Why should voters be prevented from re-electing a leader, or rather a parliamentary majority that supports him, if they choose to do so? Indeed, virtually no parliamentary democracy — where, unlike in presidential systems, executive power is shared with a cabinet and remains fundamentally dependent on maintaining a parliamentary majority — imposes a term limit on the head of government.

But the new government didn’t stop there. Another provision, the 17th Amendment, sets a 12-year term limit for members of parliament. Again the ad hominem — or in this case ad partem — nature of the law is clear. Conveniently, no sitting MP from Magyar’s Tisza Party is affected: only the opposition. Fidesz and its allied party KDNP, having dominated frontline politics since 1990, stand to lose their entire senior cadre. One might call this Lex Fidesz, though other parties are caught in the net as well. The blow falls equally hard on the political Left, disqualifying most of its veteran figures and rendering a progressive resurgence all but impossible.

Equally striking is the manner in which the new government ousted the incumbent president, Tamás Sulyok, who had been elected by the previous parliament in February 2024 and whose term was supposed to run until 2029. Magyar, who accused Sulyok of being an Orbán puppet, targeted him from the moment of his victory speech and did everything possible to force him to resign. When Sulyok refused to step down, the new government could have initiated an impeachment procedure, the only mechanism for removal provided for by the Fundamental Law.

Instead, Magyar chose simply to slip a line into one of the constitutional amendments which literally reads: “the term of office of the incumbent President of the Republic terminates today”. Meaning: removal by legislative fiat, what we may call Lex Sulyok. Even Amnesty International Hungary criticized the constitutional coup aimed at unseating the president. It is worth noting that Sulyok also appealed to the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe body that advises states on constitutional and rule-of-law questions, to review the amendment. The Commission’s reply, following a brief trip to Hungary? That it would rule on his motion at its next plenary session in October, neatly coming months after his removal.

The judiciary has not been spared either. Magyar’s 17th Amendment reintroduces a mandatory retirement age of 70 for Constitutional Court judges, effectively removing the chief justice and three other judges, and handing Magyar the opportunity to flip the political balance of the court within his first term. The same amendment further establishes a new body, the National Office for Asset Recovery and Asset Protection, tasked with “the tracing and recovery of public assets that have been unlawfully managed or used” by the previous government. Creating a body to investigate alleged corruption might not seem particularly nefarious: until one realizes that Hungary, like every European country, already possesses institutions devoted to precisely this purpose.

More from this author

The Ukraine war's big lie

By Thomas Fazi

What makes this one unique is that it’s charged solely with investigating the alleged wrongdoings of a single party — Fidesz — outside judicial and societal oversight. As András Schiffer, the former leader of the green party LMP, put it, the body’s aim is to “make it morally impossible for Fidesz to compete through a series of trials — spiced with staged theatrical performances — and inquisitorial proceedings”. The new government’s decision to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), itself a highly politicized body effectively operating under the Commission’s control, will only reinforce this.

Magyar has defended these actions by invoking “the exceptional mandate received from the electorate” and as a “precondition for the restoration of constitutional democracy”. The new prime minister’s argument is simple: since Orbán created a “mafia state” that trampled the rule of law, its restoration requires the complete destruction of the Fidesz system. The constitutional amendments, indeed, are only part of a much wider offensive, which includes shutting down the news output of the public media; closing Fidesz-aligned cultural institutions such as MCC and the Danube Institute; and launching a judicial raid on the offices housing Fidesz’s servers to seize its databases, taking the party’s website offline (it still is at the time of writing). For their part, Orbán and his party have accused the new government of dismantling the rule of law, eliminating the system of checks and balances, and persecuting the opposition — of creating, in essence, precisely the authoritarian regime that the liberal establishment always accused Orbán’s government of being.

My purpose is not to convince you that Orbán is right. It is rather to reflect on what the post-Orbán transition tells us about the vanishing meaning of words like “rule of law”, “democracy” and “tyranny” in our post-everything age — and to highlight some of the contradictions within both the liberal and the Orbán camps.

Let us start by clarifying that, technically speaking, the new government’s measures are not illegal. Post-communist Hungary has always been defined by what might be called a hyper-parliamentary system: simply put, a government with a two-thirds majority can amend the Fundamental Law, or even replace it wholesale, in a single chamber, in a single vote, without facing any substantive review by judges. A two-thirds majority also controls the so-called “cardinal laws” — electoral rules, media, judiciary, central bank — and key appointments like constitutional judges and the prosecutor general. The Hungarian parliament thus faces far fewer obstacles in its legislative functions than most of its European counterparts, where constitutional revision tends to require multiple votes, referendums or even general elections. In Germany, certain constitutional fundamentals are outright unamendable — permanently beyond the reach of any parliamentary majority, no matter the size. In Hungary, by contrast, a government with a two-thirds parliamentary majority faces effectively no institutional veto at all.

More from this author

Von der Leyen is coming for Europe’s wallet

By Thomas Fazi

Orbán himself mastered this institutional logic better than anyone before him — and in fact reinforced it after 2010, severely curtailing the Constitutional Court’s power to review constitutional changes. The following year, Fidesz then used its own supermajority to adopt an entirely new constitution, redefining the country’s constitutional identity in explicitly national-conservative terms. From there it expanded the court from 11 to 15 judges, handing itself the opportunity to immediately pick four new justices, even as it consolidated a powerful pro-government media machine.

In this sense, you can argue that Magyar is simply following the democratic logic established by Orbán: that a government with a strong mandate should be free to implement sweeping changes that reflect the popular will, and use its constitutional majority to entrench the ruling party’s political interests. Somewhat ironically, Tisza itself benefited from Orbán’s 2011 electoral reform, which raised the share of single-member constituencies from about 45% to 53%, boosting the majoritarian, winner-take-all component of the system. As a result, Tisza’s 53% of the vote translated to roughly 71% of seats. Certainly, Fidesz’s accusation that Tisza is “dismantling the rule of law”, “eliminating the system of checks and balances” and “destroying the legitimacy of independent institutions” rings rather hollow — even as it mirrors the accusations the EU establishment directed at Orbán for years.

All the same, it is true that Tisza has crossed red lines that Orbán never dared to cross: no previous government, for instance, had ever ousted a sitting president by decree. In this sense, some of the new government’s actions, while not technically illegal, undoubtedly violate well-established constitutional principles — such as the inviolability of the president.

But are we sure this is a principle worth defending from a popular-democratic perspective? Setting aside the specifics of the Hungarian case for a moment, the reality is that many of the “independent” institutions that make up the edifice of modern liberal democracies — presidential offices, independent central banks, constitutional courts and the like — do not limit themselves to “upholding the constitution and the rule of law”. Rather, they pursue their own political and institutional logic, independent of that declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day, and more often than not reflective of entrenched elite (and increasingly supranational) interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is arguably another example.

In other words, they exist to limit the popular will — and indeed routinely rule against elected governments — according to the logic of what we might call “constrained democracy”. This is obviously not to claim that there should be no limits whatsoever on an elected government’s actions. But the current model is deeply flawed — and in this sense the fact that Hungary’s system is much less constrained than elsewhere should be viewed as a positive thing.

Returning to the Hungarian case, then, can we really blame the new government for not wanting to spend four years contending with a president appointed by its predecessor? And if the roles were reversed — if Fidesz had won a two-thirds majority and found itself saddled with a staunchly pro-EU president — would conservatives blame it for wanting to get rid of him? After 2010, indeed, Orbán made sure to appoint presidents aligned with his government’s agenda, and I would argue that this made perfect sense from a popular-democratic standpoint.

Ultimately, then, I would claim that the new government’s measures should not be challenged on procedural grounds — with arguments that often echo those the EU establishment deployed against Orbán in the past — but on their substance. The real question is what the government’s measures are for, not how they are done. And on this point there is little doubt: they are aimed at essentially destroying the opposition in Hungary — at making sure Fidesz never returns to power — and thereby “locking in” Hungary’s EU-dictated economic and foreign policy agenda forever.

What that agenda entails is no mystery. It means dismantling Orbán’s heterodox economic model — starting with price caps and energy subsidies, and which the new government has already started to unwind. It also means phasing out Russian oil and gas, whatever the cost to Hungarian households and industry. And above all it means full alignment on Ukraine: within weeks of taking office, Magyar had lifted Hungary’s veto on the European Peace Facility, the Orwellian-named off-budget fund through which the EU, whose own treaties bar its budget from financing military operations, reimburses member states for weapons shipped to Ukraine. At the same time, Hungary no longer now opposes opening accession talks for Ukrainian EU membership, with Magyar further signalling that he would no longer block sanctions against Russia.

Beyond the policy questions here, there is simply no way this brazen attack on the opposition can be defended on democratic grounds — and indeed Orbán himself, for all the EU establishment’s claims about the allegedly autocratic nature of his government, never dared to legislate his opponents out of existence. This brings us to the contradictions of the liberal camp. Because regardless of what one makes of liberal-democratic dogmas, there is no doubt that the Magyar government’s measures represent a blatant violation of the rule of law as defined by Brussels itself. It is remarkable watching the EU establishment, which spent a decade and a half accusing Orbán of being a proto-dictator on “rule-of-law” grounds, now reward much graver violations by the new government.

Indeed, the EU’s main response to Operation Purgatory has been to unblock €10 billion in post-pandemic funds which Brussels had blocked Orbán from receiving. Nor is it just the EU. Hungary’s liberal legal scholars — the same experts who spent years cataloguing Orbán’s every constitutional sin — have proved remarkably accommodating now that the shoe is on the other foot. As one of them put it on Verfassungsblog, the house organ of European rule-of-law orthodoxy: since “the previous legislator has obviously violated the fundamental values of the EU”, and the new majority is “laying the foundations for a new republic, committed to EU fundamental values”, it follows that “the swift removal of the head of state is, exceptionally, acceptable”. In other words, the rule of law may be suspended, provided it is suspended in the name of the rule of law — and, crucially, in the name of “EU fundamental values”.

We have seen this film before. After coming to power in Poland in 2023, the pro-EU coalition led by Donald Tusk launched an unparalleled attack on the rule of law: seizing control of the public media and the judiciary, sidelining constitutional norms and undermining institutional independence. Yet as in Hungary today, all this was met with silence or enthusiasm in Brussels — in that case as well, funds that had been frozen for years were rapidly released. All of which is further confirmation that the European Commission’s insistence on democracy, values and the rule of law is, more than anything, a convenient pretext for targeting dissenting governments that resist aligning with the EU’s expanding supranational authority and broader political agenda. Indeed, when it comes to supporting its own emissaries, there is apparently no red line the EU will not cross — up to and including greenlighting the outright annulment of entire elections when they go the wrong way, as we saw in Romania in 2024. As for Hungary, the strategy seems clear: the EU is bent on punishing the rebellious colony — by making sure it can’t rebel ever again.

By the usual scholarly standard, Hungary: A Short History (2018) was a failure. But it doesn’t take much for the reader to figure out its real purpose. Early on in the book, Stone recalls that he knew the then-Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, back when he was a student at Oxford in the Eighties: “he has gone on to great things.” Among the pictures inserted in the book are two showing Orbán at different stages of his dramatic political ascent. The point of the book is to present Orbán as the happy culmination of Hungary’s unhappy history. Orbán had fought valiantly against “Official Europe”; he fought, during the migrant crisis of 2015-16, for “national survival”. Hungary, Stone explains, “had already had a Moslem occupation”, under the Ottomans. If Hungarians had now been delivered from such a calamity a second time, they had Orbán to thank.

Norman Stone died in Budapest — and where else? Conservative intellectuals in the 2010s swam the Danube as surely as now they swim the Tiber. What Berlin was around this time for anxious, artsy, digital nomads, Budapest was for the kinds of people who love Wagner and hate brutalism. In both cases, the expats gained local infamy for never learning the language; Stone, a virtuoso polyglot who knew Hungarian already, was atypical in this respect. Stone had advised Thatcher on European affairs; he spent his final years as an affiliate of the Danube Institute, run by another alumnus of Thatcher’s Downing Street, John O’Sullivan. 

As the Right-wing intellectuals began to move in a more postliberal (and Catholic) direction, the “illiberal democracy” which Orbán was building in Hungary became all the more alluring. Here, the Postliberal International crowed, was a little beacon of hope, a flicker of that old Europe, which elsewhere had been trampled over by Brussels and modernity. Hungary was a quaint little land, a land of Baroque castles, folk dance, and King Saint Stephen. It was a land filled with common sense, oikophilia, and serious Roman Catholicism, as embodied by that most serious papabile, Cardinal Erdő.

No matter that Hungary is less Christian (42.5%) than even Vermont, America’s least Christian state (45%). No matter that Hungary’s fertility, for all Orbán’s much-hyped “family policy”, is about the same as Britain’s, pitifully beneath the replacement rate. No matter that Hungary is one of the poorest countries in the EU — indeed, for a certain kind of postliberal, this is really rather a good thing, because poverty is godly, a triumph over luxury and Mammon. Orbán earned the praise of the Right-wing intellectuals by securing the border, by taking the fight to Brussels, by banning same-sex marriage, and, more recently, by making overtures to Putin. He kept them warm with talk of culture, values, and God.

Orbán’s Budapest had pretty cathedrals and “Scruton Cafés”; it had Old World gentility and Mitteleuropa charm. It had, too, the finest (and best-funded) network of Right-wing think tanks and institutes anywhere in the world outside America. In his master’s thesis, Orbán dealt with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci: he understood that the populist Right needs “organic intellectuals” of its own, and that it needs to aspire to cultural hegemony. From his firsthand experience of communism, he knew what cultural and intellectual power the state could wield, and the urgent need for the Right’s own patronage network. So he set about building an entire ecosystem from the ground up. Aside from the Danube Institute, there is the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a private university and talent incubator. Orbán’s government gave it $1.7 billion— 1% of the country’s GDP — and a satellite in Brussels, for the purpose of monitoring the beast up close. Orbánist postliberalism was becoming a globe-spanning enterprise. It was to rival goulash and the Rubik’s Cube as Hungary’s top cultural export.

“In 1989, we thought Europe was our future,” Orbán declared in 2019. “Today, we know that we are the future of Europe.” It was a tremendous weight to place upon a nation of less than 10 million. Orbán was clearly flattered by his global celebrity, and hoped, this time in vain, that it would provide some electoral advantage. Throughout his campaign, the great and the good of the international Right would come to praise him and the country he had built: winners (Meloni, Milei, Netanyahu) and losers (Mateusz Morawiecki, Liz Truss) alike. The website for “CPAC Hungary 2026” announces that, although “Brussels and Kyiv” might not like it, “Europe and the world stand with Viktor Orbán”. There was thus a pronounced globalist streak to Orbánist nationalism.

Americans, especially, would sing their encomia. The conservative intellectual Rod Dreher, a key player in the conservative Budapest scene, garlanded Orbán with the highest compliment he knows, by drawing a rather strained parallel between his life and JD Vance’s — these were the two brightest stars in the postliberal firmament. Both Orbán and Vance were country hicks, sneered at by the liberal elites: Orbán’s hometown Felcsút, apparently, is the Appalachia of the Carpathian Basin. Both managed to break into the elite, studying at Oxford and Yale respectively. Both, then, spurned the social class into which they had raised themselves: they chose rather to be loyal to the people who raised them. If this brings a manly tear to the eye, let it not be diminished by the revelation that Dreher was on the Orbán payroll: how much art and beauty, after all, has been the work of court sycophants?  

Suggested reading

The Hungarian revolution isn’t what it seems

By Aris Roussinos

Such, anyway, was the Budapest bacchanalia, 2010-2026. For his first order of business as prime minister, Péter Magyar will pull the plug. Already he has announced that he will investigate the state funding of MCC and CPAC. It’s not hard to imagine the Orbánist think tanks and institutes being turfed out of Budapest, much as Orbán turfed out the Soros-funded Central European University in 2018. The CEU upped sticks upriver, to Vienna; who knows where the Orbánist institutions will go, or which other European illiberal will attempt to pick up Orbán’s mantle. Slovakia seems a plausible contender; it would not be surprising to see the Postliberal International descend upon Bratislava. Prime Minister Robert Fico is rather similar to Orbán, even in his physical appearance; he supported Orbán in the election and tends to align with him within the EU, including on Russia. He might, however, now look upon Orbán as something of a cautionary tale, and consider the possibility that the ambitious and expensive intellectual project was ultimately a misfire.

Indeed, at least for the duration of the Trump administration, the intellectual Right still has a Mecca, and a money spigot, in Washington, DC. Against the glitz and glamor of the “cruel kids’ table”, we impoverished Europeans have little to offer, except for winding streets and old stone. Vance, of course, was an Orbán booster during the election, and is close to Dreher and Budapest’s postliberal circle. He undoubtedly hopes that the network which Orbán cultivated in Budapest will swing behind him, in full force, in 2028 — and indeed that, if he does become president, he can hit the ground running with friends and connections in high places in Europe. Vance had already been supplanting Orbán as the darling of the intellectual Right — and unlike Orbán, he’s a Catholic, to boot. Without being anchored in Budapest, one can imagine the old network relying more on American financial support, and becoming even more Americanized. CPAC probably gives us a hint of what this would look like in practice: more strobe lighting, more God. 

Magyar, meanwhile, is now faced with the difficult task of uprooting all that Orbán laid down. He is, as is widely observed, hardly a pin-up for liberals and Europhiles, who are cheering him only because they see him as a relative improvement. Now, as prime minister, he has to go to war against what is, in effect, an Orbánist deep state. He has to take on politically compromised and infiltrated universities. He is staring down the state broadcasters, telling them that they will not receive a penny from the taxpayer until they have restored their “public service character” and can guarantee “objective, impartial reporting”. Already he has announced his intention, in a bracingly ruthless manner, to dispatch the incumbent president, an Orbánist placeman. Even if he succeeds in all this, Orbán might not be gone for good. Trump’s comeback in 2024 will doubtless be on Magyar’s mind; as will the Right’s victory in the presidential election in Poland last year, less than two years after the liberal Donald Tusk became Prime Minister. 

Encouraged, and often handsomely remunerated, by the Orbán government, the international Right-wing intelligentsia has paid careful attention to Budapest. They have hoped to learn various lessons — about policy, tactics, and the difficult business of statecraft. But the new Hungary, Péter Magyar’s Hungary, might prove to be of interest, too. If, for example, Reform UK wins the next election in Britain, they will be met with open hostility from the universities, the civil service, the BBC, the bishops, the judges, the Lords, perhaps even the Crown. There is still much for the Right to learn in Hungary, if only they know where to look.

In the wake of Brexit/Trump a wave of influencers (including me) theorized the end of liberalism, a retrenchment of globalization, and an insurgent, resurgent Right. With populist parties on the rise and rise across Europe and in the USA, and Orbán seemingly unstoppable in Hungary alongside (at that point) Poland’s conservative PiS government, all the cultural energy was bubbling up from this corner. It felt as though the pendulum had swung as far Left as it could, and was beginning its inexorable “RETVRN”.

Now, though, Orbán is out. Trump, meanwhile, has abandoned his campaign promise to end US interventionism in the Middle East. Forever wars are back; Hungary is “normalizing” relations with the EU. Is it over, then? Are we back in the End of History? Where does this leave the movement in which Orbán and Trump seemed such symbolic keystones? And where, in turn, does this leave Britain’s own would-be national populist insurgency?

The end of Orbán’s reign suggests there’s nothing inevitable about the ideological Right as it was envisaged by both proponents and opponents after Trump 1.0. But while Hillary Clinton is already gloating, this may be premature. I don’t think it follows from Orbán’s defeat that it’s just progressivism all the way now. Rather, the Hungarian turn against Orbán underlines the fact that structural factors driving so-called “national populism” have not gone away. And it underlines the fact that anyone who pledges to address those grievances, and fails to do so, will in time face the same anger. These things remain unchanged; what has altered, though, is something that should not elicit any gloating from the likes of Hillary. It does indicate a shift in for European populist movements: but less away from the Right, than away from America.

The picture was very different within the New Right that emerged following 2016. There, Orbánism served as a Rorschach test. His program rested on rejecting mass migration and LGBT activism in the teeth of pressure from Brussels and the international NGO class, all while seeking to incentivize pro-Christian Hungarian culture and family formation. The efficacy of the program itself was a mixed bag, but merely by pursuing it for 16 years Hungary came to occupy a dual role: both as a real place, with its own history, language, and local politics, and also an imaginary “place” in (heavily America-inflected) online political discourse.

More from this author

Trump's betrayal of his base

By Mary Harrington

Viewed in meme terms, Orbánist Hungary symbolized, among Anglophone progressives and their Eurocrat friends, the threat of authoritarian nationalist backsliding. For their opponents, it was as a pocket of resistance to woke totalitarianism, like the Right-wing equivalent of Asterix’s village holding out against the Romans. In practical terms, Orbán cultivated the latter image as a source of soft power, often in English, via a network of publications, think-tanks and other institutions funded by the Fidesz party, that enabled Hungary to punch some way above its weight in New Right intellectual circles.

The vision on offer was of a kind of nationalist Internationale, envisaged as a mutually respectful world of center-right sovereign nations, with strong borders and greater space for ideological pluralism: a “Europe of nations” as fellow national populist Marine Le Pen put it. In tandem, the geographic Budapest became, especially during the Biden years, a kind of Casablanca for disaffected Right-wing intellectuals. This Anglophone community of conservative expats comprised, in a sense, the real-world manifestation of the Right-wing meme Hungary, superimposed on and only lightly embedded in Magyar-speaking Budapest and its domestic politics.

The first sign that the memes might not be realized with the force of historical inevitability came in 2023, with the electoral downfall of the “based” Visegrad regime in Poland, at the hands of a coalition led by Teflon Eurocrat Donald Tusk. But then came the re-election of Trump to the White House in 2024, celebrated at an inauguration attended by numerous international Right-wing leaders including Giorgia Meloni, Marion Maréchal, and Javier Milei.

JD Vance castigated European states at Munich last February, for too much immigration and not enough defense spending: in other words, not being nationally sovereign enough. In November, a new American National Security Strategy (NSS) stated that Trump’s USA would support a vision of Europe as “a group of aligned sovereign nations”: the very vision promoted by Europopulists such as France’s Rassemblement National and Germany’s AfD. Had the hour of the nationalist Internationale come, at last?

Well. If Trump’s friends overseas hoped for a less globalizing America, and a US foreign policy keen to foster a Europe of nations, what they got was the monkey’s paw curling. Trump 2.0 has, to date, comprised such disorienting moves as punitive tariffs aimed — he says — at improving America’s relative position, but imposed every which way including upon putative allies. It’s included demands to annex Greenland from fellow Nato member Denmark, accompanied by some startlingly abrasive rhetoric. Latterly it’s included bombing Iran, in a joint operation with Israel, a move that has spiked energy costs in Europe, and been condemned by numerous European states, not to mention the Vatican.

Taken together, the impression is definitely of a less multilateralist USA. But if it’s increased European enthusiasm for more defense spending and sovereignty, it’s also scuppered the cozy vision of a nationalist Internationale — especially one led by a Trumpist USA. Indeed, Trump’s actions to date have rendered him so wildly unpopular across Europe that the surest way for the USA to lend support to a European populist party now would probably be encouraging King Don to say rude things about them on Truth Social.

These parties seem, themselves, to have recognized this, and are taking steps to disavow any electorally toxic association with Trump. RN and AfD have both spoken out recently against him. Even Nigel Farage, grinningly photographed in 2016 in the gilded Trump Tower elevator, has begun to distance himself, as have other supporters of Brexit.

But none of this tells us anything about the structural issues that drove those populist movements in the first place: immigration, living standards, and energy policy. This trifecta of wicked problems is so intertwined that it can appear as though solving any one of them will make another one worse. Some variant or other of this three-legged stool of populist disaffection can be seen across Europe, and none of these challenges have gone away just because Viktor Orbán became too firmly linked in Hungarian voters’ minds with crony capitalism and a pedophile cover-up.

Indeed Orbán’s successor, Péter Magyar, is hardly a squashy progressive. Himself a former Fidesz member, his campaign promises on immigration were even more restrictionist than Orbán’s. Meanwhile, Europe overall may be coming round to a more Hungarian stance on borders: recently it transpired that Brussels is exploring “Rwanda-style” offshore processing for asylum claims. So it may turn out, in the end, that Orbánism wasn’t so much defeated by the EU as assimilated into its program.

Suggested reading

The Hungarian revolution isn’t what it seems

By Aris Roussinos

What is perhaps changing, though, is the perception among European Right-wingers of America’s role in these dramas. There’s long been a tradition on the European hard Right of hostility to the USA. For example, The American Malady, the “Nouvelle Droite” theorist Alain de Benoist paints America not as the savior of European civilization, as the NSS would have it, but rather as the force threatening it with extinction. Back in the heady days of Trump 1.0, arguments such as de Benoist’s seemed mad. Now, though, the transatlantic relationship is — if not exactly hostile — certainly warier. Shortly before the election in Hungary, Vance traveled to Budapest to address a rally there, in support of Orbán’s re-election. But it’s far from clear whether, at this point, an American endorsement would have been any kind of help.

What, if anything, can Britain’s insurgent Right-wingers learn from these developments? Well, first of all that the nationalist Internationale was perhaps always a contradiction in terms. Trump’s erratic second term has comprehensively and (I suspect) permanently shattered what remained of international faith in American global leadership. This includes the Hillary/USAID version, yes, but it also extends to the New Right version that imagined the USA “preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity to foster aligned conservative regimes internationally”.

My sense is that this is what Péter Magyar is responding to, in Hungary: a cold assessment that Hungary, historically a small state trapped between competing empires, needs to adjust its alignment. Whether or not it’s what he ends up delivering, what he offered voters was broadly the same conservative program as Orbán, but with less cronyism. And, importantly, more deliberate distance from a USA that appears to have set aside any aspiration to serve as moral exemplar, and is now, like China, simply a superpower pursuing its own interests.

Any national-populist government coming to power in Britain will need to make a similar assessment: taking cold-eyed stock of our country’s actual clout, and interests, and re-learning the art of statecraft based on these factors, rather than on sentiment or ideology. But any government offering solutions will also need to be frank about the trade-offs. Anyone who promises everything but fails to deliver, or just delivers more of the same plus some dank memes, will eventually face the kind of electoral anger that eventually turned on Orbán, and may turn on Trump.

As it stands, the hour for us is late. Britain hovers increasingly uncomfortably between the EU, the USA, and the Commonwealth, all of which now ask competing things of us. Our renewable energy aspirations, meanwhile, are unnervingly dependent on China. Our energy prices are some of the highest in the developed world. The cost of living is soaring yet again, thanks to Trump’s Iran war. Our welfare spending is unsustainable, our military is laughable, and despite all this Labour is putting asylum housing contracts out to tender that reach into the 2030s.

Sorry, Hillary: populism isn’t going away, because the problems causing it aren’t going away. What might be going away, though, is the short-lived dream of an America-led solution.

I asked her what it was about the Fidesz system she disliked. “It’s about the corruption,” she said, “and selling our country and our nation to the Russians, and stealing our money, and EU taxpayers’ money, and this sort of feudalism that he built.” Beatrix, her niece, nodded along emotionally. “I want to get married and have children,” she said. “We all have good jobs but we don’t earn EU wages. My boyfriend lives in London, and if we lose now I’ll move there and leave Hungary forever. I see this as an election for the EU and against Russia — I’m a European and I don’t want to belong to the East.”

But as polls closed, and the crowds gathered in front of the giant screens showing the televised results coming in, the outcome still seemed to hang in the balance. Government-aligned commentators had made much of what they claimed were strong showings across the country; earlier in the day, turnout had looked strongest in rural areas long seen as Fidesz strongholds, with liberal Budapest only rousing itself to vote in significant numbers in the afternoon. It had been assumed that the initial results would show a strong showing for Fidesz and Orbán, with the true dynamics only revealing themselves late into the night — or even, in case of a close-fought battle, later in the week, once the results from the sizable Hungarian diaspora had been counted. But whatever inner trepidation the crowd felt was not to last long. As each new tranche of results came in, the crowd roared in joy at the victory suddenly unfolding before them, chanting “Dirty Fidesz” and “The Tisza is Flowing”, the motto of their party, named after Hungary’s second-largest river. Fidesz’s vote share in the provinces had collapsed, a source at the government’s rival election night party told me, and the mood there was grim. A Trumpian election night party, Patriots of Europe, was abruptly canceled.

Perhaps this wasn’t the shock it seemed. The evening before, I had attended Péter Magyar’s final campaign event in Debrecen, Hungary’s second city, close to the eastern borders with Romania and Ukraine. Long a Fidesz stronghold, Debrecen was now contested territory. Orbán had pulled large crowds into the city center a few days earlier, but the crowd for Magyar, gathered in the University Square, was larger still. The sight of tens of thousands of Tisza voters, young and old, bearing flaming torches in the lowering night sky and chanting for Magyar’s victory was impressive enough from the middle of the crowd. Seen on television, the sea of fire filmed from above by a drone, it was overwhelming. The speech from Magyar, a fluent and charismatic speaker, was good enough, but the sheer size of the crowd was the real message being sent to the wavering voters watching at home. Provincial Hungary was now in play, Gabor, a 22-year-old trainee teacher from a nearby village told me. “The majority are still Fidesz voters, unfortunately,” he said, “but we are trying to convince our parents and grandparents, and things are definitely changing.” Daniel, a 19-year-old student, agreed. “Hungary’s history has always been pretty bad, to be honest. And now we feel that things are finally beginning to change.”

Back in Batthyány Square, the whole crowd pulsed with a mass intake of breath and then let out a vast roar of victory as the ticker ran across the screen announcing that Orbán had congratulated Magyar on his win, long before anyone expected — such was the scale of Tisza’s victory. Magyar had won a countrywide landslide, and the generation-long political experiment of Orbánism was over, at least for now. Breathless and alarmist commentary, from Hungarian opposition activist-journalists and their aligned thinktankers and commentators in the West, had warned that Orbán would, in the face of defeat, try to hold onto power through some malign dodge or other, whether dragging the election through the courts or staging some kind of provocation to annul the results. But in truth, this was never Orbán’s style: illiberal he may have been, but he was never a dictator, however his opponents framed him. In the end, the genuine popularity that kept him in power for a generation meant too much to him, and when he lost, in a free and fair election, he relinquished power gracefully. 

Even so, it was a historic moment for those gathered in the square, debating what should be done with the man who had shaped Hungary in his image for so long: I hope he goes to Russia, one said; no, I hope he goes to prison, her friend said; no, said an older woman, shaking her head slowly as if asserting the wisdom of age, I hope he stays in Parliament, and is made to answer for everything he did. “We feel the breath of ‘89,” Hanna, an 18-year-old goth, told me. “All our lives, we lived through the Fidesz system, it’s kind of a new breath to see this change. Fidesz never cared about us, until we make children.” Her companion, Milos, agreed. “Thank God, Thank God,” he said, casting his eyes upward. “I really hope we get closer to the European Union, and we can distance ourselves from Russia.” 

This election, cast externally as a battle between liberal Europeanism and something approaching Asiatic despotism, was perhaps swung by hard-nosed domestic rather than broader philosophical concerns, centering on the struggling economy, on corruption that was “simply indefensible”, as one Fidesz insider had previously put it to me, and on the parlous state of public healthcare and social infrastructure. Yet it must be said that the liberal, middle-class inhabitants of urbane Budapest, gathered in the square, some of them waving EU flags as well as the far more numerous Hungarian ones, certainly fit the image of Tisza positively projected by its supporters outside Hungary, and negatively by Fidesz loyalists domestically and abroad. Budapest, which still looks and feels like the polyglot imperial capital it once was, is a liberal city in a conservative country: but the final electoral map made the country as a whole look far more like Budapest than anyone had expected.

Yet Tisza’s leader, a Right-wing nationalist with a far more restrictive stance on legal immigration than Orbán, is hardly the radical liberal Fidesz and its army of MAGA influencers made him out to be. The crowd’s most animated and vehement chant was “Russians Go Home”, a relic of the 1956 revolution latterly applied to Fidesz, but Magyar has already signaled he won’t be unplugging the country from Russia’s cheap and plentiful energy bounty any time soon. Hungary has moved from one version of personalist conservative rule to another, this time round led by a former Fidesz insider with a European focus, ready to unlock Brussels’ long-withheld and sorely missed financial bounty. Magyar’s victory seems less a defeat for the European Right than a generational evolution of it, which — at least in Hungary’s unique circumstances — has brought liberals and Leftists, both political nullities in this country, under its conquering wing. Perhaps that’s why Phil, a 26-year-old voter for the far-Right Mi Hazank party, was calmly philosophical about the new regime, as he watched the crowds of ecstatic zoomers beeping horns and waving flags as if Hungary had just won the World Cup, pulsing Eurodance blaring from car windows. “Orbán was just too close to America, and Hungary is a European country,” he shrugged. “At least Tisza is Right Wing.”

In the election’s final days, the tone of campaigning has become unusually dark, with both sides accusing each other of being the playthings of foreign intelligence services, conjuring apocalyptic visions of the other’s victory. The news cycle is now dominated less by campaign pledges than by competing leaks of wiretaps, intelligence service interrogations, arrests and accusations of treachery and espionage. The claims and counter-claims, simultaneously dramatic and unprovable, are as dizzying as they are plausible. Even independent commentators, like the former leader of the Green Party András Schiffer, now allege the British, French, German, Polish and Baltic security services have involved themselves in influencing the election’s outcome, while journalists and activists supportive of the opposition assert Russian interference and looming false flags to keep the incumbent in power.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky’s face looms everywhere here in Budapest: in posters depicting him smugly reaching out his hand for Hungarian taxpayers’ money, or cackling evilly at passersby. As Hungary’s relationship with Ukraine, frosty at the beginning of the war, has dramatically worsened, it feels as if Ukraine itself, personified by its leader, has become Orbán’s primary antagonist in the election.

According to Gábor Győri, a political analyst from the progressive Policy Solutions think tank, this focusing on Ukraine is a tried-and-tested Fidesz tactic. Aware that the opposition’s strength lies in Hungary’s faltering economy, Ukraine is a useful external enemy for Orbán — one previously played by transnational migrants and their NGO lobbies; Brussels; and the international LGBT movement. “Since the war seems like a stalemate from a Hungarian perspective,” Győri told me, “and it hasn’t moved that much in Hungary’s direction, the recent effort has been to portray Ukraine as an active threat.” At the beginning of the war, Hungary condemned the Russian invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and opened its borders to Ukrainian refugees, despite Orbán’s amicable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Yet since then, Győri observes, “it has shifted to saying that, well, Russia was provoked, to now saying that, essentially, Ukraine is the culprit, the really aggressive power, so much so that they are a threat to Hungary. And I’m not sure if they can sell this, to be honest, but that’s the effort now.”

At least in liberal Budapest, not everyone is on message: it is common to see posters linking Magyar to Zelensky torn off advertising columns, or defaced with stickers saying “Vile, Deceitful Propaganda”, “Dirty Fidesz”, or simply, “Shit”. But at the Peace March, the message seemed to play well enough among the crowd, which had thronged to Budapest’s vast neo-Gothic parliament behind a banner declaring: “We will not become a Ukrainian colony!” “Viktor Orbán is one of the few in politics who is proud to be Hungarian,” attendee Marco, 42, told me, “But Tisza and Péter Magyar, I think he will make steps outside of Hungary, maybe in Brussels against his own country, against the government, and this I think is not correct.” The crowd cheerily waved placards demanding “Stop War!”, and when Péter Szijjártó, the foreign minister, gave his speech railing against the “Ukromafia” the crowd booed Zelensky’s name like a pantomime villain.

The Kyiv government, which has at times exasperated its European allies with a demanding and sometimes alienating approach to diplomacy, is partly to blame for the worsening of its relationship with Hungary. The European Union has sided with Hungary and Slovakia in the dispute over Ukraine’s closing of the Druzhba pipeline, which carries the cheap Russian oil on which both countries depend, and whose smooth operation, despite the war, is a central plank of the Fidesz electoral offer to voters. By apparently directly threatening Orbán, Zelensky recently earned another direct EU reprimand. As relations worsen, Hungary has used its veto to block the EU funding package on which the Ukrainian state survives, while Hungarian intelligence officers recently arrested their Ukrainian counterparts transporting a shipment of money across Hungary for what was heavily implied to be nefarious purposes.

In response, Zelensky’s security services arrested a Hungarian alleged to be running Budapest’s spy network in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia oblast, home to the country’s Hungarian minority, and long an area of contention between the two countries. Despite multiple requests, neither Tisza nor the Ukrainian foreign ministry agreed to an interview for this piece. The Hungarian government was more accommodating, offering unusual access to some of its senior leadership. Framing a Tisza electoral victory as a risk to Hungary’s energy security and neutrality, Péter Sztáray, State Secretary for Security Policy and Energy Security, told me “We [would] have to let through weapon deliveries through the Hungarian-Ukrainian border… while, at the same time, Ukraine is closing our energy supply, Ukraine is shrinking the rights of the national minority communities, including the Hungarian community. So why should we do that? And their political messaging is very insulting at the same time.”

Now, the war next door has moved from a source of background anxiety for Hungarian voters to the very foreground of Fidesz’s campaign. As polling day nears, it is more openly being alleged by government figures that Tisza is directly funded by Kyiv, and that it is infiltrated by the Ukrainian intelligence services. In a rather dubious riposte to claims of electoral inference, the Ukrainian government last week launched a 24-hour Hungarian-language radio broadcast, aimed directly at Hungarian voters. Should Orbán pull off a last-minute victory, despite the strong polling lead claimed by the opposition, it is difficult to see how the relationship with Kyiv could be salvaged. For Fidesz, it may not matter. Hungarian government policy is driven by the assumption that, however long it takes, Ukraine will eventually lose the war, and the rest of the EU will slowly come around to this reality, just as it eventually did on Hungary’s isolated stance on the 2015 migrant crisis. As a consequence — and fueled by equally hostile rhetoric from Kyiv — a working relationship with Hungary’s larger neighbor is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for a domestic election victory.

A few days after the march, I asked one of the most powerful men in Hungarian politics, Balász Orbán — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor, and campaign manager — whether the temporary demands of the election were setting up a longer term enmity with its larger neighbor.

“The conflict between Hungary and the Ukrainian leadership is based on three issues where we have complete disagreement, and there is no in-between,” he replied. The first, Orbán said, was active financial and logistical support for the war against Russia. “We don’t want to finance the war, we don’t want to give our weapons to them, and we don’t want to send soldiers for Ukraine.” The second issue is European Union membership for Ukraine: “it goes also against the interest of Hungary, because if anything happens in Ukraine, it would mean that we are in the war. And the second thing is, we don’t want to be a net contributor.” The third issue “is the Russian energy. In this situation, when the Middle East is blowing up and energy prices are again skyrocketing, we cannot say no to Russian energy, simply it goes against the interest of Hungary, and I think it goes against the interest of all other European nations. These are the three critical issues, and these are just black and white issues. So either we give it up and we surrender, or we keep our positions.”

Yet while the Tisza party is portrayed by the Hungarian government as zealous pro-Kyiv radicals, and is indeed heavily promoted by Ukraine’s excitable online fanbase on this basis, Magyar himself has avoided talking about the war on the campaign trail. Indeed, in his rare interventions so far, Magyar, a former Fidesz functionary and conservative nationalist, has seemed to echo Orbán’s policy platform, opposing sending weapons to Ukraine; insisting that Kyiv’s EU bid should be subject to a Hungarian referendum it would almost certainly lose; and stressing that weaning Hungary off Russian energy would take at least a decade. Hopes in Brussels or Kyiv of a post-election about-turn in Hungarian attitudes to Kyiv seem unlikely to survive the apparent inclinations of Magyar himself, let alone the broader suspicions of the Hungarian electorate.

Four years ago, the risks and uncertainties brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped turn the tide in an election campaign where Hungarian voters seemed, until the results came in, to be leaning toward the opposition. The Fidesz messaging at the time, that Orbán’s long track record of steady governance was the safest option in a volatile international situation, is now being replayed, in an election where the opposition would rather focus on Hungary’s domestic problems. But the rhetoric has, since 2022, dramatically escalated, with the added novelty of Ukraine itself now being presented as a direct threat to Hungary’s sovereignty and security. Now both sides are trading accusations that their rivals are deeply enmeshed with foreign security services, working against the national interest.

If it is confusing and exhausting for foreign journalists, it must be doubly so for Hungary’s voters, 79% of whom believe foreign intelligence agencies will attempt to meddle in the election. On Easter Sunday, the Hungarian government, alongside its regional ally Serbia, revealed what it has claimed to be a plot to sabotage the vital Turkstream gas pipeline with explosives, a development that Magyar has immediately claimed to be a false flag to sway or delay the election. As Hungary’s hard-fought and ill-tempered campaigning season approaches its climax, the European Union’s most important election of the year has now fully adopted the murky and paranoid tone of a spy novel.

 A cynical interpretation might be that, with President Trump and MAGA in power, various foreign influence operations are in overdrive, trying to recruit homegrown American allies close to power. A less conspiratorial read is that these days, some degree of “globalism” is impossible to avoid for influencers and intellectuals — even hard-core nationalist ones.

 The crisscrossing lines of tension — between the various factions and their beloved foreign lands — became starkly visible this week during the annual Doha Forum. The Qatari state sponsors the annual gabfest to promote “Diplomacy, Dialogue, Diversity.” Tucker Carlson, a leading spokesman for the Israel-critical faction of MAGA, spoke at the forum, and was pictured on the sidelines flipping off the camera while holding a cocktail; in another photo, he was seen standing next to Donald Trump, Jr. (a reminder of the Trump dynasty’s general Qatar-friendliness).

But Carlson didn’t just speak in Qatar. He staked a personal claim in the tiny emirate, telling the country’s prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, “I am . . . tomorrow buying a place in Qatar…. I’m doing that because I like the city. I think it’s beautiful.”

More from this author

Kevin Sabet: reefer madness is here

By Sohrab Ahmari

He was joined by Rob Smith, described by Fox News as a “black gay conservative influencer,” who gushed on X about the “INCREDIBLE time to be a FREE AMERICAN and visit the AMAZING Doha, Qatar! Can’t wait to return!”

To each his own, I suppose. I’ve only transited through the Doha airport, and couldn’t get out fast enough, what with the gaudy atmosphere, the tacky design, the dry duty-free shops — all upheld by an army of South Asian and Southeast Asian workers who showed the foreign sahib such extreme obeisance, it made me wonder if they were forced into it or kept in line with corporal punishment (human- and labor-rights groups allege widespread worker abuse, including in the construction of the airport).

Neil Patel, a longtime Carlson collaborator and his co-founder at both The Daily Caller and the Tucker Carlson Network, seemed to trollishly revel in just this impression, taunting opponents with a Doha Forum greeting posted from “​​the booodthirsty [sic], terror-supporting slave state of Qatar,” as he put it.

At his best, Carlson speaks for the Jeffersonian ideal of a modestly propertied, competent, and free republican citizenry. Qatar is very, very far from the vision. So why is he love-bombing the Doha sheikhs? It’s because they represent a counterpole to another foreign state, Israel, which Carlson blames for playing a destructive role in the Middle East and a distortive one in domestic US politics. Lately, the pro-Israel community has been accusing many of the Jewish state’s critics of being on the Qatari payroll. Carlson’s newfound admiration for the slave state — unlike Patel, I mean that unironically — probably has less to do with Qatar as such than poking his factional enemies in the eyes.

Which brings us to Israel, a site of deep libidinal investment for a different populist faction — and not just populists, but also classical liberals, neoconservatives, and hard-core evangelical Zionists, among others — and for a much longer span than the Right has been interested in charming Qatar.

For Americans of a certain vintage (me included), support for Israel has been an extension of our faith in Western democracy, and an expression of our solicitude for the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. Zionism predates the industrial slaughter of Jews in World War II, but that event added urgency to it. In my case, part of my political maturation involved the conclusion that, for so long as the world is divided into nation-states, the Jews are entitled to one of their own.

Yet lately, Israel’s American reception has dramatically changed. The Jewish state’s popularity is underwater with nearly all demographic groups save for Republicans over the age of 50. This owes to a number of factors. One is fatigue with the Mideast wars and, relatedly, strategic divergence between Jerusalem and Washington (the United States wants to leave the region; Israel keeps goading Washington back in, most recently by explicitly demanding American intervention in its 12-Day War with Iran).

Another is the brutality of Israel’s operations in Gaza — and the growing power of an Israeli hard Right that makes the country hard to swallow for liberal-minded Americans, not least many younger American Jews. 

Amid these troubles, Israel has become a Right-wing-influencer destination (even as others take the opposite journey to Qatar). For hard-line populists drawn to it — figures like Laura Loomer and Tommy Robinson — support for Israel is less about postwar liberal ideals and more about the Jewish state as a smiter of Muslims and a place that is increasingly and unabashedly ethno-nationalist, a transformation they wish more Western democracies would emulate.

The pundit junkets to Israel continue — I’ve taken several under the auspices of mainstream Jewish groups and Christian ones — but they have a different tenor now, and attract a different type of commentator.

Other MAGA trips have similar domestic valences. Hungary is seen as a successful nationalist model that combines an unapologetic cultural conservatism and border restrictionism with Christian-democratic, pro-family welfarism (though many Anglo-American admirers neglect to notice, much less try to reproduce, that last aspect). Russia is, for some, a “based” avatar of Christian civilization (notwithstanding its high rates of alcoholism and low birth rates); others rally to its cause because they oppose NATO interventionism and NATO values (“globo-homo”).

Here’s the thing, though: as an American and a Republican, you can simply favor a more restrained foreign policy without falling in love with any foreign state, whether a fortress-outpost of Jabotinskyism or a decadent, slave-owning sheikhdom. Indeed, the modal attitude among the MAGA base is probably something like: to hell with all of them!

There is an interesting material explanation for America First factions’ investment in exotic lands. To wit, intellectuals and pundits are part of the hyper-mobile professional class, even the ones who outwardly reject transnational mobility. 

We’re hyper-online, have the means to travel, and attend schools, seminars, and shindigs that put us in touch with opinion elites from around the world. Moreover, the human mind, if we are to believe the Greek sages and Saint Paul in Romans, tends to seek universal models and rationalities. Pure MAGA-ism, for the chattering class, is almost impossible. We’ll always have Paris — or beautiful Doha.

The match that night at the Groupama Aréna ended well — Keane’s side beat their Dutch rivals 4-3 — but the shift into management hasn’t always been so straightforward for Ferencváros’s boss. Ireland’s all-time leading goalscorer is a pariah back home, and is unlikely to find success in his native land again. The former Tottenham striker’s crime? Managing Maccabi Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest club, a job that saw him assailed as a “Zionist rat” and “blood money Robbie”.

Ugly language, and a vivid testament to the attitudes of many in Ireland to the conflict in the Middle East. Yet more than that, Keane’s story hints at a broader lesson, of how politics and football are inevitably linked, and how trying to steer clear of geopolitical controversy is doomed always to fail.

Suggested reading

The ghosts of the Munich air disaster

By Kester Aspden

In the summer of 2023, when Keane was offered the Maccabi Tel Aviv gig, he was keen to see the positives. He has always been keen, as he puts it, to experience “other countries and cultures” — and is dismissive of those who have refused to leave their “comfort zones”. Until recently, it’s a philosophy that served him well. Leaving Ireland at 17, and playing everywhere from Italy to India, the striker has enjoyed a far more varied career than many of his contemporaries, struggling with drab managerial jobs at second- and third-flight English clubs.

This time, though, things would be different. Even before the October 7 massacre, Ireland was firmly pro-Palestinian. That stems largely from a general anti-colonial feeling, but it’s also true the IRA long enjoyed close links with the PLO. Stadiums have often been the stage for protest and demonstration, but this issue has a particular prominence because those who follow the Ireland national team are disproportionately drawn from that Left-wing, anti-colonial constituency.

More recently, Ireland supported South Africa’s legal action against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a move that in December saw the Jewish state shutter its embassy in Dublin. Worse was to follow: Gideon Sarr, the Israeli foreign minister, last week accused Ireland’s president of “a cheap despicable provocation” when he referenced the war in Gaza during a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. These global tensions have often played out on home turf. When Ireland played Greece in Dublin six days after Hamas’s attack, the stand behind one goal was dotted with Palestinian flags.

More from this author

The tragic life of Brian Clough

By Jonathan Wilson

Keane has, perhaps naively, tried to stay neutral. As manager at one of Israel’s most popular sides, the Irishman was widely expected to support his hosts — especially after their retaliatory assault on Gaza. Yet Keane was quiet, doggedly refusing to engage in anything beyond football. But merely by remaining in Israel, many in Ireland felt he was tacitly supporting Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.

When he presented caps to players at an Ireland national team get-together last November, Keane was duly subjected to a barrage of online abuse. Israelis, for their part, have criticised him for his reluctance to speak out from the other direction. Nor is he the only one to have suffered. His wife Claudine, who still lives in Ireland with their two sons, has spoken publicly of feeling unsafe. Involved in a series of social media flare-ups, she even requested a meeting with Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, after a former TD accused Robbie of “sportswashing apartheid and genocidal Israel”.

In a sense, none of this is surprising. The October 7 slaughter, and the bombing of Gaza that followed, has turned football into a battleground. Quite aside from Palestinian flags in the Dublin stands, that was clear last November, when Maccabi Tel Aviv played Ajax in Amsterdam. Maccabi fans targeted Palestinians and other Arabs, while the visitors and local Jews faced antisemitic violence, leading to 71 arrests. Keane himself had resigned five months earlier, walking away from the final two years of a lucrative contract, saying it would have been unfair on the staff he had taken with him to leave sooner.

“Was it tough?” Keane asked last week during a press conference in Budapest. “Unfortunately I can’t control what people say. It is what it is. I’m sensitive to the situation and hopefully, please God, everybody can move on peacefully and I can get on with what I do best and that’s being involved in football. I get it’s a complicated situation.”

Not that Keane’s departure for Hungary is likely to restore his reputation. If he were to set foot on the Dublin pitch now, he’d almost certainly be booed. For the first Irish manager to win a foreign league title since 1935, that’s remarkable — even if it speaks, once more, to the impossibility of keeping football and politics apart. That’s just as true in Hungary as it was in Israel. Ferencváros’s president is Gábor Kubatov, a vice-president of the ruling Fidesz party. Even the Groupama Aréna, the site of Keane’s maiden home win, is a result of the Orbán government’s generous investments in sporting infrastructure.

More to the point, Keane’s tenure in Tel Aviv influenced where he ended up next. Orbán is a close ally of Netanyahu, and at the very least Hungary is one of the few places in Europe where Keane’s last job wouldn’t be an issue. Before the match last week, Hungarian fans were baffled by questions about Israel and Palestine, far more interested in whether Keane had won the Israeli league because Maccabi were good: or because Hapoel Haifa, their main rivals, collapsed.

All the while, Keane seems as anxious as ever to focus on the sport. As the players performed a lap of honor following their victory against Alkmaar, taking a salute from the ultras behind the goal, Keane stood by, watching on beaming. He had been relaxed and uncharacteristically chatty even before the match. When a packed stadium is celebrating his victory, he may wonder if he really needs Ireland. Listening to Keane talk warmly about his new apartment, and the local restaurant scene, he seemed to be reveling in his new Hungarian future.

In footballing terms, Keane’s next task is to win a seventh league title in a row, although Sunday’s 0-0 draw with MTK represented a slightly flat start. Yet here, once more, politics threatens to encroach onto the pitch. At the moment, Ferencváros are second in the standings. Ahead of them are Puskás Akadémia — an Orbán brainchild based in his home village of Felcsút. Given every top-flight club has some relationship with Fidesz, and it becomes very hard to look at the Hungarian league and argue that politics and football can truly be separated.

Keane last week compared himself with Roy Hodgson, who pursued an itinerant career before coming back to manage England. Although he implied he would ultimately like a job in the Premier League, he also spoke of a 20-year managerial career and being in no rush. Politics, though, might already have scuppered any dream of going home to manage Ireland.

According to their promoters, these projects will restore the city’s shamefully neglected heritage, and no less important, attract tourists. On Castle Hill, for instance, the neoclassical Royal Guard House was entirely demolished during the Seventies, and has now been rebuilt to serve as a modish restaurant and café. But unsurprisingly for the pioneer of “illiberal democracy” in Europe, Orbán’s resurrection of an older Budapest also carries a political message. Besides stripping away the legacy of Communism — Fidesz originated as an anti-Communist movement after all — the changes manifest a nationalist account of Hungarian history.

This account portrays Hungary as a victim of foreign aggression during the 20th century, while also suggesting a partial rehabilitation of Miklós Horthy, the authoritarian conservative who ruled the country as regent between the World Wars. In the Parliament area, Horthy-era monuments have been reproduced, including one that represents Hungary as a man locked in combat with a dragon — a celebration of the “National Martyrs” who fought Bolshevism in 1919. In 2014, a similar memorial was erected in Freedom Square, showing the Archangel Gabriel being savagely attacked by an eagle. This depiction of Hungary’s occupation by the Nazis was widely criticised for eliding the Horthy regime’s own antisemitism — it was an ally of Nazi Germany — as well as Hungarian complicity in the Holocaust.

Orbán has stopped short of endorsing a public monument to Horthy, on the grounds that he “collaborated with Hungary’s oppressors”. But those who fear Orbán’s own autocratic ambitions can point to his relocation of the prime ministerial offices from Parliament to Castle Hill, where they now look down on the city from a restored Carmelite monastery. The Hungarian leader’s desire to maintain good relations with Russia has likewise found symbolic expression. The purge of Communist monuments has notably avoided the large Soviet war memorial in Freedom Square, whose protection the Russian government has long demanded. Meanwhile, a statue of Imre Nagy, a leading figure in the 1956 Hungarian uprising that was brutally crushed by Soviet forces, has been moved to a less prominent position in the city.

Suggested reading

Inside the Orbán insurgency

By Lily Lynch

All of this attests to the complexity of historical symbolism in a city that has fallen under the control of numerous empires, not just German and Soviet but, before that, Ottoman and Habsburg. Against this background, Orbán’s urban schemes represent a narrative balancing act. The reconstruction of grand Gothic, classical and baroque structures evokes not primarily the Horthy era, but an earlier moment when, as a partner in the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, Budapest stood as a prestigious European capital. At the same time, reminders of Hungary’s historic vulnerability serve to sustain a nationalist siege mentality.

Yet this politics of architecture and memory also has a wider resonance. As numerous critics have pointed out, there is a trend towards architectural tradition and restoration among populist and reactionary movements. Princeton professor Jan-Werner Müller emphasises the role conservative patrons have played in the reconstruction of Prussian edifices in Germany, most notably Berlin’s Hohenzollern Palace. Elsewhere, Müller compares Orbán’s architectural vision with those of religious populists Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Narendra Modi. Erdoğan has subverted Turkey’s secular design traditions with monumental mosques and Ottoman aesthetics, while in India, Modi has embellished his Hindu nationalist agenda with monuments, temples and the renaming of symbolic places.

Nor has this architectural culture war left the English-speaking world unscathed. In the last days of his first term as president, Donald Trump issued an executive order decreeing that all federal buildings conform to a classical style, only for the Biden administration to rapidly rescind it. Think tanks advising British governments to support more traditional styles, such as Policy Exchange and Create Streets, have been aggressively denounced by progressives in the design world. According to Stephen Sholl, one of the conservative émigré intellectuals who have flocked to Hungary’s state-funded institutes, “traditionalists are the revolutionaries fighting against the entrenched beliefs and notions of modern architecture”.

But opponents of this populist tendency have struggled to come up with a coherent criticism of it, let alone an effective one. Where restoration involves ripping pages from the historical record, as with Orbán’s efforts to erase the Communist legacy from parts of Budapest, it can clearly be a manipulative act, replacing the complexity of the past with a deceptively simple narrative. Yet historical veracity is not the only thing that people want from public space. Many will prefer an attractive setting to an authentic one, and some will prefer not to acknowledge aspects of the past they find offensive. Such sentiments can be used to justify political schemes in architecture and planning, and it’s not always easy to say why they should be resisted. Orbán’s critics have been notably less vocal, for instance, about the removal of monuments associated with slavery and colonialism from Western cities.

Müller and others claim that historicist architecture allows populists to shape cultural attitudes. By evoking notions of heritage, these buildings are “an intervention on the side of tradition and supposed normality”, imprinting us with conservative assumptions about who we are and making us more protective of that identity. Müller even suggests that such conditioning can help to explain a growing acceptance of far-Right ideas in Germany.

Suggested reading

Harrods sold us a fantasy

By Wessie du Toit

The obvious flaw in this line of argument is that illiberal regimes are equally fond of modern architecture. In Budapest, Orbán’s reconstruction projects have their counterpoint in the Városliget, the city’s main park, where a new museum district is taking shape. Here we find ultra-contemporary, curvaceous glass and steel structures that would not look out of place among Pritzker Prize finalists. Authoritarian states from Azerbaijan to China, and above all Saudi Arabia, have eagerly commissioned global starchitects to design such monuments to modernity. As Müller himself points out, Modi and Erdoğan have each staked their image on airports, sports stadiums and modern office complexes as much as on temples and mosques.

This raises a further problem for critics of populist design. If that category can encompass both the traditional and the modern, what would a progressive or liberal alternative look like? Put simply, public architecture, and especially monumental buildings, are just not very well suited to conveying ideals like pluralism or openness. They can certainly function according to such principles, but someone has to decide how a building should look, and it can only have one form. If it indulges a popular appetite for heritage, pride, beauty or spectacle, it can be called populist. The only path left for progressive architecture is therefore one of negation, denying aesthetic expectations in the name of being inclusive or “challenging”. That tends to result in something like the Scottish Parliament Building in Holyrood, well regarded by design aficionados but broadly considered a depressing mediocrity.

Ironically, a liberal architecture becomes even less attainable if you believe that the built environment shapes attitudes and can even radicalise the public. In that case, it doesn’t matter what people think about a building, because it is the building that tells them what to think. Thus, in his own furious denunciation of traditional design as an “appeal to blinkered, quasi-fascist old white men”, the architect Sam Jacob argues that buildings should be “a form of resistance”, seeking to “hard-wire progressive ideas into the fabric of the world”. This outlook simply gives architects a license to enact their own visions in the name of engineering a just society.

This is not to say that public buildings should just reproduce familiar formulas in an endless stream of neoclassical monuments and flashy modern art galleries. We should give architects some freedom in the pursuit of aesthetic excellence, even if that sometimes leads to controversial work. Nor should we ignore the political agendas that are almost always present in the design of public space. But good architecture still has to respond in some way to the needs and desires of society, and in this respect it would be better to learn from the populist approach than to pretend it is mere propaganda.

Though it pains progressives to admit it, there has always been a place for reproduction and pastiche in modern architecture, because modern societies seek a connection with the past. This is as true of contemporary China, where the remains of the country’s pre-Communist heritage have today been painstakingly restored, as it was of the 19th-century Europeans who built structures like the Hungarian Parliament in a medieval Gothic style. The euphoria which greeted the reopening of Notre-Dame cathedral last week was another expression of the sanctity that beautiful old buildings can achieve. Nor does this nostalgic tendency announce that a culture is no longer open to change; rather, it is a necessary counterweight to the constant change that modernity entails. Most people are not ideologues; they recognise that old and new can both have their place.

Besides, if anything can turn historic buildings from tourist attractions into symbols of identity, it is the suggestion that people should feel ashamed for admiring them. Therein lies the cunning of the restoration projects in Budapest; like many populist schemes, it is designed to provoke responses that make its opponents appear extreme. By claiming that architectural heritage is dangerous, Orbán’s critics are walking into his trap.

When von der Leyen introduced the new Commission’s lineup and organisational structure last month, even the typically Brussels-friendly mainstream media was forced to admit that what she had pulled off was nothing short of a coup. By placing loyalists in strategic roles, marginalising her critics, and establishing a complicated web of dependencies and overlapping duties that prevent any individual from gaining excessive influence, the Commission President has set the stage for an unprecedented supranational “power grab” that will further centralise authority in Brussels — specifically in the hands of von der Leyen herself.

She is busy transforming the Commission “from a collegial body into a presidential office”, noted Alberto Alemanno, EU law professor at HEC Paris. But this is the culmination of a longstanding process. The Commission has been stealthily expanding its powers for a long time, evolving from technical body into full-blooded political actor, resulting in a major transfer of sovereignty from the national to the supranational level at the expense of democratic control and accountability. But this “Commissionisation” is now being taken to a whole new level.

Consider the bloc’s foreign policy, and its defence and security policy in particular. It has gone relatively unnoticed that von der Leyen has used the Ukraine crisis to push for an expansion of the Commission’s top-down executive powers, leading to a de facto supranationalisation of the EU’s foreign policy (despite the fact that the Commission has no formal competence over such matters), while ensuring the bloc’s alignment with (or, rather, subordination to) the US-Nato strategy.

A signal aspect of this move has been the appointment to key defence and foreign policy roles of representatives from the Baltic States (total population: a bit more than 6 million), which have now been bumped up the political food chain because they share von der Leyen’s über-hawkish stance toward Russia. One particularly important figure is Andrius Kubilius, former Prime Minister of Lithuania, who, if confirmed, will take on the role of the EU’s first Commissioner for Defence. Kubilius, known for his close ties to US-funded NGOs and think tanks, will be responsible for the European defence industry and is expected to push for greater integration of military-industrial production. Furthermore, Kubilius served on the advisory board of the International Republican Institute and is a former member of the Atlantic Council’s EuroGrowth Initiative — two Atlanticist organisations whose primary objective is to promote US corporate and geopolitical interests around the world.

Kubilius’s nomination comes alongside that of Kaja Kallas, former Prime Minister of Estonia, to the role of European foreign and security policy chief; of Finland’s Henna Virkkunen to the role of executive vice-president and Commissioner for Technology; and of Latvia’s Valdis Dombrovskis, to Commissioner for Economy and Productivity.

It should come as no surprise that the Atlantic Council, which has distinguished itself for its very hawkish approach to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, has welcomed the formation of this “Baltic squad”, seeing it as a signal that the EU considers Russia to be its “primary threat”, and that the bloc will remain in lockstep with America on Ukraine and other key geopolitical issues, such as China.

Suggested reading

The EU's American Queen

By Lily Lynch

In addition to reshaping the EU’s foreign policy, von der Leyen is also seeking to centralise the Union’s budget process — a move that would further consolidate her power. Under the current system, around two-thirds of the EU’s structural funds are covered by the bloc’s regional or social cohesion policy, whereby the money is given directly to regions, and largely managed by them, for the implementation of EU-approved projects. But von der Leyen now plans to radically upend the system.

The new budget plan for the period 2028-2034 proposes the creation of a single national pot for each member state, which will determine spending in sectors ranging from farm subsidies to social housing. Under von der Leyen’s proposed model, the money would no longer be given to local bodies but to national governments, conditional — and this is key — upon the implementation of reforms dictated by Brussels. This would essentially create an institutionalised system of financial blackmail, offering the Commission a powerful tool to pressure countries to conform to the EU’s agenda by withholding funds in case of non-compliance. Critics also argue that this is a smokescreen to cut existing programs and divert money towards new priorities, such as defence and industrial build-up.

The plan further calls for an ad hoc steering group that will handle the budget process. This group will comprise von der Leyen herself, the budget department, and the Secretariat General, which operates under the President’s direct authority. This centralisation will shift power away from regions, which often have a more conservative political leaning, and other Commission departments, into the hands of von der Leyen.

The President’s increasingly authoritarian approach was obvious during a confrontation at the European Parliament with Viktor Orbán, when von der Leyen broke diplomatic protocol to deliver a scathing attack on the Hungarian Prime Minister. She lambasted Orbán for maintaining diplomatic and economic relations with Russia, calling him “a security risk for everyone”, and implicitly criticised his attempts to try to broker a peace deal with Vladimir Putin. Orbán pushed back, calling out the catastrophic failure of the EU’s Ukraine strategy, and arguing that the European Commission should be “neutral” and a “guardian of the treaties”, and that von der Leyen was instead acting in an inappropriately political manner.

“Europe is not in Brussels, not in Strasbourg”, Orbán said. “Europe is in Rome, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Paris. It is an alliance of nation-states”. In substantive terms, Orbán is, of course, right: European nations and their peoples are the repositories of Europe’s cultural, civilisational and, dare I say, spiritual capital. In a fundamental sense they are “Europe”. But the truth is that the EU stopped being “an alliance of nation-states” a long time ago.

Suggested reading

The great Brussels stitch-up

By Thomas Fazi

Over the past 15 years, the Commission has exploited Europe’s “permacrisis” to radically, yet surreptitiously, increase its influence over areas of competence that were previously deemed to be the preserve of national governments — from financial budgets and health policy to foreign affairs and defence. As a result, the EU, through the Commission, has effectively become a quasi-dictatorial sovereign power with the authority to impose its agenda on member states and their citizens, regardless of their democratic aspirations. This “competence coup” reached new heights under the first presidency of Ursula von der Leyen (2019-2024), in response to the Covid-19 and Ukraine crises — and is now on the verge of being institutionalised with her second term.

In many respects, the feeling is that the EU has definitively entered its late-Soviet stage. Faced with the bloc’s societal and economic breakdown, escalating geopolitical crises, collapsing democratic legitimacy and mounting “populist” uprisings, Europe’s political-economic elites have chosen to declare all-out war on what is left of democracy and national sovereignties. The bolts of the EU’s techno-authoritarian regime are being screwed tighter and tighter. For a glimmer of hope, we might turn to the history of the Soviet Union itself: 30 years ago, the authoritarian backlash to the crisis of the Soviet system simply accelerated the regime’s demise. Will the same prove true for the EU as well?

Once, the rich and powerful built cathedrals or temples; now they build stadiums. The Olimpico in Rome was Mussolini’s reimagining of an amphitheatre, positioning himself as emperor. The concrete sweep of the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro was modernism tempered by a Latin sensuality entirely in keeping with the optimistic Brazil of the late Forties. Al-Bayt, a tent emerging from the desert north of Doha, was a vast symbol of Qatar’s welcome to the world. The Groupama Arena, you suspect, is how Viktor Orbán’s Hungary likes to see itself: energetic, modern and yet rooted in history; before the main entrance are three statues, of the former players Sándor Kocsis and Flórián Albert, and of the first chairman of Ferencváros, Ferenc Springer.

As thousands mustered in support for him at the weekend, few would dispute that Orbán’s rule has been illiberal, but his achievements, at best, have been mixed. Where he has unquestionably succeeded, however, is in football. Why does it occupy so much of his energy?

Sport lies at the heart of Orbán’s project and football is his greatest love: the Groupama Arena is one of more than 40 football stadiums refurbished since he returned to power in 2010. Orbán used to play for the youth team of Videoton, a club based in Székesfehérvár near his home village of Felcsút, while his first official overseas trip in his first stint as prime minister was to the 1998 World Cup final. In 2007, when he was out of office, he founded a football academy in Felcsút, naming it after Puskás, Hungary’s greatest ever player. Six years later, the academy team was promoted to the top flight for the first time and has since qualified for Europe three times.

This was, of course, something of a political victory, too. All 12 sides in the Nemzeti Bajnokság have some sort of link to Fidész, the governing party, though none more overt than Ferencváros, who in April sealed their fifth Hungarian league title in a row. Their president since 2011 has been Gábor Kubatov, an MP and vice-president of Fidész. When we met last month, I wondered how willing he would be to get into the politics of it all — but within seconds, the familiar Fidész lines were spilling out. “We are a Christian country 1,000 years old,” he said. “We protect our heritage and history. We look after our culture and beliefs. We stopped migration at the border and we don’t allow gender ideology. As a result, Hungary has become the most secure country in Europe. You can walk safely at night in Hungarian cities.”

As for so many in Fidész, for Kubatov 2010 — the year of Orbán’s return — marks year zero. Everything is before or after that date. And for football, the picture has transformed radically for the better. It’s not just the tax breaks that have allowed the rash of new and refurbished stadiums. Before 2010, grassroots clubs were disappearing; often poorly maintained, few protested when their pitches were built over. Since 2010, however, resources have been found to build 1,590 new pitches and refurbish 2,800 others.

But why? György Szöllősi, the editor of the national sports daily Nemzety Sport, and a former head of media at the Puskás Academy, often talks of the need to reverse the underinvestment of the immediate post-communist years — but there are other more obviously important demands on the public purse, notably health and education.

Suggested reading

Inside the Orbán insurgency

By Lily Lynch

Tracing the results of investment in football infrastructure is never straightforward, but there are worse places to start than 2016, when Hungary qualified for the European Championship, their first appearance at a major finals since 1986. Although they’ve missed out on both World Cups since, they also qualified for both Euro 2020 and 2024 and will play in the highest tier of the 2024-25 Nations League, having twice beaten England in the last edition. And, for the first time in a long time, there is a clutch of Hungarian players at top European clubs — notably Dominik Szoboszlai at Liverpool and Péter Gulácsi and Willi Orbán (no relation) at RB Leipzig. Progress for club sides has been less striking but since 2010, the Hungarian league has risen from 32nd in the Uefa ranking of coefficients to 23rd.

The other big change in football since 2010 has been the crowds, which are slowly growing again. Last season, the average attendance was 3,541. That’s still well down on the mid-Fifties when 15,000 or so was standard — but, excluding the Covid lockdown, the average has risen every year since 2015, when they hit a low of 2,502.

The make-up of crowds is changing as well. Kubatov remembers with shame the monkey-chanting that greeted the visit of Ajax to Ferencváros in 1995, or the way ultras would habitually mark Hitler’s birthday with antisemitic songs and gestures. He has attempted to tackle that in his time as president, with the result that ultras boycotted Ferencváros games for three and a half years. Lighting flares and invading the pitch have been criminalised, while improved security at games, with cameras and tickets that carry biometric data, means that perpetrators can be isolated and prosecuted. “When they’ve been fined 2 million Forints (£4,400),” Kubatov said with a slightly alarming relish, “they’ll think twice about it.”

Which all sounds very much in line with Fidész’s tough stance on law and order, but it doesn’t tally with memories of the last Euros, when black-clad Hungary fans directed monkey chants at France’s players and brandished homophobic banners. Jude Bellingham and Raheem Sterling were also racially abused during a World Cup qualifier in Budapest in 2021. And when England last played in Hungary, in the Nations League a year later, it was in a stadium from which adult fans had been banned because of racist and homophobic chanting. “The committee that makes a decision like that,” Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijjarto said, “is a pitiful and cowardly body. They should be ashamed of themselves.”

Those black-clad fans are the Carpathian Brigade, the result of a Fidész policy that seems to have backfired. In 2009, party leaders met ultra groups from various clubs and, in an attempt to curtail neo-Nazi violence, formed the Brigade. Initially, it was supposed to bring fans together behind the national team while helping various charities. For a while it worked, but as the Brigade grew in popularity, the far-Right element took control and there was violence at games against Romania in 2013 and 2014. Which presents Fidész with a problem. On the one hand, the ultras are on their side on most culture-war issues — but on the other, they have the potential to be an embarrassment while at the same time representing a dangerously anarchic force.

Since the Fifties, football terraces have been a locus of dissent, the weight of numbers providing a measure of security, which perhaps explains why Kubatov is so keen to crack down on misbehaviour. But hooliganism also puts off the families and wealthier fans he wants to attract for business reasons; he has even discussed a fast-track system for stadium entrance for those willing to pay for it. But football, as many illiberal regimes have found, is not readily controllable; club affiliation offers an identity that can challenge the regime.

More from this author

Thomas Piketty and the decline of football

By Jonathan Wilson

This makes Orbán’s obsession fascinating. It’s not as simple as bread and circuses; even if the trend is upward, attendances at Hungarian league games are simply not big enough for anyone to think they serve as a mass distraction or opiate. Rather, there is clearly a sense that, by staging major events, Hungary, in a less dramatic way than Saudi Arabia or Qatar, is positioning itself as a major player in global sport with all the attendant benefits that brings in terms of influence and prestige. Budapest’s vast Puskás Arena, it was announced in April, will host the 2026 Champions League final.

Orbán himself overtly harks back to the early Fifties when Hungary was widely regarded as the best side in the world, as though trying to portray the present as the start of a second golden age. The problem with that, though, is both a sense of Puskás-fatigue and the fact that, while the early Fifties might have been a great era for Hungarian football, the economy was collapsing and a backlash was beginning against Mátyás Rákosi’s hardline Stalinist regime, leading ultimately to the 1956 uprising and the mass defection of players, including Puskás — something of which Orbán must be aware.

Orbán, a keen reference of the importance of 1956, no doubt knows this. In the end, his investment in football may come down to nothing more complicated than the fact that he really likes football.

Come next month’s European Parliamentary elections, Orbán hopes a Right-populist wave will allow him and his ideological kin to seize top positions and institutions. With Hungary set to assume the rotating presidency of the European Council in July, its prime minister’s influence could be unmatched.

But rather than just being a question of power, there is something more ideological, philosophical even, at play within this conflict. Orbán’s many liberal detractors characterise him as a threat to fundamental “European values”, but there is a strange lack of clarity about what these “values” actually are. We can assume that people wielding the idea of “European values” mean the “religion of universal progress”: liberal democracy, free markets and, in more recent years, neoliberal identity politics. There is also a hint of secular evangelism in the term; these “European values” can seem like imperialism with a human face.

Orbán, however, also sees himself as the champion of European values, and his critics as the ones who are imperilling them. At stake in this continental insurgency, then, is the very meaning and direction of the EU’s core principles — as well as the equally opaque alternatives offered by Orbán.

At the level of rhetoric, the Orbán concept of a “Europe of nations”, with values rooted in the Christian tradition, is clearly at odds with the progressive liberal vision of a secular Europe premised on human rights and equality. But even the pathologies that Orbán’s opponents rightly ascribe to him — nationalism, clientelism, authoritarianism — are ultimately as European as Eurovision. Indeed, the fact that “EU values” are vulnerable to attack in this way at all reveals a certain vacuousness at the heart of the European project. It is, in other words, an empty vessel ripe for hijacking — and a stealth takeover has already begun.

In 2022, the European television network Euronews was purchased by an obscure Portuguese investment fund close to the Orbán government. The Hungarian sovereign wealth fund, Széchenyi Funds, which is a public body, also invested €45 million in the purchase, and a communications company owned by a close Orbán associate contributed €12.5 million more. The motivation here was not hard to glean: according to internal Széchenyi Funds documents obtained by journalists, Euronews, which was described as “the seventh most influential brand on EU politics”, had been purchased “to mitigate Left-wing bias in journalism”. It is an approach to managing media that Orbán has already perfected at home: recent estimates suggest that Orbán and his Fidesz associates now own or control up to 90% of the Hungarian media landscape.

As part of the Euronews makeover, the network recently moved its headquarters from Lyon to the heart of Brussels. There, in terms of soft power at least, it is in very good company. In 2021, the Hungarian government bought a sprawling 18th-century mansion on the same street in Brussels that officials are already calling  “Hungary House”. Other existing Hungarian government initiatives include the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (often referred to as MCC), a think tank which opened a new branch in Brussels in 2022, promoting conservative values and discussions of EU affairs in accordance with Orbánist thought. Finally, the Hungarian government also funds the European Conservative, an English-language publication that runs conservative commentary on European news. Taken together, the proliferation of these Orbán-backed institutions highlights the scale and seriousness of his Brussels ambition.

More from this author

The EU's American Queen

By Lily Lynch

In Orbán’s view, the conflict in Europe is defined by two competing camps: his own cohort, the sovereigntists (or nationalists), and his opponents, the federalists. The federalists want to create a centralised “United States of Europe”, undermining the nation state and reducing its powers. Sovereigntists like Orbán, meanwhile, believe the EU should be reduced to a loose, mostly cultural body that unites European nation states in their shared Christianity. For their part, federalists see the sovereigntists as regressive blood-and-soil nationalists — the ideological cousins of fascists responsible for the worst horrors of the 20th century.

But while the divide between the two camps has grown wider and more acrimonious in recent years, Orbán believes that the sovereigntist-federalist tension was once integral to the EU’s functioning. In the past, he explained recently, it was thought that “if [the] sovereigntists defeat the federalists, then the cohesive force will cease, but if the federalists eliminate the sovereigntists, then what follows can only be the creation of another oppressive empire”. However, Orbán says, this constructive balance was degraded as the federalists began to change. In his view, the old federalists of yore were “Catholic universalists”; they did not call for the abolition of nation states, but rather for their protection within something like a united Christendom, an Occident, or a Res Publica Christiana. What has changed is that those federalists have mutated into “progressive liberals… [who have] become like the communists and are now a real threat to our freedom”. There is some irony in Orbán’s conflation of progressive liberal “European values” with communism. As historian Samuel Moyn and others have written, these values were often championed by post-war European politicians and institutions in an effort “to combat domestic socialism”.

Hungary has been at odds with the federalist eurocrats since Fidesz came to power in 2010. Before then, the technocratic elite of the ruling socialists generally got on well with the technocrats in Brussels. The EU played a leading role in helping Hungary avoid bankruptcy in 2008; along with the IMF and World Bank, it assembled a 25-billion-euro rescue package for the country. Punishing austerity measures were introduced, and the socialists replaced their anti-poverty programme with workfare, placing enormous strain on already struggling Hungarians. Fidesz seized on the accompanying discontent.

The party campaigned on a platform opposed to globalisation, supranational institutions and the concept of an “ever closer union”. The battle lines sharpened around the time of Brexit. The British, Orbán said in March, “always thought in terms of nation states”, and with the UK gone, the countries of Central Europe were tasked with upholding the sovereigntist position. But around the same time, something else also provoked major fissures between the so-called Visegrad Group (Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland) and much of the rest of the EU: the 2015 migration crisis. That year, Hungary’s notorious border fence became a site of contestation for the meaning of “European values”. For the progressive liberals in Brussels’s federalist camp, it was a symbol of brutality and violence, a dereliction of those essential European “fundamental values”. For Orbán and others in the V4 camp, it was an expression of Hungary’s sovereignty and the Orbanist concept of “European values”, a fortress shielding Christian civilisation from the Muslim hordes. To drive the point home, Orbán invoked the Ottoman invasion during the crisis, stating “when it comes to living together with Muslim communities… we had the possibility to go through that for 150 years”.

This fundamental disagreement about the meaning and maintenance of “European values” is part of what Orbán is hoping to exploit ahead of the European Parliamentary elections. But it won’t be easy. Fidesz abandoned the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) in 2021 after facing expulsion over Hungary’s multiplying democratic deficiencies and rule of law concerns, and has yet to join either of the two Right-wing nationalist political groupings in the European Parliament. The two groups are divided on a single issue: support for Ukraine. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, which includes Poland’s Law and Justice party and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, strongly supports continued military aid for Kyiv. In contrast, the Identity and Democracy (ID) group, home to Alternative for Deutschland and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, is critical of arming Ukraine and wants to maintain friendly relations with Russia — a position Orbán shares. Polls suggest that both Right-wing groupings are poised to amass more power in the European Parliamentary election.

Some have speculated that, despite their differences on Ukraine, the ECR and ID could merge into a single populist-Right bloc. In mid-April, Orbán held a joint press conference with Former Polish Prime Minister and leader of Law and Justice, Mateusz Morawiecki, and former Frontex chief, Fabrice Leggeri, a candidate for France’s National Rally. The event, hosted by ECR, was attended by numerous members of ID, including MPs from the German AfD and the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang. On the potential for further cooperation, Morawiecki told Euractiv: “I can tell you that I have a very good feeling with my colleagues from Fidesz; I know that Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán have a good relationship.” But the prospect of a merger is highly unlikely, as there are others who are far less enthusiastic about the prospect of welcoming the Hungarians into their ranks. Some ECR members from Czechia’s ODS and the Sweden Democrats have objected to the idea of aligning themselves with Fidesz, citing Hungary’s insistence on maintaining warm ties with Russia. Czech MEP Alexandr Vondra drove the point home in an interview earlier this month: “If someone simply parrots Putin’s propaganda, he has no business being here (in ECR). I have told Fidesz this and no negotiations with them can take place now because of this.”

More from this author

Germany's self-destructive Greens

By Lily Lynch

And there are further contradictions within this emerging Right bloc. Though many in Brussels may have forgotten it, prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was Hungary that pushed hardest for enlargement of the union to include its eastern “neighbourhood”. Budapest has long insisted that the EU embrace expedited membership for Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. This enthusiasm is based in part on Orbán’s personal rapport with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and the president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska territory, Milorad Dodik. In early April, Orbán was even awarded the Order of Republika Srpska, and referred to Dodik as “my friend Milorad” during his acceptance speech. In the UK and US, meanwhile, Dodik has been sanctioned for pushing for the secession of Serb-majority Republika Srpska, an act that would very likely trigger a new war in Bosnia.

Upon receiving the award in Banja Luka last month, Orbán also spoke of the necessity of EU enlargement: “Without the Serbs, there is no European security. Without the Serbs there is no healthy European Union… And of course… there is a lot wrong with the European Union — I fight there every day. But today there is no better framework for our nations to strengthen themselves than the European Union.” On the surface, this pro-enlargement rhetoric may seem puzzling — but upon closer inspection, it is entirely coherent: Orbán desires a larger but more fortified bloc. Extending membership to other sovereigntist Christians also has the potential to stymie the federalists’ centralising aims. As Bulcsú Hunyadi, a senior analyst at the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute, explained in 2016: “The bigger the EU gets, the less integrated the union becomes”.

Orbán has always presented his Euroscepticism as part of his broader plan to remake the social fabric of Hungary itself. But such rhetoric often masks the fact that his grand visions are at odds with his meagre domestic record. In the very beginning, he wasn’t entirely without promise. Orbán came to power disavowing neoliberal orthodoxy and the “rescue package” dictated by the IMF, World Bank and EU — and his interventionist economic policies produced some initial success. Yet with time it has become clear that this supposed flaunting of orthodoxy has amounted to little more than “neoliberalism in one country”. As Hungarian sociologist Andras Bozoki has written: “Orbán skilfully attacked the banks (most of them being in foreign hands), the multinational corporations, the foreign media, and EU officials on the basis of [his own preference for] economic nationalism and sovereign independence, but he also combined this with business-friendly domestic policy, such as the introduction of a flat tax, reduced employment rights, and attacks on the homeless, unemployed and trade unions.” In December 2018, for instance, the Orbán government adopted a so-called “slave law” which permits employers to demand 400 hours of overtime per year, a dramatic increase over the 250 hours allowed before. The law also allows employers to delay payments to workers for up to three years.

Meanwhile, Orbán has transformed the state into a vehicle for his own interests, with EU-funded public procurement contracts creating a new class of convivial oligarchs. Consider Orbán’s childhood friend, Lőrinc Mészáros, who became the richest man in Hungary in 2018. Mészáros had previously worked as a pipe fitter for decades, but that year, his companies won the most taxpayer-funded public tenders in the country. These contracts were worth a staggering total of €826 million — 93% of which came from the European Union. He has also appointed allies to key positions of the state and maintained total control over the public prosecutor’s office, ensuring that he and his associates can be shielded from scrutiny.

And while Orbán claims to be the defender of Christian Europe, the number of people who identify as religious in Hungary has plummeted: more than 50% of the country say they do not practise a religion or decline to name their faith. The number of people who admit to practising a religion is at an all-time low — even lower than it was during the socialist period when religious practice was frowned upon by the state. Orbán himself reportedly does not attend Church. He has also fallen out with key religious leaders in Hungary, including some who were once his closest associates. Pastor Gabor Ivanyi, the man who officiated Orbán’s wedding and baptised two of his children, is now among his fiercest critics, enraged by Orbán’s decision to deprive more than 200 religious institutions of official state recognition, leaving many churches near bankruptcy. “Orbán’s Christianity is political Christianity,” Pastor Ivanyi has said. “It has nothing to do with Christ, with humanism or with the Bible.”

Despite his rhetorical trade in nationalism and conservatism, this speaks to an essential vacuity in the Orbán project. Like Vladimir Putin, Orbán’s cultural strategy mostly sees him tilting at windmills, making an enemy of a “wokeness” lifted from the Anglo-American culture wars that have little or no domestic resonance; predictably, his targets have included drag queens and Gender Studies departments. His fixation on “anti-wokeness” in homogenous Hungary can give the impression that he would rather shadowbox with American college students than confront his country’s punishing economic reality, where inflation peaked at over 25% in 2023 — the highest anywhere in the EU — and where food prices surged to more than 45% over the year. Beyond mere domestic distraction, however, fanning the culture war serves an additional function: it allows Orbán to position himself as a leading figure in the transnational Right, and Budapest as a beacon of “anti-wokeness” — a narrative that will serve him if he is to rally populist-Right forces across Europe ahead of next month’s EU parliamentary elections.

Orbán has his own sexual culture war to deal with too. In February, it was revealed that President Katalin Novak had pardoned a man imprisoned for covering up child sexual abuse by the director of a state-run orphanage. President Novak and then justice minister Judit Varga, two of the most prominent women in Fidesz, were subsequently forced to resign — almost certainly on Orbán’s order. But further details soon emerged. As part of the Pope’s visit to Budapest in April 2023, Novak pardoned the former deputy director of a children’s home who had blackmailed children into withdrawing testimony against the orphanage director, a prolific paedophile.

When the full story was made public, protesters filled the streets of Budapest. The inevitable charge of hypocrisy has been levelled at the government: Orbán the great defender of “the family” found protecting such debased criminality. The scandal was made more significant by the defection of Peter Magyar, Varga’s ex-husband and a former Fidesz insider, who in March published a recording of Varga detailing the extent to which members of Orbán’s elite inner circle interfered in the prosecution of a corruption case. Magyar has since styled himself as the new face of the opposition, where he hopes to reclaim the political centre.

Suggested reading

The coming civil war on Europe's Right

By Thomas Fazi

And yet, Orbán’s authority has emerged a little dented but intact. While his credibility has taken a hit, he will survive — though whether his domestic staying power can translate into an illiberal wave that will engulf the whole of Europe remains to be seen. He has proven himself as a political survivor and a chameleon, rising first through the ranks as a young liberal dissident and then to the heights of power as an anti-liberal Svengali. This has led some of his Hungarian critics to assert that his anti-liberal turn was entirely opportunistic, and that he is devoid of any real principles or ideology. Journalist Paul Lendvai has written about then-liberal Fidesz’s crushing defeat in the 1994 election, which reduced the party to the smallest in parliament. He claims it was at this point that Fidesz began its Rightward shift, even swapping their long hair and jeans for more conservative dress: “There seemed to be no deep ideological soul-searching involved — just clear-eyed calculations about what it would require to win power.” Soon, their speeches were filled with references to tradition and the homeland. In this, perhaps Orbán is not so different from the EU with whom he has long been at odds: vacuous and politically malleable, invoking supposedly ironclad “European values” to mask an impoverished spiritual core.

None of this is to downplay the scale of his ambition. At last month’s CPAC Hungary Conference, Orbán suggested that a “sovereigntist world order” could replace the current liberal one, and that it could do so this year, with critical elections on both sides of the Atlantic. “Let the age of the sovereigntists finally come,” he said. “Make America great again, make Europe great again, go Donald Trump, go European sovereigntists!” He emphasised that the sovereigntist world order would have no ideology, and we can surmise that China, with whom Hungary enjoys warm relations, would also be included in it. Whatever the outcome of the European parliamentary elections, this post-ideological competition, which progressive liberals frame as one of autocracies versus democracies, is here to stay.

The question then remains: who and what is truly “European”, or best representative of “European values”? However widely adopted they may seem today, progressive liberal values are a relatively new phenomenon, and, some would say, somewhat deceptive. As Sartre wrote in 1961, during Algeria’s war for independence from France: “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.” Anti-colonial icon Frantz Fanon concurred that same year, when he said that “it is in the name of the Spirit, meaning the spirit of Europe, that Europe justified its crimes and legitimised the slavery in which it held four-fifths of humanity”.

If Europe’s evangelists of “Europeanisation” were to ask people outside the West who best epitomised “European values”— themselves or Orbán — they might not like the answer. As much as it may panic the enlightened liberals of Brussels liberals, Orbán’s brand of exclusionary nationalism is integral to European history — and is sure to be a part of its future too.

If we add those MEPs from Right-wing parties that are currently not affiliated with any group, such as those from Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, a Right-populist coalition could potentially emerge for the first time in the history of the European Parliament, unseating the “super grand coalition” of the three centrist groups (EPP, S&D and Renew Europe) that currently rule the EU institutions. That’s easier said than done, however. Aside from the near impossibility of an alliance between the EPP and ID, Europe’s Right-populist parties are far from a united front. In fact, with polls showing a very tight race between the ECR and ID for the position of third-largest party in the European Parliament, the two groups — and their respective unofficial leaders, Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen — are currently engaged in a fierce battle for the leadership of the European Right.

This was brought into stark relief earlier last week, when the ID group — which includes Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany and the Freedom Party of Austria — gathered in Rome for a convention. Salvini and Le Pen reaffirmed their refusal to support a second mandate for EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (VDL) and slammed Meloni for not ruling out a deal with the EPP over VDL’s re-election.

Over the past two years, Meloni has developed a close relationship with VDL, even joining her on European diplomatic visits to Tunisia and Egypt to curb migration. The reason is rooted in self-interest: Meloni sees the prospect of maintaining a powerful ally in Brussels as vital to her government’s survival, even at the cost of disappointing voters and her own coalition ally. Le Pen’s concerns, on the other hand, are very different: as she gears up for a showdown with Macron, she needs every disgruntled vote she can get.

“Giorgia… will you support a second von der Leyen term or not?”, Le Pen asked in a broadcast to ID delegates. “I believe so. And so you will contribute to worsening the policies that the people of Europe are suffering from so much.” In her message, Le Pen also urged Italian voters to oppose Meloni and vote for Salvini’s League. André Ventura, the leader of the rising Portuguese party Chega, also backed Salvini at the congress. “We’re not going to lie to ourselves: we’re watching ECR’s support for von der Leyen very carefully because it’s going to be a very, very divisive element,” concluded Mathilde Androuët, president of the ID Foundation.

For her part, Meloni continued to dodge the issue: “The problem is not the president of the Commission, the problem is the majority that supports the president, because it is this majority that decides policy in Europe,” she said. The important thing, Meloni argued, is to achieve “a centre-right majority” within the European Parliament — even at the cost of a possible compromise with VDL.

Despite her best attempts to paint a rosy picture, the episode was indicative of the growing strains within Meloni’s coalition: being the junior partner of an increasingly pro-establishment government has been a disaster for Salvini’s popularity, hence his recent efforts to boost his populist credentials by marking his distance from Meloni over the EU — and enlisting the endorsement of a populist heavyweight like Le Pen. But there’s more to the Le Pen-Meloni spat than mere electoral calculus.

Suggested reading

The EU's American Queen

By Lily Lynch

The question of VDL’s re-election is exposing deep rifts within the European Right — and not just between the EPP and the Right-populists. Even within the ECR group, many of the largest national parties — including the Law and Justice party in Poland, Vox in Spain and Reconquête in France — are strongly opposed to a second VDL mandate. Even more strikingly, VDL is facing opposition within her own group. The Republicans party, which represents France within the EPP, has also come out strongly against VDL’s re-election, denouncing her as “the candidate of Mr Macron and not the Right”. It’s thus easy to see why many of Meloni’s Right-wing “allies” are concerned by her relationship with VDL. Having one of Europe’s largest and most powerful Right-populist parties endorse a new “Ursula coalition”, together with Macron and the Socialists, would be a huge symbolic blow to any claim that Right-populism represents a viable alternative to the European political mainstream.

And yet, it would be a mistake to lay all the blame for this on Meloni. The reality is that the row over VDL’s re-election also reflects fundamental ideological disagreements between Europe’s Right-populist parties, particularly on geostrategic issues. The parties that make up the ECR, for instance, all generally have a strong transatlantic, pro-Nato orientation, and have come out in favour of military support for Ukraine. The firm criticism of Russia by the ECR group as a whole was recently illustrated by the co-signing of a joint declaration on further military support for Ukraine in January 2024, together with the EPP, S&D, Renew and the Greens.

The ID group, meanwhile, is deeply split over the issue. Salvini’s League, which had previously sought close ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin, has now aligned itself with the political mainstream over Russia-Ukraine, while the Finns Party last year left ID for the ECR, largely due to disagreements over Russia. In contrast, both the National Rally and the AfD have taken a much more critical stance on EU-Nato support for Ukraine, while many parties within ID have either abstained or voted against every resolution relating to Nato relations. Similar fundamental differences exist in both groups on other crucial strategic issues — such as EU membership, European enlargement and China — as well as on social and economic matters.

Ultimately, however, the biggest obstacle to the emergence of a united European Right-populist front has little to do with the parties’ ideological differences, but is related to the nature of the European Union itself. Due to the degree of economic and financial control that Brussels exercises over member states, especially those that are part of the eurozone, even “populist” governments have little choice but to go along with the EU’s diktats.

After all, the EU has had no qualms about resorting to financial and monetary blackmail in the past, including against countries that are not part of the eurozone, as it recently did with Hungary after Orbán threatened to veto the bloc’s latest Ukraine support package. Brussels’s threat to sabotage Hungary’s economy was telling of the neocolonial mentality that dominates the EU establishment — and of how far the EU will go to bring recalcitrant governments to heel. The result is that populist parties, particularly in the eurozone, can afford to be radical only insofar as they are in opposition, but are forced to betray their electoral promises once they get into power.

Suggested reading

Trump is not Nato's biggest threat

By Thomas Fazi

This goes a long way towards explaining the differences between the ECR and ID groups: while the former includes several parties that have been or are currently in government, ID member parties have largely played an opposition role in their respective countries. If they were to get into government, they would quickly shed their radicalism, as others have done before them. Indeed, for all her criticism of Meloni, the truth is that Le Pen herself, in her bid to become France’s next president, is already undergoing a process of “Melonisation” — abandoning her anti-euro platform and softening her position on Russia-Ukraine and Nato.

All of which is to say that it would be naïve to assume that a Right-wing majority in the European Parliament would change this state of affairs, given that the real power in the EU is exercised elsewhere — in the Commission, in the Council and in the European Central Bank. Nor is there any guarantee that electing more Right-populist governments would create the conditions for “changing the EU from within”. Despite all the top-down efforts to “Europeanise” politics on the continent, European politics is still driven by national economic, geopolitical and cultural dynamics — and these will continue to differ starkly among nations regardless of the ideological affinity between governments. By refusing to acknowledge the elephant in the room — the fundamental and irreconcilable incompatibility between the EU and democracy — Right-populists across the continent are, once again, setting themselves up for defeat.

In yesterday’s election, which confirmed Vox as the country’s third-largest party, Spain came close to joining Hungary, Poland, Italy, Finland and Austria and electing a Right-populist party to government. In Germany, meanwhile, the AfD has just elected its first mayor and district administrator, after surging into second place in the polls; in the Netherlands, the newly formed Farmer-Citizen Movement won its first provincial elections in March; in Austria, the Freedom Party is leading the polls; and in France, polls suggest that Le Pen would now win a run-off with Macron.

This shift to the Right will no doubt affect the make-up of the next European Parliament, due to be elected next June. And Right-wingers across Europe are feeling giddy. At a recent rally in support of Vox, Giorgia Meloni couldn’t contain her glee, claiming that “the hour of the patriots has arrived”, announcing  “a change in the politics of Europe”.

It seems inevitable that Right-populism will play an increasingly influential role in the coming years. But exactly what kind of “change” should we expect from these “patriots”? From a cultural standpoint, such parties could not be further from the liberal-progressive mainstream: they share an attachment to Europe’s traditions and religious heritage, a dislike for eurocrats and an opposition to all things woke — immigration, gender ideology, green fanaticism. So we can definitely expect a pushback on these fronts, within individual countries as well as at the European level: more relaxed climate policies, more restrictive immigration policies and less talk about gender.

On other, arguably more important issues, however, these so-called populist parties are peculiarly aligned with the mainstream. In terms of economic policy, for example, almost all of them are wedded to the neoliberal orthodoxy embedded in the EU: with few exceptions, their economic agendas revolve around pro-austerity, pro-deregulation, anti-worker and anti-welfare policies.

Consider the new Finnish government’s economic programme, which includes wide-ranging welfare cuts, rules to make it easier for companies to lay off employees, limitations to the right of collective bargaining, and fines for workers on strikes. Similarly, Vox’s economic programme is rooted in what Miquel Vila has called “a special kind of Spanish neoliberalism [which favours] economic deregulation while supporting a conglomerate of big corporations dependent on government contracts”. The same (with slight variations) goes for several Right-populist parties — from Austria’s Freedom Party to the AfD to Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.

There are exceptions, of course. Le Pen, for instance, believes in a moderate redistributive programme of Keynesian orientation based on state interventionism, social protection and the defence of public services; in the past she has castigated the “neoliberal” logic of many of Macron’s proposals. Even Viktor Orbán’s economic policies — which have included capping the prices of basic goods in response to galloping inflation — have defied the orthodoxy in certain respects.

Yet overall, there is little reason to believe that this Right-populist wave will result in any major economic policy shift. And this is highly problematic, given most of the support for these parties doesn’t come from voters who are tired of wokeness — though that certainly plays a role — but from those who are anxious about their socioeconomic situation and lack of economic security. At a time when millions of Europeans are struggling with inflation and falling real wages, any party that wants to survive the next electoral cycle will also need to provide answers to the majority of voters who expect a material benefit from their vote. In this sense, the fact that most of these parties are wedded to the economic orthodoxy doesn’t bode well for their future — or that of the millions of Europeans struggling to get by.

That said, even those parties who would choose to defy the economic status quo have to contend with the very limited autonomy that countries have today, especially in the eurozone. This relates to an even more striking aspect of contemporary Right-populism: as much as they love to rail against the “Brussels bureaucrats” and the “globalist elites”, they have virtually all ditched any mention of leaving the EU and/or the euro from their programmes (to the extent that they ever made that claim). Nowadays, Right-populists are all euro-reformists who speak of “changing the EU” from within. This represents a significant change compared with the first European populist wave of the mid-2010s, when many of the then-leading populist parties — the National Front, the AfD, the Northern League, the Five Star Movement, even Brothers of Italy — openly called for their respective countries’ exit from the EU or euro.

This development was effectively formalised in July 2021, when all the major Right-populist parties from across Europe signed a document whereby they agreed to work within the framework of the EU. This inevitably entailed a shift in focus from socioeconomic issues — over which member states have little control over — to more cultural ones: by retreating from the battle for national sovereignty, they had little choice but to couch their challenges to the status quo, and to the EU itself, in strictly cultural and identitarian terms. Hence the document called for the need for European nations to “be based on tradition, respect for the culture and history of European states, respect for Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage and the common values that unite our nations”. The point is not whether one agrees with this or not, but rather the way in which the EU has succeeded in shifting opposition from the socioeconomic terrain to the identitarian one — in other words, to the culture wars.

Suggested reading

Boomer Europe is dying

By Aris Roussinos

This emphasis was brought about by several factors, but a crucial one was the EU’s crushing response to the first populist government which attempted to challenge its rule: the League-Five Star government that emerged from the 2018 Italian elections. At the time, the EU resorted to a wide array of tools — including financial and political pressure — to prevent the government from deviating from the economic status quo, eventually causing the coalition to collapse in just over a year. The experience showed that the margins for an individual country to challenge the EU’s economic framework are close to zero — at least within the context of the euro.

From “nationalist” and “patriotic” parties allegedly devoted to taking back control from Brussels, one might have expected an increased awareness of the need to break away from the EU — something that Brexit had shown to be feasible. Instead, they reached the opposite conclusion: that the EU is so powerful that there is no alternative but to accept its existence. The tragic consequences of this are exemplified by the Meloni government: a nominally “sovereigntist” government which has no choice but to go along with the policies dictated by the European Union (and Nato), while engaging in empty culture-wars rhetoric. She symbolises the inevitable fate of Right-populism within the framework of the euro: that of becoming an anti-woke version of the economic mainstream.

Such hopes of changing the EU “from within” through the European elections are equally delusional. They might make sense if the EU were a fully-fledged federal state with a truly sovereign parliament. But it is not. In fact, the European Parliament has relatively limited powers: unlike national parliaments, it doesn’t even have the power to initiate legislation. This is a power reserved almost entirely for the EU’s “executive” arm, the European Commission, which is unelected and promises “neither to seek nor to take instructions from any government or from any other institution, body, office or entity”. And even though the European Parliament has the power to approve or reject (or propose amendments to) the Commission’s own legislative proposals, this doesn’t change the fact that it has relatively little control over the actions of the Commission. It has even less control over the European Central Bank, which ultimately exercises the power of life and death over euro area governments.

Yet even if economics were not a factor, there is a greater reason to be sceptical of the Right-populist wave’s life expectancy. On perhaps the most important issue concerning Europe’s future — the war in Ukraine and the bloc’s geopolitical positioning — the parties are deeply divided. Most Nordic, Baltic and Eastern parties, just like their mainstream equivalents, are strongly in favour of greater ties with Nato, though the same goes for Vox and Meloni. Then there are those who are strongly opposed and favour a renormalisation of relations with Russia — most notably Orbán, Le Pen and the Austrian Freedom Party. And then you have those which are deeply split on the issue, such as the AfD.

At their root, these divisions simply reflect the often divergent or even conflicting economic and geopolitical interests that characterise the EU’s member states. If the Right-populists think that these differences can be cancelled in the name of anti-wokeness — and synthesised into a common European policy — they are operating under the same Europhile delusion that the mainstream has been peddling for the past 30 years. Ultimately, there is only one project capable of delivering a truly populist agenda, in material and not simply cultural terms: one focused on reclaiming national sovereignty and democracy from the EU. It is a tragedy, then, that Europe’s Right-populists have all but given up the project.

I had good reasons for wanting to join them. My parents and grandparents were active during the 1956 anti-Stalinist revolution and raised me and my siblings in the anti-communist tradition.

Within six months of joining Fidesz, I became an elected member of the party’s board. I stood next to Viktor Orbán in 1989 as he delivered his now-historic speech at the reburial of the former prime minister Imre Nagy. We were fighting for liberal democratic principles and wanted to build a strong European democracy; in 1990, we entered Hungary’s National Assembly in Hungary’s first free and fair elections.

In parliament, Fidesz was highly critical of Hungary’s Right-wing government coalition. Our principles were consistently liberal and we deliberately positioned ourselves in the centre of the political arena. Orbán said in 1992 that the “fate of the country can only be improved by a civic liberal government… which does not give in to the temptation of either Right or Left-wing statist economic policy.”

Some politicians in Fidesz, however, felt that the party would never lead from the centre. A bitter rivalry broke out with the other liberal party, the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), and the liberal-centrist strategy soon became a minority position within Fidesz. Those who continued to espouse this view were bullied and humiliated.

In this hostile political climate, Orbán was elected as Fidesz party chair in 1993. That same year, a financial scandal broke out involving Fidesz investment of hundreds of millions of Hungarian forints in businesses linked to Orbán’s friend and financial advisor, Lajos Simicska. It quickly became clear that Orbán would not allow anyone to obstruct his intermingling of party funds and political power. For politicians like myself, who still upheld Fidesz’s founding liberal ideals, this was a step too far. Together, we left the party.

From that point on, Orbán had a free hand to pull Fidesz to the Right — where he saw a political vacuum and an opportunity to build a party capable of winning power. In his speeches, he drew a sharp line between the “post-communist liberal elite supported by international capital” and Fidesz’s so-called “civic union”. Anti-communism, nationalism, and Christianity served to bond Right-wing voters to Fidesz, as part of its newly shaped conservative identity.

Orbán’s gamble soon paid off; his refashioned Fidesz party beat the ruling socialist-liberal coalition in Hungary’s 1998 election. His first premiership was undeniably successful. In just four years, the country’s economic position rebounded, following a period of austerity; Hungary joined Nato; and the government undertook negotiations to join the European Union. But this run would not last, and, in 2002, Fidesz was kicked out of office.

Suggested reading

Giorgia Meloni is no radical

By Thomas Fazi

Shortly after losing power, Orbán called his supporters together and gave a powerful speech. “It may be that our parties and MPs are in the opposition in parliament, but we here in this square are not and can never be in the opposition, because the homeland [nation] cannot be in the opposition.”

It was an act of Machiavellian genius. In that moment, Orbán claimed for himself the right to represent all Hungarians. He was portrayed as a hero by Fidesz-built media and Right-wing columnists, and was given free rein to spread his polarised agenda. Fidesz became, exclusively, Orbán’s party — and the party’s appeal now encompassed supporters from the centre to the far-Right.

In 2010, Fidesz won a landslide victory, which Orbán saw as a personal mandate giving him free rein to rewrite the rules of government. His actions ever since have followed an autocratic playbook. For some time, I witnessed this first-hand as an MP for the “Together” party, which was established to build an alliance of democratic opposition parties to challenge the erosion of democratic norms in Hungary. Orbán’s party has rewritten and amended the constitution; elections rules have been modified 20 times, paralysing opposition parties; and Fidesz has heaped pressure on the independent judiciary. Orbán has also built a loyal new business elite with the help of billions of EU funds, all the while leading anti-EU campaigns: most recently agitating against the bloc’s sanctions on Russia.

Suggested reading

Denmark is a Right-wing paradise

By Maurice Frank

In 2014, Orbán himself declared his regime an “illiberal state”. Two years later, at the 60th anniversary of the 1956 revolution, a year-long government-funded celebration began to rewrite our country’s history. It overlooked the role of prime minister Imre Nagy in leading the revolution, and hardly mentioned the Soviet troops who crushed Hungary’s freedom fight. The festivities were part of Orbán’s attempt to transform our traditionally-negative feelings towards Russia; in recent years, he has developed close ties with the Kremlin.

In Orbán’s view, the age of Western dominance is over, and alliances with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are the future. As such, he has sought to open Hungary’s economy to the East, in doing so distancing himself from his 2007 position: “Hold out for a Western Hungary; don’t let them divert Hungary from this path. Love the fact that Hungary is a Western country, which means we believe in the freedom of human will… Oil might come from the East, but freedom always comes from the West.”

A political shapeshifter, Orbán appears to have no trouble burning bridges. He has openly smeared Western organisations, such as the IMF and claimed that opposition parties and critical NGOs are seeking to “destroy” Hungary. He has accused the EU of attempting to “colonise” Hungary, while taking opaque loans for giga-projects financed by the Chinese and Russian state.

Suggested reading

Is Giorgia Meloni an EU puppet?

By Thomas Fazi

What do Hungarians make of all this? Colossal amounts of government funds are devoted to party messaging and costly smear campaigns to mobilise Fidesz’s anti-communist-nationalist base. Orbán, who has avoided public debates for 15 years, gives sarcastic, five-word answers in our country’s equivalent of PMQs, such as “I don’t deal with business matters” or “Happy Christmas, Mrs Deputy!”. For those Hungarians who buy into his rhetoric about elevating Hungary’s place in the world, and may have helped propel him to a surprise victory in April’s election, Orbán’s ever-radicalising path is an acceptable means to an end.

Yet his illiberal experiment may return to haunt him. His shift to the Right places him in a political camp made up of Eastern autocrats, Donald Trump, and the European hard-Right — and, to ensure his survival, he has no choice but to continue along this path. Perhaps that’s why earlier this year, at the American Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he called for taking back political institutions in Washington and Brussels, and coordinating the movement of US and Hungarian troops.

For a time, Orbán managed to tread a fine line in his dealings with Western allies and Eastern autocrats. Now, this is not so easy. Hungary desperately needs EU funds, with Russia’s war in Ukraine threatening its energy supplies, and inflation spiralling out of control. Although Orbán appears on the cusp of striking a deal with the bloc — EU funding in return for strict rule-of-law concessions — tensions will remain high. So far, his Machiavellian instincts have proved successful — but European partners are more alert today, and Orbán may not get away with his divisive strategies.

First, I attended the “EuroCentralAsian Lesbian* Conference (EL*C)”. It was international in its participant list, lavishly funded, and linguistically and aesthetically indistinguishable from any other modern LGBT event. There were pronoun declarations and safe space policies. There were wild dye-jobs and big specs. There were workshops on how to undermine women’s sport. There was the robotically impersonal ejection of a heretical wrongthinker on the eve of the conference. In other words, it was business as usual for Queer Inc. — albeit with some more local stuff about Roma and Ukrainian lesbians thrown in.

A second group of mostly young activists, who I met in a Budapest bar, were homegrown Hungarian, cash-strapped, defiantly female-only, and fairly punk in their aesthetic. And they were very cool. We smoked hookahs, got drunk, took selfies in the toilet, and talked about how stupid everything had got. They gave me homemade badges in Hungarian saying “Lesbian not queer” and “Nobody is born in the wrong body.” They solicited drunken soundbites from me for a podcast about how great being a lesbian is. They exhibited a frankly staggering general knowledge of happenings on “Terf Island”, otherwise known as the UK.

Some of this second group worked for organisations dealing with the aftermath of violence against women. They told me how wealthy Western funders, attempting to prop up embattled women’s services against the incursions of Orbán’s anti-feminist manoeuvres, would make their donations conditional on the insistence that organisations be “inclusive”, and so include males. The recipients simply could not afford to say no.

This brand of cultural colonialism — you know, the one that dare not speak its name and everyone’s fine with — was also in evidence at the EL*C conference, where it was quietly whispered that at least €1 million had been awarded to organisers by the European Commission and other private Western funders, partly on the condition that males who identified as women be included too. Despite the name of the organisation, the official focus of the conference was now “LBTI” people — lesbian, bi, trans, and intersex.

Predictably, with this widening of scope came a narrowing of what you could permissibly say at the conference. The result was a change in subject matter, away from boring old women who love and have sex with women towards something more soothingly generic, and the usual blanket denial that there had been any change in subject matter at all. Oceania had never been at war with Eurasia, and lesbians had never needed to politically organise away from males, just for themselves. The fact that only a few years prior, the EL*C had aimed to do exactly that seemed to have been memory-holed.

More from this author

The emptiness of being queer

By Kathleen Stock

Officially, the story from the stage was that the rainbow coalition needed to stick together like glue against the anti-gender backlash currently being waged by Orbán, Putin, Erdogan and others: no queer left behind! For these self-styled strongmen, “gender”, vaguely defined, is a strategically useful symbol for everything terrible about the decadent West.

The original political target of Orbán Fidesz’s party was liberal feminism and gay rights. But with the official addition of the T to the LGB internationally in the last decade, and the sudden Western shift towards extreme policies such as self-ID and the medicalisation of trans-identified youth, not to mention the Western presentation of transactivism as a logical extension of feminism, a golden opportunity emerged to give added plausibility to Fidesz’s tale of crazy identity politics and moral corruption. Now they could juice up their disparagement of “gender” with tales of young girls being made to believe they were boys, and predatory males in women’s changing rooms. These days, I was told, the biggest focus of Orbán’s anti-gender campaign is extreme transactivist demands imported from the West and their consequences.

Inevitably a polarised situation has emerged, with both sides insisting the T be lumped together with the LG and B, for good or ill. On one side, Fidesz use the extremes of Western transactivism to justify incursions on the rights of women, gays, and the sex-non-conforming generally. And on the other, in the name of solidarity, Hungarian and Western progressives insist there is no difference between these extreme demands and more staid requests like being able to teach schoolchildren about homosexuality or demanding the right to gay marriage.

Suggested reading

Mermaids is endangering children

By Julie Bindel

Reading between the lines, testimonies at the EL*C suggested that a similar dynamic is taking place elsewhere in the former Eastern bloc. A charismatic Albanian lesbian activist, Xheni Karaj, told the conference that she had visited the UK and worked in some capacity with Stonewall towards a campaign for greater acceptance of LGBT+ parenting. Going back to Albania, the idea had got out that she wished to replace the words “mother” and “father” with “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”.  In a highly conservative country such as Albania, this notion caused a huge scandal, and Karaj became the subject of severe abuse and harassment because of it.

Karaj was clear on stage that she had never intended to suggest replacing the word “mother” with anything else. I believed her. But what she didn’t also say was that, only last year, Stonewall suggested doing precisely this in the UK. The idea was incendiary enough to many when made over here — let alone in a context like Albania, where religious leaders have a large influence, the family is venerated, and homophobia and misogyny is entrenched.

And Albania is not the only place where the creative projects of bored rainbow bureaucrats from North London are being used to make mischief. In his annexation speech last week, Putin said “no more Parent 1 and Parent 2, only mother and father”. A few days earlier, a 2019 speech by the new Italian leader Georgia Meloni went viral on Twitter — and was retweeted not just by conservatives but also by some gender-critical feminists who seemed to assume they had found a fellow traveller. “I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother,” she complained. “No. I must be Citizen X, Gender X, Parent 1, Parent 2. I must be a number.” Sound familiar?

More from this author

Why the Tavistock had to fall

By Kathleen Stock

Left-wing gender-critical lesbians like those I met in that Budapest bar are stuck in the middle of all this, a means to everyone else’s ends. The state paints them as deviant and anti-family to bash the liberals, while progressives in Hungary and their Western supporters demand that they pretend that their interests perfectly align with the rest of the rainbow. If lesbians nonetheless insist, perfectly sensibly, that female biology makes a difference to their political interests as lesbians, they are treated as somehow in league with the far-Right. And, in terms of optics, matters are not helped by the fact that Fidesz-supporting publishing houses are now buying up gender-critical titles to translate into Hungarian. Indeed, I discovered on my trip that the would-be Hungarian publisher for my own book was an Orbán think tank. (Since I got home, I have pulled out of the deal.)

In the febrile climate of UK gender politics, there is a tendency for those fed up with biology-denial to fall gratefully upon anything which looks like it asserts the primacy of material reality in a more sensible way. But feminists should beware strongmen and women bearing gifts. The international rejection of extreme trans ideology will be a pyrrhic victory if it is accompanied by a raft of measures against women, gays, and sex-non-conforming people. And the futures of young lesbians like those I met in the Budapest bar will be all the poorer for it.

Far from the war, in Ukraine’s sleepy, western city of Uzhhorod, whose crumbling pastel-coloured Habsburg-era buildings straddle the river Uzh, government officials are concerned about the growing tension with Hungary. Despite Hungary’s voting in favour of EU sanctions against Russia, its supply of major humanitarian support to western Ukraine, and its hosting of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, the country’s refusal to supply weapons or use its territory as a transit point for them has won the enmity of the Zelenskyy administration, which has singled it out for allegedly “helping Putin”.

At his recent Budapest victory speech, the re-elected Viktor Orbán drew one of the biggest laughs from the jubilant crowd when, along with Brussels, George Soros and the international NGO lobby, he listed Zelenskyy as one of his defeated foes. But that wasn’t his only reference to Ukraine: Orbán also had a message for the country’s ethnic Hungarian minority. He offered “a special greeting to the Hungarians of Transcarpathia: I tell them not to grieve, to hold on — the Mother country is with them”.

The timing, while the world was watching the uncovering of Russian war crimes in Bucha, was not opportune. But the delicate situation of the roughly 150,000 ethnic Hungarians of Ukraine’s western Zakarpattia province — Transcarpathia, to Hungarians — has long been a source of tension between the two countries. Now the current war has heightened Ukrainian anxieties of potential Hungarian irredentism, to the delight of Russian propagandists.

In a controversial Facebook post on 24 March, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereschuk accused Orbán of being reluctant to deepen sanctions because Putin had secretly promised him to “hand back Transcarpathia” in the event of a Ukrainian defeat, a claim immediately denounced by Hungary’s official spokesman Zoltan Kovacs as “not only groundless but also insane”.

In his office in Budapest’s Matthias Corvinus Collegium, surrounded by plaques and photographs gifted by Ukrainian military units he had met on research trips, Attila Demko, former head of planning for Hungary’s Ministry of Defence, gave me his opinion on Vereschuk’s comments.  “I think it’s very unwise,” he said, “I think she believes Russian propaganda. Russian propaganda wants to split Nato. They want to have the Ukrainians and Hungarians debating… so maybe she made a huge mistake with repeating Russian propaganda.”

Russian propaganda networks in both Ukraine and Hungary have long stressed the purported desire of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarians to be reunited with their kin over the western border, and Russian intelligence networks have tried to use the Hungarian question to destabilise Ukraine. A recent campaign of sending threatening SMS messages to ethnic Hungarians was undoubtedly a Russian intelligence effort, Demko assured me, just as the much-publicised 2018 petrol bomb attack on a Hungarian cultural centre in Uzhhorod (Ungvár to Hungarians) turned out to be the work of Polish ultranationalists in the employ of a Russian agent, who died “of a heart attack, aged 45” shortly after his escape to Moscow.

But in reality, there’s no desire “beyond some very narrow nationalist circles” for territorial reconquest, Demko told me, “and anyway, it’s impossible in today’s Europe”. The Hungarian portion of Zakarpattia’s population has dwindled over the decades so that they now make up only 12% of the region’s population. That said, the region’s Hungarian minority are an “important historic community”, he added, reminding me that “this land, part of Ukraine, was part of Hungary until 1945 for 1000 years,” when it was annexed by first Czechoslovakia and then the Soviet Union after a brief wartime interlude of Hungarian rule, “against the will of the local population”.

More from this author

How the Ukraine war saved Orbán

By Aris Roussinos

“There was no vote,” he emphasised, “There was no self-determination. It was war, and it was taken in war, so the local Hungarians still watch Hungarian TV, still use the Hungarian timezone, still speak much better Hungarian than Ukrainian, still feel themselves Hungarian. Ukrainians cannot change it without forcing them.”

Whether or not Ukrainian-Hungarians are being forced to change their sense of national identity is one of the main issues of contention between the two countries: in the eyes of many Hungarians, including the current government, the rise of Ukrainian nation-building efforts since the war with Russia began in 2014 has had the unfortunate effect of placing undue pressure on them to speak Ukrainian in place of their native Hungarian.

Was this an unintended consequence of attempting to reinforce a sense of Ukrainian-ness under Russian threat, I asked Balász Orbán, Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor? “Probably unintended,” he replied, “I understand that their intention wasn’t to violate the rights of the Hungarians. Rather, they wanted to focus on Russia.” But Ukraine’s adoption under Zelenskyy’s predecessor, the Right-wing populist former president Petro Poroshenko, of new educational and language laws promoting the use of Ukrainian in daily life affected the right of ethnic Hungarians “to be educated in their mother language and to use their mother language in public life,” he told me. “That’s a serious violation.”

***

In the Zakarpattia Oblast administration building, bored soldiers standing behind sandbag gun emplacements guard the cavernous marble staircases. Seated at a wide table, Igor Shynkriuk, Deputy Chief of the Zakarpattia administration greeted me. A former Lieutenant-colonel of Special Forces fighting Russian-backed separatists in Donbass, the muscular, buzzcutted Shynkriuk is a commanding presence in his black jacket, a holstered pistol at his waist. As of two years ago, he corrected me, Ukraine no longer refers to a Hungarian minority, only Ukrainian-Hungarians, to prevent Russian attempts at destabilisation, “because firstly, they are Ukrainian, secondly Hungarian”.

“For Ukrainians, they’re Ukrainian citizens, our friends. But for the Russian Federation, [they’re] the main thing of destabilisation here,” he told me. Groups of Russian saboteurs aiming to destabilise the ethnically mixed region had already been rounded up by local counterintelligence agents, he told me, as well as the Russian botnets in Odessa who sent the intimidating SMS messages to ethnic Hungarians. Furthermore, cooperation with Hungary on humanitarian aid was good: “perfect for now: that’s why we are actually very thankful.”

When I asked Shynkriuk about the 2017 language law, he replied “Shit”, before leaning back in his chair and exhaling slowly. The issue, he emphasised, was that ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine were going through the school system in Hungarian and coming out at the end entirely unable to speak Ukrainian. “I’m the person responsible for education in the region,” he told me, and in the end of year-ranking tables, “Transcarpathia is always in the last place, and I’ll tell you why: it’s the language… If they don’t understand the exams, how can they can pass them?”

More from this author

How the Ukraine war saved Orbán

By Aris Roussinos

What about the laws promoting the use of Ukrainian in public spaces, which Hungarian officials claimed caused ethnic Hungarians to feel wary of using their native language in everyday life? “No, that’s absolutely not true. That’s ridiculous,” he laughed. We were speaking in English now, he observed, “Do you see someone just running through the door and just kicking me out? That’s bullshit. Those claims about the language are the same useful [propaganda] for the Russians. Ukrainian-Hungarians know very well what exactly is happening, but I think it’s for after we win this war, when we’ve killed all those Russian orcs.”

The war beyond the mountains is yet to directly touch Zakarpattia — the nighttime air raid sirens are invariably false alarms, and it is the only region of Ukraine where volunteer checkpoints have not been set up along the roads. But a sense of emergency still lingers. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from deeper inside Ukraine have passed through on the way to Hungary and Slovakia, and thousands more have swelled Uzhhorod’s population, dependent on aid from local volunteers working from a converted wine cellar in the city centre.

Asking local ethnic Hungarian officials for their opinion was not an easy task. In the impoverished ethnic Hungarian village of Velyka Dobron, or Nagydobrony in Hungarian, the village mayor, seated in front of the Hungarian and Ukrainian flags inside a town hall, refused an interview, telling me that “that there’s a war on, I don’t want to cause problems”. Another village official, who had caused local controversy by playing both national anthems at official events, also turned down an interview, citing orders not to speak — he did not elaborate from whom. Local Hungarian teachers, cultural officials and political figures all declined, as did the Hungarian consulate in Uzhhorod, whose “security attaché” brushed away my questions with firmly polite refusals.

Talking to ordinary ethnic Hungarians — in Russian, because none could speak Ukrainian — in Velyka Dobron’s muddy marketplace, where a trader’s horse and cart was tethered near the statue of a peasant woman braiding paprika, their complaint was not that they were forced to learn Ukrainian, but rather that it was taught as a native rather than a foreign language, making it harder to grasp. “Education was better in Soviet times,” Diana, a middle-aged market trader complained. “The Ministry of Education doesn’t care about our problems.” In broken Russian, a young waiter in a hotel decked out in folksy Magyar kitsch told me that young ethnic Hungarian males with dual nationality weren’t permitted to leave the country, but neither did they want to join the army because they couldn’t understand orders in Ukrainian.

Certainly, local expressions of Hungarian identity were not being suppressed in Zakarpattia: in Velyka Dobron, a war memorial to the Hungarian Honvéd army of the First World War was bedecked in red-white-and-green wreaths to the glorious dead. In the largely Hungarian town of Berehove — Beregszász in Hungarian — where Hungarian was an official language, the public spaces seemed more intensely Hungarian than anywhere in Hungary, with bronze statues to national saints, kings and poets on every corner, and the Magyar tricolour flying from every official building, even as electronic billboards blasted out patriotic Ukrainian techno music over footage from the front.

Suggested reading

Why Putin's invasion failed

By Edward Luttwak

Driving into the wooded foothills of the Carpathians, I left behind the main roads studded with billboards of the Virgin Mary protecting Ukraine and exhortations to join the Territorial Defence Forces and entered a tucked-away region of single-storey cottages protected by honking geese, where road signs announce ethnic Hungarian villages in ancient Magyar runes. Interrupting his lunch, I spoke to the 74-year-old farmer and winemaker Sándor Nagy, who gave me homemade cheese and samples of his latest vintage while unfurling a map of Greater Hungary. “Look at this map. It is Greater Hungary, former Hungary, and now it’s like this. It is our land, it is not just my own idea,” he told me. “We were born here, we want to speak Hungarian, say hello to each other, those who don’t want it can go to Hell, I don’t care!”

Like other ethnic Hungarians, Nagy was not impressed with the recent educational reforms, telling me: “They want everybody to speak Ukrainian, but they are so stupid they cannot teach Ukrainian in a proper way. They give literature to the first three years, but not phrases like “Give me, please, bread”, “give me, please, a glass of wine” — but instead texts from writers from 300 years ago. It’s not education, it’s stupidity.” As for the mood in the village: “We don’t care. Leave us alone. Even if Tartars come, French or even Putin, we don’t care. Let us live our peaceful life, here where we were born.”

***

In so far as a conflict between the Ukrainian and Hungarian states exists in Transcarpathia, the dividing line seems to be more age and class than solely ethnicity, with older, Hungarian-speaking rural populations looking towards Hungary and middle-class urbanites content with their dual identity. In a hipster bar in a converted Soviet bomb shelter in Uzhhorod, the local ethnic Hungarian writer Bandy Sholtes unzipped his rollneck cardigan to show me his “Russian Warship: Go Fuck Yourself” t-shirt, ignoring the air raid siren going off around us in favour of his beer — it was just another false alarm.

A bohemian, cosmopolitan figure, faintly scented with the fruit moonshine he was transporting to friends in Odessa, Sholtes told me such ethnic questions were an irrelevance in this preserved corner of Habsburg Mitteleuropa: “My grandmother’s grandfathers were born in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Then they were citizens of Czechoslovakia and then Hungary and they died Ukrainian citizens. And, you know, this region was like this, changing citizenships and never moving anywhere and never emigrating anywhere. It’s quite unique in Europe.” A fierce Ukrainian patriot, who had taken part in the Maidan revolution, Sholtes was not happy to see his dwindling community utilised in heated interstate rhetoric: “I think the situation is very hard because after our victory, I think we will have much to talk about with Hungary.”

Suggested reading

Inside the Battle of Bucha

By David Patrikarakos

If, as it seems, the issue is more the question of how Ukrainian is taught to Zakarpattia’s Hungarian minority, rather than it being taught at all, the dispute ought to be easily resolved. Yet in the current circumstances, with Ukraine struggling against an existential threat and wary of what it sees as an unduly close relationship between Hungary and Russia, small problems can easily spiral into a broader crisis. On the diplomatic level, relations are already deteriorating: last Wednesday, Hungary summoned the Ukrainian ambassador to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a dressing down over what Fidesz viewed as Ukrainian interference in Hungary’s election, telling him “it is time for the Ukrainian leaders to stop insulting Hungary and to take note of the will of the Hungarian people”. The risk is that in such a tense climate, minor disagreements between the two capitals which could otherwise be easily resolved may be inflated out of all proportion.

“I can’t say that this legislation is perfect,” the Ukrainian political analyst Dmytro Tuzhanskyi, director of the Institute for Central European Strategy told me at a cafe underneath Budapest’s towering Basilica. “So many gaps and shortcomings are in this legislation, especially regarding national minorities, where it’s always a sensitive question.” But the Hungarian rhetoric was overblown, he assured me: “they are talking about this law like it means closing of Hungarian schools, being forbidden to speak in Hungarian, forbidden to pray in Hungarian? And this is, you know, insane.”

“The problem is,” he added, “I think that both sides, Kyiv and Budapest, have no real capacity or expertise to manage this tension. Moreover, many from both sides are interested in maintaining this tension.” For Orbán, it was a useful card to use while conferring with Trump on applying pressure on Ukraine, he told me, and for Zelenskyy’s predecessor Poroshenko, Right-wing populism on the language question was also a useful political tool. “This is very irresponsible because when you use ethnicity, in the sense of political manipulation, it is like Pandora’s box. It can be very, very dangerous.”

At a time of existential threat for Ukraine, both capitals will need to work carefully together to defuse such points of tension. The Russian propaganda about secessionist sentiment in Zakarpattia may have little basis in reality — but for both Hungary and Ukraine, the escalating rhetoric may have very real consequences.

In the 12 years of rule that have followed three landslide electoral victories, Viktor Orbán, now Europe’s longest-serving leader, has successfully reshaped Hungary in his own image: too successfully, in the eyes of both the weak and fractured opposition and of the EU mainstream.

Hungary is not the dictatorship Orbán’s more strident critics allege, but it departs from the stated norms of European liberal democracy in a number of ways. Under his leadership, the ruling Fidesz party has placed its thumb on the electoral scales, ensuring that while elections are free, the government enters them at an advantage. Opposition candidates are given significantly less airtime on state broadcasting networks than government figures, with the result that Fidesz narratives dominate the airwaves; the opposition claims that electoral boundaries have been redrawn to favour the government, a charge that Fidesz disputes; and a sophisticated politics of patronage has created a new conservative elite which owes its survival to Orbán’s continued rule. 

It is precisely these same innovations, which make Orbán’s Hungary anathema to Western liberals, that make the country so attractive to so many Western conservatives — particularly Anglo-Saxon ones. Where conservatives in Britain and America can win elections but find their governance impeded by a liberal powerbase in the media, NGOs and the judiciary (termed by conservative Hungarian intellectuals as an anti-democratic “juristocracy”), in Orbán’s Hungary the liberal intelligentsia’s political powerbase has been dismantled and replaced with a confident new conservative elite. A wealth of glossy conservative magazines, universities, think tanks and NGOs are the lavishly-funded product of Orbán’s Gramscian conservativism.

Rather than the vulgar 20th-century authoritarianism with which his more excitable critics charge him, Orbán’s dominance of Hungary’s politics is a subtler, more postmodern exercise. A product of George Soros’s attempt to nurture an elite governing class in Central Europe, the disaffected liberal reformer has adopted and inverted the same methods that produce liberal hegemony towards distinctly post-liberal ends. No wonder so many Western conservatives, who cannot translate electoral success to meaningful political power, find Orbán’s Hungary an object of both envy and inspiration. At Gólya, a far-Left cooperative and cultural space in a disused Budapest warehouse bedecked with PKK flags, I met the Marxist journalist and leftwing activist Csaba Tóth, who wryly described Orbán’s Hungary as “Rojava for western conservatives”, an idealised polity onto which they can project their political hopes and dreams.

“​​The point about Fidesz,” Tóth told me, “is that they’re against this liberal Deep State, NGO elite, whatever you want to call it. But they are mesmerised by it, and they are trying to replicate it along their own political lines. So they will have their own NGOs, their own think tanks, their own societies and international influence, modelled after this Atlanticist elite.” This creates a system, Tóth claims, where “I don’t think there is a level playing field now in elections. There’s kind of a controlled press in which there’s very little administrative measures against the opposition press, but on the other hand, pro-government media is very heavily rewarded, even from state funds… [This means] there is an economic and political power centre that is overwhelming and couldn’t really make another power centre come about.”

Suggested reading

How Hungary became the American Dream

By Will Collins

Before her election as Hungary’s first female president last month, the then Fidesz Vice-President Katalin Novák suggested to me that Western European politics is itself undemocratic, as government policy is driven by a “very, very powerful NGO network, which drives this kind of ongoing aggression against those countries who would like to step out of line in migration and all these big liberal trends dominating European policy today”. In Hungary, due to the government’s use of direct referendums to enshrine policy (such as the question on LGBT education in schools, which is also on the ballot on Sunday’s election), Novák claims politics is more democratic in practice than the European mainstream: “I don’t think that in Western Europe politicians would dare to hold a referendum about migration.”

Struggling to make headway against this consolidated conservative system, six of Hungary’s opposition parties have united in a fractious and unwieldy coalition to unseat Orbán, under the titular leadership of Péter Márki-Zay, a gaffe-prone, small-town mayor and Catholic conservative. Dominated by social and economic liberals but encompassing parties as disparate as the social-democratic Socialist party on the one hand, and the until-recently fascist Jobbik party, which has put aside its black uniforms for a centre-right rebranding, on the other, the opposition are united in an awkward marriage of convenience by one goal only: to depose Orbán. And to do so, their campaign has settled on an unexpected lightning rod issue: the war in Ukraine.

There are few things that can focus a voter’s attention more than a bloody war in a neighbouring country, and Orbán’s long-standing policy of amicable relations with Putin’s Russia makes the issue more pointed here than anywhere else in Europe. At an opposition hustings event this week in Budapest’s Széll Kálmán square — until 2011 Moscow Square — where a crowd of perhaps 200 people had gathered to hear the opposition leaders’ speeches, I asked the neatly-suited, smoothly Atlanticist Márki-Zay how the Ukraine war was feeding into his election campaign.

“Many people just woke up that Orbán’s best friend is a war criminal who’s killing kids, who’s shooting at nuclear power plants,” Márki-Zay told me. “So of course, now Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine and Orbán is responsible for supporting Putin. Orbán has been a traitor of Europe, has been a traitor of Nato and of course, a traitor of Hungary for 12 years.”

Hungary’s opposition has focused on attacking Orbán for his non-interventionist stance in the Ukraine war. While the Fidesz government has agreed to EU sanctions against Russia and sends humanitarian aid to Ukraine, as well as accepting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, it refuses to deliver Ukraine weapons or to allow Hungary to be used as a transit point for weapons deliveries from other Nato countries. In return, Fidesz has accused the opposition of being reckless interventionists, eager to embroil Hungarians in a war whose outcome is uncertain, and to torpedo Hungarian living standards by shutting the country off from its energy supplier Russia.

“Unfortunately Orbán controls 90% of the media environment in Hungary,” Márki-Zay asserted, “so he is now attacking the opposition [saying] that we would send untrained kids to die in Ukraine in this war.” So would a Márki-Zay government intervene in Ukraine, I asked? “I will always support Nato’s position because we have to be a loyal member of Nato. We can only rely on defending Hungary with Nato troops in Hungary, which Orbán first denied and then allowed. And then he was also attacking us with allowing arms shipments to Ukraine and [then] Orbán decreed that they can cross Hungary,” he replied. “[He is] a pathetic liar, of course, Orbán, who’s always saying one thing today and changing his mind tomorrow. He was a communist, a liberal, a conservative — and now he’s building a fascist Putinist faction in the European Parliament.”

More from this author

Europe must prepare for war

By Aris Roussinos

Also at the event was Anna Júlia Donáth, a young MEP and leader of the liberal Momentum party, which failed to reach the 5% threshold for representation in Hungary’s last parliamentary election. A scion of a liberal political dynasty, former project manager for an NGO dealing with migrant rights, and member of an EU parliament committee concerned with LGBT issues, Donáth is a Fidesz opponent straight from central casting. I asked her how the Ukraine question was playing in the election campaign.

“It’s about the war of narratives,” she replied, “Orbán builds up a new narrative, which, of course, for us is like a 180-degree change from what he said 24 hours before. But in his communication machine, it works. Yes, indeed, right now, he is a peacemaker. Three weeks ago, he was the most pro-Putin person in Europe.”

Struggling to get the opposition’s message across in the election campaign, Donáth was not sanguine about her coalition’s chances. “Sometimes we really feel like we are fighting against a machine which is impossible to win against,” she told me. “Because they have everything, they don’t just use their own budget. They’re using the state budget for campaigning; this is ridiculous. You can’t win against them.” 

“Two thirds of the country,” she claimed, “are only receiving propaganda media, so they only get a reality built up by the government. And in that reality, they are the best and we are monsters. I can’t blame people for that. They don’t even want to ask questions anymore, because… the system has polarised society on such a level that we cannot even start talking to each other right now.” 

The pre-election polls which a month ago were uncomfortably tight for the government now show Orbán pulling away by a comfortable margin. When I was last in Hungary during the first days of the Ukraine war, government officials were privately downbeat about their prospect of victory, cautioning against over-confident assumptions of success. Four weeks of campaigning later, they are feeling far more positive. 

In an interview at the Scruton cafe at Budapest’s Matthias Corvinus Collegium — part of the flourishing ecosystem of elite conservative institutions created by Fidesz — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor Balász Orbán told me that the coming election was Hungary’s “most important ever since the transition period [from communism]” because “it’s about deciding between peace and war. It’s about deciding between peaceful cooperation or coexistence and ideological warfare… I think that the result will be obvious on Sunday, and then this whole turbulent period of time will go away.”

Do most Hungarians support the government’s anti-interventionist stance on Ukraine, I asked? “Yes, yes, yes,” he replied emphatically. “What I feel when I’m traveling all around the country, is that about the Ukrainian conflict, even those who are undecided voters, or who had some willingness to vote for the opposition, even those voting groups are saying that we support the government and government change is not a real option anymore.” Indeed, he added, “if you want to really understand why [the opposition] aren’t successful for like 10, 12 years, and why they’re going to lose the election, that’s the reason: because they think that everything is part of the political issue where they have to somehow get close and in line with the international mainstream liberal approach, but it goes against the majority of the Hungarians’ opinions, even those who are not in favour of Fidesz.”

More from this author

It’s the war, stupid

By Aris Roussinos

But even if staying out of the war appeals to Hungarian voters, Orbán’s position on Ukraine is isolating the government from its closest allies in the EU, with Poland’s president Andrzej Duda stating that it is “hard for me to understand the approach” of Orbán towards Ukraine, and warning that “this policy will be costly for Hungary, very costly”. Similarly, Czechia’s defence minister Jana Černochová posted on Twitter that “I am very sorry that cheap Russian oil is now more important to Hungarian politicians than Ukrainian blood.” Even a planned meeting this week of V4 foreign ministers in Budapest was cancelled at the last minute by Orbán’s erstwhile Central European allies in protest at the Hungarian government’s stance. 

For Hungary’s beleaguered opposition, the war in Ukraine must have seemed like a dramatic, emotive bolt from the blue that could turn the electoral tide in their favour. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy has even singled out Hungary for criticism in a video address to EU leaders, though this intervention has been criticised in turn by Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó as an unwelcome attempt at “influencing the election results in Hungary.” Walking around Budapest, a liberal city in a conservative country, I saw election posters for Fidesz candidates defaced with the words “PUTIN KILLER”, and on the Buda side of the river, a display of emotionally powerful photographs of the carnage and destruction in Ukraine set up at a busy traffic intersection. 

But for the electorate as a whole, the war seems to have instead prompted a rallying effect around Orbán’s message of stability and security in a newly-dangerous region, with voters apparently heeding his message that a more actively pro-Ukrainian stance would be “getting involved in a war that is not our war, in which we have nothing to gain and everything to lose”. Barring a major upset, Sunday’s polls look set to deliver a historic fourth consecutive term of office for Orbán and the consolidation of Hungary’s fascinating — if controversial — experiment in enshrining conservative cultural and political hegemony. The Orbán model may not, as liberals fear and some conservatives dream, be applicable outside of Hungary’s own unique historic and political context, but it seems for now firmly secure in the heart of Europe.

At dusk on Hungary’s Beregsurány border crossing with western Ukraine, a small, but constant flow of displaced people was making its way across the border. They were mostly women, children and old men: Ukraine has reportedly banned men of fighting age from leaving the country.

Wheeling their luggage, wrapped up against the biting wind, ethnic Hungarians and Hungarian-speaking Roma from Ukraine’s Zakarpattia region waited to be picked up by family members on the Hungarian side of the border, and ethnic Ukrainians from deeper inside the country were asking for lifts to Budapest. 

The Hungarian government has waived visa requirements for Ukrainians fleeing the war, and has indicated it is willing to accept up to 600,000 refugees. But one young couple from Kyiv I spoke to, Olena and Yura, were going the other way. Newly-engaged, they were returning to Ukraine to reassure Olena’s mother in Lviv, after her 50-year-old father had taken up arms with a local defence militia. “My mother was crying,” Olena told me chirpily. “But my father said, ’Who’s going to do it if not us?’”

Four days into the invasion, the Ukrainian armed forces and local volunteers are fighting bravely, defending the capital Kyiv against early Russian infiltration efforts and putting up a dogged defence against Russian pushes from the northeast towards the city of Kharkiv and from the separatist provinces of the Donbas region in the east. But for all the well-meaning excitement on social media from Ukraine’s Western supporters, stoked by video evidence of Ukrainian tactical victories, the strategic odds remain stacked in Russia’s favour.

The air and missile strikes on Ukraine’s defences have, until now, been far below Russia’s potential capabilities, probably indicating that Putin is eager to minimise the destruction and civilian casualties to make a conquered Ukraine easier to dominate, and to limit international condemnation. The Russian push on Kyiv has so far consisted of a high-risk assault by lightly-armed airborne infantry, which established a staging ground for probing movements by elite reconnaissance forces. The Ukrainian defenders have been able to contain their attempted sorties into central Kyiv, inflicting heavy casualties. 

More from this author

Putin's next move

By Aris Roussinos

But the main Russian ground forces have reached the capital in two armoured thrusts from the north, massing either side of the river Dnieper, with another thrust closing in on the capital from the northeast. Another armoured push is spreading out northward and along the Black Sea coast from the Crimean peninsula, rapidly gaining ground and so far meeting limited resistance.

Perhaps the intention is to encircle the bulk of the Ukrainian army in the east: if there was any Russian ambition to shatter Ukrainian morale in the war’s opening hours, that gambit has failed. Yet Russia has, at the time of writing, deployed less than half of its forces assembled at Ukraine’s borders. It is still too early to make confident pronouncements about the war’s final outcome: we are still in its opening phase, and the real battle for Kyiv has not yet begun.

Viewed from neighbouring Hungary, the Russian invasion has come as a terrible shock to a Fidesz government that has long aimed to balance Nato and EU commitments with a pragmatic working relationship with Putin’s Russia. Only a few weeks ago, in his state of the nation address, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that “we are members of Nato and the European Union, and at the same time we have balanced political and economic relations with Russia. The Hungarian example proves that this is possible,” adding that he was “convinced that without economic cooperation with Russia, Europe will remain weak and anaemic”. 

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upset this delicate calculus. In interviews with UnHerd over the past week, senior Hungarian officials emphasised their horror and condemnation of Putin’s actions, and their commitment to both Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Nato’s defence of Central Europe — while still observing that Hungary has long criticised what they view as the repression of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority. Unlike other Central European nations, Hungary will not actively support Ukraine with weapons supplies or demand an American military presence, but now supports sanctions against Russia. In unequivocal language the Hungarian president János Áder has stated that Hungary condemns “the aggression decided and then carried out by the Putin regime” and that it sees “the Russian attack as a serious violation and a mockery of Moscow’s international obligations”.

Speaking to UnHerd, Orbán’s communications advisor, Zoltan Kovacs, observed that “in the Ukraine, we have an immediate interest because of the 150,000 ethnic Hungarians living across the borders”. Dismissing early claims that Hungary would not accept displaced persons from Ukraine, he emphasised that “we are practically preparing ourselves for all possible scenarios, like the influx of large numbers of refugees, so we’ve started to make preparations for that. And the Hungarian military is preparing for all kinds of scenarios.”

Suggested reading

Kyiv will rise again

By Dominic Sandbrook

Considering the geopolitical implications, Viktor Orbán’s Political Director and strategic advisor, Balasz Orbán (no relation), told me that this is a turning point for Europe as well as Hungary. “We realise that justice and wonderful ideas are not enough. You can be on the good side of history, but still lose wars and lose geopolitical positions: you need to have power,” he said. “Because right now, the problem is that Europe is not capable of defending herself. And we are dependent on the big guys, the United States on one side and Russia on the other side, and they are the decision makers, if we take it honestly. Without a military, Europe is just a voice accepting statements. It’s just nothing.”

When I asked him if Hungary was moving towards Macron’s concept of strategic autonomy, which would enable Europe to defend itself from threats like Russia, Balasz Orbán answered without hesitation: “Exactly. It’s very important,” he told me. “Emmanuel Macron is a very smart politician and what he is talking about, it’s obviously a French context, but we can deal with that. We have the same idea with a Central European context.” 

Certainly, the war in Ukraine has helped Macron make his case for strategic autonomy, with the French president declaring that the Russian invasion “has shown again that we have to accelerate the sovereignty agenda for Europe. Tragic times are back. War is back on our soil. If there was ever any need to prove Europe isn’t just a market for consumers but is a power,” that time is now.

The invasion has also helped diminish the moral and political standing of a Germany that long fought to quash any talk of European strategic autonomy, while waving away warnings that disarmament and reliance on Russian energy have left Europe helpless against any future Russian aggression. In an extraordinary admission, the head of the German Army, Lt. General Alfons Mais, bemoaned on LinkedIn that years of neglect have “left the Bundeswehr more or less powerless”, so that “the Bundeswehr, the army that I am privileged to lead, is more or less bare. The options that we can offer the politicians to support the alliance are extremely limited… This does not feel good! I am pissed off!”

Of course, much the same could be said of Britain’s deep military cuts, though our own military and political leaders are markedly less willing to say it. Indeed, excitable enthusiasts for military intervention such as Tobias Ellwood, chair of the Commons Defence Select Committee, have been trying to drum up enthusiasm for a Nato No-Fly Zone in Ukraine, a euphemism for shooting down Russian aircraft entering Ukrainian territory.

Suggested reading

Putin's spiritual destiny

By Giles Fraser

Not to be outdone, David Davis MP has pushed the idea of providing close air support for Ukrainian forces against Russian ground troops, an idea far beyond the bounds of either British capacity or rational analysis. Shooting down Russian aircraft or bombing Russian tanks means war with Russia, and Nato simply will not go to war with its nuclear rival over Ukraine. These are dangerous times for Britain and for Europe as a whole, and such wild pronouncements do not instil confidence in the capacity of the British political system to manage them sensibly. 

For all of Europe, from Hungary to Britain, the war in Ukraine must come as a wake-up call. The good times are over, and a return to conflict between the great powers on our home continent is now more likely than it has been in a generation. For a small country like Hungary, watching the prospect of a resurgent Russia creeping its way towards its borders with alarm, the danger is clearly apparent. In his state of the nation address, Orbán observed: “whether a Nato member or not, no ally in the world will take our place in defending our homeland. Alongside us, with us, they might; but certainly not instead of us. If we are not strong enough, Hungary cannot be safe. Clint Eastwood taught us this: if there is a gun nearby, it is best if we are holding it.” 

For all the conflict between Brussels and Budapest, it is time for European officials to take this warning to heart. Europe needs to rearm, and to be ready to defend itself alone if necessary. The announcement on Sunday afternoon by Germany’s new Chancellor Olaf Scholz that Germany will double its defence spending is a welcome relief, and hopefully a turning point in European security policy.

The Russian invasion has done much to reinvigorate the Atlantic alliance, but it has also exposed Europe’s utter dependence on US arms at a time when America’s greatest strategic threat is in the Pacific. America cannot, and will not, fight a two-front war in Europe and the Far East: a serious threat to American hegemony in the Pacific will force Europe to shoulder much of the burden for its own defence as Washington’s attention and industrial might focuses on China.

All the earlier appeals to the rules-based order by EU officials have been exposed as dangerously empty rhetoric: in a world of hard power, it is only those capable of imposing order that get to write the rules.

For decades, the EU has been providing heroic floods of funding for peculators, perhaps the greatest such flows the world has seen. From 2014 to 2020, the bloc spent €960 billion, and to 2027 has plans for €1,820 billion more. Of these scarcely fathomable sums, around two-thirds goes on various forms of regional and industrial support.

Estimates in the relatively well-policed UK suggest you can expect anything from 2% to 10% of project money to be syphoned off via fraud, collusion, or bribery. But Brussels has long been reluctant to exert central control over its cascades of cash. Only this year has it established a European Public Prosecutor’s Office to pursue malfeasance: despite a tiny budget, in its first few months EPPO has accumulated more than 300 cases. Yet the value encompassed, €4.5 billion, is microscopic compared to the scale of the problem.

This is largely a result of the lack of central oversight, which means you can’t disaggregate skewed spending from theft. You’ll never tally which eye-watering sums have been misallocated, misappropriated, or simply stolen. The best you can do is survey the mechanisms that foment intellectual corruption, and can lead to all the criminal ills.

Take one of its biggest programmes: agriculture, fisheries, and environmental good works, which account for €774 billion of the 2014-27 totals. Leave aside, if you can, the “small scale” rural defraudations over many decades, which by now must total many billions. It’s the essence of the EU’s rural policy that’s obscene, for it’s built on tariffs around food that are passed onto the consumer. Development economists will tell you that, even as latterly reformed, this costs Europe’s consumers over €20 billion a year. This number is a good surrogate for the income denied annually to the poor farmers in the global South who would love to feed the EU’s people.

Suggested reading

Angela Merkel was no saint

By Maurice Frank

Astronomical sums are also spent on space, where the EU works with outfits such as the European Space Agency. The numbers here are deliberately obscured, but in recent years, upwards of €36 billion has been budgeted. The EU’s space policy amounts to a me-first system of outdoor relief for a charmed circle of giant French-controlled firms, with others involved for cosmetic decoration. Step forward Arianespace, run by Airbus (France-Germany-Spain) and Safran (France). Offshoots of Leonardo (Italy’s state-run defence champion) and Thales (France) are also prominent. The Union’s space trajectories reached their apogee with the Galileo scheme to send GPS satellites whizzing above the earth. As far as the numbers tell you, this wheeze has so far absorbed over €10 billion. The bizarre rationale was to rival the perfectly adequate American system, which reserves its tightest accuracy for military use by the US and its allies. Was the EU expecting America to invade? In a further moment of madness, the Chinese were asked to join, though they were later disinvited. After Brexit, Britain was scandalously expelled, though non-EU members Israel, Norway and Switzerland are kept in.

Also among the big boondoggles are central allocations to R&D under programmes dubbed Horizon. From 2014 to 2027 they will total €176 billion. Here, too, the beneficiaries are mainly an established club of “Old EU” companies in France and Germany, plus selected chums in academia. (Britain was a major taker until it left.) The in-built bias was underscored during the latest seven-year spending round, when the newish 11 members in Central and Eastern Europe, despite having a fifth of the EU’s population, were vouchsafed a mere 5% of the largesse available. Meanwhile, famous EU states such as Israel and Switzerland received much more. And has anyone monitored the real-world sales and profits resulting from all that spending? What do you think?

Ensconced in Luxembourg is the European Investment Bank. This is a huge machine for channelling financial subsidies to the Union‘s banks and projects. The EIB does this by borrowing ultra-cheaply on the back of guarantees from the member states. As of the middle of this year the EIB had €179 billion out to financial institutions and €342 billion to other borrowers. The EIB is forever trying to reconcile bankerly professionalism with massive political pressures. It often fails. It’s especially lax in its subsidies to financial institutions, as the modus operandi is to offer overall funding lines that the entities in question use to on-lend at will. Full disclosure: I spent some time as a Head of Division at the EIB, and saw the political machinations first-hand.

Many peculative possibilities come from the plethora of mainstream EU schemes for regional and industrial spending. Even when the goal is a worthy hospital, road, railway or factory, abusive opportunities abound. Start with the local or central governmental satrapies which sponsor many of the projects. They have an inherent tendency to over-specify (the EU’s grants are “free”, after all) and to mismanage the implementation. Greedy advisers and construction firms egg them on. Contractual fiddles can cut links between performance and payment. Central governments (which provide counterpart financing) and EU bureaucrats are complicit, as it’s in everyone’s interest to get the money out of the door. As we’ve seen, when it’s embroiled, the EIB is often swayed by the politicians too.

Suggested reading

Ireland's Brexit blackmail

By John Lloyd

Yes, public tenders are stipulated by the EU for most procurement: there are €1,900 billion-worth each year. But it’s easy to fiddle the specifications and the criteria for selection. In particular, Italy, Austria, Spain, Greece, and Portugal have long had poor reputations with their public tenders. In recent years, Hungary, Cyprus, Romania, and Bulgaria have come galloping up the track, and are poised to overtake. Hungary has already won some sort of prize, as PM Viktor Orbán notoriously rewards his chums via hand-steered EU contracts; the country is to receive €22 billion in regional funds to from 2021 to 2027, and more in post-Covid aid.

For decades, the resultant cases of waste and theft have been scattered across Europe. Among the thousands of suspect schemes, notable clumps are in southern Italy, Spain, and in Germany’s once new Länder. A classic of over-investment is Spain’s high-speed rail network. It has absorbed €56 billion over the past 35 years, €14 billion from the Union, but remains chronically underused. One external report put the inappropriate allocation of public funds (to 2016) at €26 billion. The euphemistic plea was voiced for “Transparency in hidden agendas behind public works”. Compared with such herculean Hispanic achievements, the case of Berlin’s new airport seems modest. Supported by the EIB, its cost has exploded from €2.8 billion to €10.3 billion or more. Finally open after 14 years, it’s still not fully functional.

The cases keep coming. Just the other day, the Financial Times revealed to a shocked German railways and to bemused German public prosecutors that the prized scheme for rebuilding the central Stuttgart station, part-funded by Brussels, was allegedly riddled with peculative ills. The original cost, €2.5 billion, has more than tripled to €8.2 billion (and counting). The FT suggested that much of the inflation was due to glaring mismanagement and corruption, one source putting the scale of the peculation so far at €600 million.

Suggested reading

Europe's war on sex

By Debbie Hayton

Until EPPO came along the Union’s only policeman was the notoriously feeble control body OLAF, which was supposed to work with another weak entity, the European Court of Auditors. They might as well not have bothered: last year, OLAF itself recommended recoveries of a paltry €293 million. However glaring the case, OLAF was duty-bound to pass it to the given country’s justice system. And all too frequently, local jurisprudence has proved ineffective. This is down to incompetence (Germany) or design (the newish East have underinvested in their legal systems, in many countries prosecutors and courts have been suborned).

From now, EPPO will have criminal law powers while OLAF will concentrate on administrative ills. But don’t expect them to do more than dent the peculation that travels along with the Brussels money juggernaut. They are a mere few hundred-strong. And the vested interests are simply too great, the huge sums of money too tempting. When, in the 19th century, Lord Acton famously said that power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely, peculation was still in common use. In today’s EU, a variant of this still holds true: lack of control over spending corrupts, absolute lack of control can cause absolute corruption.

Against logic and justice, the EU’s 340 million western rich suck in wealth from the 103 million eastern poor. The elites in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) rarely rock the boat as they hate to admit the facts; many have been co-opted or cowed. But now and then resentment bubbles up. “We’re not a colony, we’re not a second-class member”, Slovenia’s premier growled at the European Commission last year. Clotilde Armand, a Frenchwoman who is a mayor in Bucharest, has also been clear that “much of the wealth in Europe flows from the poorer countries to the richer ones”.

In the West, those in the know are not just quiet, they egg on the bien-pensants who are convinced that the Old EU keeps the East afloat. “See those pesky Poles, Czechs and Hungarians,” your typical Eurocrat will whine. “They’re lurching away from liberalism, even as their hot paws reach out for our largesse!” This kind of thinking is doubly skewed. The East’s purported nastiness merely matches supposed Western sins (compare Hungary on gender with Denmark on its Muslims, say). It’s the colonial status of CEE that really splits the EU, not any over-hyped cultural cleft.

To see what’s going on, start with the deal struck when the eleven joined in or after 2004. CEE was weak after communism but was forced to throw open its borders prematurely. Capital from the Old EU was to compensate. But as so often in history, the biggest impact was unforeseen. As frontiers fell, there was a human haemorrhage in CEE as the West hoovered in ten million of its workers. Up to a third had higher education; they’ve driven much of the West’s growth.

Suggested reading

How the EU bungled Brexit

By Helen Thompson

In Brussels, however, it is taboo to talk of this epochal shift of wealth. No one dares claim the credit for capturing those diligent white migrants, Christian in culture and capable of quick assimilation. Imagine the howls of “ray-cist!” if they did.

In the East, meanwhile, the elites are shamed to silence, for they’re complicit in a population collapse of wartime scale. Croatia has lost almost a quarter of its people (an existential meltdown, one premier dared to moan). Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic three of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia have seen a fifth of workers go. Poland has lost over a tenth.

The social devastation has been horrendous. Hospitals have been hollowed out. Of the EU’s top ten countries for excess Covid mortality, eight are in CEE. You can be sure that the dearth of doctors helped cause the 315,000 extra deaths tallied up to June. Overall, the demographic disaster has probably put paid to hopes of ever catching up. Beata Javorcik, Oxford professor and chief economist at the region’s development bank EBRD, judges that “Eastern Europe could grow old before it gets rich”.

The other unexpected consequence was a radical recasting of CEE’s business landscape. This too is a taboo topic in Berlin, and points West. Cash-rich offshore companies swooped in and bought the leading firms at knock-down prices. They rescued some bankrupt red behemoths (think VW with Skoda in the Czech Republic, Renault with Dacia in Romania). But it went much too far; with new implantations which followed, most key sectors in industry and services are now dominated from abroad.

In Poland, foreigners own a half of the manufacturing and retailing industries, mainly in the form of larger firms. Non-locals account for half of Czech and Polish industrial exports. In Hungary, it’s four-fifths. This is unprecedented in countries with their competence. After all, the Czechs remember that in 1938 they were as prosperous as Switzerland and Sweden; the Poles and Hungarians recall that they were ahead of Spain before the latter’s civil war.

Unpick the statistical thicket, and the balance is bittersweet. Take the lost workers. The rich-country club OECD says that in educating them CEE donated a mind-boggling €400 billion or more. This far exceeds anything Brussels has sent. (Poland spent €160 billion to educate the 2.6 million who’ve gone, so far it has received €138 billion.)

Suggested reading

The fate of the 'Anywhere' people

By Robert Tombs

The boost to western GDP delivered by CEE’s migrants is more massive still. The Old EU benefitted by over €1,000 billion in just the three pre-Covid years, official figures state. Then there’s the corporate investment. It’s now mature, so foreign profits and dividends sent home from CEE often exceed annual transfers from Brussels. And in any case, much EU money is spent on infrastructure, where western firms recoup up to four-fifths of the flows.

On the plus side, the region is now a supply chain Powerhaus (so the German financial paper Handelsblatt calls it). The Old EU syphons out components and embeds them in exports to China and elsewhere. Poland outranks France, Italy and Spain as supplier to Germany. CEE is also the Old EU’s key, and wholly captive, market.

Its German hegemon depends on it. In 2020 Berlin exported €179 billion-worth to the eleven, compared to €103 billion to the US, €96 billion to China and a measly €23 billion to Russia.

The region’s economies have duly grown, but figures for real GDP per capita yield bitter reminders of the challenge still ahead. Poland generates only around one-half of the EU’s average, the Czech Republic two-thirds. Of course, this occludes the distance to the advanced Northwest. Your average Pole produces 26% of what a Dane does, your Czech, around one-third. Bulgaria generates a mere 14% and Romania 18% of Denmark’s output per head.

Will CEE ever catch up? The odds aren’t promising. Demography and China’s galloping self-sufficiency are brakes enough, but the colonial system could be the clincher. To enjoy advanced-country wealth you must match the productivity. Here CEE desperately needs to improve its pathetic innovation, but dominion status now is a major block.

In a branch economy non-local firms sit atop the best value chains. Foreigners skim the largest returns and send the profits back. Nothing guarantees they’ll reinvest. They do most development at home, and nothing forces them to share. The IMF confirms that increasingly they force their CEE offshoots to buy high-value inputs from outside. And foreign-owned firms are barred from classic routes to growth, such as building brands or buying out the competition.

So CEE depends on its native firms. They tend to be small and are hard pushed to innovate. They battle with EU bureaucracy and fight a plethora of extra ploys. Certification games can add a fifth to export costs (Northern Ireland ring a bell?). Public tender rules prevent you from favouring your own. You want your government to develop new sectors?  State aid rules are draconian. In one of those rare public outbursts Poland’s Premier Mateusz Morawiecki lamented: “The technology-rich EU sells us their VWs and Renaults. But when our truck drivers enter their markets, they go for protection”.

Suggested reading

Is the EU about to crumble?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Dense webs of incumbents rig the rules. “In Brussels they feign surprise when no CEE companies turn up to plan standards,” a Czech official in charge of high-tech policy told me. “It’s pure hypocrisy. Our firms are too small, they aren’t in the old boy networks. Time and again the regulatory game’s been fixed before we get there, stitched up by the usual suspects”.

Lacking big industrial groups, the East is locked out of giant high-tech projects on which billions are lavished. The West hogs spending on space, defence and research and development (€120 billion is earmarked for these to 2027). Though it has over a fifth of the EU’s population, scandalously CEE received a mere one-twentieth of the €65 billion disbursed for R&D in 2014-20. (Compounding the insult, non-members Israel, Norway and Switzerland cashed in more.)

Things will get worse as the EU devotes more to chips, champions and other chunky goals which favour established players. Expect Old EU firms to grab most of the €56 billion in Covid recovery grants allocated to CEE (only 13% of the total, discrimination again). Then there’s the absurd net zero carbon target. The region can’t afford it. Nevertheless, cheap energy sources will be banned. CEE’s competitiveness will be squashed, and the region’s taxpayers will be made to subsidise western producers of green kit such as wind turbines and their ilk.

There’s little sign, then, that native firms can achieve global scale and productivity en masse. Meanwhile, foreigners will retain every incentive to milk their implantations and withhold the best technology. So CEE faces a “middle income trap”. It’ll be stuck behind for good, even as the Old EU’s anachronistic economies themselves battle to keep up with the US and Asia.

Of course, within the bloc the economic crevasse will still count. Too wide, and there’ll be a massive new mezzogiorno, festering with resentment, depopulating fast and prone to implode at any point. To minimise this threat Brussels must urgently cut a New Deal for its inland empire. It should free up its rules and help the region’s businesses to expand.

For their part, politicians in CEE should call out the colonialism and extract freedom for their firms. If there’s no radical change, the Old EU had better brace for the strange populisms and other ills that a chronically two-tier Europe would unleash.

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.

Suggested reading

Europe's deplorables have outwitted Brussels

By Wessie du Toit

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.

Suggested reading

How Viktor Orbán plays his enemies

By Alexander Faludy

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.

Suggested reading

America has become its own worst enemy

By Ed West

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.

Orbán’s love of football is unfeigned. He played for the youth team of Videoton, a club based in Székesfehérvár about 20 miles south-west of his home village of Felcsút, who reached the Uefa Cup final in 1985. His first foreign trip as prime minister was to the World Cup final in 1998 and he has been a regular at major finals ever since. It’s said that there are days when he watches as many as six matches — he played the game, he loves the game, and he dreams of returning Hungary to the glories of the early 50s, when it could realistically claim to be the greatest football team in the world.

The end for Hungary as a great football nation came with the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Uprising. Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor, three key members of the great side that had taken Olympic gold in 1952, reached the World Cup final in 1954 and twice hammered England, defected and moved to Spain. The Under-21 squad, who had been in Geneva when Soviet tanks rolled through Budapest, didn’t go home. And it turned out that the brilliance of the Aranycsapat — the Golden Team — had disguised an underlying mounting crisis within the Hungarian game.

Hungarian football had boomed in the years after the First World War, the vacant lots of the rapidly expanding capital proving fertile ground for a lingering British cultural influence and the coffee-house intellectuals who became fascinated by football. During the decades that followed, economic and political turmoil led to a great diaspora of players and coaches, who had a profound influence on the development of the game, in Italy particularly, but also in Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, Yugoslavia, France, the Netherlands and South America. Yet the generation of talent, largely through two clubs, MTK and Ferencváros, never stopped. Hungary reached the World Cup final in 1938, and the final of the 1939 Mitropa Cup (a forerunner of the European Cup for sides from central Europe) was contested by two Hungarian sides.

Although neither club was at all exclusive, MTK were seen as the side of the assimilated Jewish middle class and Ferencváros of a nationalistic, often ethnically German, working class. MTK were forcibly disbanded by the Fascist government in March 1942 and although they were reconstituted after the war, there had been not just a catastrophic loss of life but also the destruction of vital links with the past.  The Communist government that took power in 1947 was suspicious of Ferencváros and its Right-wing leanings, and so when football was nationalised in 1949 it was given to the food-workers union rather than one of the bigger state organisations such as the army (Honvéd) or the secret police (MTK), a deliberate attempt to limit their resources and influence. Again, the result was to undermine the foundations of Hungarian football’s excellence. After the defections of 1956, there was no means of replacing what had been lost.

The memory of how good things had been, though, remained — and proved inhibitive. The side that reached the quarter-final of the 1966 World Cup always suffered by comparison with the Aranycsapat. The 1978 World Cup side suffered by comparison with them, and the 1986 side was in turn seen as being not as good as the 1978 generation. After that the returns diminished to such a point that Hungary stopped even qualifying for tournaments.

In October 2006, I interviewed György Kárpáti, who had played in the notorious “Blood in the Water” water polo match at the Melbourne Olympics, when Hungary beat the USSR 4-0 a month after the Uprising had been crushed. The day before, he’d paid what he knew was likely to be his final visit to Puskás, who was by then in the grip of dementia. “At least he doesn’t understand we’ve just lost to Malta,” Kárpáti said. Hungarian football was at a new low.

A week later, Orbán spoke at a march to mark the 50^th anniversary of the start of the Uprising. He had come to prominence in 1989 with a brave and incendiary speech calling for the Soviets to withdraw, and would go on to be elected prime minister in 1998 before being defeated by a Socialist-Free Democrat coalition in 2002. Scandal within the government and the anniversary of the Urpising presented him with an opportunity; the march developed into an anti-government protest and then rioting, during which plastic bullets were fired.

More from this author

Maradona, the Argentinian Messiah

By Jonathan Wilson

Football went hand-in-hand with politics for Orbán, and on 1 April 2007, less than six months after Puskás’s death and on the 80^th anniversary of his birth, he co-founded the Puskás Academy, a football club in Felcsút.

Orbán was re-elected three years later and, claiming a democratic mandate, set about reforming the constitution on more authoritarian lines. As the control of Fidész, his increasingly Right-wing party, tightened, so the Academy grew. In 2014, construction was completed on the Pancho Arena in Felcsút, an extraordinary 3,800-capacity stadium with copper domes and a wooden vaulted roof, for a town with an official population of 1,800. “Pancho” was a nickname for Puskás, a man who never set foot in the village. It is more than a football venue, though; the stadium has become a vital networking site, a place where politicians and businessmen know they can find the prime minister, who owns the dacha next door.

In 2013, the Academy was promoted to the top flight for the first time, and although they were relegated in 2016, they came straight back up the following season. In 2020, the club finished third. Last season they were second. Whether their sudden rise is a sign of smart investment and excellent coaching, or of the weakness of the rest of the Hungarian league depends who you ask — or it could be that there is something more sinister going on. Towards the end of the 2019-20 season, the Mezőkövesd coach Attila Kuttor was fined €5,000 for claiming referees were under pressure to help the Academy qualify for the Europa League. (They did qualify, but lost 3-0 to the Swedish side Hammarby in the first qualifying round).

Football is a vital tool for Orbán, and 11 of the 12 top-flight clubs in Hungary are effectively Fidész-controlled. At least 25 major new stadiums have been built in Hungary over the past decade, often by construction firms with links to the Prime Minister, and all taking advantage of the country’s TAO scheme, which gave tax breaks to companies who donated to sports clubs. Might those funds have been more usefully directed elsewhere? As Hungary’s hospitals have creaked under the strain of the pandemic, it’s been impossible not to wonder.

Progress on the pitch is difficult, and the economics of European football are stacked against Hungary. Talented young players gravitate naturally to the wealthier leagues of Austria and Germany; but slowly, there are signs of progress. When Hungary qualified for Euro 2016, it was their first appearance at a major tournament for 30 years. When they then beat Austria and three times held the lead against Portugal before drawing to reach the knockouts, it felt vaguely miraculous. Then reality dawned with a 4-0 defeat to Belgium.

Still, the sense of inevitable decline is over. In part that’s down to a belated acceptance that the achievements of the early 50s are unattainable now, but it’s also because of the Orbán-inspired investment. The forward Roland Sallai, who is likely to start against Portugal, is at Freiburg now, but he came through the Puskás Academy. And, at last, Hungary have a young player of truly exceptional potential, their first for perhaps four decades: the 20-year-old midfielder Dominik Szoboszlai who, like Orbán, was a youth at Videoton. He joined RB Leipzig from Red Bull Salzburg in January but hasn’t played since because of injury and will miss the tournament.

Suggested reading

Football and the decline of Englishness

By Dominic Sandbrook

With on-field success a distant prospect, Hungary has started to promote itself as the ideal host, staging judo, wresting and aquatics world championships in recent years. A possible Olympic bid lurks, unconvincingly, in the background. Last year, Budapest stepped in to stage the Uefa Super Cup when the pandemic forced a rejig of the schedule. That was the first major game held at the Puskás Arena, built on the site of the old Communist Népstadion in central Budapest. In February and March, both legs of the Champions League last-16 ties between Manchester City and Borussia Mönchengladbach and Liverpool and RB Leipzig were held there to circumvent Covid restrictions.

Of course, Hungary is not the ideal host for everybody. Orbán condemned Ireland’s players for taking the knee before a friendly in Budapest last Tuesday, while the commentator János Hrutka was sacked by the Orbán-affiliated Spíler TV after he supported the national goalkeeper Péter Gulácsi for criticising a law that prevents unmarried or same-sex couples adopting children. Football is an arena for Orbán to appeal to his populist nationalist base.

The Arena was always going to be built for the Euros, and for it to have staged games behind closed doors would have seemed a dreadful anti-climax. Which is why the decision to allow maximum capacity has been greeted with some scepticism — if not from the Fidész-controlled Hungarian media.

Hungary’s figures have improved recently, with just eight deaths and 199 new cases announced on Friday, which allowed Orbán to announce a widescale lifting of restrictions at the end of May as a total of 5 million vaccinations was reached. But Hungary has suffered dreadfully from a widespread complacency about the second wave: its ratio of 3,060 deaths per million population is better only than Peru. By way of comparison, the UK lies 15th in that list, with 1,909 deaths/million.

Suggested reading

Europe's deplorables have outwitted Brussels

By Wessie du Toit

There are those who wonder how 60,000 can be allowed into a football stadium while public protests are still limited at 500: the demonstration that prompted Orbán to make a U-turn last week, by offering a referendum on whether Budapest should host a campus of Shanghai’s Fudan University, instead involved multiple small protests converging outside the parliament.

Polls suggest Orbán could face a serious challenge from a united opposition in next year’s elections, which is another reason the show must go on. Staging this tournament is part of the legacy he has envisaged. Drawn in an extremely difficult group with France and Germany as well as Portugal, progress is very unlikely. Even taking a point would be an achievement.

But a full stadium alone may be enough. Orbán has not returned Hungarian football to the status of seven decades ago — who could? — but he has brought about improvement and he is bringing the biggest circuses to town. Whether that justifies deflecting spending from more obviously worthy causes is debatable, but few in the Ferenc Puskás Arena will be worrying about that if Hungary upset Portugal this evening — or frankly, even if they don’t.

For speed and scale the deportations went unmatched: 424,000 people were despatched by train in just 52 days, from 14 May to 9 July. In this fleeting window Hungarian Jews became the single largest group gassed at Auschwitz. The crematoria couldn’t cope with such “over-supply”, and Commandant Rudolf Höß ordered special fire pits dug — filling the camp with noxious smoke. According to Primo Levi, “there were weeks when only Hungarian was heard in Auschwitz”.

Physical annihilation was undergirded by Eichmann’s elaborate psychological strategy. Sophisticated Budapest Jews who might escape or resist were pacified by newspaper reports that only “ost Juden” from Hungary’s nether regions were being removed as “undesirables”. Many only saw through the lie, if at all, when deportations reached Budapest’s outer suburbs in early July — just before Admiral Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s Head of State, halted them under diplomatic pressure from the Western Allies and neutrals.

Throughout the deportations, and across Hungary’s length, Eichmann deluged Jews with ever more complex regulations covering the minutiae of daily life. These instilled a false sense of permanence which inhibited hiding or escape: “why would the authorities go to all this trouble if they were just going to get rid of us?”

Even as deportations rolled on, Eichmann conducted elaborate negotiations for fanciful “rescue schemes” including, but not limited to, the infamous “Blood for Trucks” project involving Rudolf Kastner — the proposed barter of one million Jewish lives for 10,000 Western motor vehicles for use on the Eastern front against the USSR. The aim, Eichmann later acknowledged, was not just to split Western powers from the Soviets, but also to distract Hungary’s Jewish leaders from counter-organising: keeping minds busy and hopes alive.

All the while Eichmann treated Jewish leaders in Budapest to flashes of menace.  One day he promised them a return to normality “after the war”, the next he would snarl “Do you know who I am? I am a bloodhound!” With studied cruelty Eichmann arranged the ghettoisation of Hungary’s Jews to begin on Sunday, 16 April: the first day of Passover, 1944.

Eichmann did many things in Hungary; the one thing he did not do was simply “obey orders” — indeed over time he defied them with gathering frequency. That autumn as inevitable defeat became ever more apparent Eichmann, helped by local enthusiasts, intensified his efforts, instigating newly inventive means of eliminating Jews in Hungary and the Balkans through “death marches” and localised killing sprees. In doing so, Eichmann subverted instructions from Himmler who ordered cessation as part of a delusional plan to negotiate with the allies.

This “Eichmann in Budapest” should be recalled while contemplating the later Eichmann in Jerusalem.

More from this author

What did the Habsburgs do for us?

By Alexander Faludy

By 11 May 1960 a fugitive Eichmann had lived for a decade in Buenos Aries as “Ricardo Klement”, a rabbit farmer and, later, Mercedes-Benz factory worker, an immigrant hailing from the German minority in Italy’s South Tyrol. That evening Mossad agents, following a tip-off, kidnapped “Klement” from the street outside his house as he walked home from the bus stop after work.

Ten days later a drugged-up Eichmann left Argentina on false papers aboard an El Al flight supporting a diplomatic protocol visit timed to cover his extraction. Fearing a rescue bid by any Nazi sympathiser network while refuelling, the plane exceeded its permitted milage. By touchdown in Tel Aviv it was flying on vapours.

Preparing the prosecution case took almost a year. Eichmann’s trial commenced in Jerusalem’s brand-new Bet Ha’Am theatre on 11 April 1961 before three Israeli judges. Eichmann was accused of fifteen counts of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity. The unusual venue arose from unprecedented international interest: over 400 journalists sought accreditation, and the country had no courtroom large enough.

Controversy raged around the trial. Eichmann’s removal, a triumph of spycraft, was a flagrant breach of Argentina’s sovereignty. Israel’s authority to try crimes occurring outside its borders, enacted by (and against) non-citizens prior to its foundation seemed, at best, dubious. Sixty years on, however, discord persists less in regards to the trial’s legal foundations and more because of how courtroom events were theorised by one writer: Hannah Arendt.

Arendt, a pre-war Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, travelled to Jerusalem to observe the trial for The New Yorker and confront the government that caused her own life’s profound dislocation. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) consolidated her reflective articles for the New Yorker published that year. Its subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil”, became synonymous with the trial: it’s how most people “know” about Eichmann.

Unfortunately, Arendt was utterly, appallingly, wrong about the man she saw, or thought she saw, in Jerusalem.

“Banality” appears just once in Arendt’s main text: in the very last sentence. Reflecting on Eichmann’s clunky, formulaic, farewell prior to execution Arendt opined: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summoning up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, world and thought defying banality of evil.”

The “banal” designation comes at the narrative’s end but condenses observations made in memorable passages throughout including “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect he was a clown”. 

Observing 55-year-old Eichmann’s bureaucratic bearing, ponderous speech, and petty jealousies Arendt deemed his key role in genocide motivated not by fanatical anti-Semitism (his denial of which she accepted), but “thoughtlessness” in its most literal sense. Arendt used the word to connote not “forgetfulness” but absence of autonomous cognition. She took Eichmann’s seeming “inability to speak” as evidencing incapacity to think. Such a person, Arendt reasoned, greets the “Führer principle” joyfully – relieved from the agony of forming opinions.

Arendt’s verdict bled through her book’s cover into mainstream pop psychology. The “banality of evil” became a banality itself thanks to excessive invocation at dinner parties and in newspaper columns. It escaped Arendt that Eichmann, who she dismissed as uneducated, was playing a clever game.

Understanding Eichmann requires less focus on transcripts of the 1961 trial and more on a collection of late 1950’s recordings from informal seminars in Argentina. These were attended by numerous former and aspirant Nazis, and taped by Dutch sympathiser-journalist Willem Sassen, who hoped to write a book rehabilitating the Third Reich by proving the “Jewish propaganda” about the “slaughter of six million” to be a hoax.

Following lengthy conversations with Eichmann, Sassen abandoned the project, having been told precisely what he didn’t want to hear, and from the horse’s mouth — the “propaganda” was true.

More from this author

What would Zionism's founder think of Israel?

By Alexander Faludy

Regrettably these recordings, though known of in 1961, were available to the court only in fragmentary transcripts: the full cache didn’t re-emerge until 1999. If they had been played at trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem would read very differently. (Fortunately, an analytical summary is now available in Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, published in 2011.)

On the penultimate recording in a long series (68 tapes) Eichmann, articulating his role in the Holocaust reflects on his divided nature, says: “I the cautious bureaucrat, that was me, yes indeed. But I would like to expand on the issue of the ‘cautious bureaucrat’ somewhat… This cautious bureaucrat was attended by a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood which is my birth right.”

A terrifying crescendo is reached with these words “No, I have to tell you quite honestly that if out of the 10.3 million [worldwide] Jews… identified we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied… We would have fulfilled our duty to our blood… if we had eliminated the most cunning intellect of all the human intellects”. Contemplating repentance, Eichmann exclaims “I could do it cheaply for the sake of current opinion… [but] for me to deeply regret it, for me to pretend that a Saul has become a Paul… I cannot do that”.

Sassen’s Holocaust denial project ended abruptly soon afterwards.

Suggested reading

Don't call Israel an apartheid state

By Giles Fraser

Before Adolf Eichmann was Ricardo Klement, he was Otto Henninger and before that Adolf-Karl Barth. At war’s end, under yet another name, he was captured by the allies but escaped. We shouldn’t be surprised if one so used to disguising his identity might also conceal his complex nature. Genocidal bent and aptitude for dissimulation was not temporarily sequential: they were interlaced aspects of personality. Long before adopting false names Eichmann mastered self-concealment.

In the 1930s and 40s Eichmann wove elaborate biographic myths to create confusion. He convinced Jewish interlocutors of linguistic gifts he didn’t possess in Yiddish and Hebrew, and forged a story of upbringing amid a notorious “Templar’ German community in Palestine known for anti-Semitic violence. These motifs, fused with deep knowledge of Zionist literature in translation, allowed him to disorientate Jewish interlocutors: simultaneously opening up an unexpected connection and a register of menacing threat.

Yet despite her analytical faults, we shouldn’t condemn Arendt harshly — as some have. Critics like Deborah Lipstadt allege Arendt arrived in Jerusalem with a commission from The New Yorker and a suitcase bursting with ideas she wanted to demonstrate. They attribute to her a drive to render Eichmann a worked example of her thesis in her 1951 masterpiece the Origins of Totalitarianism about the moral disabling of individuals which a supercharged ideology possessed of state-power can achieve.

This is unfair. Arendt didn’t see in Eichmann what she wanted but what he projected. Arendt’s evaluation is consonant with that of many journalists reporting on the trial with no ideological axe to grind. It’s just that her intellectual subtlety was outflanked by Eichmann’s psychological one. As Stangeth points out, Eichmann lead “a highly intelligent person to defeat herself with her own weapon”, the assumption philosopher Arendt carried that “someone speaks and writes only when they want to be understood”.

Conversely Israeli Police Captain Avner Less, who interrogated Eichmann pre-trial, was sharper. “After the end of the first hearing [interview], I was convinced that Eichmann wasn’t telling this story for the first time,” he said afterwards: “I had the feeling this man had been rehearsing it somewhere.”

Eichmann in Jerusalem wore a mask, yet pulling that mask off doesn’t pull the rug from under Arendt’s Totalitarianism. Historical sociologists take the deep conditioning of the Third Reich seriously; contemporary behavioural psychology confirms our susceptibility to manipulation by authority figures. Paradoxically Eichmann’s performance supports Totalitarianism’s thesis: he could ably present himself as one deformed by totalitarianism because he helped to fashion it and deform others.

And so, under questioning, Eichmann presented himself both as one for whom obedience was the supreme virtue and as a mere “messenger” operating an intermediate administrative ‘clearing house’ for orders. Though he couldn’t evade conviction he hoped to slip the noose by passing himself off as a cog in the machine.

Curiously his counsel, Cologne lawyer Robert Servatius, took a contrary approach. Servatius asserted not that superior orders absolved Eichmann from subjective moral responsibility. Rather, he argued, the order’s receipt and discharge objectively subsumed Eichmann’s personal actions into “Acts of the German State” raising the shield of “sovereign immunity” — a more plausible legal argument then than now. The defence concluded on 15 August.

Judgment came on 11 December. Rejecting Servatius’s “Act of State” defence, Eichmann was found guilty on all counts. The defendant’s interpretation of events was likewise dismissed: Hungary proved Eichmann’s distinct moral agency: he was not just “obeying orders”.

Suggested reading

The Left's long history of antisemitism

By James Bloodworth

A sentence of execution by hanging followed on 15 December, and was carried out on 31 May 1962. Eichmann’s body, like his victims’, was cremated: the ashes scattered at sea to prevent a grave attracting Neo-Nazi pilgrims.

It has become fashionable, since the Sassen tapes emerged, to despatch Arendt’s thesis, or at least a representation of it, to the winds of oblivion too. Her “banality of evil” thesis should, it is argued — because of its contextual inapplicability to Eichmann — be banished from the moral Lexicon per se. This however risks an empirical misreading of both Eichmann and his trial.

Eichmann was both a calmly meticulous administrator and a murderous anti-Semite. The punctilious observer of office routine and arranger of index cards is far better placed to achieve genocidal aims than the volatile smasher of windows.

The infectiousness of the genuine “banality of evil” was demonstrated, inadvertently, at trial by the defence counsel. Robert Servatius, himself entirely innocent of complicity in genocide witnessed to its precondition by unthinking, and at the time scandalous, reference of the gassing at Auschwitz as “medical matters”. The lawyer meant no offence — he had, as a former inhabitant of Nazi Germany, simply internalised the euphemistic language by which such things were referred to under the Third Reich.

If we discard Arendt completely, we risk something worse than misreading Eichmann. We chance missing the mask calculated evil wears before us now.

Last week, representatives of the European Parliament triumphantly announced a new disciplinary mechanism which, they claimed, would enable Brussels to withhold funds from states that violate liberal democratic standards. According to MEP Petri Sarvamaa, it meant the end of “a painful phase [in] the recent history of the European Union”, in which “the basic values of democracy” had been “threatened and undermined”.

No names were named, of course, but they did not need to be. Tensions between the EU and the recalcitrant regimes on its eastern periphery, Hungary under Orbán’s Fidesz and Poland under the Law and Justice Party, have been mounting for years. Those governments’ erosion of judicial independence and media freedom, as well as concerns over corruption, education, and minority rights, have resulted in a series of formal investigations and legal actions. And that is not to mention the constant rhetorical fusillades between EU officials and Budapest and Warsaw.

More from this author

Why anti-racism is all about white people

By Wessie du Toit

The new disciplinary mechanism is being presented as the means to finally bring Hungary and Poland to heel, but it is no such thing. Though not exactly toothless, it is unlikely to pose a serious threat to the illiberal pretenders in the east. Breaches of “rule of law” standards will only be sanctioned if they affect EU funds — so the measures are effectively limited to budget oversight. Moreover, enforcing the sanctions will require a weighted majority of member states in the European Council, giving Hungary or Poland ample room to assemble a blocking coalition.

In fact, what we have here is another sticking plaster so characteristic of the complex and unwieldy structures of European supranational democracy. The political dynamics of this system, heavily reliant on horse-trading and compromise, have allowed Hungary and Poland to outmanoeuvre their opponents.

The real purpose of the disciplinary measures is to ensure the timely passage of next EU budget, and in particular, a €750 billion coronavirus relief fund. That package will, for the first time, see member states issuing collective debt backed by their taxpayers, and therefore has totemic significance for the future of the Union. It is a real indication that fiscal integration might be possible in the EU — a step long regarded as crucial to the survival of Europe’s federal ambitions, and one that shows its ability to respond effectively to a major crisis.

But this achievement has almost been derailed by a showdown with Hungary and Poland. Liberal northern states such as Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands, together with the European Parliament, insisted that financial support should be conditional on upholding EU values and transparency standards. But since the relief fund requires unanimous approval, Hungary or Poland can simply veto the whole initiative, which is exactly what they have been threatening to do.

Suggested reading

How Viktor Orbán plays his enemies

By Alexander Faludy

In other words, the EU landed itself with a choice between upholding its liberal commitments and securing its future as a viable political and economic project. The relatively weak disciplinary mechanism shows that European leaders are opting for the latter, as they inevitably would. It is a compromise that allows the defenders of democratic values to save face, while essentially letting Hungary and Poland off the hook. (Of course this doesn’t rule out the possibility that the Hungarian and Polish governments will continue making a fuss anyway.)

Liberals who place their hopes in the European project may despair at this, but these dilemmas are part and parcel of binding different regions and cultures in a democratic system. Such undertakings need strict constitutional procedures to hold them together, but those same procedures create opportunities to game the system, especially as demands in one area can be tied with cooperation in another.

As he announced the new rule of law agreement, Sarvamaa pointed to Donald Trump’s threat to win the presidential election via the Supreme Court as evidence of the need to uphold democratic standards. In truth, what is happening in Europe bears a closer resemblance to America in the 1930s, when F.D. Roosevelt was forced to make concessions to the Southern states to deliver his New Deal agenda.

suggested reading

The West's monumental crisis

By Aris Roussinos

That too was a high-stakes attempt at federal consolidation and economic repair, with the Great Depression at its height and democracy floundering around the world. As the political historian Ira Katznelson has noted, Roosevelt only succeeded by making “necessary but often costly illiberal alliances” — in particular, alliances with Southern Democratic legislators who held an effective veto in Congress. The result was that New Deal programs either avoided or actively upheld white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. (Key welfare programs, for instance, were designed to exclude some two-thirds of African American employees in the Southern states).

According to civil rights campaigner Walter White, Roosevelt himself explained his silence on a 1934 bill to combat the lynching of African Americans as follows: “I’ve got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America… If I come out for the anti-lynching bill, they [the Southern Democrats] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”

This is not to suggest any moral equivalence between the Europe’s “illiberal democracies” and the Deep South of the 1930s. But the Hungarian and Polish governments do resemble the experienced Southern politicians of the New Deal era in their ability to manoeuvre within a federal framework, achieving an autonomy that belies their economic dependency. They have learned to play by the letter of the rules as well as to subvert them.

Orbán, for instance, has frequently insisted that his critics make a formal legal case against him, whereupon he has managed to reduce sanctions to mere technicalities. He has skilfully leveraged the arithmetic of the European Parliament to keep Fidesz within the orbit of the mainstream European People’s Party group. In September, the Hungarian and Polish governments even announced plans to establish their own institute of comparative legal studies, aiming to expose the EU’s “double standards.”

Suggested reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

And now, with their votes required to pass the crucial relief fund, the regimes in Budapest and Warsaw are taking advantage of exceptionally high stakes much as their Southern analogues in the 1930s did. They have, in recent months, become increasingly defiant in their rejection of European liberalism. In September, Orbán published a searing essay in which he hailed a growing “rebellion against liberal intellectual oppression” in the western world. The recent anti-abortion ruling by the Polish high court is likewise a sign of that state’s determination to uphold Catholic values and a robust national identity.

Looking forward, however, it seems clear this situation cannot continue forever. Much has been made of Joe Biden’s hostility to the Hungarian and Polish regimes, and with his election victory, we may see the US attaching its own conditions to investment in Eastern Europe. But Biden cannot question the EU’s standards too much, since he has made the latter out to be America’s key liberal partner. The real issue is that if richer EU states are really going to accept the financial burdens of further integration, they will not tolerate deviant nations wielding outsized influence on key policy areas.

Of course such reforms would require an overhaul of the voting system, which means treaty change. This raises a potential irony: could the intransigence of Hungary and Poland ultimately spur on Europe’s next big constitutional step — one that will see their leverage taken away? Maybe. For the time being, the EU is unlikely to rein in the illiberal experiments within its borders.

Of course, women in the modern world have options. My GP was happy to prescribe me the Pill when I was a teenager. When I was in my twenties in 00’s London, sexual health clinics plied drop-in clients with great fistfuls of condoms packed in brown paper bags like party favours. My years of prime fertility unfolded in a culture where an active sex life is seen as normal and healthy, and contraception as a basic healthcare right.

More from this author

Why aren't women having more babies?

By Mary Harrington

We seem sometimes to have forgotten that birth control is at least as central to women’s participation in public life as universal suffrage. Today, it’s expected that women will join the workforce on reaching adulthood, and pursue careers on equal terms with their male colleagues. But that couldn’t happen without contraception.

Shorn of the ability to control our fertility, a woman might pay others (if she can afford it) to care for her children, give her babies away to be adopted, or avoid sex altogether to ensure she doesn’t have them in the first place. But as for ‘having it all’ (or ‘having it’ at all without getting pregnant), forget it.

A century or so before I reached my prime shagging years, Margaret Sanger was making this case in a very different world. “Enforced motherhood”, she wrote in 1914, “is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.”

Sanger is no less controversial today than she was a century ago, albeit for different reasons. Recently Planned Parenthood, the contraception and abortion charity she helped found, disavowed Sanger for her enthusiasm for eugenics, which was considered a progressive cause in Sanger’s time. But 100 years ago, Sanger faced threats and even arrest for campaigning to make contraception and contraceptive knowledge widely available.

In 1929, she published Motherhood in Bondage, a collection of excerpts from letters sent to her by women desperate for help with fertility. The book gives an inkling of what life looks like when you’re poor and your fertility is not within your control: a litany of exhausted, ground-down, ill and impoverished women, many on their seventh or eighth pregnancy in their mid-twenties, begging Sanger for information or help on “how to don’t have more children”, as one correspondent put it. One writes:

My smallest baby is three months old and I’m afraid I’ll get pregnant any time from now on. So please give me some kind of advice because I cannot support what I got and when they are four I don’t know what to do. I’m only twenty years of age.

Sanger was one of the first feminists to campaign for a woman’s right to be, as she put it, “the absolute mistress of her own body”. A century on, in the developed West, her goal has been largely reached. While accidental pregnancies still happen, the vast majority of women are able to access contraception, emergency contraception and — should they wish it — abortion services.

Suggested reading

How the establishment fell for eugenics

By Peter Franklin

The grim condition of those impoverished early twentieth-century women, struggling to feed and clothe an ever-growing brood, is happily a thing of the past. But I wonder if we can take this for granted in perpetuity.

The story of contraceptive manufacturing is, broadly speaking, the story of manufacturing generally: offshored to Asia to reduce overheads, with only branding, administration and R&D still predominantly based in Europe. Durex, once the British Rubber Company, has based its entire condom manufacturing capacity in China, India and Thailand. The vast majority of oral contraceptives, as well as the component ingredients used in their creation, are manufactured in China and India. No one makes contraceptives in Britain.

This is just fine in a situation where relatively frictionless international trade is assumed as a permanent feature of the modern world. But this turns out to have some drawbacks when there’s a political, economic or biomedical shock to supply chains.

It doesn’t even take a pandemic. Last year, doctors were worrying about the impact of Brexit on contraceptive supplies. In February this year, the estimated 3.1 million British women who use the contraceptive pill faced severe shortages, for reasons that still remain unclear.

Then when Covid-19 hit in the spring, India banned the export of pharmaceuticals, including progesterone — one of the key ingredients in the Pill. The ban only lasted three weeks, but still caused shortages of oral contraceptives. According to the global development organisation Devex, the ripple effects of coronavirus-related disruption to manufacturing also triggered a condom shortage in Mozambique and import delays in IUDs to Iran.

Suggested reading

The disturbing history of 'artificial mothers'

By Louise Perry

An optimist might tell me that none of these incidents is likely to be more than a blip. And perhaps they’d be right. Provided, at least, that the global economy stays stable, China stays friendly (and doesn’t go to war with India), global commercial shipping is able to continue, and there are no more surprises in store that threaten the fabric of globalised trade. A year ago I’d have said that scenario looks a reasonably safe bet. Halfway through the madness of 2020, I’m not so confident.

Of course, new factories can be built closer to home, if they seem economically viable. Women’s contraceptive security, though, is threatened not just by de-globalisation but also environmental concerns.

The contraceptive pill is one of the most widely used pharmaceuticals on the planet. 3.1 million British women use it, making it our most common prescribed contraceptive. It works by mimicking the hormones released during pregnancy, and its main hormonal component is a synthetic estrogen known as 17α-ethinylestradiol — a compound that is disastrous for aquatic life. Its presence in rivers and groundwater disrupts the endocrine systems of a range of species, causing intersex conditions in frogs and fish and severely harming their ability to reproduce. It is also difficult and expensive to clean from waste water.

Environmentalists tend to be broadly liberal-feminist in their sympathies, which may help to explain why this issue generally gets soft-pedalled. No one who supports women’s reproductive autonomy will be enthusiastic about confronting the ecological harms done by synthetic estrogens. So the topic remains, to date, mostly a talking-point for the Weird Right.

But there’s a clear trade off between a woman’s desire to be “absolute mistress of her own body”, and our collective duty to ensure oryzia latipes (and all the other aquatic species turned intersex by 17α-ethinylestradiol) can remain even to a degree masters of theirs. Eventually, we will have to confront this issue.

Let’s hope that when we do, science prevails, and we come up with a better way of cleaning waste water. If we don’t, sooner or later the contraceptive pill will be banned.

Suggested reading

Can India keep China at bay?

By Tim Marshall

Such a ban might be hastened by demographic fears. The BBC recently reported a “jaw-dropping” global crash in fertility rates. In the developed West, fertility has been below replacement for generations, but the report predicts that the global birth rate — currently around 2.4 — will on current trends plummet to 1.7 by 2100. Extrapolated long-term, this is an existential threat to humanity: as Professor Christopher Murray, one of the reports’ authors, puts it: “If you can’t [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears.”

I doubt we’ll remain so committed as a species to reproductive autonomy that we shrug our shoulders while the birth rate plummets toward human extinction. Far more likely is that we’ll see growing pressure on women to get gestating. Oryzia latipes may yet find itself championed by pro-natalists, keen to use the ecological downsides of the Pill as an argument for restricting women’s contraceptive choices.

Though not (yet) on ecological grounds, some countries are already restricting contraception as part of efforts to drive up the birth rate. Iran has ceased to offer birth control and vasectomies via state healthcare — a policy that explicitly targets the country’s slumping birth rate. In effect, for Iranian women, worry-free sex has become a bit like cashmere jumpers or safari holidays: nice, but only if you can afford it.

Should contraceptive manufacturing be expensively re-shored, in response to de-globalisation, we might face an analogous situation in Britain: birth control still available, but only as a luxury product.

None of these scenarios is inevitable. But those of us concerned for women’s welfare should take the question of contraceptive security seriously. We should also take seriously the question of why women don’t seem to want to have babies.

Suggested reading

Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

The Left tends to blame this on sexism and the immiserating effects of capitalism (see for example Laurie Penny here), arguing that these factors make child-rearing arduous and unaffordable. The reactionary Right, on the other hand, tends to blame the baby strike on the pernicious effects of feminism. They’re both partly correct.

As that “jaw-dropping” BBC article puts it, falling birth rates are partly a result of “more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception”. In other words, they’re a consequence of the increase in women’s choices and as such are — in the article’s words — a feminist “success story”.

But recent research from the US-based Institute for Family Studies also shows that, worldwide, women are having fewer children than they’d like to. This implies that the supposedly ‘free’ choice to have fewer children is indeed, as Laurie Penny suggests, constrained by structural factors.

It ought to be possible for public policy to recognise that unwanted pregnancies are a nightmarish prospect for women — especially given today’s uncertain economic outlook — while also acknowledging that many women wish they could have more babies. Hungary’s birth rate has increased by 5.5% following Viktor Orbán’s introduction of subsidies aimed at encouraging larger families; this implies that state intervention can indeed tip the balance for would-be mothers, without coercive measures such as taking birth control away.

Those Right-wingers who are indifferent to women’s interests, safety or subjectivity might be tempted to leap on the prospect of contraceptive shortages as a straightforward solution to shrinking populations. But this would mean returning women to forms of bondage that Margaret Sanger fought to end a century ago. If we’re to stabilise the birth rate without embracing this kind of anti-women approach, the Right will need to learn from Hungary and embrace an activist, pro-family state.

Meanwhile, the Left will need to get over its obsession with abolishing the family. Both these perspectives, in different ways, treat human reproduction as a matter solely of individual choice. But bringing new generations into the world is the responsibility not just of individuals and families, nor just of women. Rather, it’s on all of us: a shared duty to our collective human future.

The surprise announcement in Serbia came a day after a heated debate on  Hungary in the European Parliament — a debate which Orbán had conspicuously declined to attend. MEPs who on Thursday called for tougher EU actions against Budapest were seemingly left high and dry on Friday. Criticism of Hungary’s 30 March ‘Enabling Act’ by OSCE, the Council of Europe and the International Bar Association was made to look hysterical. Yet, things are not as they seem.

Orbán’s most recent manoeuvres fall into a long-established pattern of strategic feint and dodge. He has, in a private May 2012 address to Fidesz policy staff, termed this his “dance of the peacock“. Hungary’s PM is adept at camouflaging the destructive inside the outrageous. The former can be smuggled past international bodies more readily if one appears to retreat on the latter. Meanwhile the theatricality of ‘performative transgression’ blurs distinctions between real and apparent danger while simultaneously moving the frontier of accepted behaviour.

More from this author

Coronavirus has given Orban his excuse

By Alexander Faludy

Justification for creating an ‘extraordinary legal order’ in Hungary — a situation bypassing normal legislative and/or judicial procedures — was always shaky. The country already enjoyed robust legal provision for tackling pandemics, notably the 1997 Act CLIV on Health and the 2011 Act CXXVII on Emergency Management. Extensive powers to activate public safety measures (including a general curfew) were thus available on the basis of pre-existing laws. This year’s novel emergency powers had ends other than infection control.

Actions taken under cover of the emergency have seriously destabilised the already precarious functioning of Hungary’s opposition parties. Though Orbán may soon surrender the power to govern by decree that does not, in and of itself, equate to annulment of emergency laws enacted to date or mitigation of their lasting effects. In the last week, Fidesz has in fact taken additional procedural steps to ensure that the most damaging legislation survives formal cessation of the emergency.

More than 70 special decrees have been enacted under the emergency powers, many with scant relation to the presenting crisis. Perhaps the most worrying to date is no. 135/2020. This decree has been employed punitively against municipalities which voted for opposition parties in the October 2019 local elections.

The decree confers power on central government to create so called ‘Special Economic Zones’ (SEZs) within the territory of local authorities. However, the true purpose of these zones is not assisting post-Covid economic recovery via the relaxation of regulation or tax burdens. Rather their function is the transfer of freehold title and planning control of land owned by municipalities, together with the levy of local business taxes, to the county-level governments.

More from this author

Coronavirus has given Orban his excuse

By Alexander Faludy

This is significant. Victory for the united opposition in Budapest’s mayoral election last autumn made international headlines. However, it was the electoral breakthrough in provincial cities, approximately half of which turned to the opposition, that really spooked the Hungarian government.

The power to transfer assets and tax receipts to county governments (all Fidesz controlled) now affords a means of retribution — pushing opposition towns toward bankruptcy. The most striking use of these powers has been in the town of Göd (population 17,000), 12 miles north of Budapest.

Göd, which recently saw the opening of a large Samsung factory, elected a Momentum (liberal party) mayor in 2019. The industrial site and its tax revenues have been designated a SEZ and Göd has lost one fifth of its territory together with one third of its income. According to the town’s mayor, Csaba Balogh, “[this] is practically a death sentence” (financially speaking).

The fate of opposition towns is echoed by the predicament of opposition parties. The latter rely on state funding allocated according to their number of fielded electoral candidates and actual MPs. Although the headline figure of a 50% cut in public funding for 2020 under the emergency procedure is dramatic, the reality is even harsher. Opposition parties will lose 100% of their funding for the second half of 2020 — a ruinous financial cliff edge.

Suggested reading

Orbán's political jackpot

By Eszter Zalan

Fidesz is insulated from the effects of the cut. Unlike its rivals, the party boasts a powerful network of oligarchic backers whose wealth derives from the allocation of state contracts. Much of Fidesz’s political advertising is subsumed within ‘government information’ campaigns and its activists paid out of public funds allotted to so called ‘civic organisations’. The OSCE has described this arrangement as ‘pervasive overlap between state and ruling party resources’. Furthermore, unlike opposition parties, the Fidesz-aligned oligarchs have been deliberately shielded by the government from financial “burden sharing” in relation to the pandemic.

Some activities carried out under the emergency powers evoke a more sinister register. The deployment of army logistics experts to ‘strategically significant’ companies has brought some beneficial effects. However civilian managers have been alarmed by the concerted effort embedded military staff have devoted to extracting the personal data of employees and clients together with sensitive intellectual property.

There is more to the present situation than the use of Prime Ministerial fiat. A confusing feature of recent weeks has been the continuance of ‘normal’ mechanisms of legislative activity alongside extraordinary ones.

The maintenance of parliamentary law-making in parallel with decree powers has allowed Zoltán Kovács, Undersecretary for International Communications, to dismiss concerns like those raised by Stephen Sackur of the BBC’s Hard Talk (26 April) that Hungary has entered full-blown dictatorship. The overlap has also afforded useful culture wars camouflage for authoritarian consolidation.

Suggested reading

Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

A global health emergency is an odd time to occupy a national legislature with votes on the definition of gender in domestic and international law. At the end of March, deputy PM Zsolt Semjén, leader of Fidesz’s Christian Democrat/KDNP satellite party, tabled a bill to parliament, a clause of which replaced the ‘gender’ category of the Civil Registry (and ID documents deriving from it) with one entitled ‘sex at birth’ — effectively making the legal dimension of gender transition impossible. This stirred up an international controversy — attracting extensive hostile coverage in the UK from media outlets like BuzzFeed and The Guardian.

The timing of the Semjén bill’s initial presentation, within a day of the Enabling Act’s passage, was strategic. It successfully diverted world media attention from the specifics of the Act and the structural damage inflicted by decrees made under it. It’s the reassigning of tax receipts more than gender identity that Fidesz really cares about.

Further controversy was stirred up when the Hungarian parliament formally rejected the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence — a.k.a. the ‘Istanbul convention’.

The chief ground for rejection was the document’s alleged ‘social construction of gender’. Again this resulted in strong criticism from concerned NGOs and headlines of the ‘Parliament blocks domestic violence treaty’ sort.

What hardly anyone noticed was that, legally speaking, nothing actually happened. Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP government has failed to ratify the Istanbul Convention ever since signing it in 2014. The policy of inaction has been pursued despite Hungary’s shockingly high rates of domestic violence (among the worst in Europe). Fidesz’s foot-dragging might even be a case of ‘because’ rather than ‘despite’: breaking the strong social taboo around domestic violence would be unpopular.

While changing nothing in law the parliament’s adoption of a “political declaration” opposing the convention did heighten Hungary’s prominence in the trans-issue culture wars, thus diverting journalistic attention from other things the government was doing at the time. Emotional outrage, however justified, is handy for forestalling forensic analysis. The peacock was shaking its feathers again.

To be understood aright these recent legislative moves need reading against earlier statements of intent. In September 2008 Orbán, still in opposition, told party loyalists gathered at the village of Kötcse, near Lake Balaton, that the next Fidesz government would constitute a “central political field of force” able to hold power for a generation. On 24th October 2019, Hungarian Parliamentary Speaker László Kövér, one of Orbán’s closest confidents, told students at the National Public Service University, Budapest “the system of checks and balances is crap, forget about it”.

Perhaps now they safely can.

Lately Hungary, unlike Britain, has had toilet rolls in the shops — but also troops on the streets. If the presence of the latter served to guarantee supplies of the former, I’d be reluctantly accepting; I’m as keen on a comfortable loo visit as the next chap. However, to me the military presence seems to facilitate another, less laudable, purpose.

Officially the deployment of soldiers in major Hungarian cities, which began last Friday, was to “reassure the civilian population”. This seemed incongruous: people here are scared of corona not of each other, and there is no sign of civil disorder.

The defensive positioning of armoured vehicles in major squares around Budapest on Friday afternoon coincided with the government tabling a law “On Protecting Against the Coronavirus”.  The APCs provided the law with a kind of symbolic escort into the Országgyűlés  (National Assembly).

The bill was first debated on Monday (23 March) and seems set to pass into law next Tuesday (the 31). Some prominent legal scholars have criticised it as a latter-day “Enabling Act”.

The law’s emergency provisions are formidable. They include allowing the government to rule by decree without legislative oversight and endowing Orbán with power to amend or suspend any provision of the criminal or civil codes at will. No elections can take place. Crucially the State of Emergency has no time limit; a standard basic safeguard in democratic systems.

The act specifies two new offences (punishable with 3- or 5-years imprisonment) related to “spreading a falsehood or distorted truth” touching the corona outbreak. Last week, Fidesz-aligned media demanded the jailing of respected investigative journalists who had exposed serious flaws in the government’s corona response.

Suggested reading

The BBC is having a good coronavirus war

By Robin Aitken

“Orbán’s terrible track record on press freedom creates the suspicion that the law is aimed at the last remnants of an independent press in Hungary,” says Kim Lane-Schepple, Professor of Politics and Sociology at Princeton University (and a long time Hungary watcher).

Governments worldwide are seeking authorisation from parliaments to intervene in their societies in ways that outstrip accustomed norms. I expect that coincidence will soon be cited by Fidesz, and its slick Anglo-American apologists, in an epic exercise in ‘whataboutery’. On close examination the case is unconvincing.

In Britain the curtailment of particular freedoms announced by Boris Johnson on Monday night, including closure of non-essential businesses and limiting exercise to one outing per day, are dramatic. However, the restrictions occur within the framework of the established legal order. In Hungary the legal order itself is the victim of the emergency.

The size of the UK’s corona legal package, at more than 300+ pages, has occasioned excited comment in the British media. Paradoxically, though, when it comes to emergency legislation “more is less” closely specifying what a government may do also limits its room for manoeuvre. Conversely brevity of language goes together with blanket empowerment.

The prolix exactitude of the British legislation, combined with time limitation and judicial-scrutiny safeguards, has enabled even a staunch human rights lawyer like Phillipe Sands to support the British bill

“You can see that… they have done it in as limited a way as possible,” Sands told the BBC Radio 4’s World Tonight on Friday, stating the bill is “absolutely connected to the objective of addressing this threat and [it] cannot be used for anything else,” .

Suggested reading

China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

Hungary’s emergency law runs to only four pages. Instead of pin-pointing variations from particular statutes, within stated perimeters, it grants a catch-all permission. Within its brief text it states that the government may “suspend the enforcement of certain laws, depart from statutory regulations and implement additional extraordinary measures by decree”.

In other words this is a legislative blank cheque which, given the lack of a sunset clause, might never expire. Though the Constitutional Court is left as a nominal counterweight to Orban’s power, there is confusion as to how appeals can reach it if, as now, trial courts are shuttered. The court has in any case been safely under Fidesz control since 2013.

The hollowness of the Hungarian government assertion that the Corona Act was motivated by public health concerns was exposed by the presence in the chamber on Monday of the Fidesz MP for the city of Szeged, László B. Nagy.

Nagy was sitting apart from his colleagues and wearing a face-mask. Only the previous day he had informed the local Szeged media that he and his family were entering a two-week voluntary quarantine after finding he had been in close physical contact with a physician diagnosed with the virus. For the government however, the desire to ensure a qualified majority for the bills immediate passage outweighed infection control considerations.

As things turned out Fidesz could not press the bill through all its stages in one afternoon. Even with support from the openly neo-fascist Mi Hazánk (“Our Homeland”) party, an insufficient number of opposition delegates could be found to reach the four-fifths majority required to suspend the normal House rules of procedure and rush the law through.

This followed Orban’s refusal of all compromise suggestions from opposition party leaders. These included an offer to give him the entirely unrestricted powers he desired but only for a (renewable) specified time-period. While opposition deputies have delayed the bill’s passage for now they cannot ultimately prevent it: the outcome of next Tuesday’s final vote is inevitable.

A way back from full autocracy could be found if sufficient international pressure forced Fidesz to withdraw or modify the bill. The only effective source of pressure on Budapest from within the EU is Berlin: Germany is Hungary’s largest foreign direct investor.

With Angela Merkel struggling to co-ordinate government from her own quarantine and Bavaria’s (Orbán-allied) Christian Social Union setting the tone in the governing coalition that seems unlikely.

Suggested reading

Can your ideology cope with coronavirus?

By Peter Franklin

Corona is the perfect vehicle for fully realising Orban’s autocratic aspirations. The epidemic excuses removal of residual legal fetters on power; emergency legislation by other states affords propaganda camouflage and the distraction of partner governments by the anti-virus battle means restraining international pressure evaporates.

What happens in Hungary should matter to us all. It is a test case for what can go wrong when the inherited liberal paradigm with all of its (admittedly significant) problems is discarded.

The failure of contemporary liberalism has been its treating of the individual in isolation from the community: assuming that freedom equates to life enjoyed without the guidance of objective truth or concession to communal norms. The damage done to public discourse and personal well-being is expertly diagnosed in many articles on UnHerd.

Some prominent Anglophone post-liberal intellectuals like Phillip Blond, seduced by Fidesz’s strongly communitarian rhetoric, have lauded it in the face of criticism. In doing so they risk the failure of post-liberalism as a morally credible project.

What becomes evident from consideration of the latest power grab in Budapest is that Orbanism does not represent a viable rebalancing of rights between community and individual. Rather it is the triumph of arbitrary power over structures of collective accountability.

In Hungary Covid-19 endangers not only the human body but also the body politic.

Much of the world is in a fertility free-fall. As a new report by the Institute for Family Studies illustrates, very low birth rates are becoming increasingly normal across the globe: the number of children born by each successive cohort is dropping rapidly. Outside of sub-Saharan Africa, almost all countries are below replacement fertility or on their way, and this applies both to rich and middle-income countries, to Christian, Muslim or officially atheist states.

Places such as China, Iran and Bangladesh have, at different times in the past 50 years, seen the number of children born per woman fall from six to three in the space of a decade or two, and in all three countries it is now much lower than that.

This has been achieved through different strategies; coercion in the case of China (although the six-to-three fall was actually achieved before the introduction of the One Child Policy); the blessing of the mullahs on birth control in the case of Iran; and a widespread, grassroots movement to spread understanding of and access to family planning in Bangladesh.

But in all the places where fertility rates have fallen fast, from Belize to Burma, governments have had the luxury of working with the basic grain of human development. Higher levels of literacy (especially for women), greater urbanisation and a rise in per capita income are invariably associated with smaller family size, so as countries develop, family size declines whether or not encouraged to do so by government.

For already developed countries with low fertile rates, which have the opposite problem — of wanting to get the fertility rate up — things are not so straightforward. There is nothing very new in pro-natalism; in the inter-war years, when much of Europe and North America was moving towards replacement level fertility, dictators were keen to boost numbers.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Both Hitler and Mussolini incentivised childbearing with limited success. In the 1960s Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu, eager to boost his nation’s demographic heft, removed the availability of contraception overnight. At first there was a sharp increase in the number of babies being born, but before too long people found ways around the system, and by the time of his fall, Ceaușescu’s Romania was not performing much better from a population perspective than most of its neighbours – which is to say, very poorly.

Although birth rates were limp in much of the developed world in the inter-war years and particularly during the depression of the 1930s, there was a famous post-war bounce in most places, and in many it lasted for a good couple of decades. In Japan, the baby boom was an intense but brief phenomenon, and likewise in much of central and eastern Europe the number of children born per woman has been extremely low for a long time.

Which brings us back to Hungary, where people have been having too few children to replace themselves for most of the last 60 years. If each cohort of child-bearing women is smaller than the last, and has fewer children, something like a population vortex starts to take effect, especially where supplementing numbers through immigration is unpopular and where emigration opportunities — such as membership of the EU — mean that many people are leaving.

Since the early Eighties, Hungary has lost just under a tenth of its population — around a million people — but the legacy of a very low fertility rate in the two decades since the mid-1990s has yet to fully work its way through the system; that is, there will be a smaller number of child-bearers in the couple of decades to come, which will have a knock-on effect in future.

Couple this with lengthening life expectancy and it is little wonder that the median Hungarian is now in his or her mid-forties, almost as senior as the super-old societies of Italy, Germany and Japan. Another characteristic of Hungary is an ethnic shift towards the Roma, who appear to have a higher fertility rate than ethnic Magyars, feeding nationalistic concerns that the majority is under threat in its own country. This is a sentiment which has also strengthened Hungary’s resolve to resist immigration from the south, but while it has largely prevented the rise of a multicultural society, it does not help boost numbers or counter the corrosive economic effects of falling numbers.

Suggested reading

What my Polish town taught me about localism

By Ben Sixsmith

Those familiar with the Orban government should not be surprised that it sees demography as a serious challenge and has introduced a wide range of measures to tackle population decline, from tax breaks to increased parental leave and the provision of creches.

Many of these policies are too recent for us to gauge their impact but there is no doubt that something positive has happened, with fertility rates rising by perhaps a quarter of a child per woman. But before the Hungarians uncork the champagne — or perhaps the Tokaj — three words of caution must be sounded.

First, a quarter of a child per woman is nowhere near enough to get Hungary up to replacement level, and even this improvement seems to be faltering.

Second, some of the effect may be what is known as “tempo”, which is the ending of the delay in childbearing; during the period when childbearing is delayed and women have children later, the fertility rate is artificially depressed. When this stops — and there is only so long that women can delay having children — the effect is unwound and the fertility rate rebounds, but the extent of the difference this makes is limited.

Third, detailed work by the Institute for Family Studies suggests that not that many of the extra children in Hungary are third children, and this is where the government efforts have been focused, so government policy may not be the real driving force in any recovery there has been. Full marks to the Hungarians for trying, then, but far too early to say whether they have proven that government policy really can make a difference.

Likewise in nearby Poland, where the current government stands on a pro-traditional-family platform and since 2016 has offered relatively generous child benefits – £100 per month per child – as well as maintaining strict anti-abortion laws. The policy has been credited with helping the ruling Law and Justice party win re-election, but, as in Hungary, the rise in fertility is small and still leaves Poland at barely two-thirds of what would be required for replacement.

With more and more countries within and beyond Europe moving into the low- and ultra-low fertility realm, then, the challenge for a society wanting to reproduce itself will become more and more prominent in the politics of the future.

Suggested reading

Can Europe learn from communism?

By Roger Scruton

For now, two things for sure can be said. First, the best guarantee of avoiding the very lowest fertility rates in developed countries is an acceptance of extra-marital births and assistance to women in combining work and family. Where women get the education to aspire but are not encouraged to combine aspiration with motherhood, they tend to opt for the former, which is why fertility rates are so low in countries with traditional attitudes to women in the workplace, such as Italy and Japan, but higher in places like Scandinavia and France.

Second, much as governments can try their best, the only true guarantee of replacement fertility is a family-oriented and child-loving culture. Societies or ethnic groups wanting to survive and thrive should not just look to their governments for tax breaks and benefits but should look to themselves, their values and attitudes.

In this Israel is an exemplar, an OECD member with a fertility rate half as high again as its nearest rival. This is not just about the religious Jews (whose fertility rate, although high, may be falling) or Arab Israelis (whose fertility rate is no higher than that of the country as a whole), but is true also of the secular majority.

While this small state has many detractors, if we wish to learn how a people is to thrive not just culturally and materially but also demographically, we must look to those who first brought into the world the famous command: “Be fruitful and multiply”.

The country that produced Lech Walesa, the most charismatic figure of anti-Communist resistance in the 1980s, now has one of the most viscerally nationalist and xenophobic governments anywhere in the world. That is quite a statement: the competition for that mantle (think Trump; think Bolsonaro in Brazil; think Orban in Hungary or Italy’s Salvini) is intense.

In one crucial way, Poland stands apart from these others. The popularity of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has dominated politics since its landslide election win of 2015, has arisen in a place where the economy, on the face of it, is a soaring success. Poland has been one of the best performing countries anywhere in Europe for the past 30 years. GDP per capita growth has been the best of all the post-Soviet states.

Since accession to the EU in 2004, average yearly earnings have doubled between 2004 and 2016 (adjusted slightly down for inflation). The minimum wage has more than doubled. Unemployment has decreased by over 12 percentage points. Indices on absolute and relative poverty have also improved. In 2017 Poland had the highest economic growth in the EU. There has not been a single year of economic contraction, not even during the 2008 crisis that followed.

Suggested reading

Is blue-collar populism here to stay?

By Henry Olsen

Yet, in 2015, the moderate Civic Platform lost power, the PiS winning both parliamentary and presidential elections, seizing an absolute majority in the lower house, giving it the authority to challenge constitutional norms.

It seems to run counter to received wisdom, that the populists should take root when the economy is doing so well. But perhaps the glowing economic story is not all that it chieems. After all, GDP figures don’t count for much if you’re not earning much to begin with. When George Osborne used to talk about sharing the proceeds of growth, many from those Brexit-voting towns that had fallen by the wayside wondered “what growth?”.

In fact, much of the economic upturn in Poland has been uneven. Working hours are the longest in the EU and while notional employment is up, much of that comes through the gig economy. A quarter of the workforce is on temporary contracts.

The core vote for PiS can be found in predictable places – with the older generations in rural and small towns, among people with lower education levels, and staunch Catholics with conservative moral views. Geographically it is strongest in the east and in coal mining communities, where the industry has declined by two thirds since the end of Communism. Intriguingly the party has also gained support among a small but not insignificant band of so-called “hipster Right”.

Suggested reading

Poles apart: what’s driving Poland’s populism?

By Ben Sixsmith

A generation of EU membership, and free movement, has given Poles a taste of wealthier countries (remember the supposed one million “Polish plumbers in the UK”?). Average wages in Poland are still three times lower than the EU average. Graduates collided with reality when entering the labour market. And the emerging middle class convinced themselves they were Europe’s lackeys.

The PiS has been artful in capitalising on the discrepancy. It has built a narrative of “Poland in ruins”, focusing on negative perceptions of public life and unfulfilled expectations, and omitting inconvenient facts about a higher standard of living and the well-over £120 billion Poland has received from EU funds. Andrzej Duda, the PiS-backed President, recently called the EU “an imaginary community” that brings no benefits.

Duda has been head of state since 2015, initially with the ultra-conservative Beata Szydlo as his prime minister. But she was replaced in 2017 with Mateusz Morawiecki, reportedly at the request of the man behind Duda’s throne, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. As party leader, but with no formal role in government, Kaczynski pulls all the strings, demanding loyalty and rarely giving it back.

As with Trump, as with Bolsonaro, it is the culture war that resonates, and history has left a deep suspicion of both Russia and Germany. Relations with Russia are complicated. Unlike other far-Right, nationalist movements, there is little evidence that the Kremlin is operating behind the scenes – notwithstanding suggestions that Russia might have been involved in the 2010 plane crash that killed Jaroswlaw’s twin brother, Lech Kaczynski. The historic enmity is too strong, and public opinion wouldn’t wear it. Now there are even signs that the official media are warming to Moscow.

Suggested reading

The West divided: Populism versus liberalism in the 21st century

By Peter Franklin

The asylum crisis provided PiS with the perfect opportunity to revive its fortunes ahead of the 2015 elections. Mixing xenophobia with the rhetoric of martyrdom, Kaczynski described refugees as carriers of cholera, dysentery and “other, even more severe diseases”, which is where Germany comes in.

There is something about Angela Merkel that sets off Polish nationalists. She stands accused variously of supporting illegal migration, tolerating Nazis and introducing permissive social reforms (how those might be reconciled is anyone’s guess).

Merkel’s calmness under fire only exacerbates a sense of resentment and envy, towards Germany, and increasingly towards all things Brussels (which is seen as an offshoot). Each time the European institutions warn Poland that its government is defying its rules, it provides the populists with ammunition.

At the heart of the battle is the PiS’s assault on a free media and judiciary. National television is now a Soviet-era propaganda tool. Dozens of journalists have been fired, in several cases because they refused to broadcast fake news stories about the opposition. State TV dropped its annual coverage of the country’s biggest charity event, which raises millions each year for sick children, because its organiser also campaigns for sexual minorities. Senior figures in public radio and television will be appointed, or dismissed, by the treasury minister rather than the national broadcasting council.

Suggested reading

How the gilets jaunes could save Macron's skin

By John Lichfield

In October 2018, the European Court of Justice demanded that Poland stop a policy that was forcing dozens of supreme court justices to take early retirement, allowing the government to pack legal benches with loyal supporters.

This announcement followed an unprecedented move in December 2017 to trigger a so-called Article 7 procedure aimed at blocking its efforts to limit judicial independence. If fully implemented, it would deprive Poland of voting rights. More punishment, more victimhood. But it’s hard to see what else the EU can do, short of kicking Poland out, which given the state of Brexit could lead to other populist regimes in Central Europe, such as Hungary, choosing to go.

The Hungarian model of self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy” is rarely far from mind when considering Poland. As with Viktor Orban’s regime in Budapest, the Polish government has initiated a series of populist (and popular) economic reforms, including reversing an increase in the pension age, increasing the minimum wage and introducing a programme for house building. It is quite prepared to break the EU’s borrowing rules, revelling in the prospect of another battle. Poland gladly takes billions of euros from the EU, whose cultural values its government holds in contempt.

But the schism in Polish society is more pronounced than ever. Last month, the Left-leaning mayor in the northern port city of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, was murdered while addressing a charity auction on stage.

The town was the birthplace of Solidarity and has long been a bastion of liberal opposition. Adamowicz, who was first elected mayor in 1998, turned the city into a haven of liberal democracy and tolerance, where immigrants were welcomed, and gays and lesbians did not need to feel threatened. He was denounced for being a criminal who would let terrorists into Poland.

The 27-year-old assailant had a history of mental illness and violence but no clear political motive.  True to form, state media showed little remorse or sympathy for Adamowicz. Initially they blamed the opposition for stoking tensions – although such was the backlash that even they were eventually compelled to tone down their line.

Suggested reading

The invisible refugee crisis on Poland's doorstep

By Aleksandra Lipczak

So against this backdrop, what hope does the PiS have in this key election year? Will it consolidate its power over the various votes (European ones in May, followed by parliamentary elections in the autumn)? Or will its power surge falter? There were tentative signs last October, in regional elections, that not everything was going its way: it failed to take control of a number of areas it had targeted, particularly in Warsaw and other big cities.

Civic Platform, on the other hand, fared moderately well, tapping into middle-class fears regarding the PiS’s direction. But the centre in Poland is suffering from the same problem as it is elsewhere in Europe. In country after country social democracy and Christian democracy have been associated with tired ‘elites’, turning off voters. In Poland, though, it appears there is room for disruption, and an interloper is gaining momentum. This week, Robert Biedron who is Left-wing and gay, launched a new party: Wiosna (which means Spring).

In a country where the Catholic Church holds sway, you might think that a party targeted at progressive Poles, with liberal policies regarding abortion and homosexuality, would be a non-starter. But Biedron is garnering support by being unashamedly different, and appealing to those appalled by the Right and ignored by the liberals. Could he become the next Macron, as he seeks to be? Or will he split the anti-nationalist vote in the forthcoming elections? That remains to be seen.

For now, the trajectory is still in the direction of the PiS, particularly as the state media and the judiciary can now be relied upon to do its bidding. There is, it seems, more life in the Polish populists yet.

That might seem a surprising statement given Russia’s record over the past two and a half decades. I lived in Moscow for several years in the 1990s and return relatively often. Most of my friends have fled, citing physical danger, demoralisation and the impossibility of doing business legitimately in the Mafia state established by Vladimir Putin. So why should we be so worried by a small state in central Europe, with the most impenetrable of languages and little geo-strategic influence? Hungary was last synonymous with the global power when it was allied with Austria in the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The problem with contemporary Hungary is that it represents Europe’s problem. It is at the heart of the continent, geographically and spiritually, and the contagion of its dangerous model is spreading to its neighbours and beyond.

The architect of it all, the Putin mini-me, is Viktor Orbán. The trouble is that he has been elected Prime Minister of Hungary four times now, the last three in succession, as an avowed authoritarian. He is obviously doing something that people, or enough of them, like. Or are impervious to.

Suggested reading

U OK Hun(gary)?

By Peter Franklin

A quick reprise: Orbán shot to prominence in 1989, in the year of revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, when as a twenty-something firebrand he denounced the Communist government in a speech in Budapest’s Heroes Square. He demanded free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

Hungary had been the loosest member of the Warsaw Pact and its transition from dictatorship was relatively smooth. The country followed a familiar path of democratisation cum privatisation. The problem was, as with Russia and others in the 1990s, the transformation became synonymous with theft. Those with power and influence – mainly but not exclusively those with connections under the old regime – were the beneficiaries. The ordinary voter, particularly people who had worked in the old smoke stack industries or in the public sector, suffered.

Orbán took office for the first time in 1998 at the helm of his right-wing Fidesz party, becoming at 35 the country’s second youngest leader. Already his modus operandi was becoming apparent. He had little patience for negotiation, seeking to sweep aside parliament and others who stood in his way. His administration was marked by a number of corruption scandals. In spite of the problems, Western governments saw him as a reliable ally. Hungary was joining Nato and the European Union.

They say power corrupts, but in his case, it was the loss of power in 2002 that turned Orbán. He resolved that next time, not only would he need to win, he would need to take control of all the levers. He began working on what his supporters terms a patriotic cohort of entrepreneurs, people on whom he could rely for political muscle and cash; in return they could benefit commercially.

Suggested reading

Europe's democratic difficulties

By Helen Thompson

Hungary developed a Russian-style oligarchic elite. The rise of Fidesz-linked businessmen happened in plain sight.

Orbán developed his concept of “illiberal democracy”, taking on the so-called ‘global elites’, in a precursor to the mindset of Brexit and Trump that would become so seductive later on.

The financial crash of 2007-8 hit Hungary hard. Unemployment shot up, living standards crashed. All around them Hungarians saw European countries, especially those in the south (like Greece) or east (such as Latvia) suffering under the debt burden. This fuelled the already latent mix of resentment and xenophobia. Hungary has traditionally seen itself as encircled.

In April 2010, Orbán swept to power with a stunning victory and the two thirds majority required to enact radical change. He planned, even during the transition, for an assault on the constitution. He needed to go after those who might resist his power grab: first the media, then the judiciary. His strategy was predicated on removing checks and balance and silencing investigations and critical voices.

Over the next five years, he used his party’s dominance to pass more than 1,000 laws, many of them enacted after a few hours debate and often presented by low ranking lawmakers who had not read them, let alone written them. Through legislative sleights of hand and force of will he transformed his country into a political test bed for a 21^st century version of autocracy, combining crony capitalism and far Right rhetoric with a one-party political culture.

Suggested reading

The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

Old school friends, neighbours and football mates (he was obsessed with the sport) made fortunes. The more control he seized, the easier it became to distribute largesse – and to receive loyalty in return. Self-styled entrepreneurs queued up to ‘work’ with him. Except they weren’t particularly entrepreneurial. It was all about state assets, or ‘state capture’ as it came to be known.

Unlike famous Russians such as Roman Abramovich or Oleg Deripaska, their Hungarian equivalents are not household names. Nor do they count their money in billions. For them it tends to be merely hundreds of millions. But as a proportion of national income, it is still not to be sniffed at.

Previously the one person whom Hungarians had heard of was Lajos Simicska. He was at school, military service and university with Orbán. He helped him build up Fidesz, assembling a loyal media empire and a sprawling construction business. Then he got too big for his boots and was kicked out of the inner circle. He is still Hungary’s 11^th richest man, worth £250 million.

Fourteenth on the list, with an estimated wealth of £180 million is Andy Vajna, a Hungarian-American who made some of his fortune as a producer of films like Rambo and Total Recall. He was appointed Hungary’s film commissioner by Orbán in 2011. Among the lucrative state contracts he was awarded were five of seven casino licences.

Suggested reading

The West divided: Populism versus liberalism in the 21st century

By Peter Franklin

Perhaps the most exotic is Lorinc Meszaros, a former gas fitter and mayor of Orbán’s home village of Felcsut (a village where they built a football stadium to accommodate a crowd more than twice the size of its population). Thanks to a number of state contracts, he jumped to number five on the rich list, his wealth soaring five-fold in just one year to £330 million. Asked by reporters how he had grown his business faster than Mark Zuckerberg, he declared: “maybe I’m smarter”.

Hungary has built this system from within the European Union – with EU funds. Some 60% of state contracts, billions of Euro, are funded by the EU. The Corruption Research Centre Budapest, a non-governmental organisation, analysed all public procurement contracts from 2010-16. It found that the aggregate value of contracts won by four Fidesz-linked businessmen (including the prime minister’s son-in-law) was 13 times larger than the size of other contracts. Their total haul came to £1.8 billion. Sometimes contracts are put out to tender; sometimes tenders take place, but competitors know they are going through the motions.

The rot set in a long time ago. Corruption was rife under Communism, when consumer goods were in short supply, it was all about who you knew and who could get hold of what. During the mad-dash liberalisation of the 1990s, the opportunities for self-enrichment increased exponentially, as assets were privatised. From Russia to Ukraine, Moldova to Armenia, they were effectively stolen, as the notional purchase price did not remotely correspond to value.

Suggested reading

Orbán's political jackpot

By Eszter Zalan

The most vocal criticism of cronyism comes, dishearteningly, from the only major opposition force, the far-right Jobbik party. Before and during the last election, it erected billboards across the country. One showed Orbán with three businessmen above a slogan in the typeface from the film Godfather, which read “gangsters”. Another brandished the words: “You work. They steal.”

Hungary has slid down Transparency International’s global legal table. It is now rated as more corrupt than Montenegro – graft was cited by the EU as the main reason why the Montenegrans were told they are not ready for membership.

The founders of the EU never considered the possibility that a member state would go backwards, in terms of politics and probity. It did not create procedures to deal with the new era of populism and cronyism. Viviane Reding, EU Justice Commissioner at the time of Hungary’s accession told the New York Times recently: “We never thought that someone would go the other way.”

Orbán invariably gets away with it. Just occasionally he runs into problems. His labour law passed in December has led to genuine street protests, which he has not been able to dismiss as part of his global elite conspiracy. The anger has come from ordinary men and women who will be required to work compulsory overtime, to compensate for labour force shortages exacerbated by his visceral anti-immigration policies.

One rule for some, one rule for others is, as the wily Orbán will know, a dangerous place for any politician to be. The crony capitalism that is now deeply embedded is facing its first serious test.