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.”

Presenting itself as less a liberal opposition to Fidesz than a reformist movement from within it, the Tisza party, built around the charismatic authority of its leader, the former Fidesz insider Péter Magyar, has developed a commanding lead in most polls. Magyar’s adoption of nationalist imagery and eschewing of support for progressive social causes has won inroads into Hungary’s electorate far outstripping the previously lackluster opposition. His party sells itself, one government sympathizer told me, as “Fidesz without the corruption”. His entry into opposition politics came after a very public breach with his ex-wife, former Justice Minister and Fidesz high-flyer Judit Varga, who resigned from public life following revelations she had pardoned a well-connected paedophile. Fidesz loyalists, describing Magyar as a “third-tier apparatchik” gone rogue, are happy to gossip darkly about the alleged character flaws displayed by their former colleague. (Tisza, pursuing a tightly-controlled media strategy which may hint at a successful Magyar’s governing style, did not agree to an interview for this piece.) But in liberal Budapest at least, almost anyone you speak to who is not connected to the government transpires to be a Tisza voter. 

On a riverboat in the Danube converted into a restaurant, I met Balázs Sarkadi, bassist and vocalist in the punk band Bankrupt. I had met young Bankrupt fans protesting at Orbán’s national day rally a few days earlier, one of whom was dressed as a zebra in an ironic nod to opposition claims that the prime minister keeps the exotic animals at his family’s country estate. Bankrupt’s songs, with titles like “Viktorland” and “Illiberal Holiday”, channel the frustration of a younger generation who have never known a different government. “It is definitely a generation gap between Fidesz supporters, who tend to be like old people or uneducated people, but all the young people are against them. They all want this Tisza party to win,” Sarkadi told me. After years of opposition failure, “This guy appeared, and he was competent. People were like, yeah, he came from Fidesz, but if he’s the one who can defeat Orbán, then let him beat them, because he came from Fidesz, he knows how they work, so he has the knowhow to compete against them.” 

Yet a Tisza victory is far from certain. Pollsters close to the opposition present Tisza with a commanding popular lead; pollsters close to the government show Fidesz winning most electoral districts. In a country whose journalism is largely inextricable from political activism, whether for or against the government, the results of the election are genuinely difficult to predict. In Hungary’s last election, the polls seemed to predict a slender opposition victory: the result was a Fidesz landslide. “It’s going to be tight,” Pál Daniél Rényi, an investigative journalist with the opposition-leaning 444.hu website, told me. “But I can’t even say that, because the system favors the winner so much that you can win and you win easily. But it’s difficult to see Orbán winning so clearly as he has been doing for the last four times.”

Still, figures close to Fidesz point out that even after all this time, Orbán can boast personal approval ratings greatly ahead of any Western leader. In liberal Budapest, it is easy to get the impression that everyone supports Tisza, but Orbán can depend on a bedrock of loyal support, particularly in the countryside and among the Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries, that may yet be enough to swing the election. “Budapest is 70, 80% for Magyar,” András, the softly-spoken middle-aged owner of a cafe in the gentrifying VIII district, told me, “but outside in the villages, I don’t know, Orbán pays poor people for votes. I hope it will be Magyar — I don’t like Orbán, I don’t like Putin, I don’t like Trump, I don’t like populism and corruption. But it is very difficult. I hope it is Magyar.” 

At the national day march, loyal supporters carried banners and placards bearing the names of their towns and villages — Nagycenk, Fertőd, Törökszentmiklós — Hungary’s conservative countryside gathered in the heart of opposition Budapest. One pensioner I spoke to, in traditional folk dress, was an ethnic Szekler from neighboring Romania’s Hungarian minority, among whom, he told me, “90 or 95% of Transylvanians support Orbán”. In its split between liberal cities and conservative provinces, Hungary replicates the familiar pattern seen across much of Europe, only more so. “In most countries, the capital rules the countryside,” one member of the foreign post-liberal diaspora in Budapest told me. “But in Hungary the countryside rules the capital.”

After Orbán’s big speech, I chatted with Buda, a 22-year-old Fidesz-supporting law student in a quarter zip. “I believe Hungary is the last bastion of the old Europe, and that has to be preserved,” he told me. “If you look at the West, with all the crime and sexual assaults that come from migration, you see the EU leadership have an idealized ideology of how things should be that just doesn’t work in real life.” Many, perhaps most, voters in Western Europe would agree, a fact not lost on Fidesz in its long-running war against Brussels. For many Western conservatives, Hungary presents an attractive vision of post-liberal governance, not only in its strict border management but in its extensive support to young families, pro-natalist subsidies and vision of a rightly-ordered conservative society. On immigration, the source of Orbán’s original rupture with Brussels, Hungary has won the argument; the EU may yet, in the aftermath of the Iran war, come around to an energy rapprochement with Russia, too. It is certainly striking that the Tisza opposition is not offering any dramatic ruptures on the questions dividing Budapest from other European capitals. But perhaps, given the dire relationship with Brussels the past decade’s battles have wrought, Fidesz can no longer extract political capital from having been right too early.

“My feeling is that all the big, important decisions which we made after rational calculations based on the national interest, it turned out that these were good decisions,” Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor Balázs Orbán (no relation to the Prime Minister) told me. We were meeting in his office in the Karmelita, a converted 18th-century monastery that is now Hungary’s seat of government, overlooking the city high up in Buda’s castle district, from where he was running a Fidesz election campaign for the first time. “And probably that’s the reason why we are still the most popular governing party in Europe. If you look at the polls, there is no other governing party which has this popularity rate and this chance to win the election.”

Yet outside the gleaming, expensively restored streets of central Budapest, where MAGA influencers are wont to take nocturnal selfies by the Danube marveling at how safe they feel, the capital sometimes doesn’t feel that different to Western Europe at all. In the VIII District, an inner suburb of grand 18th- and 19th-century palaces and apartment blocks, once notorious for crime and prostitution but now heavily if unevenly gentrified — and visibly reshaped by mass migration — the expensive cafes and bakeries patronized by middle-class, opposition-supporting young families are punctuated by the same halal takeaways, African hair salons, phone repair shops and Middle Eastern barbers as London. Returning to Budapest for the first time since the 2022 election, I find it striking how many more rough sleepers there now are, and how numerous and visible street drinkers and beggars have become. It is often pointed out by the government’s post-liberal advocates that Budapest is a liberal bubble in a conservative country: it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the post-liberal utopia is also something of a bubble of its own.

“The economy is not good now,” Gábor Győri, a political analyst with the progressive Policy Solutions think tank, told me, as we chatted at a pavement cafe. “And you have what is catching up to the government, is that for many public services, they haven’t done anything in 16 years, or whatever they have done has made it worse. So, the Hungarian public, and we have done surveys about this, has a very devastating opinion of public services in Hungary, and when it comes to healthcare, for instance, even a significant minority of Fidesz [supporters] agree that it’s not good.” 

While Fidesz presided over an economic boom in the earlier part of its reign, the Hungarian economy has suffered in recent years, particularly since the outbreak of the Ukraine War, with growth trailing that of the country’s Central European neighbors. Since 2021, research reveals, the Hungarian upper middle class has almost halved in number, while the poorest class in society has grown from 31% to 43% of the country’s population. Prices, in shops and cafes and restaurants, are now not markedly lower than in Britain, but wages have not risen accordingly. Government officials stress that the Ukraine War is an external shock beyond their control, and that without the continued access to cheap Russian energy maintained by Orbán, the cost of living for Hungarian voters would be even more crushing. 

Yet with the dire state of the country’s hospitals a recurrent theme among the opposition, even Fidesz loyalists privately concede that more should have been spent on healthcare over their generation in office, on raising ordinary state employees’ salaries and on spreading wealth beyond the party’s innermost circle. While the government campaigns on foreign policy, centering the Ukraine war and Orbán’s close relationship with the Trump administration in its messaging, Tisza is running on bread-and-butter domestic issues: in many ways, it is now Magyar running a populist campaign against what he pits as an out-of-touch establishment. 

“The difficulty in terms of running this campaign,” Balász Hidvéghi, State Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, told me, “is that there is a foreign affairs, um, dominance in our message, you know? Whereas we’ve done a lot in Hungary that we can be proud of. We have a lot of results, economic results. We’ve increased wages, we’ve given a lot of tax cuts and other advantages to families, to young mothers, to young people. So there are lots to talk about, as positive… But of course, even I feel, when I finish a speech or an exchange with voters, that perhaps I talk too much about the international order, you know, the war, the strategy, and not enough about what we’ve done here in Hungary and what would be good for the community.” 

Rényi, a long-term observer of Fidesz’s inner workings, believes that this time round, Orbán is losing his once-sure touch for the public mood. “He has a very close circle, and he started to make mistakes,” he told me. “That’s the feeling. You know, they just try to create content and dominate the daily discussions on politics, and it’s just not really working, to be honest.” The old style of Fidesz campaigning, pitting the country as fighting a valiant, lonely battle against internal and external enemies, is losing its appeal, he believes. “I think there’s some sort of an exhaustion in the system,” Rényi told me, “the whole way of doing politics, actually playing on people’s existential fear. I think this is something that just people got somehow fed up with. People are exhausted being all afraid all the time.”

In his office in a Baroque building in Buda’s castle district, a Make Europe Great Again baseball cap prominent on his desk, I met Zoltán Kovács, Hungary’s Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. An often combative presence on social media, he was relaxed and affable in the flesh, leaning back into his armchair as he defended the government’s record in office. “Most of those criticisms can simply be refuted by the facts,” he told me. Over the past 10 years, the government had spent more on healthcare than ever before, he added, and wages were rising, even in an era of pan-European stagnation. “So as a matter of fact, [how] people feel about the economy is completely different to how people in reality are having that opportunity to actually consume, how their wages are changing. So that’s the reality on the ground.” As for the state of the healthcare system, “We can have an argument about it, but there comes the fact that actually the European resources that could be used for renovation are being withheld for political reasons.” With just a few more days of campaigning before the election, Kovács exuded confidence in the final result. “I believe there’s a huge surprise going to come on Sunday, especially for the international press. And I’m going to tell you that all the push polls you see, especially for the past couple of days, are completely nonsense.”

At least publicly, both sides are going into the election expressing certainty in their victory. Speaking on background, it is more common to hear doubt and uncertainty creep in. Independent observers, too, stress the unpredictability of the final result. “I think that maybe the odds are in favor of Tisza,” Győri told me, “because the polls, the independent polls, [show] such a strong lead.” Yet even still, the polls have been wrong before, understating the extent of Fidesz’s shy voters, and the party’s ability to turn out the wavering and undecided at the last moment. “So, if it weren’t for that,” he adds, “then I would say yes, Tisza are certainly going to win, because all the independent polls would give them a healthy margin. But still, I don’t know.” 

Whoever wins the election will inherit a polarized country, and perhaps a pyrrhic victory. In its creation of a post-liberal counter-elite, Fidesz has enmeshed itself within the inner workings of the state. Without winning a supermajority, an unlikely outcome, Tisza will find its ability to govern effectively hemmed in by a state bureaucracy reshaped in Orbán’s image. Even in opposition, Fidesz will remain a tried and tested political machine, while Tisza — derided as a “virtual party” by Kovács — may struggle to hold together a disparate electoral coalition formed solely to unseat Orbán. On the other hand, a slender political victory for Fidesz, and perhaps even a coalition government, should the electoral arithmetic require it, with the radical Right-wing Mi Hazánk party, whose policy positions are far to the right of Fidesz, and who express quixotic foreign policy stances at which Orbán’s Trumpist allies would look askance, would also hamper Orbán’s ability to govern effectively for the first time in many years. The government’s hope, and a dominating theme in its campaigning, is that the uncertainty inherent in a new government formed by an untested party will, in the end, be too much of a gamble for Hungary’s voters. “They know him,” Balázs Orbán insisted of the Prime Minister, “They understand who he is, they understand where he is coming from, they know the bad and the good things. And in these times of uncertainty, you do not choose any risky candidate, and the guy itself [Magyar] is a risky candidate.”

One “interesting scenario”, cautions Győri, would be Tisza winning the popular vote but not, due to the intricacies of Hungary’s electoral system, winning a parliamentary majority. “That would be, technically speaking, a legitimate victory,” he notes, “but it would dispute the legitimacy of the election, because it would show that more people would have preferred Tisza.” In such a scenario, protests are not out of the question, notes Rényi, given the high expectations held by opposition voters. “They believe that this is the moment and that the regime is going to be over. So I think this is the first time when I had this feeling that when the opposition would lose, they would be less willing to accept it than the government. I mean, if the opposition loses, Budapest is going to be, I don’t know, something’s going to happen.” According to one recent poll, 71% of Tisza voters would not now accept a Fidesz victory as legitimate. 

Whoever wins the election will require a commanding majority not just to govern effectively, but, perhaps, merely to convincingly take power. In an election that has seen previously unimaginable foreign interference, both for and against the government, and with such a polarized political and media landscape, a slim or even contested victory for either side would present great challenges for political stability over the next few years, and make the country a target for even more overt external meddling. Yet for all the foreign interventions so far, and the projected hopes and fears of foreign liberals and post-liberals alike, Hungarians seem set to go to the polls tomorrow centering domestic Hungarian concerns. The central Fidesz pitch, that after a generation’s rule, Orbán represents tried and tested leadership in an uncertain world, is the precise inversion of Tisza’s message that Fidesz has ruled for too long, and the country desperately needs change. In weighing up the merits of these opposing arguments on Sunday, in an election perhaps more finely balanced than domestic and foreign coverage would make it seem, it is in the country’s interest that whatever Hungary’s voters decide, they are seen to do so decisively.  

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

In Warsaw, however, politicians struck a rather less sycophantic tone. “The wind of history is blowing even stronger,” proclaimed Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, soon after Trump’s victory. “Poland’s leadership will rise to the occasion.” And why not? Poland already leads Europe on defence spending as a percentage of GDP, and boasts the third-largest army in Nato. And, especially if Trump makes good on his threat to abandon his transatlantic allies to their fate, the country might yet have an opportunity to become a military powerhouse right across the continent — one that could yet evoke the country’s bygone days of geopolitical dominance. 

Trump’s election is already transforming Polish politics. With the country’s 2025 presidential election looming, Sikorski, who threw his hat into the ring to become the nominee for the ruling Civic Platform party shortly before the US election, has now recalibrated his campaign around Trump’s victory. Among other things, Sikorski argues that what Poland needs now is someone with the diplomatic experience to weather the vagaries of a Trump presidency. Just as important, the foreign minister points out that he has a good working relationship with Trump, distinguishing himself from Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and Sikorski’s rival for the job.

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In reality, though, Trump’s victory is about far more than day-to-day political bickering. For while capitals across Eastern Europe are unsurprisingly worried by the security implications of America First, they equally know that whatever happens, they’re going to have to take care of themselves. And if that means filling a US-shaped void in terms of national security, not least when it comes to Russia, the disappearance of American power may also bolster the presence of the Poles or Romanians on the wider Europe stage. 

That’s clear enough West of the Oder. The recent collapse of Olaf Scholz’s government in Germany was partly triggered by arguments over support for Ukraine and the prospect that US assistance might end, even as the chancellor has been criticised by other Nato members for speaking to Vladimir Putin for the first time in years. Not that the chaos in Berlin should surprise the generals in Tallinn or Sofia. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Nato’s centre of gravity has gradually shifted eastwards. It’s no coincidence that ministerial talks on the future of European defence were lately held in Warsaw. And though Emmanuel Macron has lately started making bold statements about deploying Nato forces to Ukraine, he was only following Poland’s lead.

To put it differently, then, only the Eastern Europeans have concrete incentives to take Trump’s security threats seriously: and only Poland has the wealth and expertise to actually drag its neighbours towards an independent defence policy. And, in a sense, that’s wholly appropriate. For while Western observers are more familiar with Poland’s years of subjugation — first by Prussia and the Tsar, later by Hitler and the Soviets — there was once a time that the country dominated the continent. In 1683, it was chiefly through the intervention of King Jan III Sobieski that Catholic armies defeated the invading Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna. Pope Innocent XI swiftly proclaimed Sobieski the “saviour of Western civilisation” for the timely arrival of the famed winged hussars. Around the same time, Polish kings, ruling over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, flanked the Baltic and Black Seas, and dominated Central and Eastern European affairs all while maintaining an inventive (if imperfect) system of elective monarchy. 

Over subsequent centuries, Polish leaders like Marshal Józef Piłsudski have occasionally tried to reclaim this illustrious mantle, seeing Poland not as a European hegemon, but rather as a power counterweight to both Russian and German expansionism. It goes without saying, of course, that the sober liberals of the Civic Platform don’t see themselves as Sobieskis reborn. Yet with Trump taking a hammer to the foundations of the European security order, the pendulum of history does seem to be swinging back towards a Polish military renaissance. 

It surely helps that since the end of the Cold War, Poland has worked hard to build up its forces. Quite aside from the headline GDP numbers, that’s clear enough elsewhere too. The country has emerged as the largest tank power in Europe, and boasts the third-largest fleet of F-16 jets on the continent. That’s shadowed by a recent shipment of F-35s from the US, with Poland receiving a custom model of the plane from Lockheed Martin. The new batch, for its part, is aptly named “Husarz” — a nod to the winged hussars of old. At the same time, Poland’s military leadership recently announced plans to develop an AI centre to support decision-making. Not to be outdone, Warsaw also said it was acquiring 486 HIMARS launchers: a ridiculous number, if undoubtedly a statement of intent. 

No less important, Poland has geographical reasons to take defence seriously. The only Nato member to share borders with both Ukraine and Russia, Poles have learnt by hard experience that their location on the North European Plain is painfully exposed. Since Trump’s election, though, officials in Warsaw have eagerly underlined that, whatever the political priorities in Washington, they remain unconcerned about America’s commitment to Poland in particular or Nato in general. 

We shouldn’t imagine that Poland can become entirely self-sufficient here, at least not for the moment anyway. It surely speaks volumes that Poland’s president recently felt the need to remind the world, and presumably Trump himself, of the importance of the American alliance. The fact he did so on Poland’s independence day is even more revealing. 

But nor should Andrzej Duda worry too much: despite his tough talk, Trump will find it almost impossible to escape Europe entirely. With the landmark opening of the first permanent US base in Poland last week, as part of a broader pan-European missile defence shield, America will necessarily continue to play some role in the region. Ever the businessman, Trump is also likely to see Eastern Europe as an enticing customer for America’s military-industrial complex. Earlier this year, the US granted loans to Poland and Romania, totalling $2 billion and $920 million respectively, all to buy American weapons. Except similar deals over the years ahead — especially if Trump is confident Nebraska farm boys won’t need to be deployed to help use them. 

Indeed, the President-elect’s essential self-interest could yet prove a boon to Eastern Europe. That’s doubtless true if Trump reduces the American troop presence enough to satisfy his domestic base — but nonetheless retains the country’s existing military infrastructure. That, in turn, could offer countries like Poland the best of both worlds: the Americans would provide essential support, in line with their own interests, even as Warsaw develops a more independent defence policy, one that ultimately goes beyond the strictures imposed by Washington. 

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In practice, this means Warsaw could finally execute major defence initiatives previously held in check by the Biden administration. One good example here is shooting down incoming Russian missiles and drones over Ukrainian airspace. As I wrote back in September, Russian projectiles have crossed into Polish, Romanian, and Latvian airspace several times since 2022, occasionally landing hundreds of kilometres inside Nato territory. Not only does this pose a threat to civilians, it also raises the risk of an Article V declaration against Russia. Certainly Mark Rutte, Nato’s new secretary general, seems to understand that where Poland goes, he’ll eventually need to travel too.

Nor is a decline in American interest merely a chance for Warsaw to flex its military muscles. On the contrary, Poland has also shown striking independence on migration policy as well. Warsaw has long viewed the influx of migrants along its border with Belarus — arguably history’s first man-made migration crisis — as indistinguishable from the security threats it faces from Russian hybrid operations in its territory and the errant Russian missiles lobbed from Ukraine. Much to the chagrin of NGOs, and despite some initial pushback, Europe has now mostly accepted the Polish narrative. 

Combined with Eastern Europe’s rising military might, and the region is clearly moving away from its traditional role as a pale imitator of Paris or Berlin. On the contrary, Warsaw and Bucharest could yet become the cities where the continent’s policy is devised and executed. Once that Pandora’s Box is opened, moreover, it’ll be impossible to close — even after 2028. Whatever happens in four years, whoever enters the White House after Trump may yet find a Europe transformed, one where the future is decided less in stagnant Brussels, and more in a fearless and prosperous Warsaw.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

As politicians continue to devise unrealistic plans for energy rationing, the reality is that soaring energy prices and falling demand have already caused dozens of plants across a diverse range of energy-intensive industries — glass, steel, aluminium, zinc, fertilisers, chemicals — to cut back production or shut down, causing thousands of workers to be laid off. Even the pro-war New York Times was recently forced to acknowledge the “crippling” impact that Brussels’s sanctions are having on industry and the working class in Europe. “High energy prices are lashing European industry, forcing factories to cut production quickly and put tens of thousands of employees on furlough,” it reported.

Zinc, aluminium and silicon production cuts (amounting to a staggering 50% of output) have already left consumers in the Europe’s steel, auto and construction industries facing severe shortages, which are being offset by shipments from China and elsewhere. Meanwhile, steel plants in Spain, Italy, France, Germany and other countries — more than two dozen in total — are beginning to slow down or entirely stop their output.

The fertiliser industry, which is heavily dependent on gas as a key feedstock as well as a source of power, is in even bigger trouble. More than two-thirds of production — around 30 plants — has already been halted. The German chemicals powerhouse BASF has temporarily shut down 80 plants worldwide and is slowing production at another 100 as it plans further output cuts depending on what happens to gas prices. To make things worse, EU sanctions have also limited imports of Russian fertilisers.

Dwindling supplies of fertilisers are also having a dramatic knock-on effect on European farmers, which are being forced to scale back their use of the key nutrient. This means higher prices for less output, and the consequences are bound to be felt well beyond Europe’s borders, potentially triggering a global food shortage.

But the shortage of fertiliser isn’t the only problem facing European farmers. Across northern and western Europe, vegetable producers are contemplating halting their activities because of the crippling energy costs — in some cases ten times higher than those of 2021 — required to heat greenhouse through the winter and keep harvests refrigerated, on top of rising transport and packaging costs. Greenhouse industry group Glastuinbouw Nederland says up to 40% of its 3,000 members are in financial distress. This further threatens food supplies — and will certainly lead to even higher food prices which, coupled with soaring energy bills, is likely to drive millions of European into poverty. In other words, the European energy and cost-of-living crisis is on course to descend into an outright humanitarian crisis.

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In the UK, 45 million people are forecast to face fuel poverty by January 2023; as a result, “millions of children’s development will be blighted” with lung damage, toxic stress and deepening educational inequalities, as children struggle to keep up with school work in freezing homes. Lives will be lost, experts warn. Meanwhile, in Germany’s Rheingau-Taunus district, the authorities have carried out a simulation of what such a blackout would mean for them, and the results are shocking: more than 400 people would die in the first 96 hours. And this in a district of just 190,000 inhabitants.

Now, these numbers may well be overestimates, but the local government can’t afford to ignore them. Indeed, Gerd Landsberg, general manager of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, has urged residents to stockpile water and food for 14 days. Landsberg says that Germany is “in no way” prepared for such a scenario.

What’s important to understand is that this is not some temporary crisis where all we need to do is grit our teeth through the winter, after which things will return to normal. The reality, as the chief executive of Shell recently made clear, is that if European governments insist on decoupling Europe from Russian supplies, the continent will face gas shortages “likely to last several winters”. It’s a bitter truth, but there’s simply no short-term alternative to Russia’s gas. Indeed, the European Commission forecasts gas and electricity prices to “remain high and volatile until at least 2023”.

To put it simply, if it stays on its current course, Europe is looking at years of economic contraction, inflation, deindustrialisation, declining living standards, mass impoverishment, and shortages — and this without taking into account the terrifying prospect of an outright military confrontation with Russia. How can anyone think Europe can survive this without plunging into anarchy?

The folly of the situation becomes even more apparent when we consider that, in its attempt to reduce its dependence on Russian gas, the EU is increasing its reliance on supplies from countries like China and India — which, it would appear, are simply reselling to Europe gas that comes from… Russia (at a higher price, of course). If people’s lives weren’t on the line, this whole thing would seem like a sick joke.

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It’s truly a sign of the feebleness of Europe’s politicians that despite the fast-approaching cliff, no one can bring themselves to state the obvious: that the sanctions need to end. There’s simply no moral justification for destroying the livelihoods of millions of Europeans simply to school Putin, even if the sanctions were helping to achieve that aim, which they clearly aren’t.

And so, rather depressingly, the only voice of reason appears to be that of Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orbán. For weeks he and other members of his government have been warning about the economic calamity facing Europe. “The attempts to weaken Russia have not succeeded,” he said recently. “By contrast, it is Europe that could be brought to its knees by brutal inflation and energy shortages resulting from sanctions”. This is a statement of fact, not an opinion. But nobody seems to want to listen.

In response, the technocrats in Brussels are proving to be just as senseless as national leaders. Not only is the EU’s gung-ho approach to Russia one of the main causes of the present crisis, but its leadership continues to pour petrol on the fire. Just this month, Josep Borrell, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said that “the strategy against Russia is working and must continue” — and promised new sanctions.

Even worse, the EU isn’t even doing anything to help cushion the effects of the crisis it helped create. After dropping the ridiculous proposal of capping only the price of Russian gas — which would have led to the latter’s immediate cut-off — Brussels is now mulling a cap on all gas imports, which even the German Minister of State for Europe has warned could lead to severe shortages.

The proposal also fails to take into account a basic fact: it’s not energy exporters that are ramping up the price of gas; the latter today is linked to the price at which gas is traded on virtual trading markets such as the TTF in Amsterdam, where speculators have been rallying up prices for months, making huge profits. Moreover, in today’s liberalised market, which is based on so-called marginal-cost pricing, the final price of power is set by the most expensive fuel needed to meet all demands — in this case gas. This means that as gas prices soar, so does electricity, even if cheaper, clean sources contribute to the total mix.

So, if the EU were serious about tackling about energy prices, it would decouple the price of gas from speculative trading markets and overhaul the marginal-cost pricing system. But that would go against the European technocrats’ fundamental ideology: the idea that prices should be set by markets. Indeed, the EU was among the most ardent supporters, against Putin’s advice, of the shift from long-term, fixed price gas deals to a system where the price is set by virtual trading markets.

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Given the unlikelihood of radical reform, what will Brussels do next? In all likelihood, it will settle for half-baked solutions — such as a cap on the excess revenues made by non-gas power plants and a windfall tax on surplus profits — as well as for what it does best: austerity. Meanwhile, the ECB, instead of announcing a new round of bond purchases to provide governments with the cash they need to cushion citizens and companies from soaring gas and energy prices, has started to taper its quantitative easing programmes and hiked interest rates, causing the spread between 10-year government bonds issued by Italy and Germany to widen to their highest levels since the pandemic began. This could easily precipitate a new debt crisis, which is the last thing Europe needs.

Without central bank support, governments in the EU have essentially been left to fend for themselves. Once again we are reminded of what it means for euro countries to have given up the power to issue their own money; it’s no coincidence that the UK alone has allocated more than 50% of what has been set aside by the EU as a whole.

This is already leading to beggar-thy-neighbour policies: those countries, such as Germany, that can rely on financial markets to raise the cash they need to help citizens and businesses, and nationalise or bail out ailing energy utilities, will inevitably outcompete weaker countries that are already facing stress on bond markets, such as Italy. In fact, this is already starting to happen, as more and more countries engage in what can only be described as energy protectionism.

In theory, Europe’s gas security is governed by a regulation adopted in 2017, which makes solidarity among European countries mandatory. But EU countries don’t always observe those rules when confronted with a supply crisis. So, for example, the Italian newspaper la Repubblica recently reported that Italy had received written notification from France’s state-controlled utility EDF regarding a potential two-year halt on power exports as part of France’s energy-saving plans. A spokesperson for Italy’s Ministry of Ecological Transition later confirmed the newspaper report, although it was denied by EDF. Similarly, Croatia and Hungary have both announced that plans to implement measures to limit exports of natural gas to neighbouring countries. While Norway, which has supplanted Russia as the EU’s largest source of gas, making gigantic profits on the back of higher gas prices, has thus refused to back a price cap on its gas exports.

Yet while moaning about such “lack of solidarity” between European states is easy, it is also naïve. This, after all, is simply how capitalism works. For all the talk of “global capitalism”, individual nations — or better, their respective capitalist elites — are still engaged in competition with each other. While the ruling classes of individual countries are more than happy to collaborate to pursue the interests of capital-in-general at the expense of workers — just look at the European Union — their competing interests inevitably re-emerge in times of crisis.

The EU, in fact, far from encouraging solidarity among countries, actually makes inter-capitalist competition even more fierce, by depriving countries of the basic economic tools that are required to deal with external shocks. It doesn’t matter if the continent is experiencing a financial crash, a global pandemic or an energy shortage. In Europe, beggar-thy-neighbour policies aren’t an exception to the rule — they are the rule.

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”.

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“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?”

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

What bothered me was the extent to which several high-profile populist conservatives were seeming to reflexively side with the cruel Russian autocrat. I watched as Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance defended Putin, or adopted the Kremlin’s critique of Ukraine. The country was a “pure client state of the United States State Department” said Carlson. “Spare me the performative affection for the Ukraine” said Vance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

These interventions, made as Russia began an invasion that looks set to result in the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, look high risk and low reward. These commentators are undermining the credibility they have accrued for taking bold stances on the “security and identity” issues their base really cares about. Namely: wokeness, the border, crime and defending national heritage.

This is a real shame for populist conservatism in the United States. During the height of progressive moral panics such as the Covington Boys, George Floyd protests or Rittenhouse trial, Tucker’s show was an oasis of sanity. It was, too, on exposing campus craziness and anti-white rhetoric in institutions, or the scale of illegal immigration. He defended the legitimacy of Americans who wanted to regulate the pace of ethno-cultural change and protect social cohesion, taking immense flak from the great and the good. Others, such as Glenn Greenwald, highlighted the blind spots and biases of progressive organisations and tech firms. Most American politicians and legacy media outlets failed to cover these issues objectively.

And yet, when it comes to a suite of other problems, the incisive logic of the sceptics and their marshalling of evidence yielded to sweeping neo-Marxist conspiracy theories about a manipulative power elite. This became evident during the pandemic, a tricky new challenge in which experts and politicians had to optimise between death rates and freedom. While governments and public health bodies may have got the balance wrong, and overreached with mask mandates, such a complex issue does not lend itself to maximalist claims.

Instead, the difficulties of policymaking during the pandemic demanded building a patient case with data and arguing for the dial to be turned a bit towards greater personal autonomy. Indeed, the politics of anti-lockdown libertarianism has not paid off for those, such as Nigel Farage, who have attempted to campaign on it. It was never a populist position.

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Another tricky issue which is largely tangential to populist voters’ concerns is foreign policy, where, even with Putin issuing marching orders to unprepared conscripts, populist elites continued to carry water for this killer. Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, and Viktor Orbán all, at various moments, spoke warmly of him. While it is legitimate to make a realist case — as John Mearsheimer has done — for tempering Ukrainian demands and accommodating reasonable Russian security concerns, the inability of some to reject the moral equivalence of Ukraine and Russia was glaring.

What lies behind this bizarre empathy toward Putin’s thuggish regime?

First, there is an important disconnect between Right-wing populist elites and their audience. Populist elites compete with mainstream intellectual elites, yearning for an overarching meta-theory to rival progressive liberalism or libertarianism. Many also desire a modicum of politically-correct respectability and thus try to pretend they are motivated by a desire to speak for the downtrodden. This typically results in a neo-Marxist mélange focused on globalist power elites and their manipulation of the masses. All of which pushes populist intellectuals toward grand theories of global economic and political order that bear little relationship to what national populist voters and audiences actually care about.

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Steve Bannon talks endlessly about the perils of free trade, Davos and the working class, despite the fact the data shows very clearly that cultural attitudes and views on immigration, not material deprivation, are what predict support for Trump. Likewise, Brexit elites such as Boris Johnson or Douglas Carswell, with their libertarian dreams of a sovereign free-trading Britain, are strangely disconnected from actual Brexit voters, who were — like Trump voters — mainly motivated by a desire for less immigration and slower cultural change. The more Brexit voters glimpse the real Johnson, who cares nothing for these things, the less connected they feel to him.

Populist elites have developed a fixation on global elites and institutions as self-interested scheming actors, and have become obsessed with mobilising opposition to the globalist juggernaut. Rather than viewing the problem as a western cultural-Left worldview which repudiates national tradition and elevates a cult of victimhood, we are treated to conspiratorial musings about the “Great Reset” and elites in Davos, Geneva or Brussels. My limited experience, having given talks at some of these institutions, is that the more international the organisation, the less woke it is. Yes, western high culture permeates global institutions, but these are nodes rather than the epicentre of the problem.

Once convinced of their neo-Marxist grand theory, some populist elites, fired by hostility to the rules-based liberal world order, feel compelled to develop an anti-western foreign policy. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic carries them toward Putin’s Russia and quasi-illiberal democracies such as Hungary. An isolationism which originally sprang from the valid concern — after protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that American nationhood not be defined by missionary democracy promotion has mutated into support for autocracy.

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The perception that Russia is a masculine, white, Christian country unafraid to stand up for its traditions forms part of its appeal to conservative populist thinkers. “Putin ain’t woke,” Steve Bannon said last month. “He’s anti-woke.” The Russian President’s 2019 interview with the Financial Times, when he declared that liberalism has “become obsolete” clearly impressed many Western conservative populists. Against Drag Queen Story Hour and self-flagellation about the sins of the past could be set Putin’s macho, Christian, nationalist Russia. Clearly, some populist elites took the bait.

Yet any honest appraisal of Putin’s Russia would reveal that its religiosity is weak, immigration substantial, and the Eurasianism of Putin and Alexandr Dugin would readily trade cultural homogeneity for more territory. Moreover, as the Russianist Edwin Bacon observes: “Eurasianists embracing Orthodoxy identify themselves as having far more in common with what they would call other traditional faiths — notably Islam, and principally Shi’a Islam — than with other Christian churches.” Putin’s Russia is a ramshackle, corrupt, aggressive despotism. It is not “really hot stuff” as Donald Trump put it once. It is not a post-woke paradise.

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Populist elites also appear to like Russia because it has spurned liberalism, failing to appreciate that wokeness, whose sacralisation of minorities is used to restrict liberty, is best resisted by liberal arguments. They confuse procedural liberalism, which has been vital for the West’s success, with Left-modernist values such as celebrating diversity and change, which developed much later and are not central to liberalism.

As a ‘rational populist’ and liberal nationalist, I maintain that the values of the median voter should be reflected in policy, but that those tasked with carrying out such policies should be guided by science, analytic logic, and expertise. The problem with many Western elites is not their technical skills, but their post-national woke values, which spring from religious rather than rational wellsprings. While populist commentators correctly skewer the progressive pieties of the elite media and political class, the anti-globalist conspiracy theorising of many needs an urgent reality check. Populist pundits and politicians should resist the urge to stake out contrarian positions on every news item, tacking instead to the centre ground on side issues to avoid losing support for core issues.

Hopefully the Ukraine crisis can serve as a wake-up call, drawing them back toward the cultural problems their base actually cares about.

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. 

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The country’s Westernised middle classes, centred on Kabul, and ethnic and religious minorities like the Shia Hazara, who played a central role in the 2015 migrant crisis, are unlikely to try their chances under Taliban rule, as long as the door to Europe remains open. Already, Afghans make up 42% of the refugees and migrants living in squalid conditions on Greece’s eastern island camps, perhaps an even larger proportion than they did in 2015 when the large presence of Afghan Hazaras was dramatically underreported in the West, distracted by the Syria crisis, despite Afghans constituting a major portion of the migratory flow, including 2/3rds of Sweden’s 2015 arrivals.

But in any case, the Europe of 2021 is not the Europe of 2015, and Europe’s leaders have no appetite for a return of the political turmoil that followed Merkel’s experiment with open borders. Distracted by Brexit and imported American culture wars, Britain’s remaining pro-EU contingent have neglected to follow the developing consensus on the continent, where the hard line on migration for which Viktor Orbán was lambasted by liberal commentators back in 2015 has now entered the political mainstream. 

When asked whether Germany had a duty to open the country’s doors to Afghan migration, even Merkel herself recently responded that “we cannot solve all of these problems by taking everyone in”. Instead she encouraged, rather unrealistically, a dialogue with the Taliban so “that people can live as peacefully as possible in the country”. In neighbouring Austria, Chancellor Kurz’s centre-right/Green coalition has responded to the surge in arrivals on its eastern borders with the deployment of the army and angry protests that European migration policy has “failed”, with the country’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer complaining that “we have one of the biggest Afghan communities in the whole of Europe,” and that “it cannot be the case that Austria and Germany are solving the Afghanistan problem for the EU.”

The Austrian government has decisively swung towards the Central European approach of hardened borders and expedited returns to countries of origin, with Kurz stressing that he would not halt deportations to Afghanistan, as Sweden and Finland already have, a reflection of a public mood darkened by recent high-profile crimes carried out by Afghan asylum seekers. Like centre-left Denmark, which is accelerating both its return of refugees to Syria and the search, apparently along with the UK, of third-party countries in Africa willing to host refugees and migrants on its behalf, the new mood in Austria is not the result of the populist Right coming to power, but instead of centrist parties adopting solutions that were in 2015 considered the sole preserve of the radical Right.

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As in Spain, where the next government is likely to be a coalition between the centre-right PP and the radical right Vox, in Italy a coalition government between the centre-Right and the far-Right looms in the wings. Indeed, Salvini’s Lega is now so outflanked on its Right by the rising power of Georgia Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, the most popular political party in the country, that it can be considered centre-Right itself, so far has the country’s Overton Window shifted. In France, where Macron has angrily rejected an imported American racial culture war in favour of the country’s homegrown culture war over Islam and the possibility of civil war, the soi-disant liberal saviour from the perceived populist menace has moved so far to the Right that the roughly even chances of a Le Pen victory in the forthcoming presidential election seem almost irrelevant in defining the country’s political trajectory. 

Perhaps it is Greece that highlights best not just the shifting mood in Europe’s external border states, but the shifting mood in Brussels itself. When Erdogan opened Turkey’s land borders with Greece in spring last year, bussing migrants to the border fences in a confrontation that came uncomfortably close to war, Greece’s militarised response unexpectedly won applause rather than censure from the EU hierarchy, as well as the swift dispatch of both Frontex border guards and funds to build an impassable border wall, now being beefed up with EU surveillance zeppelins and drones. Rather than a rerun of the 2015 migrant crisis, when Europe functioned as a ready source of monetary tribute to an embattled Erdogan, last year’s Evros crisis functioned as a dry run for the coming Afghan wave.

After all, when Belarus’s autocrat Lukashenko began funnelling migrants to the Lithuanian border a few weeks ago, Frontex immediately responded with the deployment of border guards, and support for Lithuania’s planned new 550-km border wall — with Estonia even donating 100km of barbed wire to its struggling ally. Once again, the exact same fortification project Orbán was condemned for in 2015 was hurriedly paid for by the EU in 2020, and presented as a heartening symbol of EU solidarity by 2021. From the Baltic to the Aegean, walls are going up across the eastern marches of the European continent, which will soon define the bloc against the huddling masses straining to get in. Even in Turkey, where the secular opposition CHP party has accelerated its demands to return the country’s three million Syrian refugees within two years and made alarmed noises about the increasing flow of Afghan migrants across the Iranian border, the ruling AKP party is constructing concrete border walls to stem the flow from Afghanistan, just as it has constructed a concrete wall all along its borders with Syria, and deploys lethal force against Syrians trying to sneak through.

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Turkey has become, indeed, the archetype of Europe’s new border guard states, the model for what will no doubt become a ring of authoritarian states bordering the continent’s southern and eastern fringes, whose rulers will be lavishly bribed to keep migrants and refugees from landing on European shores, a relationship somewhere between clients and blackmailers. Like Erdogan, who quickly learned to deploy migrants as a weapon against Europe whenever he was under pressure, Lukashenko has learned the value of Europe’s desire to keep migrants away while not actively being seen to dirty its own hands with the rough business of border management. 

The Moroccan government was equally quick to learn this lesson, recently waving through thousands of migrants to Spain’s North African foothold of Ceuta after the Spanish government granted asylum to a Western Saharan leader, and receiving a handsome bribe to take them back again. Meanwhile, Europe’s only interest in Libya is which faction can most effectively police migrants, just as its only interest in Tunisia’s ongoing coup will be the maintenance of this summer’s border policing deal. Despite the difficulties raised by American financial sanctions, the EU even appears to be eyeing up Iran as one of the potential host nations for the coming Afghan exodus, a dynamic which, if it takes effect, will surely dramatically affect all other aspects of its difficult diplomatic dance with the country. 

So while handing responsibility for keeping migrants out of Europe to regional states may be domestically easier for EU leaders, particularly those from Northwestern and Nordic countries with Green-tinged parties ideologically committed to pro-migration policies, it also offers neighbouring nations handy weapons to deploy against the bloc for their own geopolitical purposes. The great difficulty for European politics is how to balance these opposing tendencies: it is difficult to think, given the steady rightward drift of European politics, that an Open Borders attitude will win out against the simpler solution of a hands-on European effort to prevent migrants entering the EU. 

The expansion of the EU’s Frontex border agency into a 10,000 strong armed rapid deployment force indicates the direction of travel. Indeed, we are already seeing early manifestations of this approach, both in the pushbacks of migrants in the Aegean by the Greek coastguard with Frontex support, and in the growing legal restrictions on the activity of Western European NGO boats blamed for accelerating the migrant flow. Both were placed with the quiet acquiescence of Brussels, despite the protests of Northern European Green parties.

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All this is, of course, a dry run for the almost certainly militarised and exclusionary border policing efforts that will grapple with the vast population movements from Africa and South Asia that will attend the coming decades of climate change. Already, Bangladeshis are the largest single national group making the dangerous crossing from North Africa, and it is not difficult to see a desertifying Sahel or collapsing Lebanon adding new sudden crises for European leaders torn between their desire to maintain allegiance to postwar liberal ideals on asylum and the increasing desire of their voting publics to reject them. The avowedly open, cosmopolitan Europe of the 1990s and 2000s is already dead, and even the lame duck Merkel and her ailing CDU party have abandoned the Wir schaffen das attitude of 2015 in the face of the coming wave. 

The British debate over the Nationality and Borders Bill, insular and self-regarding as all British political debate somehow manages to be, therefore ignores this rapidly shifting European context. In some ways, this must be a relief to a Conservative government that has shown itself incapable of satisfying its core voter base’s demands to stem the flow of irregular migration across the Channel: without any action by the UK itself, the EU will find itself drawn towards a Fortress Europe approach that will, eventually, choke the flow arriving on Kent’s shingle beaches. 

Just as France’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin demands a Frontex deployment with aerial surveillance assets along the Channel coast, Priti Patel’s border woes will be solved by European leaders without meaningful British input other than funding analogous to the tribute the EU hands in desperation to Erdogan. The walls are going up across Europe: we will not see them coming down again in our lifetimes.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Even the late Sir Roger Scruton’s worldview represented an uneasy marriage between Thatcherite capitalism and the last vestiges of the world that came before it. It didn’t ever quite perceive that the Thatcher revolution was too successful: by kicking away the last props of the pre-capitalist order that underwrote the traditional conservative worldview, it killed off that which it proclaimed to love. 

The ultimate irony was Scruton’s appreciation, late in life, of the post-Communist, quasi-authoritarian conservatism of Hungary and Poland as a model. For all the anti-Communism of their post-Cold War governments, surely it was the statist paternalism of their communist regimes that preserved in aspic societies fundamentally more conservative than those eroded by capitalist liberalism in the free-market West. Without Marx, there could be no Orban or Kaczynski; without communism, Hungary and Poland would look like Britain or France.

With this irony in mind, perhaps Government officials, ideologically adrift at a time of national crisis, would do well to read the Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s 72-page dissection of Britain’s decline in the latest issue of the New Left Review. A first draft of modern history from the groundbreaking author of Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, Anderson’s savage critique of modern Britain is as far from the court gossip and palace intrigue which characterises political journalism in this country as it is possible to be.

A product of Eton and Oxford, and of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the 82-year old Anderson demolishes the British establishment from within. Like many European if not American Marxists, Anderson is a stern critic of the hyper-liberalism, derived from French Theory via American Puritanism, which disfigures much of the modern Anglophone Left. He is, indeed, more conservative in his thinly-veiled and patrician distaste for Anglo-Saxon liberalism than our own nominally Conservative government. So what guidance can this elderly communist give our Conservative leadership at a time of national crisis?

Citing the most doom-laden author of Germany’s interwar Konservative Revolution — noteworthy in itself — Anderson warns that “Decline, banished for a season from reputable discourse, has returned in more drastic guise. What lies ahead,” for Britain, “is more like the term in Spengler’s mistranslated title — Untergang: not decline, but downfall”.

Britain’s problems are structural, the combination of appalling economic planning over decades and inherent constitutional dysfunction: “Without any mass upheaval, or even such turbulence as marked the seventies, the order of Ukania  [a term for the UK adopted by Anderson from the Marxist and Scottish nationalist historian Tom Nairn] has been disrupted as never before since 1911–14, with no new equilibrium in sight. All its components — economy, polity, ideology, territory, diplomacy — have simultaneously and interconnectedly been destabilised. The model of growth around which the country has been built since the late nineteenth century has generated such internal tensions that it has finally backfired.”

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The outcome, for Anderson, is the inevitable collapse of what he terms “the Westminster state”. As he declares, the “nexus is bound to dissolve, in one way or another. When or how is anyone’s guess.” Anderson’s essay, which follows the  slow-burning fuse of British decline back to the Early Modern period, is not party political: indeed, like many conservatives, he reserves his greatest ire for the various political and economic innovations of New Labour, which, like Thatcher before it, eroded Britain’s old order and replaced it with something worse. 

It is remarkable, for all his Marxism, how much Anderson sounds like a Tory grandee of old when he observes that Thatcher “had staged an intra-party coup, routing Tory paternalism as well as Labour corporatism with a cult of the market and a petty-bourgeois zeal no longer restrained by fear of the proletariat.” It is difficult, at times, in his dissection of the finely-graded class differences of Conservative leaders, or in his digressive lament for the declining standards of public schools, to discern where Anderson the Marxist analyst of power networks ends and where Anderson the harrumphing patrician begins. Either way, the upshot is the same. By the beginning of this century, he observes, “Tory England in the old sense was dead. What had replaced it in the Conservative Party was not better.”

In foreign policy, Anderson channels Powell as much as any left-wing thinker when he excoriates Blair and Brown’s “hyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power, whose pay-off overseas was a hugely greater sum of killing and torture”. Paraphrasing the conservative writer Peter Oborne approvingly, Anderson savages the “surrounding incrustation of advisers, assistants, researchers, lobbyists, think-tankers, client journalists and broadcasters” which New Labour introduced into Britain’s political life, which, “instrumental in all its relationships, without roots or connections beyond its own shallow, insecure, public-relations obsessed, ideas-empty world” still dominates our politics.

We think here, of the lobby correspondent Matt Chorley, who gloated on the downfall of Dominic Cummings, like a palace eunuch in the court of the last Chinese emperor Pu Yi, that “every genius who arrives vowing to shake up the media, undermine, bypass and destroy the lobby, ends up leaving. And for good or bad, we’re still there.” That is, of course, precisely the problem, and it is Anderson’s open contempt for our elites that guides the path to some form of solution.

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There is, perhaps, an echo of the Neo-Tories of the 1930s in Anderson’s tracing of the roots of Britain’s current day decline to the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution, though of course fantasies of cutting a path back to Merry England do not occur to him. The source, for Anderson, of our relative economic decline is that “unlike any of its major competitors, the country knew no second revolution from above after the settlement of 1689, nor intervening convulsion on the road to modernity,” and thus the “fault-lines now becoming visible followed from the original composite nature of the British state itself.” 

Summarising the Nairn-Anderson hypothesis underpinning the New Left Review’s analysis of modern British history, Anderson, like the Scottish nationalist historian and writer Neal Ascherson, traces our current woes to our inhabiting an unreformed Early Modern union of three crowns, in which “the very success of the Anglo-British parliamentary monarchy in overtaking all rivals to become, as early as the 1690s, the most advanced power of Europe, fixed it fast in a shape whose counterparts elsewhere were later swept away”. 

Our early success is thus the cause of our modern failure: “Developmental priority and imperial success had arrested the British ancien régime—‘the grandfather of the contemporary political world’— half-way between feudal and modern forms, leaving its structures an ‘indefensible and unadaptable survival’ of the transition from absolutism to constitutionalism,” with the result that we remain trapped in “a conceptual landscape of Britain swept clean of all but ‘one significant life-form and one technology: the post-1688 ruling bloc and its prosthesis, the Westminster state.’”

If Anderson’s thesis is correct then all our problems, in one way or another, lead back to Westminster and the great gothic fantasia on the Thames, the increasing decrepitude of whose architectural fabric is an almost too obvious metaphor for the British state itself. Can it be restored without bringing the whole structure crashing down? The very antiquity of the British state is argued, by some, as a source of potential strength: if devolution could be rolled back, if the almost dictatorial powers available to a confident executive could be wielded effectively, perhaps some of the rot could be cut away, as long as the essential structure underpinning it remains strong?

But the British state is only as strong as the people entrusted with its care, and it is the deteriorating quality of our elites — a theme running through Anderson’s essay — that is perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of all. It is not, unfortunately, an exaggeration to observe that both main parties are dangerously incompetent, and that the also-rans are, if anything, even worse. The conservative journalist Henry Hill’s recent call for a British “Meiji Restoration,” a reassertion of the power of the central state in a programme of national renewal, “conducted with an eye to tradition and the power and sovereignty of the nation” surely falls at this hurdle: the idea may be good, we are forced to answer, but have you seen who’d carry it out?

So what comes after Westminster? The European experiment — a Tory attempt at “taking Britain into Europe as a surrogate for Empire”— clearly failed, leading to a fraught denouement whose terminal “Brexit referendum was a domestic quarrel, in which both sides were at mass level essentially oblivious of the ostensible object of the occasion, the European Union itself, other than as an object of polar cathexis; Remain and Leave opinion at large equally ignorant of, and indifferent to, its structures and mutations.”

As befits the editor of the New Left Review, whose deep engagement with European politics is not matched by that of Britain’s FBPE media ecosystem, Anderson is notably more critical of the wounded class consciousness or “status anxieties” of Britain’s bourgeois Remainers than of the Brexiteers, noting dispassionately that Remain was a project of the AB social class, support for which has led Labour to be “penned in to the corral of an increasingly middle-class— professional, managerial, clerical— Europeanist constituency, where it risks competing more with Liberal Democrats than Conservatives.” 

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As Anderson observes witheringly, “the correspondence columns of leading dailies overflowed with professorial fury at the prospect of exiting the Union, literary periodicals raised a din such as London had not heard for a century,” yet in time, “some of the Remainer emotion of recent memory, the part reminiscent of mourning for Diana, will presumably fade.” Instead, for our post-1688 political class, it is “peripheral nationalism” that will likely be “their potential nemesis,” yet Anderson’s analysis of Scottish nationalism is entirely devoid of the lust for national self-negation, part romanticism-by-proxy and part-schadenfreude, displayed by the London intelligentsia for whom he shows such disdain.

Following Nairn, Anderson undercuts the self-aggrandising mythologies of the SNP, reminding his readers that Scotland was not a colony but a beneficiary of Britain’s industrialisation, and a keen and active participant in the imperial project. Instead, he traces Scotland’s sudden drive towards independence to distaste for New Labour, “the neo-liberal regime in London, packed with vociferously unionist Scots — Brown, Cook, Reid, Darling, Campbell et al: bards of Britishness to a man” whose economic mismanagement “antagonised more and more sectors of Scottish society”.

The essential dilemma for the SNP is that Brexit has made independence simultaneously more attractive and impossible to achieve, at least as a member of the European Union. Pleading to enter Europe from without, its way barred by another fragile Early Modern kingdom, Spain, “departure from Europe has both inflamed Scottish nationalism and entrapped it”. We remain, unfortunately, trapped in a loveless marriage for the foreseeable future, with no preferable partners available and an ugly rift of some kind awaiting us. 

Intriguingly, Anderson takes the case for English nationalism more seriously than does our political class, sounding like a Marxist Simon Heffer in his sympathy for “the country that had not spoken yet, the English, whose voice had long been usurped by a British-imperial class speaking for them”. As it stands, New Labour’s constitutional reordering, by granting autonomy to the peripheries while keeping England subject to the Westminster entity, has set the stage for English nationalism to manifest itself in unappealing forms: “in not affording it any institutional expression” Anderson argues, “Blair’s project made it likely that [Enoch] Powell’s intonation of it would be heard once more.” 

There are two Englands struggling to be born, Anderson argues: the angry, resentful England of the streets and a social-democratic European nation “with a sensibility closer to the historic connotations of ‘Little England’ — insular, but unambitious and pacific, socially somewhat Scandinavian, free of all illusions of grandeur.” Indeed, here Anderson approaches a call for what we have in these pages called a certain National Hobbitism. Whether this is what we’ll get is, of course, another matter entirely. More likely, in Anderson’s view, is “a very British attempt to ‘muddle through’ with a model which is itself not working,” treading water as “a dinghy towed by the capital ships of Washington and Brussels” until the Westminster state’s final collapse.

If there is a coherent thread to Anderson’s broad sweep of British history, it is that the relentless outward focus of the Westminster establishment set in train a slow-burning decline at home. As he writes, “Imperial expansion had formed this state. When that was no longer available, it followed its traditional outward bent, resolving to ‘press towards the internationalisation of the UK economy as the answer doing most good to the flourishing parts of the system and the least damage to the ailing ones.’”

Yet every attempt at reform, by trying to solve Britain’s structural problems at home through leaping headlong into the wider world, whether Europe, a subordinate role in the American empire or globalised finance, has only patched up the surface cracks and allowed the underlying rot to advance further. From 1945 onwards, British politics has been consumed by “futile attempts at retrieving national greatness, in which the very term ‘decline’ was a lure inviting the notion that ‘revival’ was possible”.

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The essential problem we now face is whether or not Britain can survive as a unitary state. For Anderson, the answer is simply No: Britain was a project of empire, and without empire, the glue that held it together has dissolved. Simply, in Anderson’s thesis, “the stability of the old order had rested on the external forcefield of empire; once that was gone, the patriciate lost its grip at home, deference giving way to a ‘molecular, resentful sort of rebelliousness’, disabling the supports of the old regime, and Thatcher’s lower-middle-class crusade could finish off the grandees”.

The work of misguided destruction in the cause of renewal that Thatcher began, Blair finished, emplacing the charges that now threaten to destroy our state. The British state, for Anderson (sounding at his most like Peter Hitchens), was the British establishment of old: once they and the empire were gone, shuffled off the historical stage by the Pyrrhic victory of the Second World War and its consequences, decline and collapse were inevitable. 

The current government, entirely devoid of any meaningful political thought, would do well to read Anderson’s essay. He presents a narrative stripped of all illusions, in which, as in Marx’s famous quote, the British reader “is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”. There is a strange unreality to British political life, with the relentless outward focus on the wider world so detached from our material conditions that it has become a kind of tragic delusion.

But there is no purpose pursuing dreams of a Global Britain while the Union fractures at home: any serious attempt to save the British state will require a serious, dispassionate appraisal of the structural flaws threatening to break it apart. If the current occupant of 10 Downing Street does not intend to make his mark in history as the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, he could do worse than inject a dose of rigorous Marxian thought into Britain’s body politic, and there is surely no more suitable vessel than the detached, patrician analysis of Perry Anderson, that most High Tory of Marxists.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

The mood at the party was euphoric. This was the high tide of strident End of History triumphalism. Communism had been swept aside in favour of globalisation, free markets and the unipolar American world.

Something changed, though, in the intervening years. Many of Applebaum’s friends came to abandon the principles which they had once held dear. Bitterness and rancour ensued. “I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party,” Applebaum writes two decades later, in Twilight of Democracy — her new book which is both an elegy to the 1990s and an overview of the authoritarianism that is currently tearing apart the contemporary Right.

Applebaum and her husband — as well as some of the guests at the party — have stayed true to their previous centre-right inclinations. However, others have re-invented themselves as court intellectuals for a resurgent authoritarian Right. As populist movements have made headway across Europe, America and elsewhere, these former friends have enthusiastically climbed aboard.

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The book concludes with another party — this time in August 2019 — at which the absence of old friends causes several morbid questions to hang in the air: what happened in the intervening years and why did so many abandon their liberal principles?

By way of answer, Applebaum takes aim at the political situation in various different countries. First, Poland which, in 1999, was “on the cusp of joining the West”. Today the country is ruled by Law and Justice, a nativist party that has built a conspiratorial myth around the 2010 Smolensk plane crash in which the president Lech Kaczyński was killed. Two Polish brothers, Jacek and Jaroslaw Kurski, both of whom marched with Solidarity in the 1980s, encapsulate the new divide. Jaroslaw edits a mainstream opposition newspaper while Jacek pumps out conspiratorial and xenophobic propaganda for state television.

Applebaum also takes us to Hungary, where Viktor Orbán and Fidesz have gutted democratic institutions right under the nose of the European Union. Government propagandists — again, often people Applebaum used to know as solid Right-leaning liberals — now foment conspiracy theories about Muslim immigration and the Jewish philanthropist George Soros. The director of Hungary’s Museum of Terror, Mária Schmidt, is an old liberal acquaintance of Applebaum’s who today rails against foreigners for their lack of “Hungarian-ness”.

Over in the United States, another of Applebaum’s old comrades, Laura Ingraham, is a courtier for Donald Trump. Like so many others who appear in the book, Ingraham’s Reaganite optimism has given way to a brutal cynicism. In her view, Western civilisation is doomed and “immigration, political correctness, transgenderism, the culture, the establishment, the left, the ‘Dems’, are responsible”.

Britain isn’t spared Applebaum’s scorn. Dominic Cummings is portrayed in a particularly menacing light for the unconservative zeal with which he seeks to transform Britain’s political institutions. The Conservative Party under Boris Johnson is described as “more Bolshevik than Burkean: these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists”.

It’s those who have lined up alongside the populist leaders of the new Right – the courtiers – who interest the author most: “the writers, intellectuals, pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of television programs and creators of memes who can sell his image to the public”. She describes these people as “clercs” — a fusion of ‘clerks’ and ‘clerics’, functionaries and evangelists — who are motivated by fear, resentment and envy towards those who are more successful than they are.

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By James Bloodworth

Some are driven by a resentful and nostalgic nationalism. Others, Applebaum believes, are “attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity.” As another friend, the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum (who, rarely among Applebaum’s circle, has become more liberal with age) writes, some of the intellectuals of the new Right are motivated by a “desire to wipe the smirk off the condescending face of some resented critics”.

It’s the chaotic nature of the contemporary world, Applebaum believes, with its discordant rumble of social media forever in the background, that contains the locus of democracy’s demise. Many people today long for certainty, or else throw themselves into mass movements which attempt to negate the tensions that are inherent in plural and democratic life: “The jangling, dissonant sound of modern politics; the anger on cable television and the evening news; the fast pace of social media; the headlines that clash with one another when we scroll through them… all of this has unnerved that part of the population that prefers unity and homogeneity”.

This is bracing stuff. Yet it is rather unsatisfactory in explaining the recent upsurge in authoritarian and populist movements. Intellectuals have always been vain and attracted to silly ideas that may line their pockets or boost their standing. More interesting is why the populist Right – Trump, Orban, Law and Justice, the Leave Campaign – have generated such large followings. It is here that Applebaum’s arguments begin to fall short.

The author excludes from her analysis all those factors which risk painting the pre-populist era — a period of boundless optimism for her and her friends — in a negative light. She dismisses all materialist explanations for disenchantment with liberal democracy on the basis that former acquaintances who have thrown in their lot with Trump and other nationalists were “not affected” by the financial crash of 2008, do not live in communities ravished by opioids, and are not losing their jobs to migrant workers.

Fair enough. But she then applies the same broad-brush analysis to entire electorates, inserting the words “poor” and “deprived” in scare quotes when discussing western societies because, she writes, the downtrodden of today “have food and shelter”. They only lack “things that human beings couldn’t dream of a century ago, like air conditioning and Wi-Fi”, she writes. This will come as news to the nine million people in the United States – the richest country in the world — who have zero cash income. Moreover, real wages have barely improved for most American workers in decades.

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Pity the out-of-work influencers

By James Bloodworth

Of course, the view you take of current events is invariably influenced by the vantage point from which you’re doing the viewing. While Applebaum and her friends were revelling in the triumph of liberal democracy in the 90s — breathing in the pieties of the new world from the rarefied atmosphere of Manhattan cocktail parties, diplomatic lunches and garden parties at the Spectator — deindustrialised regions in Britain, America and parts of Europe were being devastated by institutional breakdown, poverty and despair. But this is surely pertinent to any discussion of contemporary populism; as Michael Lind has written for UnHerd, “the heartlands of populism are often deindustrialised former manufacturing regions such as the North of England and the American Rust Belt”.

Moreover, while Applebaum may dislike Brexit, she provides little to back up her repeated insinuation that the 2016 referendum was somehow undemocratic. She also blames the result on “English nationalism” while offering no explanation as to why a majority in Wales voted to leave the European Union. Perhaps material explanations do matter after all.

Applebaum is a principled individual: she refused to vote for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 on the basis that his running mate was the obnoxious know-nothing Sarah Palin.

Yet at times her judgement seems to falter. Why has she only recently concluded that Dinesh D’Souza — who was at that 1999 party — is bad news? D’Souza is a convicted criminal (illegal political donations) who makes hagiographic films about Donald Trump. He was sentenced in 2014, but had been spreading nonsense for decades. It was in his 1995 book The End of Racism that he notoriously claimed that “liberal antiracism” was a greater threat to blacks than racism, and that the purpose of segregation in the Southern states was to “protect blacks”. Two of D’Souza’s black colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute resigned in protest at the book.

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Today's liberals dream of a workerless paradise

By James Bloodworth

Boris Johnson — another with whom Applebaum was previously on friendly terms — is a more intelligent and interesting character than Dinesh D’Souza. Yet she seems surprised that the man who was fired from the Times for making up quotes today exhibits an “outsized narcissism” and a “penchant for fabrication”.

This initial misreading of certain friends could perhaps be blamed on an error of focus; she has always viewed the threat to democracy as coming predominantly from the Left. In this, her myopia recalls something Hannah Arendt once wrote about the dangers of cultivating an “obsession” with totalitarianism to the extent that it can “blind” a person “to the numerous small and not so small evils with which the road to hell is paved”. As recently as 2014 Applebaum was arguing that Europe required more, not less, nationalism — a view that surely requires some revision if the arguments in this book are to be taken seriously.

Applebaum interestingly notes the similarities between the language of the European radical Right — of “elites” and “revolution” and “cleansing” — and that once used by the radical Left. But she fails to notice that her own writing drips with condescension for those who exist outside of her political haut monde. “The ancient philosophers always had their doubts about democracy,” she writes (with seeming approval) before launching into a brief discourse about how the American electoral college was originally envisioned as “a group of elite lawmakers and men of property who would select the president, rejecting the people’s choice if necessary, in order to avoid the ‘excesses of democracy’”.

Elsewhere, in seeking to explain the radical Right, Applebaum briefly resurrects the work of Theodor Adorno and his speculations about the “authoritarian personality” being located in “repressed homosexuality”. But the antidote to populism, whatever it is, is unlikely to be found in haughtiness; nor in Freudianism, nor any other cod-psychological speculations.

Applebaum may be correct to reject a myopic Marxian view that attempts to pin everything on the economy when explaining why “everybody got very angry” between 2015 and 2020. But even crude economic reductionism offers a better guide to present events than some of her own explanations, which recall Virginia Woolf’s fatuous post-World War One belief that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed”.

The post-Cold War era that the author pines for was undone, ultimately, by its own ideological hubris. It wasn’t Dominic Cummings or Vote Leave that invented political lying. The financial crisis, the Iraq war, a rapacious model of capitalism that undermined communities and precipitated industrial decline — all have chipped away at faith in democracy over the years. The populist demagogues we hear so much from today have in fact walked through a door left enticingly open for them by the silver-tongued, sharp-suited, Atlanticist politicians that Anne Applebaum reveres.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Le Corbusier’s rectangular forms, the alien importation of French colonial planners, were aped by Syrian planners after independence, Atta’s thesis observed, an architectural symbol of Islamic civilisation’s total subjection to the West. Three years later, Atta’s critique of modernist architecture as a symbol of Western domination assumed its final form when, as the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, he flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, the glittering towers in the heart of the liberal empire standing as a symbol for Western modernity itself.

The Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni, a student and admirer of the late Sir Roger Scruton, likewise sees in the Middle East’s modern architecture a tragic symbol of “a region where even the application of modernism has failed,” where “we traded our close-knit neighborhoods, our modest and inward houses, our unostentatious mosques and their neighbouring churches, our collaborative and shared spaces, and our shaded courtyards and knowledge-cultivating corners, leaving us with isolated ghettos and faceless boxes.”

For al-Sabouni, the anomie of liberal modernity was built into its very architecture, bringing desolation in its wake. An opponent of Islamism, she nevertheless shares the Islamist analysis that the Middle East’s instability is not inherent, but comes from the West’s exporting the structures of liberal modernity to the somnolent peace of Islamic civilisation, setting in train chaos.

“Losing our identity in exchange for the Western idea of ‘progress’ has proved to have greater consequences than we could predict,” she claims. “This vacuum in our identity could not be filled by imported ‘middle grounds’, as was once naively thought; this vacuum was instead filled by horrors and radicalizations, by sectarianisms and corruption, by crime and devastation — in one word, by war.”

It is natural to read a culture’s attitudes to its monuments as expressions of its social health. They are the symbolic repository of any given culture, and deeply imbued with political meaning. When civilisations fall and their literature is lost to time, it is their monuments that serve as testaments to their values, to their greatest heroes and their highest aspirations. Statues, great building projects and monuments are stories we tell about ourselves, expressions in stone and bronze of the Burkean compact between generations past and those to come. As Atta’s thesis states, the architecture of the past is imbued with moral meaning: “if we think about the maintenance of urban heritage,” he wrote, “then this is a maintenance of the good values of the former generations for the benefit of today’s and future generations.”

It is only logical then, for the terminal crisis of liberal modernity to play out in culture wars over monuments, as the fate of a monument stands as a metaphor for the civilisation that erected it. It is for this reason that conquerors of a civilisation so often pull down the monuments of their predecessors and replace them with their own, a powerful act of symbolic domination.

The wave of statue-toppling spreading across the Western world from the United States is not an aesthetic act, but a political one, the disfigured monuments in bronze and stone standing for the repudiation of an entire civilisation. No longer limiting their rage to slave-owners, American mobs are pulling down and disfiguring statues of abolitionists, writers and saints in an act of revolt against the country’s European founding, now reimagined as the nation’s original sin, a moral and symbolic shift with which we Europeans will soon be forced to reckon. 

On our own continent, the symbolic, civilisational value of architectural monuments was expressed last year when the world gathered together online to watch Notre Dame in flames. The collective grief that for one evening united so many people was not just for the cathedral itself but for the civilisation that created it, a sudden jolt of loss and pain that came with the realisation the skill and self-belief it took to erect it had vanished forever.

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Will Libya tear Nato apart?

By Aris Roussinos

Like Dark Age farmers tilling their crops in the crumbling ruins of a Roman city, we realise we are already squatting inside the monuments of a lost and greater civilisation, viewing the work of our forebears with the wonder and sadness of the Anglo-Saxon poet of The Ruin: 

This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it
courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying.
Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came,
death took all the brave men away;

For many observing from outside liberalism, the current iconoclasm of the West is just such a cautionary tale of civilisational collapse. “Statues are being toppled, conditions are deplorable and there are gang wars on the beautiful streets of small towns in civilized Western European countries,” Hungary’s defiantly non-liberal leader Viktor Orban remarked in an interview last week,  “I look at the countries advising us how to conduct our lives properly and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

In contrast, in a recent speech to mark the centenary of the hated Treaty of Trianon, Orban specifically cited the historical monuments of the Carpathian region as a testament to the endurance of the Hungarian people throughout history: “the indelible evidence, churches and cathedrals, cities and town squares still stand everywhere today. They proclaim that we Hungarians are a great, culture-building and state-organising nation.”

It is notable that this speech, laden with architectural metaphors, saw Orban for the first time situate Hungary in a separate Central European civilisation outside the West, adopting the language of anti-colonialism in a marker, perhaps, of his shift towards China as a geopolitical patron. Raging against the “arrogant” French and British and “hypocritical American empire”, Orban claimed that “the West raped the thousand-year-old borders and history of Central Europe… just as the borders of Africa and the Middle East were redrawn. We will never forget that they did this.” But these days are over, Orban exulted: “the world is changing. The changes are tectonic. The United States is no longer alone on the throne of the world, Eurasia is rebuilding with full throttle… A new order is being born.”

It is striking, and meaningful, that the self-conscious civilisation states rising to challenge the collapsing liberal order express their neo-traditionalist value systems in reimagined forms of their pre-modernist architecture, with stone and brick giving concrete expression of the ideal.

In Budapest, Scruton’s city “full of monuments” where “in every park some bearded gentleman stands serenely on a plinth, testifying to the worth of Hungarian poetry, to the beauty of Hungarian music, to the sacrifices made in some great Hungarian cause,” Orban is engaged in an ongoing project to erase the modernist architecture of the communist era. The concrete boxes of the rejected order are now shrouded with neoclassical facades and the long-demolished monuments of the glorious past are being re-erected stone by carved stone.  

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The case for Tory anarchism

By Aris Roussinos

In Russia, Putin’s new Military Cathedral, an archaeofuturistic confection fusing Orthodox church and state in an intimidating expression of raw power, symbolises the country’s apartness from collapsing liberal modernity. The cathedral is a symbol of a civilisation that links its present with its past and future, expressed by Putin in overtly Burkean terms in his recent essay on the Second World War as the “shared historical memory” that foregrounds “the living connection and the blood ties between generations”. 

Erdogan’s Turkey similarly expresses its desire to return to its imperial heyday in the elaborate mosques, palaces and barracks in neo-Ottoman style springing up across Turkey itself and its former imperial dominions. In architecture as in political order, the stylings of modernity already seem old-fashioned and stripped of all vitality, the sunlit optimism of the Bauhaus degenerated over one bloody century to the vision of Grenfell Tower in flames.  

Like liberalism, the architecture of the postwar order conquered the world, for a time, and is now being rejected by the liberal order’s challengers in favour of the styles that immediately preceded modernity, a civilisational kitsch rejected by al-Sabouni as merely “mimicking the creations of our ancestors”.

In a recent essay, the influential software engineer and thinker Marc Andreesen urged the West to start building again, to recover civilisational confidence, but what should we build? What does our architecture reveal about our political order, in the greater West and here in Britain? What are the greatest recent building projects of our times? Perhaps the glass and steel skyscrapers, temples to our financialised economy, that dominate our capital? The Nightingale hospitals, hurriedly converted from conference centres to deal with the mass casualties of a disease of globalisation? 

Perhaps the airport is the fullest architectural expression of liberalism: the liminal symbol, both within the nation state and outside it, of global travel and optimism; a temple of bored consumption where the religions of the pre-liberal order were tucked away, all together, in the bland anonymity of the prayer room; until, that is, Mohammed Atta’s blowback to globalisation soured this post-historical dream, forcing the architecture of liberalism back to its early roots in Bentham’s surveilled and paranoid Panopticon.

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The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

The problem, at heart, is we can take down our monuments but have nothing to replace them with. As Scruton notes, monuments “commemorate the nation, raise it above the land on which it is planted, and express an idea of public duty and public achievement in which everyone can share. Their meaning is not ‘he’ or ‘she’ but ‘we’” — but perhaps there is no We any more, with the nihilism of the American mob an expression of a far deeper malaise. 

It is surely no accident that this is a moral panic driven by millennials, an evanescent generation without property or progeny, barred from creating a future, who now reject their own past in its entirety. This is the endpoint of liberalism, trapped in the eternal present, a shallow growth with no roots from which to draw succour, and bringing forth no seeds of future life.

For Scruton’s pupil al-Sabouni, the salvation of Islamic civilisation is to be found in an architecture rooted in its past, where, she states, “we must be sincere in our own intentions toward our own identity. We must realise the desire to regain it in order to regain peace. And in order to do so, we simply have to do exactly what any dedicated farmer does to a plant: cultivate the roots and carefully prune the branches.” 

But a civilisation that uproots itself will soon wither and die. Able to destroy but not to build, the fading civilisation of liberalism is now a grand, crumbling old edifice whose imminent collapse is wilfully ignored by its occupants, because they have too much invested in it, and can’t imagine what can possibly replace it. But as its unstable masonry keeps falling onto the streets below, the risk of a more spectacular, uncontrolled collapse gathers every day.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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,” .

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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.

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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.

We may hold our nose when nativists like Viktor Orbán describe his nationalisation of IVF clinics as a “strategic investment”, but across Europe tax breaks and cash handouts are everywhere and growing. This month Greece became the latest with plans for a €2,000 baby bonus, joining a long list of European countries now providing strong incentives for its people to have more children.

Indeed many demographers view Britain as oddly unsupportive of natalism, and of 41 OECD countries, the UK comes in 34th in paid parental leave. While in France mothers receive extra-long maternity leave and a cash bonus after their third child, and there are travel perks and reduced income tax for large families, in Britain child benefit is means tested and capped at two children. Oh Mon Dieu!

Former Eastern Bloc countries, once the family’s enemy, are now resurrecting the idea that parents must somehow be allowed to capture the economic rents of child-rearing. An outflow of young workers to the West, empty cradles at home and a reluctance to embrace immigration have produced an existential crisis.

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From the Baltic to the Black Sea, governments are thinking long-term demographic thoughts. Hungary, which now spends four times more on pro-natalist measures than it does on defence, aims to get the birth rate up to replacement level — 2.1 babies per mother — by 2030.

Britain, too, has targets for the 2030s, but not for children. Indeed environmentalists behind our green carbon goals see population as a problem, even though — with the number of Britons living alone recently hitting 8 million for the first time — rising consumption per capita will be one consequence.

The green argument against children is popular, and it’s not just Harry and Meghan who fret about their minuscule contribution to population growth. A YouGov survey in January found that of under 35s who do not want children, one in seven cite fears for the planet’s future as their motivation. A fifth of British women are childless, the third highest proportion in the developed world.

Yet where this is a genuine sacrifice, it may also be unnecessary. Many demographers say global population is a lagging indicator and should top-out by mid-century, falling sharply thereafter. In many developed countries it’s already in free fall.

In Finland last month the Finnish equivalent of the CBI demanded that the government starts to think about managing fertility as it might inflation or growth. Whereas those traditional economic indices are cyclical, Finland’s fertility rate looks terminal. In just a decade it has crashed from 1.9 to 1.3 children per woman, creating a “doom loop” of ever older pensioners supported by fewer workers. The young pay more tax to sustain the welfare state, which means less disposable income for homes and babies.

Breaking that cycle is the work of decades, and governments rarely think that far ahead. As Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times: “It’s very hard to find a way to effectively place value on things like the creation of new workers 30 years from now. It’s just too long-term.”

So could this be a job for a prime minister whose personal contribution to the British birth rate may be at least three times the national average? Someone who — by signing off on HS2 — understands that some projects are a generation in the making and that, though we’ve left the EU, we could still have much to learn from the continentals?

If he has at least two terms in office, Boris will serve to see other countries grapple with demographic challenges, and might be surprised by what he sees. When Vladimir Putin gave his annual state of the union address last month he spent 20 minutes on constitutional reforms and twice as long on the need to remedy Russia’s birth-dearth. Here, as elsewhere, religion is increasingly invoked; in neighbouring Georgia, the birth rate jumped after the Orthodox Patriarch took to personally baptising babies.

China, having ditched its wicked one-child policy, is now in a panic about becoming the first country to get old before it gets rich. For now it seems to be trying gentle persuasion – a recent stamp to mark the year of the pig showed three piglets, taken as a sign of government approbation for bigger families – but draconian measures may not be far off, with reports from some provinces suggesting that it is getting harder to secure abortions and divorces.

But could Boris launch a British pro-natalism agenda, while staying true to his liberal roots and new northern electoral powerhouse?

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For a policy so mired in memories of dictators ordering women to breed for the fatherland, a new wave of demographers is stressing the liberal case for pro-natalism. The Left-leaning IPPR think-tank has addressed the “baby gap” — the difference between the number of children wanted by women and those they actually had — which is running at about 100,000 a year.

A Guardian survey in 2014 found a third of couples would have more children were they not so expensive; indeed if British women had all the babies they wanted, our birth rate would be above replacement level. In the US, which has seen huge falls in fertility in the past decade, 40% of women do not have all the children they wish.

When I interviewed the demography writer Jonathan V Last for a BBC documentary last year, he stressed how reproductive rights once meant the ability to control fertility downwards, something still true in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. But in the developed world a woman’s ability to achieve her stated fertility ambitions can be seen as a form of social justice and source of empowerment.

Nuanced pro-natalism might also allow Boris to spike nativist guns (if that is, you believe that relying on ever increasing numbers of migrant workers stokes populism). Best of all, pro-natalism could allow him to forge a connection with his Leave heartlands and further undermine Labour’s territorial claims there.

In his book, The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart argued that Somewhere women had been ignored by a highly-educated elite of Anywhere careerists, who obsess about things like boardroom representation.

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Somewheres, according to data from the British Social Attitudes Survey, are much keener on a work-life balance and feel pressured into going back to work after having a baby. “Thanks,” wrote Goodhart, “to those Anywhere assumptions, Britain has evolved into one of the most family-unfriendly tax and benefit regimes in the developed world.”

It may even be possible to mobilise the cultural arguments for bigger families. There’s strong evidence to show that children do better with siblings and, other things being equal, are less prone to mental health issues and obesity.

This is not an easy sell, because it can annoy the parents of only children (a segment of the parenting public which has now climbed to almost half of all couples), but that doesn’t invalidate the argument. It may be true that the growth in what the media calls “snowflake culture” owes something to the rapid rise of the singleton whose rough edges are not worn down by abrasive contact with brothers or sisters. It’s certainly true that a future Britain — and it’s coming — where a large proportion of marriages involve an only child marrying an only child, will consolidate wealth and militate against social mobility (something especially damaging to the prospects of children from bigger BAME families).

So go on Boris, do it for Britain. Do it for those patriotic hard-working northern Leave voters who want to see that you’re really serious about change. Roll out free IVF for the youngsters of tomorrow. Give young people a chance to start the sort of families their parents enjoyed. The cost will be dwarfed by the billions you’re about to spend on social care for the elderly — and in future decades we’ll all be reaping the rewards.

What do they all want? At the more wonkish end of the debate, the argument is broadly that the political push throughout the twentieth century for ever greater social and economic freedom has brought many benefits, but that these have been unevenly distributed and are now reaching the point of diminishing returns.

The pursuit of ever greater freedom and individualism, this strand of thought argues, has delivered rising wealth while hollowing out working-class communities; liberated some women while forcing others to work a double shift and abandon the young and old in substandard care, and provided an infinitude of consumer choice but at the cost of mounting ecological damage. Under the sign of radical individualism, the new communitarians argue, we are all becoming more solitary and self-absorbed. Even charitable giving seems to be in unstoppable decline.

But what, in practice, are the new social conservatives seeking to conserve? Calls for a revival of cultural conservatism, many in the name of Christian values, seem often on closer examination oddly insubstantial. In 2017, UKIP’s leader-for-that-week Stephen Crowther said that the UK is a Christian country, “and we intend to stay that way”.

Yet for Crowther, being a Christian country does not seem to impose any obligation to actually be Christian, but he says, simply “reflects the Judeo-Christian classical and enlightenment origins on which our laws, our social systems and our cultural norms have been built over two millennia.”

Elsewhere in Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn describes his brand of authoritarian, identity-oriented politics as “Christian democracy”. Only a minority of Hungarians go to church every week – only 12% attends church regularly, although around three in four identity as Catholic or Protestant — but the identifier “Christian” has nonetheless become central to Orbàn’s politics.

Much as Crowther did, the Orbàn-supporting Bishop of Szeged, László Kiss-Rigó, bridges this gap with a vague, cultural definition of what actually constitutes a Christian: “In Europe, even an atheist is a Christian”, he said. It turns out that being “Christian” is less about prayer or doctrine than values, for as he puts it: “We are very happy that there are a few politicians like Orbán and Trump who really represent those values which we Christians believe to be important.”

What exactly are these values, then? Attendees at anti-Islam Pegida rallies in Germany carry crosses and sing carols. Italian Right-winger Matteo Salvini punctuates anti-immigration rhetoric by brandishing a rosary, drawing criticism from the very Catholic faith whose symbols he invokes. Try to pin down any actual values this form of Christianity might require of its adherents, and matters are much less clear.

Even those whose stated desire is to defend the place of faith in public and political life seem keen that the faith itself stop short of imposing actual obligations. To take a more moderate example of the new cultural conservatism, the Social Democratic Party took a broadly post-liberal, culturally conservative stance in its 2018 relaunch. The New Declaration made an energetic defence of our right to hold even illiberal religious views openly in public life, stating that “Citizens holding a traditional, patriotic or religious outlook are often bullied and marginalised, stifling the open debate upon which a free and democratic society depends.”

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Then, about a year later, the SDP lost its only donor over a bitter intra-party dispute about whether or not it should be party policy to ban religious non-stun slaughter — a position markedly at odds with the party’s previous defence of religious pluralism. And when the Church of England recently reiterated its long-held position on sex and marriage, prominent SDP member Patrick O’Flynn took to the pages of the Daily Express to mock “the otherworldliness of these Men of God”. Instead of insisting on “out of touch” doctrine, O’Flynn suggested, in order to attract more young people to weekly worship the Church should adjust its doctrines on sex and marriage to reflect their values.

In this view of faith, theological positions do not reflect any kind of truth-claim but should be emergent properties of the aggregate ethical positions held by the members of that church. Less “Christian democracy” than “democratic Christianity”: whatever the congregants believe becomes the doctrine of the Church.

From a religious perspective this makes no sense. To the believer, doctrine is handed down from God Himself. The thought of God’s word being subject to plebiscite is absurd, if not outright blasphemous.

This debate reveals the missing piece in today’s would-be conservative revival. Where do our values come from? What is the proper source of political authority? Progressives gesture at natural rights or an imagined future utopia, but for anyone who remains unconvinced that we are all on a journey somewhere wonderful, some other authority is required.

Edmund Burke suggested the answer lay in a blend of deference to tradition and God’s grand design, tempered by carefully constrained democratic institutions; his Savoyard contemporary, Joseph de Maistre, argued that the only proper form of authority lay in God’s will, delivered via the Pope and an absolute monarch.

The history of modernity has unfolded in the tensions between these competing understandings of political authority. “The will of God”, the will of “the People” and the grand designs of utopias have variously been used to justify all manner of enterprises, with outcomes from the magnificent to the horrific. But our present political difficulties may be in part down to a growing popular discomfort with accepting the legitimacy of any of the above.

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Since the election of Donald Trump and the vote to leave the EU, there has been a low but persistent rumble from our moral betters that democracy should maybe have its wings clipped a little, to stop stupid proles making bad decisions. A degree of wing-clipping has in fact long since taken place: John Gray has discussed recently in these pages the way the language and legal mechanism of ‘rights’ is used to shift entire areas of public life from democratic debate to the dry realm of unelected lawyers and judges. But if authority does not reside in the will of the people, nor does it reside with God: it is difficult to imagine a mainstream British politician claiming moral authority on the basis of divine will without being roundly pilloried.

Progress and human rights, then? Every young person who passes through a modern university is taught in no uncertain terms that totalising metanarratives are suspect. At best, they are power moves. Whenever you find one you should ask cui bono? In the case of universal human rights, the answer is probably: lawyers.

This leaves would-be conservatives in a bind. If (with a few honourable exceptions still holding out for direct Vatican rule) political authority rests not in tradition (too restrictive on personal liberty) or democracy (probably rigged) or even God (don’t tell ME what to do!) or even in the lawyers, then what is left? Politics professor Matt McManus argues that the result is a postmodernism of the right as well as of the left: a series of nested calls for a return to authority, tradition and culture that all, on closer inspection, turn out to be largely delivery mechanisms for adversarial but hollow identity politics.

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Having come unmoored from its roots either in the past, the divine, or the popular will, McManus suggests that this postmodern conservatism has warped a Burkean belief in tradition into a kind of moral cosplay whose main purpose is less seeking the good life than making a noisy defence of whichever identities its sworn enemies attack. As the postmodern liberal-left demonises heterosexual white males, so postmodern conservatism sets out to defend them; and so on.

Seen in this light, the problem with Orbàn and other borrowers of Christian clothing is not that they do not believe their own words. Inasmuch as they can mean anything, they genuinely identify as Christians. It is more that when all sources of authority are suspect, the only legitimate recourse is to the self: to identity, and identification.

And the problem with identification is that it remains separate from whatever it identifies as. Just like the modern dating marketplace, where commitment is radically undermined by the ease of swiping right, modern cultural conservatism is radically undermined by the fear that without a reliable foundation of authority, and with more identity-choice options only a click away, we are never fully the thing we claim as our identity.

Without a sense of confidence in the roots of its political legitimacy, conservative values dissolve from concrete obligations to consumer accessories. This in turn is why Orbànist “Christian democracy” and many of its populist cousins find their most compelling realisation not in religious doctrine or observance, but in defining themselves against their outgroup. If “even an atheist is a Christian” then either no one is a Christian, or everyone is. The only way of defining what a Christian is, is in terms of what it is not: foreigners.

But if this is so, then in a postmodern environment, shorn of recourse to authority, cultural conservatism is a waste of energy. It cannot define what it wants. All is insubstantial; there is no exit from the Matrix, nothing left to conserve.

Does it follow from this that those who long for place, limits, love, family, faith and meaning should just sit in the rubble and watch it all burn? I do not think so. But when there is nothing solid to go back to, anyone attracted to what is left of the ideology that used to be called “conservative” needs to find a new name for their yearning. “Constructionists”, perhaps. There is a lot of building to do.

The intellectual fuel for this movement comes from Yoram Hazony, an Israeli academic and Orthodox Jew who came to the fore two years ago thanks to his book The Virtue of Nationalism.

As is often the case with much-discussed non-fiction books, the work ended up having two functions: the first was to provide a scholarly and well-thought-through counter-blast to a prevailing orthodoxy. In recent decades there has been something like a consensus around the idea that nationalism is a problem — indeed that for states in Europe it is perhaps the problem. Hazony’s book carefully and persuasively sought to blow apart this consensus. Nationalism is a force for good, he argues, and rather than being the cause of instability is, in fact, the best prerequisite for stability.

Which brings us to the second function: to be used by those who have not read it as a weapon to beat back a prevailing wisdom.

Hazony turns out to have been at the head of a distinct intellectual wind. His book has been succeeded by a number of equally thoughtful works around the same theme, all of which help to bolster the argument. Last September, Rich Lowry, the editor of the American conservative magazine National Review, published The Case for Nationalism: How it Made Us Powerful, United and Free. And this was followed, a month later, by Return of the Strong Gods: nationalism, populism and the future of the West by RR Reno, the editor of the conservative religious journal First Things.

So why is nationalism be causing so much intellectual excitement now? The obvious explanation is that it comes after a period of liberal — indeed globalist — overreach.

During recent decades, the presumption among those in positions of power in western Europe, in particular, leant in a clear direction. This was often summed-up as the Davos worldview: the presumption that the future was inevitably one of greater integration, where states would be giving up ever-more sovereignty, borders would be less and less important, and the world presided over by a benign, internationalist, NGO-like political class. If this view has taken a battering, it is less because of the success of any intellectual counter-punch but, rather, because of events.

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The Eurozone crisis made visible what some economists had warned about for decades: it is difficult, if not impossible, to ever fully meld Greek and German fiscal habits (or in other ways to impose the behaviours of northern Europe on the continent’s south). And then there was the migration crisis of 2015, when even some of those who advocated most volubly for a borderless world began to balk at the reality of hundreds of thousands of people moving at speed into countries that could not accommodate them — and which in most cases did not want them.

These two events — among others — demonstrated that perhaps the internationalists did not quite know what they were doing. And it restored the idea that states needed to stand up for themselves and perhaps even go their own way on major issues of the day. The sentiment was in place, and had been acted on by a number of European governments, before the intellectual groundwork was laid, or re-laid.

And yet a certain odour remains around the term — an odour whose origins ought to be honestly acknowledged.

Last year, Hazony hosted a National Conservatism conference in Washington DC and the difference between the speaker line-up and content in that event, versus the one in Rome presents a demonstration of the problem which “nationalism” will always have when it moves. For while there are certainly figures in America who would wish to take nationalism to its worst possible ends, in general, American nationalism remains a reasonable and odourless political force.

America has asserted its nationalistic — and one might point out, unilateralist — tendencies under Democrat and Republican administrations. Under both parties, it has remained suspicious of those international institutions which require a giving up of sovereignty — such as the International Criminal Court. This is not to say that American nationalism could not go bad, only that it hasn’t done so in anything like a European manner.

In Europe, of course, the story is different. Contra at least one of the speakers at the conference in Rome, it is undeniable that for European countries in the previous centuries, there were at least two world-engulfing conflicts in which nationalism played a part, even if not the defining one.

It is entirely uncontroversial and true to state that nationalism led Europe to war in 1914. And while there is a get-out that the war that began in 1939 was — like its predecessor — caused not by nationalism but by German expansionism, nevertheless it is an intellectual overstretch to claim that nationalism played no role in either conflict.

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As I told the conference, in my remarks made at a sceptical distance on Tuesday, there is an answer to this. For to claim that nationalism causes conflict is to make an assertion that is far too simplistic. Nationalism can cause conflict and it can keep the peace. To that extent, it is like every other force in nature: it is able to be used for good and for ill, can lead to triumph and disaster. There is nothing unique about this.

Contra the sort of people who like to think that we can wage war for “peace” or wage campaigns against “hate” (what other human emotion will they come for next one wonders?), even love can cause wars. The Trojan Wars were caused by love; countless acts of violence are still committed each year in the name of love. To date, nobody has called for the eradication of that instinct.

But with nationalism, there is a residual sense that if only it could be eradicated, the world would not experience wars. It is a sentiment that is additionally simplistic because before Europe was wracked by the wars of nation-states, it was wracked by centuries of wars of religions — a fact the current generation might do well to remember.

In any case, the difference in the manner in which “nationalism” is heard in Europe and America is a problem worth contending with. The proximate distance in Europe between what one might regard as healthy nationalism and unhealthy nationalism is undeniably closer than it is in America. And the fall-off from a reasonable attitude towards nationalism to its ugliest elements is a cliff which European history has unarguably made vertiginous.

To me, at any rate, this is the aspect of the National Conservatism Conference which was most interesting. There have been efforts in parts of the press to pretend that the entire conference was filled with unacceptable far-Right elements and the like. Certainly some of those who were present are from parties which have far-Right pasts and other new parties who may well be a cause for concern in the present.

But to dismiss all of these — let alone figures like Chris de Muth, John O’Sullivan and Hazony himself — as somehow engaged in far-Right politicking is so ignorant as to be embarrassingly revealing of the person asserting them. The idea that a conference organised by an orthodox Jew should have been in any way anti-Semitic is ridiculous. The idea that a conference addressed by several well-known gays was homophobic is equally lazy.

But there is a reason why such anathematising occurs. Not every complainant is directed by ignorance or short-term political point-scoring. For the fact remains that across the continent of Europe there are dragons; there are movements like Casa Pound in Italy which would seem to want to replay the fascist past.

There are groups such as Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece whose members have indulged themselves in the ugliest attempts to simultaneously deny and replay the brutalities of the mid-twentieth century. Anyone concerned to keep such things in history would be motivated by the most legitimate imaginable fears.

And yet there is an over-reach happening — an over-reach caused by the cordon-sanitaire having been subtly but seriously wrongly placed. There are papers and politicians across Europe and America who look at swathes of Europe and claim them to be — and claim their governments to be – “far-Right” or otherwise unacceptable. Is everything “far-Right” once anyone says so? If there is a reason why such claims are rarely interrogated it is because there is so little reward – and some considerable risk – in carefully interrogating them.

Calling people “fascists” is easy and bestows on the accuser the instant breastplate of “anti-fascist”. But European politics is more complex than that. The simplistic analysis that believes that we are condemned perpetually to replay the 1930s and ‘40s is past usefulness and is indeed hampering any attempt to understand who to deal with across Europe. Not least because governments and parties are being called ‘far-Right’ when they are not, and whole countries and movements are being anathematised when they will — must, in fact — be partners in the years ahead.

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The roots of identitarian liberalism  

By John Gray

The principle reason why I attended the National Conservatism conference in Rome was to listen, and to work out a little further for myself the complex question of who one is comfortable with and who one is not. It is part of an ongoing research effort on my part — one in which I have been engaged for some years. All in the knowledge of one irrefutable fact.

The UK has now left the European Union. Outside of it — as inside — we will have to deal with the parties and governments who run Europe. It is simply not sustainable to expect that the only parties we can deal with are a small number of leftist and centrist parties, beyond which we should be ignorant and insulting. That isn’t to say we need to be moral relativists.  Very far from it. The point of paying close attention will be to make fine but crucial judgement calls.

Which is why in the coming months I plan to use this space to write at greater length and in greater depth about this subject. A subject which is one of the most fascinating and — for the writer — perilous jobs of political analysis in town.

That is to try to sketch out what the realities on the continent of Europe actually are. Not as we are told they are by people, publications and pressure groups who have a dated and prejudiced view of the present, but what they actually are in the round. I can think of no more interesting or perilous writing role. I look forward to bringing you along with me.

For most of us the realisation started to dawn whenever there was a story we knew something about. One read the NYT version and just thought “But that isn’t quite right”. In time this happened with story after story until you realised that if you didn’t trust them on the things you knew about, how could you trust them on the things you didn’t?

In no area in recent years has the NYT made itself more ridiculous than on the subject of the United Kingdom. Since those of us who live in the UK might be regarded as, if not experts, then at least well-informed observers, the paper’s coverage has stood out as being especially ridiculous or defamatory, depending on your mood that morning.

Take a few examples from recent years.

In May 2018 someone called Peter S Goodman wrote a NYT piece titled, “In Britain, austerity is changing everything”, the author basing his story on an apparently brief trip to Prescot in Lancashire. In some ways this is a good idea. Profiles from a capital city can — as UnHerd readers know — give a warped idea of the true state of a nation. But if the NYT expected illumination to come from Prescot they had overestimated the competence of their contributor.

Intent on portraying the entire United Kingdom as an austerity-ridden wasteland, Mr Goodman claimed in his piece that the Prescot library had closed when it was actually open. He claimed that the local fire station had been shut, despite a new one just having just been unveiled. He claimed the local museum had “receded into history” when the Prescot Museum was very much alive and well.

In short Mr Goodman claimed that everything in Prescot was shut down, and after the online, unpaid sleuths of the internet did the job any paid fact checkers at the NYT had failed to do there was nothing left of Goodman’s strange Prescot-based piece. So mercilessly were the flaws in his article shown up that on social media Goodman was soon reduced to retreating to that favoured defensive position of the fabulist: claiming that although the actual facts may not be true, nevertheless, the “perception” was correct.

In August 2018 the paper was back at it, in this case trying to attack Britain through the old staple of its food. In a culinary review written by one Robert Draper, readers of the NYT could learn that residents of the UK had been subsisting on boiled mutton and oatmeal until very recently. Indeed in his piece Mr Draper claimed that this was as recently as the time of his last trip to the country a decade earlier. That is, in 2008.

Elsewhere Mr Draper seemed to believe that the heart of London included a place called “Mayfield”, by which he presumably meant Mayfair. Though it is possible that he misheard the name as it was perhaps spoken to him by a shoeless street-urchin busily trying to extract a piece of stray mutton from his toothless mouth.

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Harry and Meghan's embarrassing predicament

By Douglas Murray

Month by month the story has continued. As though to prove some ill-intent, by December 2018 America’s paper of record was advertising on its social media accounts, asking people to submit stories to the paper if they had “experienced a petty crime in London”.

In March 2019 an all-but-unknown novelist called Sam Byers was drafted in to write a piece titled “Britain is Drowning itself in Nostalgia”. In the article the author claimed that “With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve retreated into falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nostalgia”. He described the UK as “poisoned” with “colonial arrogance” and suffused with “dreamy jingoism”. On and on this fiction writer went.

In May the paper was back at it, plucking another person from obscurity to do the necessary drive-by on England. This time it was an unknown academic called Maya Goodfellow, who was drafted in to write a piece headlined “A new face won’t cover the British government’s racist heart”.

This headline came about because Ms Goodfellow’s piece claimed that although Sajid Javid had just been appointed to the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and although he was undeniably of ethnic minority background, this was in fact just the sort of ruse that any racist country would come up with to try to cover its tracks. Ms Goodfellow had no evidence for this, but the NYT’s trawl of obscure figures to make specific slanders against the UK continued.

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Broadcaster bias is destroying public trust

By Douglas Murray

In June 2019 Times readers learned that “extremists” had taken over the UK and “A fanatical sect has hijacked British politics”. What was this fanatical sect? ISIS? Extinction Rebellion? Followers of Krusty the Clown? No, the paper disappointingly revealed that the people in question were Brexit supporters and the evidence that they had “hijacked” British politics was that they had persuaded the UK Government to exit the European Union.

Once again the author was a wholly obscure figure: someone called William Davies whose byline qualification for writing this piece was given as the fact that he “writes about politics” — a claim that would not normally be needed in a byline on a political piece.

Then this past week the Gray Lady surpassed herself. The news that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had announced that they were leaving their royal duties and hoping to spend more time living abroad was manna for the NYT’s UK-bashers, and on this occasion the paper drafted in Afua Hirsch to do the necessary hit-job.

Afua is very slightly interesting to me, as someone who had made a career by working out which direction mobility is going: she is a weather-vane of a kind. A mutual acquaintance once laughingly told me that when she had first known Afua, she was an “It-girl” — for in the 1990s and early 2000s upward mobility was the way to go.

At this moment of time downward aspirationalism is all the rage, and so Afua now hawks herself around the op-ed pages of the West opining about her upbringing in the wilds of Wimbledon and the infamous lack of opportunity for people of colour that led her to have to attend Oxford University. But perhaps the NYT does not know the hilarity with which most of Hirsch’s views are greeted at home, and for their purposes they had found the necessary person.

And so Afua wrote a piece headlined “Black Britons know why Meghan Markle wants out”. The incredibly interesting, original, and vindictively untrue claim that Afua Hirsch gave — for surely the first time in her journalistic career — was that Britain is racist and that is why Meghan and Harry are leaving.

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Broadcaster bias is destroying public trust

By Eric Kaufmann

Why is the NYT doing this?

The truth is sadly simple. At some point in 2016 the Times decided that the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump were both of a piece. After the President turned into their number one critic it became important not only to attack him at every given opportunity but to damn everything else they saw as part of the same trend. It may be one reason why the Prime Minister of Hungary appears to be on the front page of the NYT almost as often as the starving residents of the UK.

But whatever the reason the paper now has it in for Britain. It presents Boris Johnson as the precise same character as the US President. After all – goes the NYT analysis – they have similar hair, and archive footage is forever being dug out of Donald Trump, like Boris Johnson, reciting the opening of The Iliad in the original Greek. Peas in a pod, those two.

It is sad in a way. Not sad for Britain, which needs to take as much notice of the NYT as the American public need to take of our Daily Sport, but because it is so misinforming for its often intelligent readership. I am friends with many Americans and in the last few years I have often been struck by how off-piste some of their views are when it comes to the UK and the motivations of its citizens.

These people don’t want to spend too much time thinking about Britain, but they would like to know and understand roughly what is happening. The New York Times is not helping them in this respect, waging a culture war vendetta against the country, but in doing so it is waging a campaign of misinformation against its own readers.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

Rousseau, one of the most famous public moralists in Europe, was contemptuous of the idea that Britain is a democracy. “The people of England regards itself as free,” he wrote, “but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.”

The philosopher was born and raised as a citizen of Geneva, then a small, independent city-state with a long tradition of direct democracy. That is what the word democracy meant at the time – the idea of a representative democracy, where voters elect people to govern on their behalf, was seen as a contradiction in terms, and not just by Rousseau. If he were alive today he would not recognise any states as democratic in his sense, since all that call themselves by that name are in fact ruled by elected elites, not by the people. They are really oligarchies — rule by the few — politely disguised as so-called “representative democracies”.

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Let's junk our electoral system

By Tim Bale

Although Rousseau was not the first person to champion popular sovereignty, he has always been its most potent and persuasive advocate. That is why his famous political work, The Social Contract, has been continuously in print since it was first published two and a half centuries ago, a political classic still read by thousands of people across the world every year. It sets out the case for popular rule more powerfully than any book ever written, which makes it a key text for our own time. It is more timely now than either Marx’s Communist Manifesto or John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which is not to deny their own importance and relevance.

Rousseau believed that the ‘general will’ of the people is the only legitimate basis for political rule, a very radical idea in the 1760s and one that has inspired generations of revolutionaries and populists ever since. The leaders of the French Revolution held Rousseau in the highest esteem, much as Lenin regarded Marx, which is why some of the bloody excesses of that event tarnished his reputation, even though the Rousseau had died a decade earlier. The reference to the law as an expression of the general will (volonté générale) in the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was almost certainly directly inspired by Rousseau. It represents a radical transformation in the foundations of legitimate government.

The Founding Fathers of the US, by contrast, were not impressed by his ideas, since they feared mob rule and the tyranny of the majority as much as royal despotism. This is why they designed a complicated political system that was deliberately weak and full of checks on the popular will, such as the Electoral College, the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court, as bulwarks against democratic despotism. They deliberately founded a republic, not a democracy, a word that nowhere appears in the American constitution.

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Dylan Thomas: populist

By Freya Sanders

The form of democracy that Rousseau advocated was not liberal. His political models were in the ancient world (above all Sparta and Republican Rome) and in modern, Calvinist Geneva. He argued that democracy could not function unless its citizens truly cared about the public good above their own private good. They must be public-spirited citizens before they are self-interested individuals. The best way to achieve this, he thought, is by an intense civic pride that overcomes our natural selfishness and strengthens the bonds of citizenship. “Do we want peoples to be virtuous?” he asked. “Let us then start by making them love their country.” That is why many 20th century liberals have condemned Rousseau as a “totalitarian democrat”.

But not everyone who rejects the liberal, representative form of democracy is necessarily a totalitarian. Rousseau is better understood as a precursor of what is now called “national populism” (a term recently coined by the political scientists Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell). He saw a basic incompatibility between liberalism and democracy and took his stand with the latter.

Rousseau was from a modest family of provincial craftsmen who came to see his age as deeply corrupt, divided and unjust. He is the eloquent voice of those who feel alienated, disempowered and ignored by the rich and powerful who dominate politics and benefit most from a system of government that was originally meant to be “of the people, by the people, for the people”, grievances that sound very familiar to our ears today. Rousseau’s faith was in the simple virtues and humility of ordinary citizens, which he contrasted with the decadence and arrogance of the elites who ruled pre-revolutionary France.

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Are these the last gasps of our old political order?

By Matthew Goodwin

The compound “liberal democracy” is coming apart in our time, as Rousseau would have predicted it must, a victim of its own inherent contradictions. The recent rise of populism is increasingly forcing a choice on us.

On one side, it has provoked many liberals to challenge policies they dislike in the courts and to sharpen their attacks on more direct forms of democracy (such as referendums and popular initiatives) in favour of diluted, representative forms, often in the name of the “sovereignty of Parliament”. They sound a lot like classical liberals of the 19th century such as Mill, who were uneasy with the rising power and assertiveness of ordinary citizens whose views and behaviour they perceived as a threat to the idea of man as a “progressive being” (in his words).

On the other side, many populists are now increasingly impatient with liberal, cosmopolitan values, which they view as the ideology of a privileged elite detached from the lives of ordinary citizens and disdainful of their views.

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Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

What seems new to us is really a resurgence of a debate that goes back to Rousseau’s time, before the 19th century foundation of liberal democracy, which has long been the established form of democratic rule in the West. We are moving from an age of “liberalism and democracy” to an age of “liberalism or democracy” again.

Nationalist democratic politicians who are openly critical of liberal pluralism, such as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro, are increasingly common now, even in western Europe, although not yet dominant there. They see liberalism as weakening democratic solidarity and identity, whereas liberal democratic leaders, such as Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, see liberalism as essential to democracy. Challenges to the liberal conception of democracy are likely to grow, echoing the language and ideas of Rousseau.

As the old and increasingly obsolete political ideologies of Left and Right that emerged in the wake of the American and French revolutions over two centuries ago give way to a new axis of political debate around globalism and elitism on the one hand, and populism and nationalism on the other, Rousseau’s relevance and importance is bound to grow even more. Rousseau, the prophet of populism, is a thinker whose time has come again, for better or for worse.

How To Think Politically: Sages, Scholars and Statesmen Whose Ideas Have Shaped the World, by Graeme Garrard and James Bernard Murphy, is published on 8th August (Bloomsbury, £14.99)