European politics took an unsettling lurch to the 1930s fascist right this week with the blood-and-soil style nationalist ruminations of Hungarian strong-man Viktor Orbán: “We are not a mixed race and we do not want to become a mixed race.”
In one universe, Orbán’s Hungary could be dismissed as a latter-day Ruritania — annoying, but largely harmless. But in the universe in which we live, Orbán has become a model for the right’s rejection of liberal democracy and human rights, embraced by conservative groups across the world.
Right now, one of his proteges — leader of Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia Giorgia Meloni — is on track to be the first overtly fascist prime minister of a western European country since World War II. In Spain, the extremist Vox party is making itself the indispensable partner of the increasing conservative People’s Party.
Orbán-mania has leapt the Atlantic, too. The Hungarian is set to headline the right’s big Conservative Political Action Conference scheduled for Texas next week. It’s a return visit, with Orbán hosting CPAC in Hungary in May, including a live broadcast of Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight show.
It’s all part of a lurch to the extreme in conservative politics across the developed world, including in Australia. On the far right, extremist parties like the Fratelli and Vox are growing support, while traditional conservative parties are following after to hang on to their voting base.
Suddenly the extreme right-wing parties are breaking through what was once thought to be a 10% ceiling. (The combined vote of One Nation and the United Australia Party in May was 9.1%.) Now, post-COVID, elections and polls show the extreme right surging past 20% in France, Italy, Spain and Austria.
It’s being driven, in part, by the climate emergency, with the right trading on the false promise held out to regional communities with the Morrisonian “technology not taxes”. In a rhyme with Australia’s 2019 bushfires, Vox has blamed Spain’s recent wildfires on arson.
The lesson the traditional conservative parties are taking from, say, France (where the traditional conservate vote collapsed in the recent elections) is: if you can’t beat ’em, you better join ’em.
In Spain, the Partido Popular has attempted the traditional reboot, with a new leader who talks centrist and is shifting policy to the right. So far as the polls go, it looks like it’s working. The party had a shock landslide win in the traditional socialist stronghold of Andalusia in June and is leading in the polls for national elections due by December 2023.
In Italy, the traditional right-wing parties, La Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, used the surge in Fratelli’s support to bring down the technocratic government of Mario Draghi, forcing elections scheduled for October.
Meanwhile, among Hungary’s neighbours, Orbán’s crude ethno-nationalism is being seen through the prism of his enduring irredentist ambitions to reclaim the territories occupied by about 2.2 million Hungarian speakers spread around each of the country’s seven neighbours — including in western Ukraine
Orbán’s claim to speak for the Hungarian minority in the western Zakarpattia Oblast has been both an encouragement for Putin’s invasion in the east and an irritant for Ukraine and its supporters in the European Union. Under Orbán, Hungary has been funding pro-Hungary media and schools in the surrounding regions, particularly in Slovakia and Serbia, as well as Ukraine.
Hungary insisted on action to respect minority (read “Hungarian”) rights as a condition for approving Ukraine’s candidacy for EU membership. Expect this to be the sort of ongoing blockage to full membership that Bulgaria’s insistence on Bulgarian rights has been to North Macedonia.
Meanwhile, Orbán’s on-again, off-again attitude to the Russian invasion has fractured the regional right-wing bloc he was building in the so-called Visegrad group, particularly with his once reliable ally in Poland.
Like much of the right, Hungary’s politics is more culture wars than economics. There’s the same city-country, young-old divide as in most of the developed world. Like much of central Europe it’s an emigrant country, with population down about 10% since the Soviet collapse.
Leading writer on post-Soviet economies Bálint Magyar has characterised it as the model mafia state, “a mix between a criminal organisation and a privatised, parasitic state” where “an organised ‘upperworld’ of elites have captured the economy, including the oligarchs themselves”.
But with the right rhetoric it’s an “illiberal democracy” that plenty of the world’s right finds irresistible.
Worldwide, Conservatives want to cheat on decarbonisation. By “technology not taxes”, the LNP was referring to carbon capture and (miraculous) storage of about fifty million tonnes per year of CO2. However it is not just technically impossible to bury that much stuff, and it is physically impossible to destroy that much mass. In practice, the call distracts our attention while the conjurer continues to emit as usual.
However, on the Left, Labor is likely to attempt a similar conjurer’s trick. To great fanfare, coalmining will be reduced being across the next few years, along with the installation of pathetically inadequate renewables. Both events will be lauded loudly to distract us from a relentless expansion of gas extraction. Now is when we want the Greens to hold Labor to account – to show us progress in the elimination of gas.
Do you know whats going on between Russia and Germany at the moment and the Congo is opening new gas fields so Germany don’t have to rely on Russian oil and gas. Australia’s emissions on a global scale are irrelevant , a statistical blip. The greens are not aware that solar panels don’t work at night time. But then as most are rather wealthy inner city public servants I don’t expect them to understand reality.
Have a look at my post above look at the original data sources.
Thanks Christopher. The problem with reporting about Hungary is that there needs to be a balancing act of rightly calling our Orban’s increasing fascist ways, but also acknowledging that Hungary’s history is not the same as western colonial empires.
Hungary had, to put it lightly, a pretty rough time for the second half of the 20th century, and many Hungarians would rightly feel abandoned by the west to suffer severely under Soviet occupation. Hungary is culturally and linguistic wise very different from its neighbours – it is not a global hegemon with many speakers (english, french, and to a lesser extent German and Mandarin). Many Hungarians see the sort of migration as proclaimed by Germany as a loss of culture.
You may agree or disagree with this, but it is this concern that keeps Orban in power – and I think it is very dangerous for “western” “powers” to so readily ignore the anxieties of a European cultural minority nation sitting between those who fell like they have a say in its affairs.
Being a global hegemon hasn’t stopped the same dynamic appearing in the US under the guise of “white replacement”.
For that matter Hungary using ethnic Hungarians to destabilise neighbouring countries is exactly where Russia went with ethnic Russians, notably in Ukraine. Or, for that matter, Nazi Germany with the Sudenteland Germans…
You don’t see Finland, which is also a small ethnic island with a very different language (distantly related to Hungarian) indulging in these antics.
Once Basque was thought to be a third isolated branch of the Finno-Urgric language group but that place is now taken by Estonian.
Currently Basque (Euskara) is deemed to be the last remnant of the original language of prehistoric Europe before the Indo-European (read Central Asian) inundation.
There are people who comment on Crikey articles who put the appeasers prior to WWII to shame. Afghanistan and the Taliban – all America’s fault. Russian aggression in Ukraine – all America’s, Germany’s and NATO’s fault. Hungary – ok, can’t blame America on this one. Let’s shove ‘Western’ in there though just so that we can keep that peculiar line of old fashioned leftist rhetoric going. Also managed to get in ‘western colonial empires’ and ‘hegemon’, just to make the comment even more like a first year international politics student who has googled.
And every time the patronising commentators who make these points feel that we need a history lesson. Yes, thanks people. Most of us do know what America did in Afghanistan. Most of us have a pretty good idea of NATO’s history. And most of us have a pretty good idea of Hungary’s history under Soviet occupation. But please, do lecture us about it. Like I’ve said before, it’s like being in a house full of geriatric teenagers.
Things are what they are now. I am not going to support appeasing Hungary because they have a bit of an historical beef with their surrounding neighbours. Given how many of their neighbours also have voted in extremely far right governments, Hungary is hardly alone. We don’t need to acknowledge any history. We need to work with how Hungary is now, it doesn’t matter how they got there. And Hungary is very dangerous, if not yet to other countries, certainly to its own people. Or maybe you think that Hungarians who are Jewish or non white or gay or any of the other groups that Orban and his thugs are targeting should sit down and shut up and remember their ‘culture’.
Appeasers eh? Geriatric teenagers eh? Yet another uninformed attack on others views from the “One-eyed Millennial Font of all Knowledge”. When you stop lecturing everybody else on your BS one-eyed views then everybody else will stop lecturing you.
In the meantime, here is a link to a video of a talk given by someone (Prof. John Mearsheimer)actually qualified to speak about who holds responsibility for the Ukraine Crisis. Try watching it, you might learn something but I doubt it.
https://youtu.be/qciVozNtCDM
Oh deary me. Another sad old man who can’t stand anyone else’s views. You’re right. I won’t watch it. Purely because you recommend it and you are so gobsmackingly ignorant that I can’t be bothered with anything that you use as a source.
No-one lectures me. You just carry on with your drooling far right nonsense that you dress up as left wing. It’s clear you love fascist hard men, which is why everything you say is tainted.
Is it because “No-one lectures me.” that you’ve never learned anything of worth?
He is the worst proponent of everything he accuses everyone else of.
Typical reply from the “Millennial Font of no knowledge”. No-one lectures you but you are quite happy to lecture everyone else you complete hypocrite. As the saying goes “You can always tell a Millennial, just not much”. “Can’t stand anyone else’s views”? You are the poster boy for that (evidence can be provided). If you hate Crikey subscribers that much why don’t you do us all a favour and take your far left Millennial drivel elsewhere?
Good stuff. However, I would not claim Orban to be that original while many ideas and much agitprop, like Australia, is imported and used to retain power via media consolidation, shutting down dissenting voices, focusing on older/regional voters, gerrymandering and catering financially to the top people, plus pensioners, and now a new cohort of low skilled/income workers in regions subsidised by the state.
Conservatives, being manipulated by external factors and funding have adopted (often faux) white Christian nationalism dependent upon xenophobia, dog whistling, the great replacement and Soros conspiracy, latter cooked up by Jewish US GOP operators recommended by Israel’s former PM Netanyahu, promoted by Hungarian media and in Anglosphere by legacy media, routinely.
By coincidence another Australian writer, Lucy Hamilton, has written about some of these influences titled ‘Australia’s Orban Sycophants‘ in the AIM Network, and SMH’s Koziol did an excellent article several years ago on a think tank linked to Koch ‘Atlas’ network, funded by Hungarian government and popular with Australian conservatives in SMH article ‘Why Australia’s conservatives are finding friends in Hungary’ (6 October 2019).
The relevant think tank, Danubius Institute, was called out by eminent US conservative Anne Applebaum on 3 April via Twitter, asking the question of their Anglo visitors.
This is what Italy is dealing with: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/31/killing-of-nigerian-street-seller-causes-outrage-in-italy
Hey Chris left or right doesnt matter with totalitarian governments. unless you think China and Russia and North Korea OK.
And Roger the Greens and Labor would have us believe that with 1.5 percent of global domestic emissions we can save the world. So they trot out per capita emissions which is a political/social measure as though the climate/world says it OK for China to produce 40 percent of total world emissions and that will not damage the climate, but Australias emissions will.
Its the difference between politics and Science.
I think i will leave it to science and the years 7 maths to decide as they tell the truth.