If you doubted that
right wing populism is an international movement, then the turnout of
support for Victor Orbán and his party Fidesz before Sunday’s election should have put
you right. It wasn’t just visits from US Vice President Vance and
Secretary of State Rubio, plus supportive messages from Trump
himself. [1] Every leader of the main right wing populist parties in
Europe offered Orbán support, alongside
Netanyahu
from Israel and of course Putin from Russia.
The scale of Orbán’s defeat, with his opponent Péter
Magyar,winning a super majority of seats
allowing him to undo constitutional changes enacted by Orbán, is
impressive when set against past Orbán victories and the extent
of election rigging in favour of Fidesz. But the main
two reasons that Magyar
won were fairly inevitable after a prolonged period of right wing
populist government: economic
stagnation
and widespread
government corruption.
I noted
here
how severe economic decline is typical after a period of right wing
populist government, and corruption is also standard in any highly
autocratic state.
The
durability problem with right-wing populist governments is not their
popularity, but that these governments meet unpopularity with
measures that degrade and possibly eliminate the democratic process.
Sunday’s election result is a reminder that there are limits to what an almost entirely pro-government media can do, and the scale of
Orbán’s defeat may have also deterred
him from trying to ignore the result by claiming it had been stolen
as a result of EU interference. [2] Orbán might have been able to get away with such a
tactic if the result had been close and he still had large areas of
support, but after such a large defeat popular resistance to such a
tactic could have been too great for Orbán to risk.
The scale of Orbán’s
defeat may also be a result of where that defeat came from. Sunday’s
victor, Péter Magyar, was a member of Orbán’s party, Fidesz,
until
just two years ago.
He is a right wing conservative, but broke with Orbán and Fidesz
over the issue of corruption. In those two years Magyar
worked tirelessly
in visiting rural areas that had traditionally been Fidesz
strongholds, and this may help explain the scale of his victory.
Social conservatives who might have still hesitated to vote for a
more liberal opposition leader were prepared to vote for Magyar. (A
lesson perhaps for centre right parties elsewhere including the UK:
you defeat right wing populism by fighting it rather than becoming
it.)
The
task ahead for Magyar is still immense, and it will take time to get
rid of all the Orbán loyalists that have become entrenched after
sixteen years of his rule. But the benefits for those outside Hungary
are likely to be more immediate. Magyar has pledged to stop Hungary
being the odd one out in the EU, which means no longer doing Putin’s
bidding and trying
to block
European aid to Ukraine.
The
desire of right wing populists around the world to support Orbán is
also an indication of the key role that Hungary played in the
international right wing populist network, both as an example of the
kind of regime that this movement hoped to spread to other countries,
and as a direct
provider of cash
for events and propaganda. However here the impact of Orbán’s fall
should not be overestimated. In the UK, for example, few of those
voting for Reform will even be aware of Orbán, and there will still
be plenty
of money around
to support right wing populism in the UK and elsewhere.
This
external support for Orbán doesn’t seem to have done him any good
in Sunday’s election, and may well have been harmful. In particular
Orbán’s increasing links with Russia and hostility to the EU (to
the extent that his ministers acted as Russian spies within the EU)
are unlikely to have been popular. But support from Trump could also
have backfired.
I have argued for
some time that a silver lining to Trump’s…
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