It is hard to overstate the significance of Petér Magyar’s victory in the Hungarian election. Nonetheless, within hours of the result, there was no shortage of naysayers already downplaying it on social media.
Magyar, they warn, is a conservative nationalist who was a Fidesz member until just two years ago, he is a hardliner on immigration and opposed to Ukraine’s accelerated EU accession. Even with a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority, they add that it will take years to dismantle Orbán’s “illiberal democracy”, during which time he is bound to fall short of the inflated expectations of his liberal supporters.
These quibbles miss the scale of what has happened. Magyar’s policy positions on immigration, Ukraine and social policy are well within the mainstream of European conservatism. But that is hardly the point. The significance of his victory lies in what he had to overcome: an electoral system extensively gerrymandered in Fidesz’s favour; a national media overwhelmingly in the hands of Orbán’s allies; a campaign of intimidation and subversion led by state agencies. And on top of it all, both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Trump administration’s overt support for Orbán – an unprecedented alignment of two of the world’s leading powers to interfere in a European democratic election.
JD Vance made a last-minute trip to Budapest to lend Orbán his blessing, framing Washington’s support as solidarity with a fellow Christian conservative and vital ally against what last year’s US national security strategy called “civilisational erasure”. This was, at best, naive; at worst, a cynical misreading of the Orbán project.
As the Cato Institute, one of America’s leading conservative think-tanks, noted in a report last week, his transformation from anti-communist campaigner into cultural crusader was always opportunistic cover for a rather simpler undertaking: the dismantling of the rule of law, the independent media and civil society, in order to concentrate power and wealth in a tightly knit circle of family and friends.
In that respect, Sunday’s election was indeed a civilisational battle – but not the one Vance asserted. It pitted the fundamental conservative principles of democracy, the rule of law and open markets, as enshrined in EU Treaties, against Orbán’s model of oligarchic capitalism, long associated with Russia and now, astonishingly, being embraced in Washington.
Magyar won because Hungarian voters had had enough of a system that had driven Hungary to the bottom of European league tables for economic performance, press freedom and the rule of law. On Orbán’s watch, Hungary had fallen 20 places in Freedom House’s World Freedom Index – below South Africa and Albania, and the only EU member state to be classified as just “partly free”.
That makes Magyar’s victory a watershed moment for Hungary and Europe. Hungary can now begin to unpick the Orbán system and restore judicial independence, paving the way for the disbursement of billions in frozen EU funds. He has already demanded the resignation of the Hungarian president and other key Orbán enablers.
Meanwhile, multiple EU initiatives that Hungary has been blocking – not least the urgently needed €90 billion loan facility for Ukraine –can now proceed once the new government in Budapest is installed. Russia has lost its most valuable lever for undermining European support for Kyiv. And the removal of Orbán will make it meaningfully harder for Washington to frustrate European efforts to deepen strategic autonomy and reduce dependencies on the US in energy, technology, defence and finance.
A crowd by the River Danube waits for the election results in Budapest. Photo by Krisztian Elek/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The wider political repercussions may prove equally significant. Orbán had positioned himself as the figurehead of an international nationalist movement, using an opaquely funded ecosystem of Hungarian think tanks to spread his anti-EU, pro-Russian agenda across the continent and into the US conservative mainstream.
That ecosystem, which included the European spin-off of America’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the Matthias Corvinus Collegium and Danube Institute, will now be deprived of its most prominent champion and, in due course, of its state funding. More importantly, Orbán’s defeat has exposed the limitations of the nationalist-populist model. The European economy needs greater integration if it is to prosper – a point that Magyar implicitly acknowledged in his post-election press conference, stating that it would be in Hungary’s interest to join the euro in due course.
Magyar’s victory has also exposed the limits of foreign electoral interference. Vance’s intervention did not save Orbán – it may, if anything, have gifted the opposition its supermajority by reminding Hungarian voters exactly what was at stake. “Hungarians said yesterday they will write their history, not in Moscow, not in Beijing, not in Washington,” Magyar said in his press conference.
It is no wonder that previously MAGA-aligned parties across Europe are now scrambling to distance themselves from an increasingly erratic Trump administration that has become a direct threat to European interests. With European voters deeply hostile to Washington, association has become an electoral liability.
It would be premature to declare the beginning of the end for European right-wing populism – not while populists lead in the polls in France, Germany and Britain. But Hungary has always seen itself as the shield of Europe, the frontier defender against foreign threats. On Sunday, Hungarian voters proved worthy of that tradition.
For those old enough to remember, the joyous scenes on the banks of the Danube – tens of thousands chanting “Russians out” and singing Queen’s We Are the Champions – invoked memories of the revolutions that swept away communism in central and eastern Europe in 1989. Those began in Hungary, too.
Source:
www.euractiv.com