Future of European Right Wing Politics

Hello and welcome back to Unheard. Momentous scenes last night in Budapest, all over Hungary, as the Prime Minister of 16 years, Viktor Orban was resoundingly rejected in the latest parliamentary elections. Now, in the news business, people are used to saying how momentous and historic events are, but this really was momentous and historic because the numbers are just so eye-watering. Right up until the day before the election, a lot of us were speculating in each direction about what the result would be. Despite the polls showing a lead for the opposition, there was this sort of innate suspicion of them because the grip that Victor Orban has apparently had on that country has seemed so permanent that we all somehow expected to wake up on Monday morning with news that he'd pulled it off once again. But the numbers just to share them with you, in terms of seats by party in the Hungarian National Assembly, a hundred and thirty-eight will be held by Tisha, which is the opposition party of Peter Magyar, and only fifty-five by Fidesz, which has been the ruling party for so long. So it's it's a complete upending, and they now will have two-thirds majority in that parliament, which means they can do far-reaching constitutional changes and really rapid ly unpick a lot of the work that Viktor Orban has done over the last decade and a half. So it really matters not only for Hungary, not only for Europe, but really for conservatives around the world. We saw J.D. Vance getting on a plane and doing a, it's got to be said, ineffective last minute little campaign stop for Victor Orban, reminding me a little bit of uh Hillary Clinton pulling in celebrities that were kind of clearly mismatched with her own electorate as a last-minute plea to win. Not necessarily a good sign, and it didn't really work. But yeah, we're waking up with a very different world, and happily we have the right person to help shed some light on what's really been going on because our very own Aries Russinos has been in Hungary for the last month talking to people, reporting from the ground and trying to work out what's actually happen ing beyond the headlines. So welcome back to Unheard, Ares . Great to be here. Hi Freddie . The background, in case people are wondering, I suppose is a a a room in hotel in Budapest. You were out late last night celebrating or commiserating with the various groups of supporters. Let's start with that. What kind of evening was it? I've never seen an election night like that in Europe like, it it actually felt more like being back covering the Arab Spring. It felt like a genuinely kind of revolutionary at uh atmosphere. People dancing on top of bus stops, streets full of you know, cars blaring out, flags waving, people out chanting and dancing till well into the morning. Everyone I spoke to was was celebrating and everyone said it it feels like nineteen eighty nine again. This is a real historic turning point for Hungary. Are the people celebrating mainly young people? Is I mean that's the kind of stereotype, isn't it? That you know the young metropolitan liber als are Orband skeptics, and then the kind of older people and people in the countryside are supporters, but with numbers like that, Peter Magyar, the opposition leader, must have scored a a lot of votes with both older people and people in the countryside, otherwise he couldn't have pulled off such a trouncing. I mean, what's your sense on the ground of how broad the support for MAGAR now is? I mean I'd say it's both. So there was a very strong uh Zuma contingent, essentially a whole generation who've never known anything other than the Fidesz rural. But at the same time, there were you know older people, mostly professionals, you know, lawyers, consultants. Budapest is a very kind of urban bourgeois city in a way. These people were vehemently pro-Magia . But even the night before last I was in uh Debregen, Hungary's second city on the eastern border, and there was a huge, huge crowd there for TISA at the kind of final campaign rally. And there were a lot of older people there as well. And that was seen as that was seen as you know fit as heartland. Even government press officers were saying TISA, they're gonna try and take Deborah Jen from us, but this is our heartland. They will never take it. But it was a huge, it was an absolutely huge turnout for TISA. It really is one of those just huge change moments for that country. I mean, we haven't had, I would say, one here in the UK since 1997 that felt like that, a kind of genuine new flavour in the air. And as you say, a lot of these people will have never have known anything other than Victor Orban. So for them it must feel like a whole new world. A lot of the centrists, a lot of the kind of liber als have been coming in saying this was a victory for democracy. Uh Barack Obama has said the victory of the opposition yesterday is a victory for democracy, not just in Europe but around the world. Kirstar , this is a historic moment not only for Hungary, but for European democracy. And to be fair, you can see what they mean because it really did defy the skeptics. It's most commonly said about Victor Orban that he has somehow rigged the system, he stacked the judiciary, he stacked the media, he has controls that are illiberal, and yet none of them seem to work very well because the vote went ahead and he lost it so comprehensively. Is it a victory for democracy? What I will say about Warban is that he placed his uh his thumb on the scales of of the electoral system in terms of control of the media and so on. But fundamentally he was a democrat. He he isn't an autocrat. He wasn't an autocrat. It was a free and fair election. When he lost, he accepted that and he bowed out of the scene gracefully. There'd been a lot of kind of scaremongering really, both from opposition journalists who are largely activists as well within Hungary and opposition aligned kind of you know liberal commentators in in Western Europe and America who'd been saying that oh you know maybe Warburton will find some way to stay in power if he loses the election. That isn't who he was. Fundamentally, Orban genuinely revelled in his popularity, the popularity among the Hungarian people that kept him in power for a generation . When he'd lost that, he accepted that. You know, he didn't want to squander his uh his record and his reputation. Hungary Orban, he called it an illiberal democracy, but it is a democracy and it always was a democracy and he did accept that. Paita Magia, it has to be said, in some ways he's a he's a more authoritarian figure, I think, than than Orban. I mean in terms of media access, it's a very tightly controlled ship. He's the only person in his party who could give interviews. It's still a personalist right wing government, just with a new person in charge. Tell us a bit more about that then. So a lot of the commentators on the left or in the center have been saying, as well as a victory for democracy, which I do think it does seem, it's also a victory for the left or for liberalism, a rejection of the right, that's not true as far as you're concerned. What are Magy ar's policies? Is he a conservative nationalist? Is he different from Victor Orban or is he just Victor Orban without the corruption, so he promises? Fidesz without the corruption, that's that's how one Fidesz uh insider phrased it to me. And that is basically it. Like he he came from within Fidesz. He was described to me as a third-tier apparatchik by one Fiddles insider. His ex-wife was the justice minister uh within Fiddest, she's seen as a high flyer, potentially uh an Orban successor a few years ago. Liberal commentators I've spoken to have said ultimately he was socialized within Fiddest. Like he's a he's a Fidesz operator. The TISA party at least initially kind of propelled itself as more a reformist movement from within Fiddess than a liberal opposition to it. What does that mean specifically then? So let's just try and detail it out for our listeners. So we know that he's different, or is different from Fidesz in that they are pro-European, or at least purport to be pro EU in a way that Orban was not. We became very used to him blocking the various instruments of European Union legislation always. And he became a kind of thorn in the side of the EU, whilst Magy ar promises to work more cooperatively with them in order to release funding that he hopes will come in the direction of Budapest. That is fair, isn't it? That is a genuine difference between them? Yeah, that's that's a genuine difference. If you look at the points of rupture or controversy between uh Orban's Hungary and the EU, so immigration and the energy relationship with Russia. Petamadja, he isn't promising anything different. So in terms of immigration, he's actually more restrictive than Orban. He's pledged to cancel or annul all the work visas for South Asian migrants working in Hungary, which is actually hugely increased under Orban. In terms of Russia, he said, you know, it will take a decade maybe to kind of wean Hungary off Russian gas. So in terms of in reality, how things are actually going to change from Orban's rule, you know, nothing really. And both these policies, Russian, Russian energy and very restrictive immigration, they're popular in Hungary. They're very popular in Hungary, among Tisa voters as well. That was never the issue, even though that's how that's framed in the West. That's really significant. So immigration is just not a distinction between them. By your account, Majiar is even more hardline on immigration than Viktor Orband was. So although it's a vote back towards Europe or it's a more affection towards the institutions of Europe, the Hungarian people are not saying they want an open-door immigration policy or they want to return to kind of a free movement world. However, you say not that much will change. This big story is that it's a rejection of the corruption perceived and real around the Orban regime. And it's a rejection of an deeply illiberal idea, which I could would say is actually quite central to the post-liberals as well, which is that the state needs to empower itself to force through its own vision and d must not get distracted or deterred by these kind of facets of a liberal democracy that stop you from making things happen. That's the sort of mood behind aubanism. And that's the mood that has inspired commentators in London and in Washington and all across Europe on the political right, that there needs to be a kind of more muscular reaction to the modern world, even if that means transgressing some liberal niceties. That was basically the Orban project, and that does feel like it's been rejected here because corruption is really the obvious next step of that process. If you put your friends in the judiciary, if you your friends acquire the media, if you start breaking down those kind of correctives of a normal liberal democracy, you're gonna get after 16 years to something like where Orban got to. So I feel like that that is a genuine rejection of the illiberal utopia. I think one of the main things to think about Orbanism is he he tried to create a counter-elite to what he saw as uh you know a liberal elite that had stacked the judiciary, had stacked the media, had stacked academia. So he created his own kind of counterproject, putting in, you know, post liberals and allies within these positions. In terms of corruption, in terms of economics, one of the economic planks of Orbanism was to create kind of strong native Hungarian industries that could you know stand up internationally against you know kind of big multinational uh corporations working within Hungary. As an idea, I don't think that was a bad thing. I think that 's actually uh a sensible project. However, in practice what that meant was channelling was channelling funds and you know state contracts towards his close political allies and friends and family. What intellectually or politically actually had a kind of good rationale behind it in practice just turned out to be petty corruption. So he didn't create these kind of strong native Hungarian industries. It was just a way of funneling funds to to cronies. That also is a major blow, I would say, to right-wing fans of Orban around the world. Because just as having a more muscular attitude to liberal institutions, the idea of kind of the state taking a stronger interest in national industry to make it more resilient, self-sustaining, and so on, you know, the big critique of that had two parts, one of which is that it leads to cor ruption, tick, that happened in the Orban experiment, and the other one is that it doesn't work, because economics isn't easily directed like that, and you won't create the wealth, and the story you were getting on the streets of Budapest from Magi ar supporters was that they were frustrated with the economic situation. So Aubonomics doesn't seem to have delivered for his voters, and they've rejected it. So that is a that's a profound lesson I would have thought for post-liberals and illiberals around the world. If you look at the uh the law and justice party in Poland, they also had a similar political project and they succeeded actually in building Poland up into, you know, a major regional economic player. I think the issue with how orbanism works in practice wasn't the intellectual or political project behind it. It was just the practice. He ultimately it it failed uh at achieving a Hungarian equivalent to the Polish economic miracle of the past uh few decades. I'd also say it's too early to know what uh Petamagia and and Tisa will actually in practice, how they'll direct or direct the economy or kind of you know, have a hands-off uh approach to it, we don't know yet. It's too early to say. And remember he does come from within Fidesz. You know, he grew up with a a poster of Auburn on his bedroom wall. He he used to be an Auburn fanboy. So I think it's too early to say that this is a total kind of you know rupture or or uh uh rift with the kind of Auburn model. Talk to us about the choice that Hungarians face between kind of Russia and Europe, or at least that's how they seem to have perceived it. Because Orban, when there was the invasion in Ukraine, Orban was initially very strongly kind of defensive and appalled by the what he saw going on, and then over time has become much more of a sort of mediator and someone who was resisting Europe an kind of rejection of Russia. That's I suppose they didn't like the voters, is that right? Do you think we can confidently say that Hungarian voters, on basis of this result , want to face towards Europe and have no interest in being a kind of third-way middle ground between Europe and Russia. Geopolitically, Orban had always positioned Hungary as a kind of amoral middle power, balancing the great kind of empires of the world, you know, Russia, China, the United States, playing them off against each other. As his rule developed within the past few years, he obviously became closer to Russia, but also to uh Trump's America. And that obviously was resoundingly rejected by Hungarian voters last night. You know, everyone I spoke to said we are Europeans. We want to be closer within the European mainstream. We want we want European wages, we want European democracy, we want European values. We're not we don't belong to the East, but also we're not Americans, we're not Trumpians. I would say last night's result was just as much a rejection of Trump's America, actually, as as Putin's Russia. You saw the you know J.D. Vance intervention. Even before that, there was CPAC Hungary. I went to CPAC Hungary. CPAC is the American Conservative Association. Yeah. So like even as a an Anglophone conservative, basically, going to this kind of Trumpian mega church of MAGA influencers and you know video endorsements from Trump and Netanyahu, it just felt strange and alien. And it I think it felt just as strange and alien to Hungarian voters who who don't appreciate this kind of one meddling in their internal domestic politics. The kind of crass vulgarity really of of American conservatism and its um its fixation on issues that have nothing to do with Hungary and the the kind of European path they want to they want to follow. I wonder what the lesson there is for our own reform party here in the UK because it seems like right wingers around the world just refuse to learn. We saw in Canada where the apparent association with Trump was absolutely disastrous for the right-leaning Conservative Party there. Nigel Farage is very closely associated with Trump and with American popul ists, and he seems to really encourage that association. He pops off over there on the plane all the time. Maybe we'll see a similar effect here. What do you think? Yeah, I think that I think that's a a major risk for reform. Even at CPAC, there were you know quite prominent uh reform intellectual figures uh attending. I mean if you look at the the populist right across Europe, in Italy, in Poland now, in Germany, there's a there's an increasing rejection of this association with Trump, who is, I think, politically toxic at this point. I do think for Farage and for Reform, this kind of vulgar Americanized populist conservatism might end up more of a millstone than it will be a the selling point. It's weird how people on the political right were so excited about this idea of internationalizing their movement. Almost taking inspiration from the you know progressive international or the left kind of global movements. But it makes much more sense within a left-wing kind of universalist project that you would have these kind of tie ups, I would have thought conservatism and nationalism are by definition wanting to be distinct and different from the neighbors. We saw it with Yoram Hazani, who is the kind of godfather of the conservative nationalist movement, already falling out with his fellow nationalists, because of course he's Israeli and they are there are perceived differences of interest there, or very real differences of interest . Same now with Hungary and Farage and we'll see Le Pen is already very much distancing herself and that party from other movements. Do you think there is such a thing as a conservative international or should that just be forgotten about? With nationalism particularly, there's always gonna be this tension between uh seeking allies, uh local or international allies, and also the inherent tensions between different kinds of you know nationalist projects. Like I actually talking to uh T Savosas last night, one thing that came a lot of people were saying this came across, you know, Orban he calls himself a nationalist and he's close allies with uh Ficho in uh Slovakia, who, as they were saying, treats the Hungarian minority in Slovakia far worse than uh Zelen sky does in Ukraine. And Urban in the Romanian election, gave a kind of late semi-endorsement of Simeon, the populist candidate. And again, that's not popular because he's he was a Romanian nationalist and is seen as working against the the interest s of Romania's um Hungarian ethnic minority. So within a European context , ultimately nationalist projects are always gonna kind of rub up against the age-old divisions of European nations, right? Um, you know, minority questions, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, that haven't been settled uh over the past century . More broadly , maybe this is just me projecting here, but I do think there's space for a European nationalist project in a way that there isn't for a broader transatlantic uh kind of nationalist international art. Look at the voters last night, they're all very pro European. I wouldn't necessarily say they're all liberal. A lot of them were expressing quite strong nationalist opinions, but they saw that they saw those nationalist opinions best protected and advanced within a a European context. And I think I think there is space for a European right wing that is detached from you know the American populist right. Where else in Europe do you see the beginnings of such a thing? Because obviously the UK left the European Union in 2016. In that moment, it was like , you know, right-wing Britain turns its back on liberal utopia of Europe. Since then, what we've seen is huge numbers of victories on the political right in Europe, and it is starting to look much more like the continent of Europe is quite a right-leaning, quite nationalistic bloc. And with what's going on with Donald Trump and the discussions around NATO and the Middle East, there's definitely an incentive there to try and build a stronger, more nationalistic European bloc. Where else is there signs of that happening and how could it take shape, do you think? I think you see glimmerings of that in France, in Italy, in Germany with the AFD, I think that's uh that's moving forward. Even at CPAC, you could see, you know, I was networking with you know AFD and uh PIS and Confederacia uh Polish right-wing politicians who were, you know, rolling their eyes and smirking at each other when they saw, you know, the star spangled banner being kind of warbled out um on stage. And when you talk to them, they express essentially European nationalist uh opinions, increasingly distinct from America's stances generally, also the relationship with Israel, it has to be said, which I think is gonna be one of the dividing lines uh between Europe and the and the US moving forward. But it's still within the constitution and within the systems of the European Union. You don't see this being a some sort of alternative grouping. I think what we saw last night was the end of a kind of 2010s European right-wing populism, Trumpian, MAGA, anti-Europe. And I think TISA represents, we'll see how they govern, but I think they repres ent an evolution of the European right wing rather than the rejection of it. You know, a younger, more Europe an focused means of advancing kind of national interests within a European framework. You see the headlines every day, but do they actually tell you what's going on? We don't just look at the front pages. We look at what's moving beneath the surface. That's undercurrents, the new daily newsletter from Unheard. It lands in your inbox every morning at 8am EST or 1 pm GMT. Get the perspective that really matters. Get undercurrents. By me, James Billow in the US Newsroom. Sign up today at unheard.com forward slash undercurrents- And finally, what do you think that means for the UK ? Because the Prime Minister, Keir Star mer, is talking about new economic collaborations with Europe, it definitely feels like it's back on the table for Britain to be reconsidering once again its relationship with Europe in the light of everything that's happened in the past five years. What do you think it means for the UK if there is this slightly more national istic right-wing flavor European Union that coming into being. I think the Iran war has given uh Starmer a bit of a boost um in terms of gaining elite acceptance suddenly for a more detached relationship with America, which inherently means a close relationship with Europe. As we were saying earlier, I think I think one of the casualties of this will be uh Farage and reform, at least as they're currently uh composed. Even on the right, actually, yeah. I think even on the British , you know, like we're having conversations now about Anglo-Gaulism and all this stuff, stuff, stuff that was, you know, very marginal a few years ago is now being kind of taken seriously and you know talked about by British commentators. I think there's an increasing sense on the British right even, maybe on the younger British right, of of of Britain having a European destiny that isn't necessarily the same as being a member of the European Union, but of Britain like Hungary, I guess, finding the means to kind of project its national will within a European framework. And I think I think that that probably will be a theme going forwards. Fascinating. Aris, thank you so much for chatting to us today. Thank you for having me . That was Unheard Aris Russinos, someone who really gets under the skin of what is happening. He was a war correspondent. He has reported deeply in the Middle East, in Syria, Kurdistan, and has become a bit of a specialist on the European right in recent years. Spent a lot of time in those countries, and most recently was there for more than a month in Hungary, spending time with supporters of all parties. And I think the impression that he gives there is very interesting and very different to what you will read in most of the newspapers, where there is this sense that the defeat of Orban is a victory for liberalism in a straightforward way, and somehow this is the kind of the revenge of the liberal centrists, and the good times are gonna start rolling once again whilst what he is picking up is something very different which is that yes the Orban experiment is over. He had some successes, he had some failures, corruption and the rest of it. Now there is a different version of nationalism, different version of right-wing politics that actually works much more within the European framework and could see in time Europe emerging as really quite a right wing set of institutions. You won't hear much about that anywhere else, and I'm delighted that Aris was able to share those ideas. Thanks to him and thanks to you for tuning in. This was Unheard .