This article is part of a series from countries that have experienced an authoritarian turn from democracy. Access the rest of the symposium here
When I was a student in Budapest at the turn of the millennium, the idea that countries in east and central Europe would continue their democratic transformation was received wisdom. Politicians, journalists and my professors all expressed faith in Hungary’s gradual integration into the Euro-Atlantic community. Today, as I face my students, I struggle to explain where things went awry.
A plethora of competing explanations exist, as if to make up for what we overlooked back then, and most contain a kernel of truth. A rapid transition to liberal democracy after the fall of communism yielded fragile institutions. Strong leaders have more appeal in a region where the state has traditionally been the main force behind societal change, and a firm presence in everyday life. The rapid adoption of neoliberal economic policies created winners and losers, often exacerbating inequalities. Many among them view transnational liberal elites as out of touch. This resentment is often amplified by a sense of collective, historical victimhood.
Yet the growth of illiberal populism is not a phenomenon unique to this former borderland of the Soviet empire—as the second Trump presidency has shown. This east-central-European flavour of politics has seeped into long-consolidated democracies. The success of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the Law and Justice Party in Poland a decade-and-a-half ago, and the recent return of Robert Fico to the helm in Slovakia, seem to have something in common with the rise of Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally or even Brexit and Trumpism. All of these share a distaste for a global elite and a desire to protect citizens from its corrupting influence.
Hungary has much to teach us about how this populism operates. One common misconception is that illiberal governments work to eliminate dissenting voices. This is wrong. While occupying important elements of the media is very much in the populist playbook, the goal is not total control of information. It is to usher in a state of permanent war in politics.
In the new illiberal political imagination, any move by the “government of the people” is bound to provoke resistance from the international networks of power and their domestic lackeys. The aim is to sustain perennially bipolar politics, with the populist government and “the people” on one side, and foreign globalists on the other. Prime Minister Orbán’s political lexicon is probably the most martial of any current European head of government. Every visit to Brussels is a battle, where he and members of his government are routinely shelled or sniped, or participate in some good old-fashioned street fighting. This reduces politics to an eternal standoff between enemies and friends, eliminating its deliberative nature. It also creates feuding tribes with opposing worldviews, and even mutually unintelligible political languages.
Remembrance is an important element of public politics—it is a ritual that generates “usable pasts”. In this, Hungary is paradigmatic. The government-sponsored view of history recounts a succession of attempts at domination by foreign forces, from the Habsburgs to the Bolsheviks and Nazis—while highlighting the allegedly similar role of liberal internationalists. The US president Woodrow Wilson and the Hungarian liberals of 1918 are often in the crosshairs, portrayed as direct antecedents to the liberals of our day, and opposed by the national conservatives of east and central Europe. Despite past border quarrels, Slovak and Serb nationalists are depicted as the closest allies Hungary has in a sovereigntist and populist rebellion against a cosmopolitan, imperial European Union.
But the new Hungarian way of doing politics works to eliminate a common, and in a sense national, political community. In its place, we see the rise of the “faction”, a favourite word of political theorists from Thucydides to Oakeshott and Arendt.
Factionalism, not complete domination, better describes the political logic of illiberal populism. The more factionalism there is to be found in the political life of a fragmented society, the stronger the ties that bind within one’s own political family. The goal is to perpetuate division and the idea of a state of quasi-war. Victory would be as fatal as defeat, because governments like Hungary’s would then have to show an actual ability to govern. They would not be able to fall back on invoking the scheming of enemies to deflect from their failures.
Hungary’s governing party, Orbán’s Fidesz, gains the support of just over one-third of all eligible voters (the turnout in Hungary hovers around 66 per cent) and around 50 per cent of the votes cast in any given election. The party’s goal has been to keep enough people away from the polls while ensuring the opposition stays out of power. Each election, however, also serves as a reminder that the nation’s enemies still pose a threat. Rallying behind the party leader remains the first duty of any patriot.
We encounter this same phenomenon in Book I, Volume III of the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. As he argued about another era of civic decay, “[t]o fit with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member … any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character”. Illiberal populism, by instituting a martial world order—a game of conflicting, political language—makes democratic grassroots action and pluralism impossible. And it seeks no resolution to the crisis it creates.
Populists like Orbán thrive under the conditions of a make-believe war that they must never quite win. That is why the most important lesson for democracy from Hungary’s experience might be that we urgently need to escape the language of civic strife that is being brought upon us, from Washington to Budapest, by the new apostles of this forever societal war
