Trump tropes and Orban’s orbit meet in Brussels
Viktor Orban, Hungary's prime minister and Donald Trump.
Regular users of WH Smith shops on high streets, railway stations, and airports have in the last years been puzzled by a new addition to the weekly magazines on sale. The Hungarian Conservative Review is a hefty, handsomely printed 120 page journal rather like university review journals aimed at a specialist audience.
No-one seems to buy a copy. It is by any yardstick dull and unreadable unless you are interested in the nationalist, religious, identity vapourings of Budapest-based rightists who are light-years removed from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of tolerant, let-and-let-live conservatism.
After 1950, communist governments in Eastern Europe produced unreadable publications. They also paid for British leftists to attend conferences in the Soviet bloc, where everyone agreed that the world seen through the eyes of Stalinists made complete sense.
Viktor Orban, the autocrat who runs Hungary as a corrupt personal fiefdom, is no Stalin. But like the Soviet leader he shares the same approach to great Hungarian chauvinism and dislike of “cosmopolitan”, “rootless” thinkers, such as the Jewish American George Soros, whose ventures Orban has driven out of Hungary.
Orban also has a list of what Lenin called “useful idiots” – well-placed intellectuals and politicians in the West. In the 1930s, Stalin’s useful idiots included the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb plus assorted Labour MPs, who would report that they had seen the future and it would work.
A modern version of these British fellow travellers will be in Brussels this weekend with Viktor Orban to hear his rants against the European Union which for today’s Orbanites is what the US and European democracy was to Stalinists after 1950.
Victor Orban, still only 60 this year, has been Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010 and was first elected to that office in 1998. Orban has brilliantly focused on political power. He is not mainly interested in economic growth and with a national income about one third of Austria’s, Hungary is prey to the endless political corruption that befalls small autocracies. His government is currently wracked by a major paedophile scandal, involving his Fidesz party and its efforts to cover up sexual predators in circles close to Orban.
But has he chosen well in paying for yesterday’s men and women of British rightism to come and pay homage to him in Brussels? Nigel Farage, Suella Braverman and recently Lee Anderson may have all their futures behind them.
They are still big names in England. But Brexit Britain, now seen as a declining power with its endless prime ministers and other ministers, has lost much of its clout since the glory days for the European right in 2016 when Marine Le Pen covered her social media with the Union Flag. The Brexit vote launched calls for Frexit or Italexit, NLexit and even Dexit, promoted by the far-right AfD in Germany.
Today none of the far-right parties in Europe talks about leaving the EU. Viktor Orban never called for Magyarexit. He likes EU money too much, as does Georgia Meloni in Italy or Marine Le Pen in France. Orban is a puffball. He is forever threatening to block EU business or veto Sweden joining Nato or funds for Ukraine, but then always collapses and is bribed to do what Brussels wants.
Europeans know who Nigel Farage is, but have never heard of Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson, Matthew Goodwin or David Starkey. Orban is told they are world-leading thinkers and political giants in English nationalist politics.
Orban’s difficulty is that his idea of modern European rightism is all about keeping Hungary removed from partnership with neighbouring countries. The Slovakian nationalist rightists now in power, headed by Robert Fico, quarrel endlessly with Budapest about the large Hungarian minority in Slovakia. The latter are encouraged by Orban to vote in Hungarian elections and to see themselves as Hungarian not Slovak citizens.
Since direct elections to the European Parliament began in 1979, a total of 16 far-right political groups have been formed by different groups of MEPs. One of these was created by David Cameron in 2009, when in a sop to anti-EU opinion he took British Tory MEPs out of their mainstream centre-right alliance with German, French, Dutch and Italian Christian Democrats.
Cameron formed a new European Parliament group with the populist anti-immigration, anti-abortion, anti-gay Law and Justice Party in Poland, which lost power last year after removing most reproductive rights from Polish women.
The anti-immigrant Italian Lega party has belonged to four different European political federations. Its leader, Matteo Salvini, who like Orban is a fan of Vladimir Putin, hates his rival hard rightist, Georgia Meloni, who supports Ukraine but has passed some nasty homophobic laws as part of her vision of national rightist politics.
As the veteran former Labour MP Richard Corbett points out, the European far right which will be on display in Brussels this weekend ahead of the European Parliament elections on 9th June, is “fragmented and disunited”. This includes the UK. The paradox of Brexit Britain is that all the polls suggest that the politicians who gave Europe the “gift” of Brexit will be handsomely defeated in the next general election.
The EU has just agreed a very tough policy on immigration, including the obligatory return of illegal migrants. Putin’s attack on European democracy, with his invasion of Ukraine, has focused minds on strengthening European defence and staying close to America.
There will be some increase in protest votes by farmers and others in the European Parliament elections, which the numerous, mutually hostile rightist parties will pick up. But there will also be an increase for green, regional and independent parties who aren’t interested in Orban’s, let alone Farage’s or Braverman’s, Trump tropes.
The monoliths of European politics have transformed into a mosaic of confused competing parties and ideas. Meanwhile Orban spends a small fortune filling WH Smith with unreadable central European visions of a world free of gays, trade unions and anti-Putin politics. His is a Balkanised Europe of Catholic states, with as few Jews, Muslims or atheists as possible, run by strong male leaders who run the show, obeyed and revered by their people.
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