The meaning of Viktor Orbán

I remember faintly as a child when Viktor Orbán once came to visit our house with his wife, Anikó Lévai, who happened to grow up in a flat adjacent to my grandmother’s in a midsize town on the Great Plains of Eastern Hungary. Even though our families lost contact, we came from the same sociological stratum – provincial elites whose descendants became upwardly mobile as the world of ideas opened up to them. Such people tend to take ideas very seriously and at times quite literally. Combined with naivety, this can result in boundless idealism. Combined with cynicism, in autocratic devotion.

My mother – who happens to be neither a cynic nor an idealist – complained bitterly in recent years about Orbán’s all too vocally articulated resentment. She insisted that he had probably never learned to cope with the fact that, as an exceptionally talented villager with immense ambitions, he had never been given due respect in the narrow elite layer of Budapest’s liberal intelligentsia.

Launching a vile campaign in the 2010s against his former patron, George Soros, and then to invest heavily in building an alternative, illiberal global network indeed made it seem like he was still acting out a personal grudge from decades earlier. Orbán apparently still wanted to show it to those liberal intellectuals that what they were capable of due to the largesse of Soros, he could achieve single-handedly – even if this required misappropriating public funds on a vast scale.

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Until the meteoric rise of Tisza, Hungary’s political opposition had wasted numerous years on a mistaken strategy: centring their politics around blaming Orbán. As he accumulated immense unchecked powers, Orbán employed an increasingly harsh political style. It soon became clear that the opposition unwittingly started to mirror his strategy of aiming at the lowest common denominator. They too began to claim that Hungarian politics was defined by clear and essential differences; what the other side stood for and did could hence only ever be wrong.

More realistic intellectual critics – such as Kristóf Szombati, Gábor Scheiring, or Stefano Bottoni – kept on insisting that while there certainly was a coercive side to Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian rule, his regime also fostered forms of consent which the political opposition ignored at its peril. If the opposition wanted to challenge his rule more effectively, it first needed to grasp what made his crude political strategies socially and culturally resonant. While admittedly possessing little more than weapons of the weak in an ever more tightly controlled system, they then needed to come up with ways to undermine Fidesz’s legitimacy by making a better and more credible offer. That is, of course, precisely what Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party managed to accomplish.

However, if Orbán-bashing came to be interpreted as a sign of a lack of political imagination in Hungary, mainstream European discussions came to devote almost exclusive attention to his regime’s problematic or even unacceptable aspects. Though understandable, this was ultimately unhelpful. It was difficult not to see in such moralizing the successful export of shallow partisanship.

Normative critiques are indeed necessary, but politics is always contextual. You cannot defeat right-wing populist hegemony by simply rejecting its abhorrent elements. You cannot change society all at once, either. To succeed at that, you first need to understand people where they are. This is a basic lesson which Europe has largely preferred to ignore – just as it has employed a stark binary to construct a fictitious position of its own innocence, as if the Orbán regime’s basic legitimacy and sustained popularity in earlier years had not been guaranteed by EU institutions and their lavish funding.

My own approach has consisted of trying to combine critique with understanding. Yet I repeatedly found myself questioned by colleagues from more fortunate parts of Europe – while being attacked in parts of the Hungarian press controlled by the government. It was difficult for me not to draw the conclusion that European publics are often eager to moralize about political developments elsewhere but cannot really grasp the dilemmas of those actually confronting an authoritarian turn.

Like many others I found myself yearning to fall silent.

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There is something specific to those places in Europe that were once part of the Axis powers, only to be Sovietized subsequently – alongside Hungary, think also Romania, Slovakia, the former GDR. Combine that with an imperial form of nationalism that was institutionalized both before and after the First World War, notwithstanding vast territorial losses upon the end of the Habsburg Empire, and you come close to accounting for what some have perceived as the ‘Hungarian exception’. But while the Orbán regime may have been an innovative product that drew heavily on prior Hungarian political traditions, it would never have happened without the great global recession of 2008–09.

What was Hungary’s position in Europe over the past sixteen years? What were we led to see that others might have missed and that might be of wider relevance?

Our very positionality has implied a profound ambiguity verging on self-contradiction. We were citizens of a member state that would no longer have qualified for entry had it not already been a member. Perceiving the sheer hypocrisy in this, critically-minded Hungarians also tended to become more sceptical about the idealistic and often moralizing tone in the wider discourse on European integration.

Hungarians have also acutely perceived a democratic dilemma that was all too rarely raised on European fora: how to play hardball with a regime while supporting citizens. Higher education capture is an obvious example. The EU did a fairly decent job, if belatedly, of diagnosing the problems, but was much less apt at coming up with countermeasures that would have given Hungarian students a more modern and open education. The same went for the media, where the EU failed to develop any strategy for giving citizens access to independent, reliable information – thereby helping to preserve the standards and quality of public life in the country.

If Hungarian citizens eventually came to view the Orbán regime as anti-democratic and dangerously subversive, by that time we had also come to realize that the EU was too defensive in its policies and therefore could not be but hypocritical in its moralizing. That painful realization might well be the meaning of Viktor Orbán in European politics.

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Listening to Magyar giving his first major public interview in early 2024, it took me just a few minutes to realize that he must come from the conservative establishment – and therefore probably views Orbán as a semi-educated parvenu.

Even though we belonged to opposed ‘political camps’, like many on the liberal left, I nevertheless supported Magyar’s political rise as the best possible thing that could have realistically happened in an illiberal state. Having been born just one year apart, political sociologists would insist that he and I have belonged to the same cohort all along. Members of our generation grew up in a well-reputed and increasingly successful country after 1989, when numerous new opportunities opened up. We are therefore particularly affected by just how impoverished and peripheral our country has remained. Many of us are also genuinely upset at how Hungary’s reputation was squandered under Orbán’s wayward rule.

This disaffection, even anger, is part of the reason why some mistake the political sentiments driving our generation as comparable to those that drove Orbán. At times we may sound similarly assertive or even blunt. But our experience of the consequences of Orbán’s resentment ought to guarantee that we seek a different, more self-critical and more cooperative path.