Orbán’s suggestion to tackle progressivism should be familiar to the New Right: build new institutions, safeguard them from eventual capture by closet liberals and radicals, legislate laws when in power, and expose visible patterns and propaganda. 

For instance, there is the issue of LGBTQ propaganda targeting children. This is still a new thing over here, but we have already destroyed it. We brought the issue out into the open and held a referendum on it. The overwhelming majority of Hungarians have rejected this form of sensitization of children.

The legal implications of these battles are complicated. Consider, that a transgender individual, by virtue of borderless travel and the EU’s Human Rights supranational umbrella, can travel to places in Hungary and Poland where local laws might bar them from using facilities of their choice. These complications are ripe ground for a clash. Such a clash brings into question individual national policies about transgenderism, as well as questions about the laws and religious traditions of Hungary and Poland, which are stricter over such rules. Transnational ideological activism, (often aided by NGOs and EU-backed civil societies) is thoroughly behind supporting human rights supranationally, to the point that it overrides national laws and, by extension, democracy and sovereignty itself. This continuous supranational challenge to national sovereignty is often by design.

Furthermore, countries like Hungary, opposed to any such supranational orthodoxy, are almost inevitably deemed illiberal and opposed to “European values.” The European Union, especially after Brexit, is prone to remind member nation-states that EU law is supreme over national laws. The catch is that challenges to such EU laws are also adjudicated by EU courts, thereby negating a fundamental principle of jurisprudence: that no power can judge itself in its own court. Any challenge to such EU legal supremacy surreally opens the challenger nation to further charges of authoritarianism and further clashes in EU courts. This challenges the very idea of national democracies and elections.

PUT SIMPLY, survival for Orbán and his reactionary vanguard as a coherent set of ideas will be structurally difficult without forming a counter-internationalist coalition to balance liberal internationalism. 

We will not give up the right to defend our borders, to stop migrants…we insist that marriage in Hungary is between a man and a woman, a father is a man and a mother is a woman…and they should leave our children alone. 

Viktor Orbán told his cheering party during the election campaign, adding that “after communist bureaucracy, we don’t want new dictates this time from Brussels, and we don’t want to leave the EU at all, they can’t get rid of us so easily.” He added, “We want to keep our sovereignty and we don’t want to find ourselves in a United States of Europe, instead of integration.”

Historically, when a country pursues a governing principle based purely on democracy—where only the mandate of the majority will be worshiped and a distinct ethno-socio culture will be preserved—the country in question usually needs to be geographically small, and possess a low, fundamentally homogeneous population. Such a nation finds itself in a hard position to navigate imperial politics, nor can it afford to be a part of an empire. The moment it is a part of a bigger and multicultural imperial entity, there inevitably is a pull towards an ethnic balance of power guarded by an imperial elite. Hungary’s own historical experience in the Habsburg Empire is exemplary of this political maneuver. Issues such as minority rights are usually never guaranteed without a thoroughly interfering imperial elite, and any imperial (or supranational) elite is disdainful of both localized mass democracy and nationalism. Overall, any enlargement, whether economic or territorial, will lead to an elite hierarchy—and conversely, democracy and sovereignty will limit economic growth. 

Any project such as Orbánism will thus inevitably face a growing challenge from an imperial core. Majoritarian democracies usually elicit a consistent decline of size, power, and influence—and, therefore, a weakening of their political position and increased dependence on larger, external powers. This is as close to a natural law of international politics as one might get, and it is the heart of the Orbánist project’s balancing. That balancing is going to be increasingly difficult as long as Hungary remains a part of an empire—in this case, a thoroughly new beast, the European Union. Orbán’s Hungary will constantly face every external pressure of the empire and the imperial elite situated in Berlin and Brussels, who are structurally opposed to any nationalist and reactionary forces within the EU. But this aspiration to balance forces is seemingly beyond a single country’s power to control, and whatever one’s desire might be, sooner or later an inflection point awaits. Just as “socialism in one country” was difficult a hundred years ago, so is, presumably, “reaction in one country.” Orbánism might simply not be able to survive without either adapting and morphing at home or compromising with similar ideological forces to form a coalition abroad.

IT IS an open question therefore whether Orbánism can be replicated, adapted, or imitated directly in a country that is much larger than Hungary. To have any form of majoritarian democracy, whether it be the Swiss, the Danish, or the Hungarians, one needs some form of cultural homogeneity. That is unlikely, to say the least, in big and historically divided nation-states like the United States, where the most prudent and peaceable form of governance is often one of minimum centralized interference and maximum compromise. There is no difference regarding attitudes towards immigration, for example, in Switzerland, Hungary, or Denmark, regardless of their ruling political party’s ideology. This is not a coincidence. Homogeneity requires an element of state-applied force as well as enforced and mandated cultural cohesion and a focused educational system—a prospect that is fraying in the current balance of power within the Anglosphere. The rise of heavy-handed Anglo-nationalism post-Brexit, for example, has already resulted in fissures within the union. Wind of any ethnocultural nationalism post-Donald Trump has also resulted in massive institutional backlash. Western Europe, and parts of the Anglosphere, on the other hand, are also post-religious. Size matters too. The United States, a federalized country, is thirty-two times the size of Hungary. An exact imitation of reactionary politics of the Hungarian model might therefore be unlikely. 

But localized replication of reactionary vanguardism is possible, and Anglosphere conservatives are indeed paying attention. In Indiana, Republican lawmakers banned transgender women from competing in women’s sports. In Texas, legislators are proposing a criminalization of drag shows where minors are present. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has single-handedly taken the fight to the “woke capital,” and revoked Disney’s privileged tax status. Florida is also, along with Virginia, leading in legislation against Critical Race Theory-laced pedagogy in schools. Over thirty states in the United States have some form of legislation ongoing in various stages to tackle increasingly left-wing activism in higher education. Across the ocean, London has finalized plans to forcibly send refugees back to Rwanda, and drafted bills to outlaw public protests that hamper daily commuters, as well as legislation to secure free speech on university campuses. Orbánism might not be imposed in its Hungarian form in the Anglosphere, but one of its key tactical approaches—winning votes on culture war issues and legislating—is increasingly popular among Anglo-American conservatives, who are moving away from their free market and non-interference dogma, returning to their pre-World War I roots. And among American Republicans, a strong nationalist and realist faction is slowly ascending. The lessons from the capitulation of Netflix, State Farm, and Disney, faced with relentless pressure from the Right on cultural issues demonstrate two things. The reason the Left has been so successful in intimidating these companies towards its favored policies is that it can harness power. The same principle, however, applies on the other side of the spectrum—if the Right can use power as effectively. And second, grassroots activism is advantageous, but almost never organic, and a counter-elite to channel such activism is critical; one can almost call them reactionary vanguards.

Will there be a rapid attempt of consolidation of a reactionary-internationale (a Holy Alliance sequel?) after Orbán’s latest win? For now, the Ukraine war has thrown a spanner in all that. Passionate Poles and pragmatic Magyars are now opposed on the question of Russia, as Poland finds itself closer to its historic alignment with the Baltics, and Hungary finds itself alongside the more pragmatic Germans and Austrians, thereby dividing the core reactionary bloc within the EU. But the bigger question remains: how long can a country remain a part of the EU, without being ruled by the EU, and with a constant fear of an impending color revolution in Budapest? It remains to be seen. Viktor Orbán is, after all, a realist.

Sumantra Maitra is a national security fellow at the Center for the National Interest and an elected associate fellow at the Royal Historical Society.

Image: Reuters.