Viktor Orban: o novo chefe da extrema-direita mundial - Ishaan Tharoor (The Washington Post)

 

Orban at CPAC brings the ‘far-right international’ into focus

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Aug. 4. (LM Otero/AP)

By Ishaan Tharoor
with Sammy Westfall 

The Washington Post, August 5, 2022

“The globalists can go to hell,” thundered Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. “I have come to Texas.”

He was delivering what was essentially the opening keynote of the four-day Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas — the preeminent convening organization of the American right-wing movement. The conference Orban helped kick off will conclude in part with a speech from former president Donald Trump. And the message the Hungarian leader sent was one that united Republican anger at “liberal hegemony” with his own narrative of illiberal triumph.

In his remarks, Orban laid out the clearest platform yet for what some analysts have dubbed “the far-right international,” a notional alliance between far-right and ultranationalist parties on both sides of the Atlantic. He trumpeted his hard-line stances against immigration, his staunch Christian nationalism, his opposition to “gender ideology” and his indifference to those who view his quasi-autocratic rule as a threat to democracy in the heart of Europe.

Orban made no bones about his contempt for U.S. Democrats and the supposed liberal media. “They hate me and slander me and my country as they hate you and slander you,” Orban said of Democrats at CPAC. “We should unite our forces.”

“We must take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels … we must coordinate the movements of our troops because we face the same challenges,” Orban added, gesturing to the upcoming U.S. midterm and presidential elections and European parliamentary elections in 2024. “These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization. Today, we hold neither of them. Yet we need both.”

Orban chose to gloss over the outcry that followed a major speech he made last month. Just across the border in neighboring Romania, in a picturesque town home to a considerable ethnic Hungarian population where Orban delivers an annual address, he warned, among other things, that Europeans must not “become peoples of mixed race.”

From his perch in Transylvania, Orban summoned the spectral menace of racist ideologies that have long haunted Europe. One long-term Orban adviser, Zsuzsa Hegedus, tendered her resignation with a letter that described Orban’s speech as “a pure Nazi text worthy of Goebbels,” and the “racist” culmination of an increasingly “illiberal turn.” (She later backtracked, appearing to echo Orban’s defenders that his remarks were misconstrued. You can read an English translation of his speech here.)

Orban supporters say that he was speaking principally about simply limiting migration and preserving European “civilization.” Even then, he used hopelessly bad historical analogies to make his claim, styling Hungary as a modern-day bulwark against Muslim encroachment as it was in supposedly fending off the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Vienna in 1683. In truth, the Ottoman army had myriad Christians in its camp, including thousands of Hungarian peasants marshaled by the Hungarian Protestant nobleman Imre Thokoly.

Whatever the case, Orban’s rhetoric now is a sign of an ideologue who is increasingly unrestrained on the world stage. “It’s one thing for Orban to drop words such as ‘replacement’ into his speeches — a dog whistle to white supremacists and their ‘Great Replacement Theory,’ but seemingly innocuous to other people,” wrote Andreas Kluth for Bloomberg Opinion. “It’s another to give speeches that sound like passages of the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935.”

Was it “an accidental slip?” Kluth pondered. “Or a sign of growing confidence, signaling a clearer line in future?”

No matter the geopolitical feebleness of Hungary in its own right, Orban and his allies see themselves as standard bearers for an illiberal future. “We do hope that you can learn from us the political mind-set how to be a successful conservative, as we also learn from you, and from Ronald Reagan,” Miklos Szantho, director of the Center for Fundamental Rights, a Hungarian think tank believed to be funded by Orban’s government, said at a CPAC gathering organized in Budapest in May. “As he put it so many years ago, ‘We win, they lose.’ That is what the Hungarian right has done.”

Big elections are around the corner — from the United States to Italy, where a party whose origins are rooted directly in Italy’s fascist past may soon lead a new governing coalition, to Brazil, where embattled far-right President Jair Bolsonaro is already echoing Trump’s falsehoods over the threat of a stolen election.

In February, Bolsonaro visited Orban in Hungary and celebrated the “affinities” they shared and “values ​​that we represent, which can be summarized in four words: God, homeland, family and freedom.” That motto, noted Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, echoed the slogans of Italian fascists in the 1920s and ’30s, which were imported by their Brazilian counterparts and also given voice by the right-wing Portuguese dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar.

None of these observations or criticisms seem to check Orban and his ilk. On Thursday, he returned the favor, casting the West’s “liberal progressives” as the successors of totalitarian communism. “We have seen what kind of future the globalist ruling class has offered,” he said. “But we have a different future to offer.”

What is that future? I explored that in a three-part series earlier this year on Orban’s political impact on U.S. Republicans, many of whom admire his dismantling of Hungary’s media establishment, his war on LGBT rights and his aggressive attempts at boosting his country’s birthrates. They are quieter about — though possibly still supportive of — his bending of the country’s judiciary and erosion of European democratic norms.

“This is the desire to build an ‘illiberal international’: a world shaped by the kind of politics that eschews the rules-based international order, liberal democratic norms, and transparency; institutions, and norms that currently make it possible for the European Commission to sanction Orban’s government and for the West to sanction Putin’s Russia,” wrote Andras Toth-Czifra, a Hungarian expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“By hitching themselves to someone who has put himself forward as a post-liberal intellectual, I think American conservatives are starting to give themselves permission to discard liberal norms,” Lauren Stokes, a historian at Northwestern University, told the New Yorker for a lengthy piece on Orban’s American appeal published in June.

“When a Hungarian court does something Orban doesn’t like — something too pro-queer, too pro-immigrant — he can just say, ‘This court is an enemy of the people, I don’t have to listen to it,’ ” she added. “I think Republicans are setting themselves up to adopt a similar logic: if the system gives me a result I don’t like, I don’t have to abide by it.”

“In order to win, it is not enough to know what you’re fighting for,” Orban told the CPAC crowd on Thursday. “You should also know how you should fight: My answer is play by your own rules.” That’s a message the Republicans appear to be hearing loud and clear.

The Orbanization of America: How to capture a democracy -By Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 

Developments from Ukraine, global analysis and top reads.

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall   Email   The Orbanization of America: How to capture a democracy This is the third installment of a three-part series on the shadow cast by Hungary’s leader over U.S. politics. Read parts one and two. Last month, after securing a fourth consecutive term, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban had reason to gloat. “We won a victory so big that you can see it from the moon, and you can certainly see it from Brussels,” said Orban, scoffing at his legion of critics among elite circles in the European Union. Orban was right. His Fidesz party and its allies came away with more than 50 percent of the vote and a two-thirds supermajority in the country’s unicameral National Assembly. Even considering the vast electoral machinery stacked against them, a united bloc of the Hungarian opposition had hopes of at least weakening the right-wing nationalist’s mandate. Those hopes were dashed. Far across the Atlantic came the sound of jubilation, at least from some corners of the American right. “Congratulations to Viktor Orban on winning a victory well deserved!” wrote far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in a tweet where she also said that Orban’s anti-LGBTQ rights legislation should be pursued in the United States. “He’s leading Hungary the right way and we need this in America.” That followed an unusual endorsement before the April election from former president Donald Trump, who had issued a statement in January hailing Orban as someone who “truly loves his country and wants safety for his people.” A month later, reports circulated that Orban had invited Trump to pay a visit to Hungary and perhaps keynote a major gathering of Western nationalists. While Trump won’t be in Budapest this week for an event hosted by the Conservative Political Action Conference — the major convening organization of the U.S. right — a host of other U.S. and European far-right politicians and pundits will. Viktor Orban takes his oath as prime minister of Hungary after he was reelected for his fourth consecutive term in the Hungarian parliament in Budapest on May 16, 2022. (Szilard Koszticsak/MTI/AP) It’s unlikely anyone in attendance will condemn the anti-democratic political maneuverings that have come to make Orban seem impossible to defeat. Indeed, they might celebrate his strategic ruthlessness. Since coming to power in 2010, Orban and Fidesz have steadily tightened their grip on the Hungarian state. The country’s media ecosystem is dominated now by entities loyal to the ruling government. The independence of the country’s judiciary has been eroded over Orban’s dozen consecutive years in power. And, though Hungary’s elections are free, it’s hard to call them fair. That’s in part because Orban’s government used its overwhelming parliamentary powers to amend the country’s constitution and rework how elections play out. Hungary has a mixed-member parliament where seats are elected both by geographic districts and party lists allocated in proportion to the popular vote — a system many political scientists consider admirable, but which, in Hungary’s case, “is warped,” as the Economist noted. “Hungary’s electoral playing field is heavily tilted against the opposition. In 2010, Orban amended the Constitution to cut the size of the parliament in about half, after which he gerrymandered the entire country,” explained political scientist Kim Lane Scheppele. Orban and his allies also scrapped the two-round voting process for geographic districts. The move allowed whichever party candidate won a plurality of votes to claim the seat instead of entering a second runoff with their closest challenger. The cumulative effect of many of these changes was to confer disproportionate power to Fidesz. In 2014, for example, Fidesz needed only 45 percent of the popular vote to win two-thirds of parliamentary seats. Other parties secured a collective 55 percent of the vote but only occupied a third of the seats. “The will of Hungarians was in no way represented by the outcome of the elections any longer,” wrote Zsuzsanna Szelenyi, a former Hungarian parliamentarian. A program for indefinite majoritarian rule seems underway: Hungary’s prime minister may flout his nation’s commitment to E.U. principles. He may have constructed a powerful network of patronage and crony capitalism to reinforce his rule. But he and his allies can almost always argue that everything they do is within the bounds of the law in Hungary. Elected strongmen like Orban are “hollowing out democracy from the inside through an incremental process,” wrote Marianne Szegedy-Maszak in Mother Jones. Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban and President Donald Trump meet in the Oval Office of the White House on May 13, 2019. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images) That’s a situation toward which many experts fear the United States is sleepwalking. “If the water temperature increases only one degree per hour it may take a while before you notice it is too hot and by that time it is too late,” Michael Macy, a professor of sociology at Cornell University, told New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall. The temperature in the United States is no doubt increasing, particularly on the right. Each new election cycle turns up more and more extremist Republican candidates who say they don’t believe in the legitimacy of President Biden’s 2020 victory and who explicitly call for new legal measures to restrict the franchise in various states and tip the scales for a Republican presidential candidate. “Both Orban’s Fidesz party and the U.S. Republicans have changed electoral rules to ensure that their party gets the disproportionate proportion of seats,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and an advocate for proportional representation, told me. “The ways with which they have done that are different because the underlying political systems are different,” he said, “but there is a shared logic” about how they see electioneering. Hyperpolarization in the United States has exposed the ways in which its aging institutions enable a form of minority rule. Republican presidential candidates have not won the popular vote in close to two decades. The disproportionate power of the Senate — where, because of rural-urban polarization, a solid Republican majority can dominate with a minority of American votes — has in turn led to a decisive conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, often the final arbiter on the country’s most contentious policy decisions. “Democracies depend on an institutional framework and on a cultural background: the acceptance of democratic norms,” Szelenyi wrote. “In Hungary, the institutional framework is formally still there, but Orban’s government gave up on democratic norms and used government power to capture the institutions, which are not fulfilling their roles as checks and balances.” The same could soon be said about the United States. “Democracy — meaning equal representation of all citizens and, crucially, majority rule — has, in fact, become the enemy of the contemporary Republican Party,” Edsall wrote.

A Hungria de Orban: um regime iliberal reacionario - Democracy Digest

Os amigos do chantecler na Europa são esses mesmos da extrema direita: Salvini, Orban e outros.
Não se trata de regimes simplesmente conservadores, ou liberais de direita.
Como indicado na matéria, se trata de regimes iliberais, ou seja reacionários.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

‘Hungary is lost’: Orban presses on with illiberal democracy

Beda Magyar

Democracy Digest, April 10, 2019

Viktor Orbán is destroying Hungary’s democracy. The institutions, the legal system and the social fabric are nothing but a pile of rubble. And the EU let it happen, argues , a Hungarian academic, formerly with Central European University (CEU) in Budapest.

Instead of simply believing that Hungary is a democracy, the time has come to look for evidence to prove that it is not a dictatorship, she writes in a must-read analysis for Die Zeit (in English):

Instead of the EU or its member states believing that democracy defends itself, the time has come to realize that it is the most fragile of all forms of government, since anybody can make a bid for power. Yet it is exactly this feature that gives democracy its greatest strength: that of relatively quick self-correction. But the tipping point toward self-destruction is visible only in hindsight.

A government spokesman said (HT: Foreign Policy) Hungary will not allow flexibility on its rules for international universities, meaning the Central European University founded by George Soros will likely continue its move to Austria later in the year.

Many of Orban’s domestic policies have been straight out of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s playbook, says Peter Kreko, an analyst at Political Capital, a Budapest-based think tank.* “Orbán has imposed his will on state media and much of the private-sector media has been bought up by pro-government oligarchs turning them into mouthpieces of the government. That’s similar to what has happened in Putin’s Russia,” he says. Russia has also been a “role model in terms of how to deal with NGOs,” he tells VOA.

“Of course, Orbán can’t go as far as Putin can with Hungary being a member of the EU. I wouldn’t want to say that Hungary is like Russia these days. Russia is a full-fledged authoritarian state, an electoral autocracy where elections are rigged. I think Hungary is becoming a hybrid regime but it is still a place where elections matter. But by the time you arrive at elections, the game has been twisted,” he says.

This year Freedom House deemed Hungary only “partly free,” the first time in its history an EU member state has been denied the designation “free.”

Kreko and other analysts say that Orbán’s attraction to the governance of Vladimir Putin and even China’s Xi Jinping is dictated partly by his critique of Western Europe, VOA adds. “He see Western Europe as less dynamic,” says Julius Horvath, an economic professor at the Sorus-funded Central European University.

“You know the growth rates of Italy and some other European countries are much lower than Hungary’s. The Hungarian government is in a certain way very pro-business and is happy to attract business wherever it comes from with low taxes or longer working hours,” he adds.

But on the issue of authoritarianism, he adds, the opposition has a mountain to climb, Kreko tells VOA.

“There’s pushback on Orbán here in Budapest among liberals and progressives, but it is not an issue outside Budapest for ordinary people. Orbán really understands the mindset of Hungarian voters: he plays the role of the freedom fighter and his regime delivers. We’ve had considerable economic growth for more than five years now.”

*A partner of the National Endowment for Democracy.