Hungary is illiberal within the normal illiberal standards of modern Europe.
Hungary is illiberal within the normal illiberal standards of modern Europe.
H ungary held an election yesterday — which probably came as a surprise to a number Americans who’ve been convinced that the small Central European nation functions as a totalitarian state. The bugbear of the American Left, and false savior of nationalist conservatives, Viktor Orbán, won his fourth consecutive term. Fidesz, his party, won two-thirds of Parliament against a cluster of center-Left, socialist, environmentalist, and hard-right-wing nationalist parties (Jobbik has only recently moderated from its xenophobic and antisemitic stances, allegedly).
Trying to decipher European parliamentary elections through the prism of American politics is a waste of time. Orbán ran on a traditionalist, socially conservative platform. A referendum on a law limiting the teaching of gay and transgender issues in schools passed; the EU opposes such limits. He leaned into anti-war rhetoric as well as anti-Brussels sentiment, though Fidesz has no plans to leave the EU. It recently instituted a significant minimum-wage increase, and its economic positions have as much in common with statist progressivism as mainstream conservatism.
The truth is, Hungary is illiberal within the normal illiberal standards of modern Europe. And that’s bad enough. Hungary is singled out for ridicule mainly because it declines to share the cultural values of the European Union or the progressive Left, especially pertaining to social policies and to the flow of Middle Eastern migrants into the European Union, which Fidesz aims to block. These positions, in the parlance of modern debate, are “anti-democratic.”
In a recent Atlantic piece, “There Is No Liberal World Order,” Anne Applebaum preposterously dumps “Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary” into the same authoritarian pot, while treating Ukraine, less free than Hungary by nearly any metric, as a bulwark of democracy. She’s right that there is no genuine “liberal order.” There is the United States, where courts (for now) often protect ideals of liberalism and democracy embedded in the U.S. Constitution, and then there is Western Europe, where liberal ideals, self-determination, and minority rights are protected only to varying degrees, as convenience and fashion dictate.
Right now, for example, Germany is considering prosecuting people who show support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unneutral treatment of speech may not bother progressives, or they may even advocate it, but it is not a “liberal” position. Volksverhetzung, Germany’s strict post-war ban on Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial, has led to the normalization of laws restricting “hate speech,” an evolving category that just happens to mirror the concerns of leftists. Germans can be imprisoned for up to five years and face huge fines for breaking these laws. Cops may show up at your door and arrest you, as they did at the homes of 36 people in 14 German states not long ago. In 2020, German lawmakers made the destruction of foreign state flags or the denigration of national anthems punishable by up to three years in prison. The German government as well as the European Union regulate media platforms in a way that would be unconstitutional in the United States.
I bring all this up to note that Hungarian speech laws and elections are no more illiberal than German ones. No one in Hungary is arrested for railing against the government. No one is poisoned by the head of state. No party is banned from participating in debate or voting. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the Hungarian election was “well run and competitive.” It did complain about a lack of ideological diversity in the media. If this is the prerequisite for genuine democracy, then the United States is in big trouble as well.
Critics also like to claim that Hungary is in league with Putin. Orbán, certainly less antagonistic toward the Russian dictator than some of his neighbors are, condemned the invasion of Ukraine and supported European Union sanctions on Russian interests and oligarchs. Hungary says it has, to this point, received 432,000 Ukrainian refugees, more than four times as many as the United States has accepted. In a nation of 10 million, that’s no small commitment. Like Germany, Hungary relies on Russian oil. Unlike Germany, it does not have the economic might to threaten Putin without the possibility of incurring ruin. So, like other small European nations, it has refused to be a conduit for lethal weapons.
On the other side, there are the Orbán cheerleaders such as Rod Dreher and the natcons types who have given up on small-L liberalism. “Make no mistake: #ViktorOrban is the leader of the West now — the West that still remembers what the West is,” Dreher tweeted after Sunday’s election. Orbán isn’t a bigger champion of the West than the average American conservative. He is simply more willing — or, rather, more able — to use state power, or “illiberal democracy,” to achieve his goals. That’s what excites national conservatives: the statism.
I’m certain that for an American sitting in a café a few blocks from the Danube, during a visit to Hungary subsidized by a think tank, this must all look terribly exciting. Hungary is a beautiful country. People aren’t suffering. An average household in Hungary, however, makes around $10,000 less than average Mississippians, the poorest group in the United States. The average Hungarian is far less religious than the average American. The replacement birth rate in the United States is at historic lows, and yet still higher than the rate in Hungary, which is now 1.53 births per woman — up from 1.31 in 2002 — even after the government employed a slew of policies that were meant to nudge the population into having more children. The largely homogenous Hungarian population has been either stagnant or shrinking every year since 1980.
Hungary isn’t North Korea or Russia. Neither is it a place Americans should aspire to emulate.