Why Orbán’s Loss Matters

Charlie Cooke finds the American commentariat’s fixation with Hungary and its soon-to-be-former prime minister, Viktor Orbán, frankly bizarre. I share his desire to never have to hear about Hungary again. But I also think the fall of Orbán from power in Sunday’s elections matters greatly in two ways: The election was important to the United States and to the American right.

First, the fact that Orbán will no longer lead Hungary is good for the United States because our allies should not align with our adversaries. Hungary is a NATO member that is treaty-bound to help defend all other members from aggression. The primary threat to NATO is Russia under Vladimir Putin, which would love nothing more than to see the alliance disintegrate and has been working toward that aim for decades. To have the head of a NATO state openly aligned with Russia — not to mention with China and Iran — was abominable.

Worse, Orbán materially advanced the interests of the despots he befriended, at the expense of U.S. interests. It is in our interest, as the Trump administration has articulated repeatedly, that Europe provide greater aid to Ukraine so it can put down Russian adventurism, yet Orbán blocked a $100 billion loan to support Ukraine’s finances. (Hungary was exempt from contributing to the loan.) Hungary also vetoed additional EU sanctions on Russia to bleed its war machine. Péter Magyar, Orbán’s successor, has promised to reverse these holds. Putin has now lost his reliable brake on Europe’s anti-Moscow initiatives, and it will cost him. Fewer Ukrainian lives and American munitions will be spent as a result.

Large swaths of the American right — the “New Right”: nationalist-populists, post-liberals, national conservatives — were not captivated by Orbán primarily because he lent aid and comfort to America’s enemies, however (though he shares their view that Ukraine is not a cause worth fighting for). Rather, for these factions, Orbán represented a cathartic way of right-wing politics that wielded state power freely to make society behave. His government blew through the institutional constraints that frustrate impassioned partisans in America — an independent judiciary, a critical press — by dominating them. Orbán openly rewarded friends, turning the state into his personal patronage network.

Consolidating power was Orbán’s means. The end was for the state to direct, if not completely saturate, Hungarian private society. Orbán declared his mission in 2014: “The Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed. And so in this sense the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.” Illiberal, as in unconcerned with individual rights and the government’s role in securing them. Many in the American right’s intelligentsia believe that the objective of politics here should be similarly revised.

As did Woodrow Wilson, who, like Orbán, spoke of society not as a collection of sovereign individuals to be secured but a single, organic entity to be superintended. Wilson employed a construction metaphor, too, during his 1912 campaign for president:

What we have to undertake is to systematize the foundations of the house, then to thread all the old parts of the structure with the steel which will be laced together in modern fashion, accommodated to all the modern knowledge of structural strength and elasticity, and then slowly change the partitions, relay the walls, let in the light through new apertures, improve the ventilation; until finally, a generation or two from now, the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.

Powerful people on the right are actively debating whether to embrace the Wilsonian vision of politics that Orbán embodied by directing society’s resources to preferred destinations, molding the economy to serve the “common good,” and spending citizens’ money on what the government thinks is best for them. This is no longer a fringe persuasion; the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in 2028 is on Orbán’s side. Magyar, the next prime minister of Hungary, is on the other side, pledging to dismantle his predecessor’s state-control apparatus, advance national interests where appropriate, and otherwise leave civil society be. Who is the conservative, again?

Perhaps any democratic government would have been ousted after 16 years in power, especially given Hungary’s economic lethargy. But post-liberals like Orbán promise finality once they win — salvation, actually. They did not deliver in Hungary. America’s progressive right has lost its model, and if that hobbles them, Orbán’s loss will have mattered.