Many observers interpreted Viktor Orban’s defeat as a disavowal of populism. A more in-depth analysis of the situation suggests another interpretation. The rhetoric of “pure people” against “corrupt elites” was that of the winning party. Tisza and his champion, Peter Magyar, were able to capture the weariness of the silent majority who have been experiencing the economic slowdown since 2020. The promises of change, skillfully formulated to seduce the right while securing the support of the forces on the left, were part of a catch-all and contradictory program; the philosopher’s stone transforming the lead of the present into the gold of the future consists entirely of the disengagement of the existing elite, whose power had enjoyed broad support for around fifteen years. No doubt, it was a populist wave that won in Budapest on April 12.
In his first interview following the defeat, Viktor Orban retrospectively presented the election as “a contest between two messages: one warning of coming challenges and advocating stability, and the other calling for change. » The latter proved more convincing. Fidesz has precisely paid the price of being less populist as the founding generation – now in its sixties – of the party founded in 1988 has become more notable. Certainly, the insolent luxury displayed by certain members of the ruling circles has aroused legitimate exasperation. But the elite linked to Fidesz was not limited to these excesses; it was built against communism and their socialist and liberal successors of the 1990s and 2000s; it asserted itself as an elite emerging from the people and acclaimed by the vote; it defined a right-wing ideological corpus called to form a lasting national consensus.
Power politics beyond electoral short-termism
In a sense, Peter Magyar is the heir, he who comes from Fidesz and campaigned on the right in order to poach voters, certain that he was supported by the left electorate driven by the detestation of Viktor Orban. What is being destroyed is not so much Fidesz’s corpus of conservative and sovereignist ideas as the means of implementing them. The time is more for settling scores between rival clans than for national sovereignty. We are witnessing the overhaul, by means of a populist wave, of a deep state and the elite which structured it with the objective of maximizing the country’s room for maneuver. The achievements accomplished by Fidesz were not part of a short-term policy to court the electorate but of a national “grand design”.
A fight against the slope of the era which leads to supranationality and individualism
Whether it is energy policy, with the doubling of nuclear energy production, the protected supply of Russian hydrocarbons, the regional rise in power of the energy champion MOL; whether it is the nationalization of a growing part of the debt or the rise in industrial power of the country with integration at the heart of the global value chain: these major projects did not have immediate and concrete benefits for the greatest number, but attested to the work of a head of state in the service of national power.
Orban and de Gaulle, the parallel
This aspect of the work built by Viktor Orban over fifteen years recalls the efforts made by General de Gaulle in his time. The parallel between these two heads of state can be attempted. Both intended to restore independence and national greatness, while remaining in the Western camp and without locking themselves into it. De Gaulle by affirming a national exception for which the country then had the means; Orban by balancing the dependencies that weigh on Hungary, given its size and its isolation. Returning to power thanks to the Algerian crisis in 1958, General de Gaulle was only elected once, in 1965, and his policy came to a halt with the events of May 68 which signaled the triumph of libertarian and liberal tendencies.
Viktor Orban’s Hungary has far fewer assets than Charles de Gaulle’s France, but the Prime Minister has managed to rebuild entire sections of the state, and to engage in battle on the cultural and ideological level at a time when the great ideological narratives imported from abroad are running out of steam. In both cases we observe a struggle against the slope of the era which leads to supranationality and individualism. For Viktor Orban this resistance was affirmed in growing opposition to the supervision of Brussels; pushing the country on the path of exceptionalism at odds with the cultural evolution of Hungarian society, which turns out to be in tune with neighboring countries. General de Gaulle was disowned by the streets in 1968. The severe denial that hits Fidesz comes from the polls, from the same source from which his successive mandates came.
So what major weaknesses plague the work built in Budapest since 2010? Viktor Orban’s policy was based on the democratic plebiscite within which distinct forces were supported: popular enthusiasm, the legality of elected power, the historical legitimacy of the nation having its own power. The weakness of such an organization is that the participation of a people in its destiny, taken in the highest sense, is dangerously confused with the satisfaction of the masses. However, the exercise of power has its limits and its failures; there is even a paradox between the simplicity of the central axioms of a conservative policy and the difficulty of implementing them. Especially since Hungary is landlocked and dependent in many respects on foreign countries and the continental framework in which it is integrated.
If the Orbanian national momentum was taken thanks to the communist ebb, it was a corollary of the global liberal advent. The “illiberal” Hungary which has asserted itself by groping for around fifteen years, and which perhaps still asserts itself under the Tisza banner, is in certain respects a digression within the European Union and the Western extinguisher. From this point of view, Hungarian conservative politics operates abroad, even at home. Which gives the efforts made a sometimes weak-willed aspect: the number of births is falling despite the most ambitious family policies in Europe, the consumer society is developing in a manner quite similar to other Western countries. The future will tell whether the brutal shift that Hungary experienced on April 12 is a result of the country’s alignment with a supranational agenda or an internal recomposition of political forces, the starting point of a new national force on the banks of the Danube.
*Thibaud Gibelin is a writer and visiting professor at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium.
