The Elementary Articles—#29 (June 2023)
Two productive forays into Latin America, strengthening ties to Hungary and a multimedia batch of interviews.
Dear reader,
Welcome to another edition of The Elementary Articles, where I get to share with you my latest work laced with the odd nugget of personal news. You may have noticed that recent editions of this newsletter have featured important changes, and those changes will continue in the near-future. My attempt to keep you abreast of my work in the least time-consuming way is a constant work in progress. Some monthly editions may carry a lot of content, others less so—but all will seek to optimize the time you spend reading.
As always, I look forward to your feedback by replying below or on Twitter (@JorgeGGallarza). Happy reading!
[Op-ed] Bridging the Gap
Editor's note—the piece below hyping our trip to Argentina and Chile featured in the print edition of Mandiner, Hungary's largest conservative magazine, a few days before we flew off. The online post is here. Below is an English translation.
Hungary and the Southern Cone seem to share nothing in common, but a soon-to-visit team from the Budapest-based Center for Fundamental Rights believes the latter can learn from the former.
If the Pacific Ocean halved its current size (as it seems to do in most world maps, with the ocean’s two halves reduced to thin margins on the edges), the antipodes of Hungary would fall right on the Andean range, somewhere along the elongated border between Chile’s thin strip of land and its cone-shaped neighbor, Argentina. This means the central European country and the two Southern Cone republics are remarkably close to being the furthest points on the globe from one another (the antipodes are the geolocation diametrically opposite a given point on the earth, arrived at by connecting that point with the globe’s center and extending the line to the outer surface).
This seems like a circuitous detour, but it’s a meaningful metaphor. As history, political economy and government go, Hungary and the Southern Cone couldn’t be more different, just like they could hardly be further apart geographically. The proposition sounds odd but think about it. While Hungary lies on a plain surrounded by the Carpathian basin, the Andean range bestrides Chile and Argentina, giving both breathtaking hilltop views into one another. While Hungary is rather evenly populated but for Budapest’s nucleus, the latter countries have vast expanses of near-desertic land south, where indigenous tribes have traditionally dwelled (another phenomena Hungary lacks).
Recent history has further deepened the gulf. Chile and Argentina awoke from the slumber of Spanish colonial rule in the 1810s, launching their nation-building journey eight centuries after Hungary began hers. That century would see it arduously defend its much older traditions against foreign occupiers absent in Latin America. From then on, the Southern Cone (much like North America) became a “promised land” of sorts for millions of impoverished and persecuted Europeans to settle in its vast expanses: Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Jews. This set them apart their northern neighbors, which had been mostly extractive colonies and thus emerged poorer from colonialism.
This story can be construed as the inverse of Hungary’s demographic history. In its national mythology, seven Uralic nomad tribes settled in the former Roman province of Pannonia around 895 BCE, thereby marking the starting point of the country’s millennia-old sense of nationhood. The shape of their political systems could hardly be more different either. While Hungary, far diminished by the 1920 Trianon Treaty, was subdued by the Soviet empire in World War II’s wake, Argentina (later Chile) succumbed under different, more conservative forms of authoritarianism: the former under Juan Domingo Perón and his acolytes, and the latter under the iron-fisted Augusto Pinochet.
From there on, the political sojourn of these three countries somewhat converges. The last military dictator to rule Argentina under Peronist principles—social justice, moral conservatism and, in a pattern that tragically continues to this day, clientelism—left office in 1982, launching a highly successful transition to multi-party democracy, only disturbed by a financial crisis in the early 2000s. In Chile, Pinochet resigned in 1990, although the constitution whose adoption he oversaw in 1980 remains in place, to the Chilean left’s rancor. That year, Hungary underwent a transition of its own, leaving its socialism in a rearview mirror it only stares at to better know what to avoid.
But bar the synchrony of their democratic beginnings, the upsets and upheavals these countries experienced afterwards soon placed them on different paths anew. In 2010, a former student dissident by the name of Viktor Orbán began a second stint in office in Hungary, launching the country into a decade of smooth economic growth, demographic dynamism, and cultural optimism, only shaken by the contempt in which multilateral institutions—primarily the European Union (EU)—hold Orbán’s fierce anti-wokery. One watermark was the adoption in 2012 of a new constitution, which enshrined such principles as the right to life and traditional marriage.
The path of Argentina and Chile wasn’t nearly as smooth. In the former, Peronism kept casting a long shadow over the country’s politics, with its ideological tenets reappropriated under a new guise in the early 2000s by Cristina Fernández Kirchner and her husband Néstor. One interlude of change occurred in 2015-2019, when a former football club president by the name of Mauricio Macri began to—but never quite finished doing, per the critics to his right—dismantle Peronism’s clientelist state in favor of free market and technocratic reforms. But Peronism came back in full swing in 2015 under the aegis of Cristina’s successor and current president, Alberto Fernández.
The path of Chile was less tragic and even exemplary. The post-Pinochet 1990s saw a contest between traditional parties underlaid by a consensus on having Chile remain the region’s crown jewel for its business-friendly economy. The agenda of the Chicago boys—economists from the namesake university advising Chilean governments—came under slightly greater strain in the 2000s and 2010s as a new center-left leader arose in Michele Bachelet, running against the establishment’s Sebastián Piñera. In the late 2020s and early 2020s, the game was turned inside out. The year 2022 saw a face-off between the left-populist Gabriel Boric and the conservative José Antonio Kast.
Against this backdrop, you would think Hungary has little to teach these countries. Think twice. As Piñera gave way to Boric, Chile set out to replace the 1980 Magna Carta with a new one. Although Chileans voted overwhelmingly for the change, they also rejected Boric’s first draft in September 2022—a wish-list of progressive fancies—a year after he was elected. Given a second chance to elect members of the Constituent Assembly earlier this month, they handed Kast’s party a 35% majority, opening the way for a more conservative draft to potentially pass. Hungary’s example could inspire that process, argues a team from the CFR who will be visiting Santiago in early June.
They will also visit Buenos Aires, where conservatives don’t face such high stakes but could have a say in the country’s future. The successor party to Macri’s coalition (Juntos por el Cambio) holds about half the seats in Parliament and will likely lead a new government past the elections in October, but in the meantime, they aren’t holding Fernández’s government accountable enough for its clientelism and moral bankruptcy. The hope for conservatives lies in La Libertad Avanza, the upstart party of scuff-haired economist Javier Milei. Although he self-categorizes as libertarian, his VP pick—Victoria Villaruel—is a solid conservative. The CFR will bring them a message of hope too.
Touting Hungary in Argentina
Editor's note—On June 3-5, along with my colleague Dóra Gulyás of the Center for Fundamental Rights (Budapest), we attended the first edition of the Panamerican Forum of Young Politicians in Buenos Aires, a regional summit convened to foster links among the continent's conservative forces.
[Op-ed] Outstretching Hungary's hand
Editor's note—the piece below follows up on our trip to Argentina and Chile, and it featured in the print edition of Magyar Nemzet, Hungary's largest conservative daily. An English translation appears below.
As Latin America readies to switch its political colors this year, a delegation from the Center for Fundamental Rights (Budapest) traveled to Argentina and Chile to build bridges.
Latin America is on the cusp of change. Voters in Chile (in May) and Argentina (in October) are being handed an opportunity to start reversing the left’s wins of the past year up and down the region. The ongoing socialist offensive to be countered began precisely in Chile in November 2021, with far-left millennial candidate Gabriel Boric scoring a 10-point margin by baselessly labeling his rival, the conservative José Antonio Kast, as an heir of Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet. Later in May last year, the left-wing tide gained momentum as former terrorist Gustavo Petro beat the mayor of Colombia’s fifth-largest town by promising the country’s voters a bag of goods they can ill-afford. Later in October, former Brazilian president Lula da Silva (the chief architect of the regional Sao Paolo Forum of left-populist parties) made a comeback by beating the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, who ran on a stellar economic record, in an election many see as fraudulent.
The outcome of this socialist winning streak has shifted the region further to the left than it was through 1998-2015, when a so-called “pink tide” of left-wing populists ran on the coattails of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, who spent most of his mandate before passing away in 2013 exporting regionwide his brand of Bolivarianism (the ideology based on supposedly “democratic” socialism and resistance to Western influence). Along with the established left-wing governments of Argentina (under Peronist leader Alberto Fernández), Bolivia (under Luis Arce), Mexico (under Andrés Manuel López Obrador) and Perú (under Dina Boluarte, who succeeded the indigenous icon Pedro Castillo upon his attempted self-coup last year), this latest series of electoral wins have brought the number of left-wing governments in the region up to 12 out of 19, covering 92% of the region’s inhabitants and 90% of GDP. With this landscape, it’s easy to fall into despair.
The good news for conservatives is that regional politics since the demise of the region’s last military dictators in the early 1990s is proving to be cyclical, and as with all cycles, this latest one can be reversed, too. In fact, it’s already being reversed if you look closely. In early May, Chileans went to the polls to elect a Constituent Assembly that is now tasked with drafting a constitution. They gave Kast’s party, the Republicans, a stonking 35% majority of seats, a result that rebukes the underlying process itself. Although it was conceived in the waning days of Pinochet’s iron-fisted rule, the very idea of enmeshing the country in a tedious constitutional process that has distracted away from more immediate concerns was never a majoritarian yearning. Voters already made this much clear in September last year, when they rejected a first draft laced with far-left ideology. May’s result confirms they want politicians to focus on spiraling crime and out-of-control immigration.
Argentina will get its chance, too. The incumbent Fernández incarnates the havoc that Peronism has wrought upon the country. Though initially birthed in the mid-50s by Juan Domingo Perón as a form of national-corporativism, Fernández’s ideology has since atrophied into a form of intellectual cover for limitless corruption, clientelism and economic sclerosis. The question is what can replace it. In 2015, Argentinians already gave Peronism the boot by electing businessman and tycoon Mauricio Macri, who went on to lose his reelection bid four years later, and whose party—the PRO—is now torn between the mayor of Buenos Aires and Macri’s former Interior Minister. Whoever wins the PRO’s primary, he or she will have to work with Javier Milei, the scruff-haired libertarian economist running to PRO’s right and currently inflaming every TV plateau with economics crash courses and fearless invectives. If Milei and PRO can get along, there is hope.
The question is what does Hungary have to do in all of this? If they’ve heard of our homeland at all, Latin Americans are likely to see Hungary through the prism of the sizable communities of Hungarian ancestry in some of the region’s countries: 100.000 in Brazil, 50.000 in Argentina, 50.000 in Chile and a few thousand in Mexico, Venezuela and Uruguay. Most Argentinians, for instance, ignore that the founder of their national military college, János Czetz, was a Hungarian refugee from the 1848 revolution, and that another emigre to Argentina, László Biro, founded the namesake ballpoint pen. And yet, for every single Latin American conservative that our delegation from the Center for Fundamental Rights met at a conference on June 1-3 in Buenos Aires, Hungary stands as beacon—an example, a model, a reference—of conservative governance across a range of issues, from protecting borders and promoting families to aiding persecuted Christians.
The problem is that the reference point is often blurry. The journalists, intellectuals, and activists we met asked repeatedly about Hungary’s stance on the Ukraine war, which they’ve been fallaciously told is somehow pro-Putin instead of simply pro-Hungarian. Perhaps our most gratifying encounters were with people whom our own progressive European media had labelled as bad company (much like their own media had portrayed us to them). With a delegation from Paraguay’s conservative Partido Colorado, which recently won a reelection bid despite the best efforts of the US ambassador (not unlike Hungary) under leader party leader Santiago Peña, we were flabbergasted to notice the many similarities between our predicament and theirs. Both Budapest and Asunción have been chastised by the Biden administration and the European Union for refusing to cave to the woke, gender ideology mob. Both have been financially blackmailed.
The purpose of our trip was hardly to proselytize Hungarian solutions so that these conservative groups can adopt our trademark. We don’t seek that kind of glory, nor do we think those solutions are necessarily replicable in the furthest ends of the globe. What we are seeking instead is to find allies to help us break the international isolation Brussels and Washington want to impose on us for choosing the “wrong” path. If these conservative victories solidify, as they seem they will, in Chile, Argentina and beyond, we would like to think we will have trusted partners that will always seek to understand and respect the way Hungary defends its own national interest. And meanwhile, as these options rise to power, we surely hope to have acted as an incubator of conservative policies for these new leaders to come and draw their inspiration. If only 1% of this ambitious program comes to fruition, it will have been well worth the 13-hour trip.
[Interview] Hungary wishes to remain a Christian society
Editor's note—the following is an interview we gave to La Prensa, Argentina's largest conservative daily. Below is an English translation.
1) How would you explain the Orbán phenomenon to Argentinian readers?
Viktor Orbán was a dissident student leader in the waning days of communism. Along with a group of fellow students at ELTE, Budapest’s main law faculty, he founded Fidesz, a youth movement that forbid the over-30s from joining and was markedly liberal-centrist in outlook, at least at the beginning. In 1998, Orbán was elected PM in his first, albeit brief, stint in government. The following decade saw the socialists return to power, with dire consequences for Hungary’s economy and its standing on the world stage. In 2006, for instance, a leaked tape in which then-PM Ferenc Gyurcsány admitted his party had lied to win that year’s election triggered mass protests in Budapest and beyond. In 2010, Viktor Orbán led Fidesz to a stunning 2/3rds victory, with a clear mandate to crack down on government malfeasance, adopt a new constitution to replace the communist-era one and whip the country’s debt and deficit levels into shape. The first half-decade of Orbán’s second stint in government was thus centered on the domestic economy, but in 2015, as droves of migrants from the Middle East seized on the chaos of Syria’s civil war to stream into Europe through Serbia, the Orbán government erected a fence along the border, thereby shifting his government’s focus to cultural and social matters. The decision to oppose mass migration quickly earned Orbán the scorn of Brussels and the EU’s de facto leader, Angela Merkel. Relations with the EU certainly didn’t improve in the late 2010s, when Orbán’s government passed a series of domestic initiatives including a Child Protection Act that forbids the LGTB lobby from indoctrinating children in primary schools. Under the pretext of denouncing “democratic backsliding”, protecting “rule of law” and even condemning importers of Russian oil and gas, EU institutions—and more recently the Biden administration—have ceaselessly piled on Hungary, even withdrawing the money it is owed from the EU’s post-Covid recovery funds. And yet, the keys to Orbán’s repeated success at the polls (he has renewed his 2/3rds majority three times since 2010) remain clear: govern for the majority of the country, and to hell with global liberaldom.
2) What role does Hungary play these days in the European Union (EU)?
Our government is highly critical of the direction the EU is headed towards: a highly bureaucratized, heavy-handed way of conducting policy for 500 million citizens that routinely marginalizes and even condemns conservative voices, whilst elevating the preferences and concerns of a tiny majority of left-radical gender activists. Whilst these trends are by no means new, they’ve markedly accelerated under Ursula von der Leyen’s Presidency of the European Commission. And yet, there has never been any real prospect of consulting our electorate on whether it wishes to leave (it doesn’t), let alone pulling out altogether. We want to work from the inside towards reconnecting the EU with what its founding fathers intended it to be: a pragmatic Union built on the voluntary cooperation of sovereign member states, where every political persuasion is afforded its place and no country is marginalized for defending its own national interest. This founding vision is what we hope to give voice to as we gear up to hold the rotating presidency of the EU Council in the first half of next year.
3) What does being a conservative mean in today’s Hungary?
Let me quote the words of PM Orbán at this year’s CPAC, which we proudly organized for 2.000 attendees, 400 of them international, and 90 speakers: “no gender, no migration, no war”.
4) What is the Hungarian government’s stance on the ongoing war in Ukraine? What about the Hungarian people?
We are pro-peace. Although we acknowledge that this war began with Russia’s illegal aggression against Ukraine, support the latter’s territorial integrity and have supported each and every EU sanctions package directed at Vladimir Putin’s regime, we don’t think that endlessly pouring millions of euros in military equipment and training for Ukraine will solve anything. It will just make the conflict even more open-ended, bloody, and protracted. Instead, we have concentrated our efforts to help out Ukraine on the humanitarian side, by welcoming refugees from across the Carpathian range with open arms. In addition, our stance on the war is also guided by the fact that almost 160.000 Hungarians live in Ukraine—the country’s largest ethnic minority—and sending weapons to Zelensky’s government would effectively put them in Russian harm’s way (it should also be noted that in 2014, the Ukrainian government passed a law that forbid the teaching of foreign languages in primary schools, which was intended against Russian but has effectively worked against Hungarian also). Furthermore, Hungary simply cannot afford to inflict more self-harm on itself by sanctioning Russia’s energy sector, which supplies 85% of our natural gas. Central Europe has historically stood to lose when East and West go to war, and this time is no exception. Instead of fanning the flames of military escalation, Hungary supports an immediate ceasefire that should lead to serious peace talks, not just between Ukraine and Russia but between the two great powers lurking behind the scenes of this conflict: the Kremlin and the Biden administration. More broadly, we believe the West should arrive at some form of modus vivendi with Putin’s Russia, which is fated to remain a key supplier of the continent’s energy needs despite our best efforts to grow our energy independence and our green policies. Under PM Orbán, Hungary has grown less reliant on Russian energy—contrary to conventional wisdom in the West—but Russian oil and gas remains a key dependency of ours, and our foreign policy simply reflects that.
5) Hungary’s ties to Russia are different from the rest of Europe’s. What national interests are at stake for Hungary to forget 1956 and the long years of oppression in the 20th century?
Hungary has not forgotten anything, least of all Soviet Russia’s suppression of our 1956 national uprising by force and its 40-year occupation and subordination of our country. More largely, Russia has long played a nefarious role suppressing Hungary’s age-old yearning for sovereignty, not least in 1848, when it was enlisted by the Habsburgs to crack down on that year’s national revolution in Budapest. But foreign policy should not be about the qualms of the past but about the interests of the present. We depend on Russia, much to our dislike, for 85% of our natural gas. Russia also operates a number of nuclear power plants across Hungary, some newly built. Therefore, much as we would like to support Ukraine’s heroic stand for sovereignty and integrity, we simply cannot afford to send infinite money and resources to Zelensky’s government in a war it likely cannot win. Instead, we are calling for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations.
6) Could you explain the changes in Hungary’s migration policy in recent years?
There hasn’t really been much of a change, only a heightened migratory stress on our borders around the year 2015 that has rightfully triggered a discrete policy response. Since being elected in 2010, Hungary’s government has flatly rejected Western Europe’s purported solution to the continent-wide demographic winter: propping up the national population through mass migration. Instead, we think the way to restore our demographic vitality is through pro-family policies to ensure the Hungarian people can remain at home in their land through generations. The main problem with mass migration is that it never works as intended. In the 1950s and 1960s, Western Europe welcomed record numbers of guestworkers from former colonies (France and the UK) and Turkey (Germany) thinking they would go back home at some point. Not only did they not, they also pressed the government to allow their families to migrate also, which they did in the form of family reunification. In 2015, as the Syrian civil war produced unprecedented migratory stress on Europe’s borders, Angela Merkel and her allies told us that migrants from the Middle East—supposedly refugees, although in most cases they were middle-aged men looking lured by Europe’s welfare state looking for a better life—would be easily assimilated if given a chance. But common sense tells us that migration in mass numbers from Muslim-majority societies tends instead to create pockets of Islamic observance, which we don’t want in our country. That is why in 2015, we erected a fence along our border with Serbia to protect the EU’s external frontier, which the Union was unwilling to do. This doesn’t mean we are averse to Islam as a religion (we have excellent relations with the Turkish people, for instance), only that we want Hungary to remain a Christian-majority country into the future.
7) How is the Hungarian economy faring?
It has been on a non-stop upward trajectory since PM Orbán took office in 2010. From a low of almost 7% negative growth in 2009, Hungary’s GDP growth turned consistently positive the following decade, but for a brief interlude in 2012 owing to the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis and in 2020 owing to the pandemic. Unemployment took a sharp dip from a high of 11% in 2010 to a low of 3% these days—and it’s not civil servants making up the difference but rather private sector employment. In 2019 and 2020, Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) into the country beat historical records at 60% and 107% of GDP. But more important than these inert economic statistics for us is the climate of optimism that reigns in the country. Hungary had Europe’s lowest fertility rate when PM Orbán took office at just about 1.3 kids per couple. Today, we are nearing replacement levels at 1.9. We take these facts and figures as a testament to the success of our conservative agenda.
8) What does Hungary know about Argentina? Is it possible to draw parallels between Peronism and the movement that Orbán leads?
We should be wary of comparing Hungary’s political sojourn of the past 13 years with the experiences of other countries—our situation is unique, and so is theirs. With Peronism, the comparison would only involve some aspects of anti-communism and traditional nationalism—but that would be it. Hungary’s politics are to a great extent determined by its 20th century history, which no other country shares. Consider that, for instance, PM Orbán has scored outstanding results among the Hungarian communities that were left outside our borders by the 1920 Trianon Treaty’s partition of Hungary into 1/3rd of what it used to be. Similarly, Orbán’s politics are largely a function of the yearning to bury and leave behind four decades of disastrous and repressive socialism in favour of a newly rediscovered traditional identity. For these reasons and more, we should pick these kinds of international comparisons with a pinch of salt.
9) What is the Hungarian government’s most valuable contribution to the cultural war against socialism?
The Hungarian government is knee-deep in the mud of the cultural war against the left. Across much of the rest of Europe, traditional right-of-center parties have concentrated exclusively on sound economic governance, thereby forfeiting the cultural realm to the left—and no wonder why rabid leftists have taken over every cultural institution from academia and the movies to drama and poetry. In Hungary, we see the challenge of governing differently. In order to contest spaces that the left has traditionally monopolized, the government has been willing to found new media outlets (there are countless of them to be named one by one), think-tanks (such as our own at the Center for Fundamental Rights), innovative cultural initiatives (such as the Terror House in Budapest which seeks to take stock of 40 years of repressive socialism) and even universities, such as Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC). In his speech at CPAC in 2022, PM Orbán outlined a 12-point rulebook to win the culture war, and one of the points was “don’t play by the liberals’ rules”. Only by setting up our own institutions and playing by our own rules will we stand any chance of curbing the left’s influence on future generations.
10) Is Orbánism hostile to liberal democracy, as is often denounced in the West?
It all comes down to what you mean by “liberal democracy”. If you mean the separation of powers, government accountability and the rule of law—no, Hungary supports all of those. Contrary to the many smears thrown up in our way by left-liberal Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Hungary operates a staunchly independent and highly effective judiciary, with some of the best-trained jurists in the continent. We also prosecute corruption wherever it happens and to the fullest extent. Yet we cannot police the motives of every single one of our public servants before they act venally (rates of corruption in Hungary are about the same as in comparable European democracies such as Spain, Italy, or Greece). Be that as it may, Hungary is a first-world country with a first-world democracy, which is liberal in the sense of Montesquieu’s classical liberalism, though not in the sense of modern left-liberal. If by “liberal democracy” you mean the ideology premised on the fullest possible autonomy of the individual, be it in the economic, moral, or sexual realm—yes, Hungary most definitely opposes that form of liberal democracy. Hungary is a conservative democracy. We believe society thrives not on the fullest autonomy of the individual but on healthy and sound families bound up in a shared national project. Therefore, Hungary doesn’t bow down to the latest whims of the LGBT and pro-abortion lobbies. Instead, we promote family formation and encourage civic associations and faith communities. This form of conservative democracy, however, gets often labelled as “illiberal”, including by our own Prime Minister in one hotly debated occasion. The catch is to know what it is we’re talking about, since so much of what Hungary is accused of these days amounts to a strawman argument.
11) Can you summarize the highlights of your trip to Buenos Aires?
We came out of the 1st Panamerican Forum of Young Politicians rather content with how Hungary’s message has been received by participants. The Hungarian government sees Latin America with hope, as a region that can quickly turn the tide against left-wing populism and towards a conservatism more in tune with traditional Hispanic values. Therefore, we place a lot of weight on attending conferences like this one. On Friday, our fellow Jorge González-Gallarza sat on a panel alongside representatives of other think-tanks, sharing some of the latest successes of ours at the Center for Fundamental Rights. And on Friday, our very own Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Enikö Györi gave an extended presentation about our government’s policy successes over the past decade. The event also fruitfully produced many new contacts. We met with Nicolás Mayoraz, future parliamentary candidate for Santa Fe (Argentina) and Ana Campagnolo, currently a state-level MP in Santa Catarina (Brazil). But perhaps most tellingly, we met with representatives of Paraguay’s Partido Colorado and couldn’t help but notice the many similarities between our two predicaments: two governments marginalized by the left-globalist liberal consensus for their conservative policies. The main gist of our message to Latin America is that governing to the right is no bed of roses these days, since standing up for conservative values attracts the smears, attacks and financial blackmail of global institutions. But Hungary isn’t anywhere near backing down, and neither should you.
[Interview] La Derecha Diario
Editor's note—the video below is an interview I gave to Candela Sol Silva of La Derecha Diario, a leading Argentinian conservative online magazine.
[Interview] Taking stock of our Argentinian foray
Editor's note—the video linked below is an interview I gave to HírTV on July 13th taking stock of our trip to Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile.
[Interview] Fear and Hope in Hungary and Spain
Editor's note—this interview of me by my friend László Bernát Veszprémy featured on the online edition of Mandiner, the leading Hungarian conservative weekly where László regularly writes, on May 28th, 2023.
How do you see the situation of press freedom in Hungary?
Of all the dishonest, politically motivated smears that global liberaldom routinely throws in Hungary’s way, this one is perhaps the most dishonest. Hungary has a free media ecosystem. To the extent it could become freer, that margin for improvement exists in every European country too (and some, like Germany, have even more homework to do). Anyone in Hungary with the requisite journalistic know-how and financial capital can launch a media venture to cover events the way he/she sees fit. There’s no government censorship of any kind. If there were, the outrage feigned by liberal Hungary-bashers would multiply severalfold, artificially ginned up as it already is. So, what’s the margin for improvement? Well, it is true that several Hungarian tycoons back Orbán’s policies. Does that make the media ecosystem rigged in any way? Not unless you consider the same to happen in Germany, which has a far more concentrated media landscape (Axel Springer controls 24% of the daily newspaper market). The bottom line is this: the Hungarian left, unable to beat Orbán at the polls, has enlisted the EU and the global left-liberal NGO complex to accuse Orbán’s government of muzzling the free press. What puts the lie to these accusations is that the opposition also has plenty of its own media. Rather than smearing their rival, they should imitate his cunning in using it.
Is Hungary really being punished by the EU due to 'rule of law' issues or for protecting families?
“Rule of law” is the pretext the left-liberal opposition, in Brussels and Budapest, has invented to wage an ideological war against the Hungarian government. Again, Hungary may well have some progress to make on ensuring the proper separation of powers and the independence of judges—just like every other European country. To give you one example, my home country of Spain fares rather poorly on rule of law. The current left-wing coalition of PM Pedro Sánchez has packed the courts, reformed the penal code to favor its separatist allies and named a former Minister of Justice as attorney general, thus undermining the separation of powers and the independent judiciary. Why is Brussels not concerned with Sánchez’s record on “rule of law”, then? Quite simply, because as a progressive government, it has become the darling of the European left-liberal complex, whilst Orbán remains a bête noire. Indeed, what this global cabal wants changed in Hungary is not so much its judiciary but rather Orbán’s social policies—primarily its law to protect minors from LGBTQ indoctrination and its protection of the EU’s outer borders by cracking down on illegal migration.
The term 'European values' is often used against us. What do 'European values' mean?
At their core, “European values” always end up encompassing whatever left-liberal shibboleth the leaders of the EU would like them to mean. This wasn’t always the case. In the interwar period, American spectators of Europe’s descent into war grasped that Adolf Hitler incarnated the opposite of “European values”: a disdain for the nation-state, the cult of violence and largely the opposite of Enlightenment universalism. With the onset of European integration in the war’s wake, “European values” began to gradually mean more than the standard values of the Enlightenment (individual autonomy, respect for human rights etc.). It began to mean belief in the peaceful cooperation of European nations determined to avoid another world war, and more largely in the rules-based multilateral world order. And yet, sometime this century, “European values” has been enlarged to mean, in addition, a battery of left-liberal creeds and postulates. The Hungarian government passes a law to ban LGTB indoctrination in schools? Brussels says that’s a violation of European values. The Polish government tightens abortion restrictions? Another violation of European values. The only possible endgame if the EU stays on this path is that it will gradually lose adherents from the right, with European integration becoming synonymous with left-wing hegemony.
What are the unique aspects of Hungarian history that enable us to have a healthier identity today compared to, for example, the British or the French?
At bottom, I think what Western Europe has that Hungary doesn’t is “post-colonial guilt”. I first became acquainted with this concept whilst interviewing the late Hungarian academic and MEP György Schöpflin for the podcast I co-host, Uncommon Decency. It is easy to see what Schöpflin meant. Much of the wokeness wave that has unfurled across Western Europe since 2020 is underpinned by a sense of remorse for having ruled vast swathes of the world through colonial empires in the past. This post-colonial repentance is what Nigel Biggar has sought to assuage with his recent bestselling book Colonialism (2022). Hungary doesn’t have any of it. In fact, it has quite the opposite: it has ruled itself as an independent country for a far shorter time relative to the time it was subservient to foreign empires, from Austria to the Soviet Union. So, while France and Britain uneasily look back to a past of grandeur made possible by the subjugation of foreign peoples, Hungary stares back at its own terrible 20th century with a feeling opposite to that of having wronged others: that of having been wronged by others. After spending considerable time in Hungary and returning frequently for various events and activities, I think this goes a long way towards explaining the climate of optimistic nationalism that underpins PM Orbán’s success.
What steps can the Western right-wing take to practically or truly reclaim their country's cultural or educational strongholds?
The roadmap starts with a paradigm shift. For far too long, the right has elevated economic concerns above and beyond everything else, to the exclusion of the culture wars. The left has seized on this vacuum to advance a radical cultural agenda of repressive tolerance (the uncompromising cancellation of anything deemed reactionary), gender ideology and anti-colonial racial identitarianism. These ideological tenets currently dominate across the cultural space of most Western nations, in universities and the movies, in theatre and high schools. The right needs to relearn the language of cultural power to reverse its exclusion from these spaces. In this sense, it needs to become more Gramscian, in the words of my friend Francesco Giubilei (it was Gramsci who in the early 1920s theorized the left’s pivot from material concerns to the culture). In many ways, Hungary shows the way. Since being elected on his second stint in office in 2010, PM Orbán was waged a relentless culture war by founding new media ventures, universities, and an altogether new narrative about the country’s past and its future. The rest of Europe should follow suit.
What should Hungarian readers know about the political situation in Spain?
Spaniards are headed to the polls twice this year: on May 28th to elect their mayors and regional governors, and later in November to elect a new parliament that will elect the (potentially new) government. The left-wing coalition led by PM Pedro Sánchez has been in office since 2018. It is comprised of the traditional socialists, PSOE (the party has swung left in a big way this electoral cycle) along with the far-left PODEMOS and a handful of left-regionalist parties from various regions. Here go just a few of the most worrisome initiatives this coalition has overseen. Having taken over from the previous right-of-center government of former PM Mariano Rajoy (which admittedly eased Spain’s recovery from the 2010s sovereign debt crisis through a series of liberalizing reforms), the pendulum on economic matters has swung all the way back to the far left. The government has raised taxes several times and has proposed special levies for the banks and the energy companies. Investment into Spain has dried up, and unemployment has increased. On foreign policy, its support of Ukraine has been insufficient; it has overpromised and underdelivered equipment and training. But perhaps most worrisome has been the government’s attack on rule of law: it has packed the courts, reformed the penal code by abolishing “sedition” to favor the Catalan separatists within the coalition that committed that crime in 2017, and moved a justice minister to the role of attorney general, thus undermining the separation of powers. And here’s my least-liked: it has passed a so-called “law of democratic memory” which amounts to an Orwellian rewriting of history to celebrate the republican side of the 1936-1939 civil war as having defended freedom and democracy from fascism when—in reality—it was fighting for a red form of tyranny. The likeliest way out for Spain is to elect a new right-wing coalition government of the PP and Vox. Let’s hope Spaniards seize the chance.
The end
Thank you all for reading! See you at the next issue.