Orban-proofing the EU

WHEN WAS the last time an election in a small European country had the world holding its breath? Early 2015, perhaps, when Greek voters handed Syriza, a far-left outfit, a mandate to reverse the onerous terms of their country’s bail-out, a task at which it failed spectacularly. Some 15 years earlier Austria had brought an extreme-right party to power for the first time in the European Union. These events injected disruption into Europe’s bloodstream. Hungary’s election on April 12th, by contrast, was a victory to the forces of moderation more resounding than mainstream European leaders dared hope.

During his 16 years in power Viktor Orban metamorphosed from a headache for the EU into a spoiler and then a nightmare. Peter Magyar’s thumping success in winning over voters united in little other than a desire to rid themselves of a prime minister who bankrupted and isolated their country, has restored some confidence to a European mainstream assailed by chaos from without and upheaval within. Mr Magyar promised to reverse some of Mr Orban’s domestic outrages, to restore a constructive approach in Brussels and to unblock aid for Ukraine. “People want Europe! This really is a turning-point,” exulted one diplomat.

It remains to be seen whether Mr Magyar, a political novice who spent most of his career in Mr Orban’s Fidesz party, can live up to the hopes placed in him. Yet lost amid the euphoria are awkward questions for the rest of Europe. How did Mr Orban, the leader of a small, poor country, become the EU’s disrupter-in-chief and an international icon for nationalist conservatives? How was his illiberal rule able to flourish for so long inside the EU? And how can the club hope to contain the next Orban?

The first answer is that, for all his faults, Mr Orban was a talented diviner of political moods, at home and abroad. When migrants from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere began streaming into the EU in 2015, for example, he saw earlier than most that voters would demand security on the EU’s external border before countenancing schemes cooked up in Brussels to redistribute asylum-seekers from one country to another. Mr Orban’s rhetoric was racist and divisive. But, as many European politicians will acknowledge, the security-first policy embedded in the border fence he built a decade ago is close to mainstream thinking today.

This in turn nurtured Mr Orban’s sense that some democracies were developing an appetite for the nativistic form of conservatism he had pioneered, sceptical of wokery and indulgent of strongmen. His success at consolidating his power not only politically but also via the media, universities and favoured firms inspired populist-right outfits across Europe and beyond. This is why J.D. Vance was dispatched to Budapest to bolster his campaign. “Trump before Trump”, Steve Bannon called Mr Orban.

Yet the comparison extends only so far, because Mr Orban could not have succeeded outside the EU or without support from the “Brusselians” he railed against. As soon as he took office in 2010 he began undermining the integrity of Hungary’s institutions and its electoral system, while using annual EU subsidies worth over 3% of GDP to foster an elite business class dependent on Fidesz. His veto on foreign policy and other decisions also made Hungary a valuable partner to Russia and China. After flailing around with unworkable legal attempts to bring Mr Orban to heel, the EU only belatedly learned to condition its financial aid—a decision that may have contributed to his loss.

A third reason is that Mr Orban was puffed up by outsiders—most glaringly by fellow travellers in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and their outriders, wowed on their visits to Budapest by glitzy conferences, state-funded right-wing think-tanks and cafés named after Roger Scruton, a conservative British philosopher. Few had the curiosity to look into the corruption that oiled Mr Orban’s machine, his kowtowing to Kremlin interests or his courting of Chinese investment. Many hailed Fidesz’s promotion of fertility as an alternative to immigration; fewer seemed interested in the dismal results of this expensive policy. Nor did many venture beyond the capital’s centre to see the rundown hospitals and crumbling infrastructure that fuelled Mr Magyar’s ascent.

Allies were not the only foreigners to build Mr Orban into rather more than he was. By taking him at his word that he was building an “illiberal democracy”, some of his foes elevated the leader of an authoritarian kleptocracy to a formidable ideological adversary, speaking of him in the same breath as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Mr Trump. Such flattery proved helpful to the prime minister of a country with a strong nationalist streak. No wonder Mr Orban welcomed their hatred.

Had Mr Orban won, or engaged in post-election chicanery, contingency plans to work around or punish him would have kicked into gear. Yet, as one Hungarian official close to Mr Orban notes: “In a week’s time they will sit down and realise Orban’s loss does not solve all their problems.” Mr Orban may have been sceptical about the EU’s sanctions on Russia, but the next package, targeting its shadow fleet, is meeting fierce resistance from maritime states like Greece and Malta. Plenty of EU leaders, as well as Mr Magyar himself, share Mr Orban’s scepticism about accelerating Ukraine’s EU-membership bid. And on 95% of eu business, notes an official in Brussels, Mr Orban was just like any other leader.

The problem of managing democratic backsliding in a country that has joined the EU, rather than one aspiring to do so, remains unsolved. Any hope that the EU might use Mr Orban’s departure to assess its vulnerabilities seems doomed as leaders manage more pressing problems. “We’re all flying by the seat of our pants,” says one European official. Back to business as usual, then. ■