What Viktor Orbán’s Landslide Defeat Can Teach Anti-Fascists Across the World
Philosopher Jason Stanley, who has been visiting Hungary for over 15 years, breaks down the historic defeat on Sunday of Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu’s top EU ally.
After 16 straight years in power, Viktor Orbán has finally lost, in a landslide. Young voters in Hungary mobilized in record numbers to vote out the 62-year-old four-term prime minister – and ally of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin. Hungary’s youth saw through the fear-mongering that had buoyed Orbán in election after election since 2010. They want a future different from a fake return to a mythical past.
I once witnessed the future Hungary could have had, and could now have once again. In 2009, I spent two weeks co-directing a summer school on the meaning of the word “if” at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Central European University (CEU) was a new university, with a spectacular urban campus in Budapest. Unusually for a European University, its departments were attracting leading professors from around the world. More than 50 graduate students from across the world attended the summer school – of them, about half a dozen are now tenured professors at leading universities, including Princeton, UCLA, Cornell, and Oxford. I met other academics spending the summer in Budapest, attracted by what Sam Gosling, a University of Texas psychology professor whom I met at Corvino, a fashionable Budapest rooftop bar, declared to be “the new Berlin.” We all agreed that the Hungarian capital was destined to be the crown jewel of cosmopolitan Europe, and Central European University had the brightest future of any continental European university.
2009 was an optimistic year. George Bush, the Iraq War, and the financial crisis were (mostly) in the rearview mirror. Barack Obama was the president of the United States. It was a good time to be thinking about the meaning of the word “if,” a concern about as far removed from fascism as I can imagine. I returned to conduct another summer school in Philosophy of Language a year later, in summer 2010.
But in 2010, Budapest had changed. The mood among my Hungarian friends had turned somber since the election of Viktor Orbán and his far-right, Christian nationalist Fidesz party. There was a great deal of talk of increased hostility towards the Roma people, and many grim jokes about politicians’ obsession with restoring Hungary’s past glory, stolen when “greater Hungary” was taken away by an international cabal of globalists with the Treaty of Trianon at the end of World War I. And Central European University was gradually becoming a political target, along with its Jewish “globalist” benefactor, George Soros. CEU was attacked for spreading “Gender Ideology” – the view that gender is a social rather than a biological construct – and other supposed progressive ills.