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May 13 - May 16, 2024
With Kaczynski uninterested in building a profile outside Poland, it was left to Orbán to become the face of illiberal strongman politics within the EU.
At law school in Budapest, Orbán stood out for his domineering and charismatic personality. He became part of a close-knit group of liberal students and benefited from internships, grants and scholarships bestowed by the Hungarian Jewish philanthropist, George Soros.
Peak irony
‘If we trust our own strength, then we will be able to put an end to the Communist dictatorship,’ he declared. ‘If we are courageous enough then we can compel the ruling party to face free elections.’ It was an appeal for democracy that has echoed down the years and become a historical landmark.
He began to break with the older, urban liberals of Budapest – many of them Jewish – and embraced a more conservative and nationalistic politics that proved popular in the small towns and in the countryside.
1994 onwards....following election failure
the Hungarian prime minister used his democratic mandate to erode democracy; and he took advantage of his legal powers to roll back the rule of law.
In the aftermath of the refugee crisis, Orbán decided to demonise George Soros, his one-time benefactor. The denunciation of an alleged ‘Soros plan’ to flood Hungary with Muslims became central to his re-election campaign in 2017 – with a grinning Soros featured on election posters that were plastered all over Hungary. There was no such plan.
Orbán alluded to Soros and employed classic anti-Semitic imagery, declaring that Hungary faced ‘an opponent who is different from us’: ‘Their faces are not visible, but are hidden from view … They are not national, but international. They do not believe in work, but speculate with money. They have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.’15
The Israeli leader was prepared to overlook Orbán’s use of anti-Semitism in domestic political campaigns in return for a valuable ally around the EU table.
One embarrassing open secret was that the German government had tolerated Orbán because he was useful to them. For much of the Orbán–Merkel years, the votes of Fidesz in the European Parliament helped to secure the working majority of the European People’s Party (EPP), which was dominated by Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
far-reaching decisions of this nature often have to be taken unanimously. And by 2016, after recent elections, Orbán had a crucial ally in the shape of Poland’s Law and Justice Party. An informal axis had emerged within the EU: Poland would protect Hungary and Hungary would protect Poland – and Europe’s liberals were left fuming on the sidelines.
Smolensk conspiracy theory. The Smolensk air disaster had taken place in 2010, when a plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, the identical twin brother of Jaroslaw, had crashed over Russia, killing the president and many other senior government officials, including the president of the central bank, military leaders and eighteen members of parliament.
by 2013, as I was told in Kraków, this evidence-free conspiracy theory was helping to frame Polish politics, with around one-third of Poles believing that Smolensk was a mass assassination that had been covered up.
Johnson told me that he had read my article and that he agreed with my side of the argument.1 I thanked him and said: ‘But you know a lot of your friends in Brussels think that you are secretly in favour of the EU.’ Johnson looked back at me, with a faintly hurt expression. ‘Of course, I’m in favour of the EU,’ he exclaimed. ‘How could you not be?’
Both men ran as tribunes of the people against the elite. Both argued that elitist politicians had put foreigners ahead of their own countrymen. Trump’s slogan was ‘America First’. Campaigning for Brexit, Johnson toured Britain in a bus demanding that Britain stop paying £350 million a week (a much disputed figure) to the EU, demanding: ‘Let’s fund our NHS instead.’ In foreign policy, both took aim at their country’s traditional alliances. Johnson’s most important policy was to take Britain out of the European Union. Trump made it clear that he regarded NATO as biased against American
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Both Trump and Johnson also capitalised on hostility towards mass immigration. For Johnson, this was something of a departure. As mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, he made a point of his enthusiasm for leading a multicultural city, a third of whose inhabitants were born overseas.
On other occasions, he had stressed his pride in his own Turkish ancestry. His great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, had been a liberal Turkish journalist, who had served briefly as a government minister. Insider accounts of the Brexit campaign suggest that, behind closed doors, Johnson expressed qualms about the Turkey-bashing campaign and even ‘erupted with rage’.4
Voter turnout in the referendum was 72 per cent – higher than in any election for twenty-five years.6 It was this mobilisation of new voters, as much as anything, that threw out the calculations of the Remain campaign.
the young Boris attended the European School in Brussels, an educational establishment for the children of EU officials.
Most of Johnson’s family are devoted Europhiles. His brother Jo attended the College of Europe in Bruges, a training school for the EU elite, and later resigned from Johnson’s government in protest at his brother’s policies on Brexit.
‘To some extent all politicians are gamblers with events. They try to anticipate what will happen, to put themselves on the right side of events.’ Johnson even interpreted Churchill’s opposition to Nazism in this rather cynical light, writing that in the early 1930s, when Churchill’s fortunes had been at a low ebb, he had ‘put his shirt on a horse called anti-Nazism … and his bet came off in spectacular fashion’.
David Cameron later revealed that when Johnson had informed him that he intended to campaign for Leave, he had swiftly followed up their conversation with a text predicting that ‘Brexit will be crushed like a toad under the harrow’. Cameron concluded that Johnson had genuinely believed that Brexit would lose, ‘but he didn’t want to give up the chance of being on the romantic, patriotic, nationalistic side’.
Johnson made a move from the strongman playbook: he prorogued Parliament at the end of August 2019. This meant that the sitting of the House of Commons was suspended in an effort to prevent it getting in the way of Brexit. When several leading members of his own party objected to these tactics, Johnson took the ruthless decision to expel twenty-one MPs from the Conservative Party.
The slowness of the Johnson government’s response was an important contributory factor to the heavy death toll in Britain, which was the highest in Western Europe.
in a very English way, he had introduced important elements of the strongman style of politics into Britain. He had shown a willingness to break both domestic and international law. He had demonised opponents as elitist enemies of the people. His political allies had extended the same description to the courts and had repeatedly questioned the impartiality of other important national institutions, such as the Civil Service and the BBC.
why the US establishment was so unwilling to acknowledge a political phenomenon that was staring them in the face. The answer, I think, lies in American exceptionalism – the sense that US politics and society were immune from the political pathologies that plagued other, less fortunate countries.
the storming of the Capitol in January 2021. Their willingness to accept Trump’s unfounded allegations of election fraud reflected their belief that he was acting in the interests of a higher good: the preservation of the traditional American way of life, which they associated with a white-majority country.
Vladimir Putin and his propagandists established the technique of a ‘firehose of falsehoods’ as a fundamental political tool. The idea is to throw out so many different conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts’ (to use the phrase of Trump’s aide, Kellyanne Conway) that the truth simply becomes one version of events among many.19
This is a phenomenon that psychologists call ‘motivated reasoning’: a form of biased thinking that leads people to the conclusions they find most emotionally satisfying, rather than those that are justified by the evidence.
the Washington Post tabulated some 22,000 false and misleading statements over nearly four years of the Trump presidency.
Trump not only dropped America’s traditional pressure on China over human rights but actively encouraged Xi in some of the worst abuses. Bolton records that at a G20 summit, ‘Xi explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing.’
The question seems to be not whether Trumpism will survive beyond 2021 but whether Trump himself will remain the figurehead of the movement, or whether a member of his family or another ambitious Republican will take the cause forward.
But with Duterte, Trump had decided to praise the most infamous and brutal policy that the president of the Philippines was associated with: the summary execution of people accused of dealing or using drugs.
‘If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself.’4 According to Amnesty International, more than 7,000 people were killed in the first six months of Duterte’s presidential term as part of his ‘war on drugs’.
folksiness
Without spending anything, the campaign could already reach the over 70 million Filipinos (of a total population of 108 million) who use Facebook.
The Philippines was at the forefront of the fake news epidemic – ‘patient zero’, as one Facebook executive put it.
Duterte’s exploitation of social media had helped propel him to victory in the Philippines. It also served as an exemplar to strongmen around the world of how fake news could be used for political benefit.
has not attempted an intellectual justification for his actions or articulated an anti-liberal project of the sort that guides other authoritarians. This puts Duterte closer to Trump and Bolsonaro. Like those two leaders, Duterte operates on instinct and patronage, appointing government officials on the basis of loyalty and personal friendship.
The episode was typical of relations between two strongman leaders, in which kitsch and mutual flattery in public merged with violence and lawbreaking offstage.
Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, both regarded the Obama administration’s policies in the region as dangerously naive.
prioritise regional stability over democracy and harden policy towards Iran.
Trump
Bibi and MBS are strongly nationalistic leaders, with a powerful streak of paranoia about the outside world. Their shared antipathy towards Iran and eagerness to work with the Trump administration remade the geopolitics of the Middle East between 2016 and 2020.
Fear of Iranian influence led MBS to take Saudi Arabia to war in Yemen and to blockade neighbouring Qatar.
In the summer of 2020, he was able to use the shared Saudi–Israeli fear of Iran to broker a historic diplomatic breakthrough; the establishment of diplomatic ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
Kushner did this
The UAE–Israel deal was also a bitter blow to the Palestinians because it had been agreed without Netanyahu making any movement towards the ‘two-state solution’ that had long been mooted as the ultimate solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Bibi had endorsed the idea of a two-state solution. When I met him in his office in 2013, I asked if he was just humouring Obama, by committing himself to a two-state solution. Netanyahu smiled and replied, ‘Well, obviously I’m doing that.’ But the Israeli prime minister had then set out the conventional argument for why Israel needed to agree to a Palestinian state. The danger, he argued, was that if Israel incorporated 2.7 million Palestinians on the West Bank into the state of Israel, then the government might end up having to choose between being a Jewish state and being a democracy, since
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The Revisionist Zionism that the Netanyahu family embraced was built around the political philosophy of one man, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who rejected the socialism of Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, and instead embraced a much more militarised form of nationalism that saw conflict with the Arab population as inevitable.
It was only in 1977 that the Likud Party, led by followers of Jabotinsky, won power for the first time. And Likud was the party that Benjamin Netanyahu would go on to lead.
Labour was led by Eastern European exiles from an Ashkenazi background, who came from the left and were regarded as the intellectual and social elite of the new Israeli state. Likud, by contrast, drew much of its support from Sephardic Jews who had been expelled or emigrated from the Arab nations, and later from immigrants who arrived from Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Likud campaign posters for 2020 featured photos of Netanyahu standing next to Modi, Trump and Putin under the slogan ‘A Different League’.
