Orbán’s crushing victory
Hungary’s illiberal populist has won a fourth term, giving the EU a headache. Stuart Watkins reports
Hungarian prime minister
Viktor Orbán, “the closest things Russian president Vladimir Putin has to a friend in the club of EU leaders”, won a fifth term in power on Sunday in an election that became a referendum on his promise to block support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, say Drew Hinshaw and Ian Lovett in The Wall Street Journal. The victory gives him four more years in power and “sets up some enormous fights for Europe”, reducing the likelihood of further sanctions, especially on energy. In Brussels, the EU had already been weighing whether to cut funding for Hungary over Orbán’s undermining of the rule of law and the integrity of elections. Upon victory, Orbán said he relished the fights that lay ahead.
Liberals reheat the rhetoric
The scale of Orbán’s victory was “crushing”, says The Guardian. His fourth consecutive win was “comprehensive and unexpected” as he faced for the first time a united opposition that put internal differences aside. Yet predictions of a close, or at least competitive, race were confounded. On a high turnout, Orbán’s Fidesz party won a greater number of seats than it held previously; Péter Márki-Zay, the opposition’s candidate for prime minister, failed even to win the local constituency he was contesting. The EU now “faces the acute dilemma of how to deal with a member state in which democratic norms have been flouted to such an extent that Orbán’s autocratic rule appears unassailable”.
You would think that liberal commentators, chastened by Brexit and Trump and the rise of other populist parties around the world, would be asking themselves questions about how they keep getting it so wrong, says John Fund in America’s National Review. Not a bit of it. Their “precooked analysis… simply gets reheated and dished out” again. Fidesz triumphed, winning 53% of the popular vote against 35% for a united six-party opposition formed to oust it from power. Another 7% opted for a hardline, antiimmigrant party. Yet pollsters predicted a tight race and Western media outlets, upon learning the result, blamed voters for their “reactionary nationalism”.
Such rhetoric hands Orbán a “loaded weapon”, says Fund, and ignores the fact that his policies are popular and the opposition was lame. Critics claim that coverage of the election campaign was dominated by “pliant media”, but opposition figures admit privately that “when one measures media influence by the size of its audience rather than the number of outlets, the opposition had plenty of access”.
The report from the European election watchdog proclaimed the vote that produced Orbán’s win in 2018 “free but not fair” and that is likely to be the conclusion this time too, says The Economist. But the opposition itself must shoulder most of the blame. The campaign “veered from an early focus on Orbán to an unconvincing effort to take advantage of the war in Ukraine” and opposition figures simply failed to understand most of the country, as one Socialist member of the European parliament admitted. “That will have been a particular problem outside Budapest. The challengers did well in the capital, but struggled in rural areas, where independent media barely reach and where Orbán’s scare stories about threats to traditional values stir up real fear.”
A tricky balancing act
For more than a decade, Orbán has “walked a tightrope”, says Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. He has stayed in the EU, enjoying all the benefits this brings in terms of investment, subsidies, increased security and diplomatic clout, while courting anti-EU figures such as Putin, Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will “make this balancing act harder”. After his election victory, Orban claimed, as he often has in the past, that his brand of illiberal conservatism represents the future of Europe. That is a “challenge to the rest of the EU” – and the EU must rise to it.