The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, sent a message congratulating his newly-elected counterpart in Hungary, Péter Magyar, for having evicted the long-serving populist leader, Viktor Orbán, from power. All the usual welcoming words, but Tusk’s
message ended with a mysterious Hungarian phrase: “Ruszkik Haza” — Russians Go Home.
It dates back to 1989, when Orbán, then a student leader, became a national hero by giving a speech telling the Russians to end their 45-year-old military occupation and go home. They did go home then, but their influence returned with Orbán’s return to the prime ministership.
Hungary’s value to Moscow was its membership in the European Union and NATO which enabled it to pass on all the information that its representatives had access to as members. Orbán also blocked various EU decisions that Russia disapproved of, like his recent veto of a $105-billion EU loan to Ukraine to replace the American aid that Trump cancelled. That loan will now go through. But repairing the damage done by 16 years of Orbán’s rule will take longer: the judiciary has been packed, the government is a kleptocracy, 80% of the media are owned by Orbán’s cronies, and the electoral map has been gerrymandered. But the main interest for non-Hungarians is the possibility that this is a communicable disease.
Populists all over the place clearly fear that it might be. Orbán rose to power when Donald Trump was a property developer, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was a junior minister, France’s Marine Le Pen and Britain’s Nigel Farage were fringe
figures, and Germany’s Alice Weidel was a financial consultant. They all found time to offer their support to Orbán, and now they are strangely silent. It’s like when your parents die: you realise that it’s now you on the front line.
When Orbán was trailing badly, they pulled all the stops out. Trump, in his fifth intervention in support of Orbán in six months, posted “I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY”, and the vice-president, J.D. Vance, showed up in Budapest on the way to his equally unsuccessful performance in the ‘peace talks’ in Islamabad.
This is an unusual amount of attention to lavish on an election in a country of nine million people located in the unfashionable end of Europe. You only have to compare it to the attention that the world media gave to the 2023 election that brought the Orbán clone, Robert Fico, back to power in Slovakia. That event got zero attention, whereas the election in Hungary got front-page coverage almost everywhere. The difference is because Orbán’s loss was seen as a defeat for the founding father of populist strategy, at least in its current incarnation, and possibly a harbinger of the future.
The anxiety of some and the hopes of others have been stoked by the growing likelihood that the populist formula is failing in its natural homeland, the United States of America. Trump’s erratic behaviour is part of the problem, but the economic dislocation caused by his war against Iran is a bigger reason for them to fear defeat in the mid-term elections. The governing party losing control of one House of Congress in the mid-terms, or even of both, is a feature of US politics, and it normally doesn’t cause despair. It’s a protest vote, and it’s not a reliable predictor of what will happen in the general election.
Yet Trump & Co in the US, and more so their fellow travellers in Europe and far-flung outposts like Argentina, seem concerned that the wind has changed, even though nobody else has noticed it yet. Maybe they are wrong, and this is only a minor setback in their inevitable march to power everywhere in the West. But protest-based mass movements have an average lifetime of 10-15 years, so a steep decline in the longevity of populist governments would not be untypical.
Trump’s desperate antics as he seeks a face-saving way out of the Iran war are prolonging an economic downturn that could end in a major recession. Voters punish whichever government is in power when a recession arrives with complete disregard for the actual causes. So we could see old populist regimes go down even as new ones emerge elsewhere.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth