The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, sent a message congratulating his newly-elected counterpart in Hungary, P\u00e9ter Magyar, for having evicted the long-serving populist leader, Viktor Orb\u00e1n, from power. All the usual welcoming words, but Tusk\u2019s
message ended with a mysterious Hungarian phrase: \u201cRuszkik Haza\u201d \u2014 Russians Go Home.<\/p>\n
It dates back to 1989, when Orb\u00e1n, 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 Orb\u00e1n\u2019s return to the prime ministership.<\/p>\n
Hungary\u2019s 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. Orb\u00e1n 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 Orb\u00e1n\u2019s rule will take longer: the judiciary has been packed, the government is a kleptocracy, 80% of the media are owned by Orb\u00e1n\u2019s cronies, and the electoral map has been gerrymandered. But the main interest for non-Hungarians is the possibility that this is a communicable disease.<\/p>\n
Populists all over the place clearly fear that it might be. Orb\u00e1n rose to power when Donald Trump was a property developer, Italy\u2019s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was a junior minister, France\u2019s Marine Le Pen and Britain\u2019s Nigel Farage were fringe
figures, and Germany\u2019s Alice Weidel was a financial consultant. They all found time to offer their support to Orb\u00e1n, and now they are strangely silent. It\u2019s like when your parents die: you realise that it\u2019s now you on the front line.<\/p>\n
When Orb\u00e1n was trailing badly, they pulled all the stops out. Trump, in his fifth intervention in support of Orb\u00e1n in six months, posted \u201cI AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY\u201d, and the vice-president, J.D. Vance, showed up in Budapest on the way to his equally unsuccessful performance in the \u2018peace talks\u2019 in Islamabad.<\/p>\n
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 Orb\u00e1n 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 Orb\u00e1n\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019t cause despair. It\u2019s a protest vote, and it\u2019s not a reliable predictor of what will happen in the general election.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Gwynne Dyer\u2019s new book is Intervention Earth<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, sent a message congratulating his newly-elected counterpart in Hungary, P\u00e9ter Magyar, for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[279,4819,30430,5324,3944,30431],"class_list":{"0":"post-48836","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-donald-tusk","8":"tag-donald-tusk","9":"tag-geopolitics","10":"tag-new-hungary-government","11":"tag-op-ed","12":"tag-populism","13":"tag-the-editorial-board"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116486713068807692","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}