Two of Europe's Right-Wing Leaders Experience Setbacks

Hungary's Orbán is facing a major challenger and the Netherlands' Wilders won't be prime minister

Viktor Orbán and Geert Wilders. Source: Wilders.

Updates on two countries The UnPopulist is keeping an eye on:

David de Bruijn

In early February, I profiled Geert Wilders for The UnPopulist and intimated that the notoriously Islamophobic Dutch firebrand, the man the Netherlands had seemingly chosen as their next prime minister, could have a rough time forming a government. A month later, Wilders publicly announced he was out of the running. His Freedom Party (PVV) had won the most seats in last year’s election, which put Wilders, its leader, in pole position to form a ruling coalition with him as premier. But, in the end, his decades-long track record as a right-wing agitator effectively made him too toxic to entrust with running the government. This wasn’t the judgment of any one individual but of the parties he could not convince to join him in forming a ruling coalition.

It’s hard to blame them. Wilders really would have been quite the departure from Mark Rutte, the current and outgoing prime minister, in every conceivable way. As I wrote:

Mark Rutte, the Netherlands’ prime minister since 2010, is unfailingly upbeat and optimistic: He rides a bicycle to official meetings and personifies the sober-minded and moderate country that until last November’s parliamentary elections Holland was keen to project to the rest of the world. Geert Wilders, the man attempting to replace Rutte as prime minister after his Freedom Party (PVV) secured the most seats in the elections, represents a massive shift away from the pro-European Union, liberal democratic openness that has characterized the Netherlands during Rutte’s tenure, and towards an anti-immigration nationalism consistent with far-right populist movements around the world.

But although it may appear counterintuitive, this is actually a good result for Wilders.

Though Wilders is the longest-serving member of parliament, which suggests he is a political creature through and through, his policy positions and rhetorical style require more “room to breathe” away from power than near it. In order to make himself more palatable to coalition partners, Wilders had been attempting to soften his stances and tone down his rhetoric—so much so that, as I noted in the February piece, it had led to him being called “Geert Milders”—but it always felt unnatural and contrived.

Instead, serving in parliament, though not being prime minister, will provide Wilders with more liberty to maintain his firebrand tone and image. Remember: this is the guy who once proposed a tax on head scarfs, a ban on minarets and the Quran (a book he likened to Mein Kampf), who called Islam “the ideology of a retarded culture,” who tweeted a photoshopped image of a political rival marching with Hamas, who publicly cut one of the stars of the European flag as a demonstration of his wish that the Netherlands exit from the E.U. (“Nexit”).

Despite the similarities with Trump, I had noted that there was one way in which Geert was major difference between the two:

While Trump is a political opportunist whose entire agenda revolves around his boundless narcissism and whose approach to policy is to take positions that’ll get him the most attention, power, and acclaim, Wilders is an ideologue at heart. His deeply held revulsion toward Islam, for example, is neither borne of political calculation nor meaningfully subject to the normal push and pull of political negotiation. In fact, up until the last electoral cycle, Wilders time and again preferred to languish on the margins of political power rather than give up or even soften his Islamophobia. … Wilders remains every bit the anti-Islam ideologue he’s been for decades. Trump, while sharing Wilders’ distaste for Muslim immigration, remains ideologically malleable in a way Wilders could never be.

Of course, Wilders’ concession that he will not be prime minister did not prevent him from milking this moment and lamenting the injustice of it all. “I think it is unfair,” he said. “Just imagine that Mr. Rutte had won the elections and said: ‘Never mind, just let someone else be prime minister.’ I think it's not how things should go in a democracy. But if things can't go as they should, then I suppose they should go as they can.”

It now appears the Netherlands will have its most robustly right-leaning party in decades—though the agreement precludes Wilders from serving as prime minister. Whatever happens, while it’s true that Wilders failing to form a government with him as prime minister is a kind of defeat, in another sense this whole episode has proved Wilders has won. As a Politico write up put it: “Wilders’ party is no longer taboo. In recent years, the Party for Freedom was never in the picture as a governing party despite winning at least 10 percent of the vote since 2010. … Wilders has [now] entered the mainstream.”

Wilders is now in an optimal position to advance his extremist agenda: He has become part of the mainstream enough to be taken seriously but not so much that he has to assume the responsibilities of governing that would inevitably force him to moderate.

H. David Baer

For the first time in a while, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is confronting domestic challenges that his captured state institutions and massive propaganda ministry are unable to control. A pedophilia scandal brought to light earlier this year involving high-ranking figures in Orbán’s party, Fidesz, secretly pardoning and covering up child sexual abuse has rocked his government, denting his carefully curated pro-family image.* The extent of the turmoil for Orbán and Fidesz should become clearer after Hungary holds European and municipal elections on June 9. Fidesz will almost certainly suffer setbacks, but whether they will be serious enough to begin eroding Orbán’s regime is an open question.

The immediate political challenge comes from a new party led by a previously unknown personality, Peter Magyar. A member of the Fidesz elite, he has turned against his former party with a vengeance. Magyar defected three months ago and became an overnight sensation. Buoyed by his instant celebrityhood, Magyar decided to organize a political party to compete in the European and municipal elections.

Whether Magyar would be able to pull that off, however, was far from a foregone conclusion, because only parties registered at the time the election date is set are permitted to run, and Magyar had missed the deadline. But he managed to find a tiny party, registered but completely unheard of, that was willing to give itself over to Magyar’s organization; the party goes by the acronym TISZA, which is also the name of an important river in eastern Hungary that periodically overflows its banks.

Like the rising river, the TISZA party has engulfed Hungarian politics and is moulding lasting changes to the political landscape. According to the most recent polls, TISZA is now the second most popular party in Hungary after Fidesz, registering 24% support among likely voters. Magyar appears to be forging a relatively broad coalition. The majority of his support comes from former voters for the opposition, but he is also activating a large number of passive voters who had dropped out of politics because their participation seemed pointless. And he’s even pulling a sliver of support from disaffected Fidesz voters.

Why has Magyar been able to succeed where other opposition figures have fallen short? In addition to the potency of a scandal that hits at a core aspect of Orbán’s pro-family image, Magyar’s status as a Fidesz defector gives him a unique kind of credibility among voters. They don’t see him as part of the ineffective liberal opposition, but as an authentic alternative. But much of Magyar’s success also has to do with his astounding level of energy. Since launching his campaign, Magyar has been criss-crossing the country ceaselessly, barnstorming not only in bigger cities, but also tiny villages where a prominent Hungarian politician has probably never set foot. This sort of intense campaigning is simply unknown in the Orbán era. On May 5, Magyar held a rally in the eastern city of Debrecen, a Fidesz stronghold, attended by tens of thousands of people, probably the largest political demonstration held outside of Budapest in at least 20 years.

Meanwhile, Orbán and the other members of his party are afraid to appear in public outside carefully controlled circumstances. Orbán’s few campaign stops are with pre-selected audiences, and disclosed to the press only after they are over. Meanwhile, his enormous propaganda machinery has so far proven singularly ineffective at discrediting Magyar. The tone of government media has become so crass and blatantly slanted—worse even than state media in the last decade of communism—that people may have stopped paying attention. An interview Magyar gave with an independent YouTube media channel has been watched 2.5 million times.

The rise of TISZA may prove to be an extinction level event for many of Hungary’s smaller opposition parties, whose voters appear willing to abandon them for a more effective alternative. But simplifying the political landscape might prove a positive development. Hungary’s democratic opposition has been hampered by fragmentation, with five or six parties vying against each other while also trying to coordinate their efforts to defeat Orbán. The elimination of most of those parties would obviate the need for multi-party cooperation, allowing opposition forces to concentrate themselves more effectively.

That Magyar can lead a united opposition capable of bringing down Orbán the next time Hungary holds elections seems unlikely. But his profound disruption of Hungarian politics does reach to the foundations of Orbán’s regime—and may be setting in motion a chain of events the end of which we cannot predict.

*This sentence’s earlier language made it seem like it was Orbán who made the pardon—but it was Hungary’s president. We have fixed the sentence and regret the error.

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