A Full English Orbán and a Cup of Sovereign Tea

Hungary, the UK, and the Rise of Zombie Democracies

                       

   

A lot has been written over the last decade about the imminent death of democracy under the impact of right-wing populism.  Such predictions tend to describe an incremental process of democratic degradation, culminating in the final triumph of autocracy and dictatorship.  

But this isn’t necessarily how things work. Democracy doesn’t need to die a final death in order to become an instrument of tyranny or the ‘tyranny of the majority’. It is perfectly possible for even the most authoritarian governments to maintain the façade of democracy even as they wield near-absolute power.

For some rulers, it can be beneficial to do this. By allowing the trappings of democracy such as opposition parties, ‘free’ elections, referendums, and open political competition and debate, astute leaders can gain a popular legitimacy that they haven’t really earned, and allow the opposition to participate in the semblance of a political process that is rigged in favour of the ruling party.

Rather than a final ‘death’ of democracy, such procedures pave the way for through the creation of zombie democracies, that have been so hollowed out, manipulated and degraded that they lack any meaningful ability to challenge or change the governments that permit them.

This is the strategy that Putin has pursued in the Russian Federation, albeit with a persistent level of low-intensity state violence and terror that other equally authoritarian leaders don’t necessarily rely on. 

Most of the new generation of populist governments have concentrated on merely hollowing out democratic institutions rather than terrorising or destroying the opposition, and the most successful exponent of the zombie democracy model is Hungary’s Victor Orbán, whose ruling Fidesz party won a crushing electoral victory against a coalition of right, left and centre parties on Sunday, after twelve years in power.

No one will be surprised that Orbán received fulsome congratulations from the likes of Donald Trump, Arron Banks, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and Mateo Salvini.  Orbán has long been lionised by conservatives and the far-right for his belligerent nationalism, his hostility to the European project, and his presentation of Hungary as an illiberal Christian ‘bastion’ against a range of enemies that include refugees, migrants, European bureaucrats and racial and sexual minorities.

One government that didn’t offer its congratulations was our own, even though Boris Johnson invited Orbán to Downing Street last year.  Johnson’s reluctance to sing his praises now may be due to the very different positions taken up by the UK and Hungary in the Ukraine war, and Johnson’s need to remain more or less onside with NATO and the EU, at least for the time being.

The UK’s silence should not be construed as criticism.  Because there is very little that Orbán has done in Hungary that the Conservative Party, particularly under Johnson, hasn’t done or tried to do in the UK.

Control of the media? Check. Admittedly, this is not a particularly challenging task in a country where most of the mainstream press is overtly Tory or will always support the Tories in a clinch, and the state broadcaster is dominated at the upper levels by Tory placemen, and generally errs on the side of caution when it comes to criticising the government.

That hasn’t stopped the Tories for attacking the BBC for its ‘bias’ simply for mentioning things it doesn’t want mentioned. Johnson’s donkey-brained culture secretary Nadine Dorries has threatened to remove the BBC’s license fee. And this week Dorries announced the forthcoming privatisation of Channel 4 – a decision that even the Tory MP Julian Knight, the chairman of the Commons digital, culture, media and sport Committee, suggested might be ‘payback’ for supposed ‘personal attacks’ on Boris Johnson from Channel 4 News.

This inability to tolerate critical voices may owe something to Johnson’s personal vindictiveness, but the privatisation of Channel 4 is straight out of the Orbán playbook.  In today’s world you don’t need to subject the media to state censorship; you simply have to make sure that as many media outlets as possible are owned or regulated by your mates and supporters.

This is what Orbán has done, and Johnson and his cronies are clearly looking to do the same. The similarities don’t end there. Redrawing of electoral boundaries? Snap.  Bypassing parliament, weakening courts and hobbling the electoral regulator?  Been there, done that, whether attacking ‘lefty lawyers’, Brexit ‘proroguing’ of parliament, post-Brexit ‘Henry VIII clauses’, suppressing or limiting the scope of parliamentary reports that are harmful to the government, or engaging in systematic lying that has exposed the limitations of the UK’s old boys club parliamentary norms.

Victor Orbán has a long history of losing opposition voters and finding new voters. In 2011 Orban passed a law granting citizenship to more than 1.1 million ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring countries, most of whom have voted for Fidesz.

The Johnson government isn’t able to just conjure up voters abroad, but in January this year it included compulsory photo ID in its Elections Bill, thereby potentially removing millions of mostly non-Tory voters from voting because they don’t have passports or driving licenses. 

The UK’s Nationality and Borders Bill is as harsh as anything that has come out of Hungary, enabling the government to strip British citizens of their nationality and override the law of the sea in dealing with cross-channel migrant crossings. In some ways the UK has gone further than Hungary, in its new bill criminalising the right to protest – a fundamental democratic right that even the authoritarian democracies of Europe’s ‘new east’ have not prohibited.

No populist government is exactly the same, but all of them – even Russia – have used the new nationalist identity politics and ‘anti-woke’ culture wars as instruments of divide and rule. Orbán has made these ‘battles’ a central component of Hungary’s ‘Christian’ identity against an array of internal and external enemies that include migrants and refugees, ‘globalist’ proponents of multiculturalism and liberalism such as George Soros’s Open Society, in addition to Hungary’s Roma and LGBTQ communities.

In his election campaign, Orban made a great deal of political capital as a defender of the traditional family – a message that appears to have gone down well in conservative rural Hungary.

Once again, the Johnson government has fought on the same terrain.  Despite its reluctant concession regarding Ukrainian refugees, the savage anti-refugee policies introduced by the Tory government are designed to appeal to migrant ‘invasion’ narratives that were already in circulation even before Brexit.

The Tory obsession with ‘wokeness’, and with battles over statues and history appeal to the same notion of a ‘traditional’ British identity that Orbán has skilfully exploited in dealing with socially conservative Hungarian voters.

Like most populists, Orbán has persistently evoked nostalgic memories of lost Magyar ‘greatness’ before Hungary’s territorial losses as a result of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.  Here, such nostalgia revolves around ‘Empire 2.0’ fantasies of a post-Brexit Global Britain. Johnson’s recent intervention in the debate on transgender rights and his flirtation with ‘conversion therapy’ suggest that these themes are likely to become an ever-more prevalent part of Tory culture war messaging in the coming months.

Johnson’s reputation as a serial libertine and a social liberal might not make him the ideal leader to take on Orbán’s role as the defender of the traditional family against the multicultural, gender-erasing hordes, but don’t put it past him to at least make the attempt.

Given the enormity of the defeat inflicted on Hungary’s opposition, these similarities might lead to some depressing conclusions, when thinking about the next UK election. Should we imagine a future in which Boris Johnson and his government-of-the-damned smirks in our faces forever? Not necessarily.

A Tory victory in the next election is not inevitable. For one thing Orbán is far more ideologically coherent than Johnson, and his governments have been far more effective.  Like the Tories, Fidesz has been in power for twelve years, and in that time, he has been able to create a far more effective model of populist economics than anything the Tories have been able to do.

Fidesz has channelled money to its favoured constituencies, kept prices on key commodities down in the run up to the election, handed out tax cuts to ‘traditional’ families, and established a clientelist system of government in which many Hungarians have been prepared to accept brazen corruption in return for some state intervention in their communities.

Johnson has made some steps in this direction, most notably in the cash allocations to Tory-voting communities under his former housing minister Bent Bob Jenrick, but these practices are nowhere near as institutionalised as they are in Hungary.  Orbán has at least attempted to protect the Hungarian population from the post-Covid/Ukraine economic fallout, if only for the sake of his electoral campaign.

Johnson’s government, by contrast, has more or less abandoned the British population to fend for themselves in the face of the steepest fall in living standards since records began. These are failings that an astute and principled opposition that can exploit, assuming it can offer concrete alternatives and avoid the culture war traps that might distract from them. 

The Hungarian opposition was an unlikely and politically unwieldy coalition of the supposedly reformed far-right party Jobbik, leftists and social democrats. Were UK opposition parties to form some kind of alliance, they should be able to work together far more effectively, whether this efforts are limited to tactical voting or a governing coalition.

Both Orbán and Johnson have gained politically from the Ukraine war. Where Orbán has lent towards Putin and presented himself as the leader who can keep Hungary out of the war, Johnson has been cosplaying Churchill and supporting Ukraine.

Where Orbán has been strengthened domestically, Johnson remains vulnerable.  His lackeys might dismiss the tawdriness of partygate as ‘fluff’, but millions of voters see these parties – and the persistent lying that followed – as an affront to any notion of fairness, decency and governmental accountability.  This cannot be papered over, particularly as millions of these same voters are now facing a truly dire economic situation – exacerbated by Brexit – for which the government has no solution.

So it is possible, however difficult, to defeat this awful government, and we need to do it. Because otherwise British democracy will stagger on, not dead but permanently dying, becoming more and more corrupted and incapable of meeting the needs of its population, hollowed out and manipulated by a conservative party that no longer conserves anything except itself.

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