Following Orban’s defeat in Hungary, his far-right counterpart in neighboring Slovakia finds he has led his country into regional isolation. From Respekt.
“The true significance of historical events is revealed in the relatively rare occurrences that interrupt them,” wrote philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book Vita Activa (The Human Condition).
One such historical process was the establishment of an authoritarian regime in Hungary, and the rare event that revealed its true significance was Viktor Orban’s electoral defeat. It interrupted a process that had seemed irreversible.
The global far right looked to Orban because he had managed to convince them that modern fascism can squeeze itself into democracy and transform it into a dictatorship in which parliamentary elections are merely a power-confirming formality.
Orban had long proclaimed the end of liberal democracy, arguing it had no future in Europe. But now, with his defeat, he has effectively admitted he was wrong.
Steve Bannon, a strategist for the American MAGA movement, sees Orban’s defeat as a “warning flare” that could also threaten Donald Trump if he fails to attend to the needs of his voters.
An even greater disappointment for the far right and Trump, however, must be the grace with which Orban conceded defeat and congratulated the winner. With this gesture, he made it clear that even his own invention of electoral autocracy is subject to the rules of free elections and can fall at any time.
The far right may feel that Orban has betrayed them, seeing as they had pinned their hopes on a platform that left no room for defeat. Now he has not only taken a defeat, but has also admitted it.
The true significance of this historic event – which we might call the Orban experiment – will therefore only become clear later, once the global far-right has processed the shock of this defeat.
Inevitable Decline
Slovakia’s far-right, led by Robert Fico, lacks the intellectual capacity to process Orban’s defeat. The only lesson to be drawn from it is that the public punishes the government for [the country’s] decline and loss of dignity.
As the now-elderly political veteran Romano Prodi (86), who served twice as Italian prime minister and also as president of the European Commission, once said: “If you have a financial crisis, you lose everything.”
The financial crisis cost Orban the election, and Fico is now facing a financial crisis of his own. But he is unable to reverse the decline, and he will not stop denigrating one segment of society, because he doesn’t know how to govern any other way.
Fico may try to follow in Orban’s footsteps, since he apparently can’t think of anything better. So far, however, he has acted so amateurishly that he has not even come close to bringing his power up to the bureaucratic level of Orban’s regime.
He tried to bring the media under his control, following Orban’s example, even though it has now become clear that this didn’t even help Orban. Fico managed to bring only Slovak Television and Radio under his control, but that station is teetering on the brink of irrelevance. So, instead of relying on Orban’s propaganda machine, Fico has to spread his own propaganda on social media.
He failed to subjugate the judiciary, including the Constitutional Court, and even the attorney general began to rebel against him. He failed to control the cultural sector – all he achieved was that it is now loudly resisting him. And he didn’t even attempt to control the education system and universities following Orban’s model, likely because he never understood the soft power of the elites and didn’t strive to cultivate his own.
To Warsaw via Slovakia
Orban lost in part because he was far more interested in building a global far-right base than in tending to his own voter base. He already saw himself as a historical figure who drives the course of history.
Neither Fico nor his people had the intellectual capacity for anything other than following Orban, yet Fico, too, enjoyed playing the role of a world-class politician. Orban’s defeat has robbed him of this pastime, as his helpless isolation within the European Union will no longer be appealing to anyone.
The most telling symbol of his isolation is the announcement by Hungary’s likely future prime minister, Peter Magyar, that his first official trips will be to Warsaw and Vienna (both countries are governed by pro-EU conservatives) and then to Brussels. There was no mention of Bratislava.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk congratulated Magyar on his victory, saying, “I think I am even happier than you.” Magyar will certainly travel to Warsaw for advice on how to quickly shed his predecessor’s political legacy, but above all, he has made it clear that Polish-Hungarian relations will once again be warm and based on a shared awareness of the Russian threat.
After last weekend, Slovakia found itself completely isolated, because all of its neighbors – which are also significantly larger; namely Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Austria, and to a certain extent the Czech Republic – align themselves with Brussels, not Moscow. Fico has led Slovakia into a state of isolation in the heart of Central Europe unlike anything it has ever experienced.
Voters for the ruling coalition could tell themselves that even though they aren’t living well, they can at least be proud of their prime minister, who, together with Orban, is standing up to the liberal oppression of the European Union. But what will they have left now? Pride in an alliance with Vietnam?
For a long time, there was a myth in Slovakia that Robert Fico was a great strategist who never made mistakes. That was always a misconception, but today it is clear that he has put himself in a situation where he can do nothing but make mistakes.
The author is a writer and commentator for the Slovak newspaper Dennik N. This article was originally published in Respekt, the leading Czech newsweekly. Republished by permission. Translated by Jeremy Druker.
