Orbán’s Reign is Over but is Orbánism?

Viktor Orbán’s party has been heavily defeated, in an election with a record turnout of 79%. And, if the victorious candidate, Péter Magyar, is hardly a progressive winner, it is an era-defining election in Hungary and a massive defeat for the far-right. But will his defeat crush the networks of funding to the extreme right which have spiralled out from Hungary for years?

As Laura from Normal Island News put it:

“In a deeply upsetting moment for fascists everywhere, Viktor Orbán’s 16-year reign of terror came to a shuddering halt after his Fidesz party suffered a humiliating landslide defeat in Hungary’s parliamentary elections on Sunday.

The man who turned “illiberal democracy” into a brand was finally shown the door by voters who had grown tired of his strongman act after more than a decade and a half. Trump and Netanyahu are said to be distraught, mourning the loss of the only world leader as open as they are about his contempt for international law.”

The result is also a major blow to the networks of dark-money that has flooded the far-right in Britain, including arch-Unionists such as Nigel Biggar and Douglas Murray.

Much of this brigade of cultural warriors is engaged in a sort of mutilated form of ‘free speech’ advocacy distorted through the lens of patronage and far-right libertarianism, exemplified by Spiked! but seen across the new right.

In 2019 Nigel Biggar organised a conference on the theme of ‘censorship’.with Eric Kaufmann, author of Whiteshift, Populism, Immigration And The Future Of White Majorities, Frank Furedi and Bruce Gilley. For coverage of this event see Gordon Gutheir: These Islands — An Open Letter.

Mathias Corvinus Collegium, NatCon and the Right Wing Media Swamp

Biggar and Murray have been part of the NatCon movement that has been directed out of Hungary for years. What we have seen is the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), the conservative Hungarian educational institution funded by Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government, expanding across Europe with projects in Brussels, Vienna and London.

As Sam Bright of DeSmog has written (‘‘Hard-Right’ NatCon Event Was Organised by Oil Funded Group‘): “MCC is chaired by Balázs Orbán, who is the Viktor Orbán’s political director. The think tank’s board also includes Hungary’s Minister of Culture and Innovation, János Csák. According to the investigative outlet Follow The Money, MCC is conservative, nationalist and Eurosceptic, and “plays a key role in spreading the ideology of the Hungarian government”. Balázs Orbán has said: “It is our goal for Hungary to become an intellectual powerhouse, in which MCC plays a key role.”

The NatCon Brussels (2024) organising committee also featured sociologist Frank Furedi, the executive director of MCC Brussels. Furedi delivered the 2020 annual lecture at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group, on the subject “eco hysteria”. During the lecture, he promoted the fringe claim that politicians and corporations are trying to push civilisation into a “climate lockdown” by reducing individual freedoms.”

In 2022, the writer Ravi Bali noted (‘Ex-Marxist Furedi Joins Racist Authoritarians at CPAC Hungary‘): “Frank Furedi––who was the foremost intellectual of UK radical-left group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, for more than 25 years––has made the transition from revolutionary Marxism into the fold of white-nationalist authoritarianism. Furedi spoke last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, Hungary. CPAC is organised by the American Conservative Union (ACU), the foremost right-wing Republican organisation in the United States.”

These networks have been sustained through intermediaries and find channels and outlets through ‘mainstream’ publishing houses like The Spectator, where Douglas Murray is Associate Editor, and Michael Gove the Editor. In fact, there’s a Scottish contingent to the Spectator’s output with Fraser Nelson pre-dating Gove in the editor’s chair and Alex Massie and Stephen Daisley also gracing its pages. Indeed, the magazine was founded, by the Scot Robert Stephen Rintoul, former editor of the Dundee Advertiser. It’s ironic that there are Scottish journalists at the heart of the publication that is really at the apex of British Nationalism and hard-right influence.

In September 2024, The Spectator was acquired by British hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, owner of UnHerd and co-owner of GB News [I cover some of this here Mapping the British Media].

Douglas Murray, Frank Furedi and Therapy Culture

Douglas Murray came to prominence most recently in November 2023 when a clip was circulated in which he muses that “if the army will not be sent in then the public will have to sort this out themselves and it’ll be very brutal“:

In January 2011, Douglas Murray stated that, in relation to the English Defence League: “If you were ever going to have a grassroots response from non-Muslims to Islamism, that would be how you’d want it, surely.”

His slurs and smears of Humza Yousaf are also well known:

These are the networks at risk by the collapse of Orbán’s Fidesz party. Unsurprisingly, the recipients of Orbán’s largesse are furious. Here Frank Furedi rails against the loss of his benefactor [Why Viktor Orbán lost]:

“The defeat of Orbán and Fidesz represents a major setback for conservative, populist-minded movements in the West. More than any other individual, the now former Hungarian prime minister personified the national-sovereigntist, anti-globalist outlook that has made so much headway over the past decade.”

Furedi’s analysis of Orbán’s defeat is remarkable:

“The main driver of this generational disaffection was the powerful influence exerted on them by Western identity politics and, underpinning it, therapy culture, with its emphasis on victimhood and vulnerability. The influence of therapy culture and the increasing focus on individual psychology and identity have tended to detach young people from the traditional, conservative values of Fidesz. In effect, many young Hungarians hold attitudes closer to those of their Western peers than the older members of their own society.”

Furedi concludes: “Supporters of the government appeared to be oblivious to the fact that they not only were facing a culture war – they were losing it, too.”

It’s not clear that the collapse of the Orbán regime will lead to the disintegration of its networks, many of which are already richly endowed – Dan Nolan at Democracy for Sale has pointed out that “MCC Brussels declared income of more than €6.3 million in 2024” [How Orban Built an Ideological Network in the UK]. But by exposing the funding sources we can begin to map the media networks that have such a malign influence on public life.

Update: Péter Magyar, the new Hungarian prime minister, says CPAC was paid by the Hungarian government and will not be any longer. He has said: The state will not finance these things, neither the event called CPAC nor other related institutions such as the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and similar attached bodies. I believe the state should never have financed them in the first place, it was a crime. Mixing party financing with government spending from the state budget is, in my view, a criminal offense, and this will have to be investigated by the future authorities, including the National Office for the Recovery and Protection of Public Assets, since those budgetary funds were not meant to finance party events. CPAC is welcome to come to Budapest, very welcome, but it should not be financed with Hungarian taxpayers’ money. It should be funded by Fidesz, or by Orbán’s proxies, at least until that money is taken back.