This article was published in Vol. 4 No. 2 of our print edition.

It may be pointless to attempt tracing when exactly our socio-political imaginary turned this unsettled, but ever since that fateful hinge, all received wisdom on our fundamental public truths seems in perma-flux, with new suppositions heralded as truisms before turning veritably axiomatic. This Protean state of indefiniteness is nowhere on clearer display than in our liquified left-and-right divide around the weakening of the nation-state and the sundry shapes of post-national governance in its wake. No longer is old-school chauvinism an electoral liability in transnational races—if it ever truly was. Instead, it is spurring parties of the euro-sceptic right to amalgamate their sovereigntist platforms even across ethno-linguistic boundaries. This emergent ‘take back control’ bloc may have once deemed beyond repair the hemicycles, backrooms, and pulpits that populate the EU bubble. Less than two decades ago, these loci of supranational power in Brussels and Strasbourg may have seemed, to this crowd, ripe for dismantling. Yet the movement’s current leaders are now devising shared strategies to conquer them, re-signify them, and subvert their purpose. Literarily inspired by our American allies, we at the Budapest-based Center for Fundamental Rights (CFR) have taken to describing this mission as ‘draining the swamp’.

Never had this paradigm shift been closer to completion than ahead of this year’s European legislative elections on 9 June. Nowhere has it been on clearer display than on 25 and 26 April in Budapest, at the third edition of our Center’s flagship annual event, the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC Hungary, the first and only offshoot of the eponymous conservative jamboree to convene on European soil. Leaders of every shade of this coalescing national-conservative front descended on Millenáris Park—the first time the event was not held in the whale-shaped Bálna venue on the Danube riverbank—with several goals in mind. They swapped notes on their varied approaches to a race for parliamentary euro-seats that will nonetheless be waged along national battle lines. Through pull-aside meetings, side chats, and toasts, they even boasted of extra-continental affinities with leaders from latitudes as remote as Paraguay and South Africa. Most relevant to the vexed journalists who again justified their smearing campaign by alleging they were denied passes,¹ these leaders outlined what euro-policies they seek to change through what every news outlet—even the vexed ones—is predicting will be an unprecedented right-wing majority in the European Parliament.²

The event’s European contingent was joined by sovereigntists from across the globe, not least Donald J. Trump’s GOP, whose ties to Hungary’s Fidesz have supplied endless journalistic fodder about the American right’s alleged mimetic descent into illiberalism,³ and who relayed its support through the former President’s video-message, along with speeches by Congressmen Andy Harris, Keith Self, and Paul Gosar. Yet this synchronized worldwide scheme to wrestle power away from unaccountable overlords will take Brussels as its opening salvo before moving towards further horizons. The event was fashioned as a campaign mega-rally encompassing the European Parliament (EP)’s two surging right-wing groups—the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID)—and the ostracized Hungarian grouping (Fidesz) they have both offered to incorporate. The customary holdouts from the right-of-centre European People’s Party (EPP) were welcome, as were some heterodox outliers from the Socialists & Democrats (former Czech PM Andrej Babiš was reprimanded by the liberal ALDE group for attending last year).⁴ If a new, right-tilting majority in Brussels and Strasbourg is followed by Trump’s return to the Oval Office come 2025, the former will be seen as having augured the latter (much as Brexit prefigured Trump’s first win in 2016),⁵ a transatlantic concatenation of events whose initial stirrings will be traceable back to our very own CPAC.

The pan-Western scope for which CPAC Hungary has come to be known was on even plainer display this year as the event’s guest list and speaker roster enlarged significantly into the southern half of the Western Hemisphere. Key US lawmakers and opinion-shapers appeared again, from Jack Posobiec to Gavin Wax, but so did virtually every country south of the Rio Grande see its delegation expanded. Spain, culturally straddling the two hemispheres, sent Vox President Santiago Abascal, whose party has put the revitalization of Hispanicity (Hispanidad) front and centre of its alliance-building. His presence was even more significant as Spain’s proto-authoritarian left-wing ruler, PM Pedro Sánchez, had earlier taken five days off to mull his retirement over a ballooning scandal involving his wife’s influence peddling and corruption. Sánchez was soon back enacting the would-be tin pot tyrant’s playbook, but Abascal’s speech raised much-needed awareness about the country he is hoping to reclaim.

Other members of this increasingly dynamic magyaro-iberic network of intellectual and political exchange on the right came, too. Chile’s José Antonio Kast, who fell short of defeating neo-Marxist President Gabriel Boric two years ago and is still reeling from a disorienting constituent process, pledged to return in two years’ time, having taken over from ‘the region’s Wokest leader’, and even travelled south the next day, to Hungary’s frontier with Serbia, to draw lessons on border management for the migratory stampede currently overwhelming his own country. Colombia’s María Fernanda Cabal took significant risks by attending, too, as her country rose up during that very week against the Marxist former guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro, whose son laundered vast sums to fund his presidential campaign two years ago, and who just imperilled the country’s armed forces and intelligence services by breaking ties with Israel. Eduardo Bolsonaro warned of the São Paulo Forum’s adeptness at fashioning regimes that trumpet false accusations against their opposition, a juristocracy that Lula da Silva is pioneering in Brazil against supporters of Eduardo’s father—and is already being imported by other such rulers in Bolivia and Nicaragua. Argentina’s Javier Milei sent the young lawmaker Agustín Romo, while President Santiago Peña from Paraguay, the closest thing to a Hungary in Latin America, sent Speaker of the House Raúl Latorre and Senator Gustavo Leite. This beefed-up presence of the Iberosphere came at a time when the Euro-American right looks worriedly to the friendly Western nations of Ibero-America where Bolivarian socialism has kept making undemocratic and violent inroads since the fateful year of 2022, when several of these countries were subsumed by a ‘new pink tide’. On 20 March, our Center opened its first office beyond Hungary’s borders, in Madrid, with the aim of helping our local partners halt that advance.⁶

Part of this transnational sublimation of nationalism is reflexive. The Western European left, though long suspicious of pan-European institutions for bypassing democratic checks to impose wage-undercutting free trade, free movement of capital, and market-driven globalization, was hardly ever skittish about forming robust networks of cross-border cooperation—either of the social-democratic variant or the euro-communist sort—to arrest this neoliberal co-option. The chasm remains open between old-school leftists yearning to snatch the supranational project away from the shackles of global capital and those resigned to the impossibility of that uncoupling in favour of a sovereigntist project of national-democratic restoration. It is unlikelier than ever to be closed, as the material concerns that ultimately drove the old-school left in either direction have become overshadowed by a sweeping agenda of social and cultural liberalism more easily legislated through supranational conduits, much as neoliberalism concomitantly appeared a harder national sell to the allies of big capital when it began its advance. The new left is keener to view challenges in a post-national framing—the rights of asylum-seekers, sexual minorities, or the climate, say—and to react in kind, by forging transnational fronts to legislate ‘solutions’ that lack popular consent. This was largely the focus of this year’s CPAC, where the slogan—and unifying raison d’être—was to mount a worldwide front of ‘wokebusters’ ready to ‘drain the swamp’.

‘This Protean state of indefiniteness is nowhere on clearer display than in our liquified left-and-right divide around the weakening of the nation-state and the sundry shapes of post-national governance in its wake’

This does not reveal whether this new left is now persuaded that its prescriptions can be implemented democratically at the supranational level, for the stubborn impossibility of enacting them with popular consent at the national level could similarly be at fault. It may not be persuaded of much when it comes to political theory, but the left’s deliberate choice to bypass the nation—and thus any real pretence of self-government—is not a bug, but a feature. In either case, it views an insulated and unaccountable Brussels-based Leviathan as a reliable conduit for its agenda, thereby leapfrogging the petty constraints imposed by retrograde publics. This could be accurately defined as the progressive ‘U-turn on globalization’,⁷ but a fairer term would be the ‘left-globalist pincer movement’: whereas globalizing policy diktats were formerly a bitter pill imposed from above, now the same channels are being cleared for a cultural-progressive version of a not dissimilar philosophy.

Where do the left’s mutations leave its opponents? In the case of the nominally opposing parties of the legacy right-of-centre, somewhere between mimesis and mimicry. Running athwart their erstwhile canonical Christian Democratic principles of subsidiarity and a spiritually infused yet politically constricted European project confined to prosperity-unleashing economic cooperation, the European People’s Party’s (EPP) leading factions have embraced not just the left’s progressive agenda, but also the method of shoving it down the electorate’s throat through eurocratic backchannels. This opens the door to the nation-bounded right, in its struggle against the supranational uniparty, to be rallied by forces who may not see eye to eye on the substance of its counter-agenda, but who oppose the other side’s method—cue the centrists and old-school leftists who attended, or were tempted but ultimately dissuaded from attending, CPAC. The transnational response to the federalization of Europe has been brewing for a while, and when it finally materializes, it may turn out to be trans-ideological, too.

What was once the chief roadblock to this transnational fusion is fast becoming the chief reason why that fusion—now revealed to be inevitable—is notorious and merits pondering. The war in Ukraine has unearthed the potential for armed conflict to re-anchor nationalist parties in the primordial aversions and loyalties of traditional chauvinist politics. The inaugural CPAC Hungary, held in 2022, mere months after Russia’s invasion, under the motto ‘God, Homeland, Family’, inauspiciously turned into the theatre of the much-hyped Polish–Hungarian breakup, a respectful but profound parting of ways between Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and Poland’s Law & Justice Party (PiS), recently voted out of office.⁸ The two previously natural allies, cooperation between which had turned the Visegrád Group (V4) bloc into a keystone EU sub-forum, bound further by the mutual admiration of their former anti-communist dissident leaders—soon realized that national interest far precedes any pan-European ideological affinities.

The following year’s event deepened the rift, not least when the organizers placed freezing the conflict on par with defunding gender-theory deanships, restoring parental rights in education, and protecting borders, in their triadic motto: ‘no gender, no migration, no war’ (the pro-Ukraine PiS delegation had slimmed down to near-naught by then, and other members of the PiS-dominated ECR may have felt similarly discomfited). Donald Tusk’s minoritarian victory late last year in Poland, and his ensuing vendetta against PiS, have somewhat begun to thaw ties, even as the war approaches a standstill. This year’s CPAC pushed the defrosting even further, as pro-peace and anti-Russia enthusiasts are being unwittingly pushed to meet in the middle by the conflict’s sheer dynamic. Poland turned out to be the largest delegation to the conference, including speeches by former PM Mateusz Morawiecki, ECR Vice-President Radosław Fogiel and MEP Patryk Jaki. No longer is the ‘pro-Putin’ smear so easily thrown at Hungary for inserting financial transparency mechanisms to ensure the European aid indeed goes to Ukraine’s war effort, for demanding tougher anti-corruption measures from Kyiv, and for insisting on linguistic rights for Transcarpathia’s ethnic Magyar minority. Conversely, the anti-Russia hawkishness of the Polish-led wing of the euro-right is being subjected to a test of feasibility—even if NATO member states jacked up their spending to 2 per cent overnight, would that suffice to roll back Russia?—and questions are arising as to a potential freezing of the conflict.

Whereas the same ‘pro-Russian’ label the anti-Orbán press has already affixed on this latest edition of CPAC hardly survives a five-minute Google search of the speakers, there is another constellation of epithets around which the group has more easily cohered, though not in the self-identificatory manner the media speculated, but rather in unanimous rejection. The labels revolve around ‘illiberal’ but have grown to encompass such absurdities as ‘anti-humanist’ or even ‘fascist’. James Q. Whitman, a Yale law professor writing at the Los Angeles Times last year, went so far as to compare CPAC Hungary to Benito Mussolini’s efforts to create a fascist international in the late 1920s, claiming ‘we badly need some way to get rid of Orbán’.⁹ David Pressman, the chief catalyst of American interference in Hungarian elections as US ambassador in Budapest, is already well ahead on that plan.¹⁰

‘Hitler was tragedy’, Professor Whitman wrote, ‘whereas Orbán—destructive as he is—is farce’.¹¹ Yale Law School may wish to reassess its policy on sanctioning Holocaust trivializers on its faculty. But the innuendos of anti-Semitism that are often wrapped into these unrigorous parallels with Nazism, for a country with Europe’s most effective policy of fighting Jew-hatred, fell even flatter this year. Rabbi Slomó Köves gave his customary blessing to the event, along with a Catholic priest and a Calvinist pastor in CPAC’s routinely ecumenical fashion, while Israeli ministers Amichai Chikli and Gila Gamliel commended the Western right’s no-tolerance policy towards anti-Semitism or pro-Hamas apologia of any kind, two ills close to being rooted out from mainstream Hungarian society.

The weaponization of the ‘rule of law’ for political point-scoring—the rhetorical grift underlying the ‘illiberal’ label—is a different matter, however. Although the fiction that Budapest is being subjected to financially punitive clauses solely on rule-of-law grounds is beginning to crumble as the EU Commission adds Hungary’s child protection law to the chopping block of its conditionality mechanism, this year’s CPAC was yet another occasion for the anti-Orbán media to posit that the prime minister is exporting not just conservative policy substance but also a way to legislate it, a playbook to undermine democratic checks, minority rights, and the independent judiciary. This sounded funny—‘farcical’, in Whitman’s terms—to attendees from parties fighting serious, endemic corruption and rule-of-law violations in their respective countries, such as in Spain and Portugal, without the slightest help from Brussels—or Whitman.

This points to CPAC’s main potential contribution, not just as an electoral stomping ground, but also to the ongoing theoretical dispute across the West around the fate of nations and the role of ideologies. Prime Minister Orbán predicted that the election of a new EU legislature and Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office will usher in a new era of sovereignty, cultural renewal, and peace. He urged the attendees to ‘saddle up, don our armor, take to the battlefield, and let the electoral battle begin!’,¹² as his party has been doing on four consecutive occasions in the past fourteen years. His keynote also warned his allies lacking governing experience, however, about what ruling along conservative lines is really like in the twenty-first century, based on his challenging, but altogether successful, experience. Protecting the innocence of children against efforts to sexualize them, upholding the legality of borders and asylum procedures, and safeguarding the right of states to exercise national sovereignty in areas where it remains their legal prerogative: pursuing these aims is no bed of roses, as Orbán can attest first-hand. It exposes one to media disinformation, financial blackmail, and attacks on one’s personal honour. Hungary is the tell-tale sign that legal norms and moral niceties have fallen prey to corrosive ideologies, but other would-be leaders who attended CPAC this year and were inspired by its statesmanlike example should not be fooled. If they win, they are next.

NOTES

1 Sebastian Murdock, ‘U.S. Journalists Denied Entry to CPAC in Hungary’, Huffington Post (20 May 2022), www.huffpost.com/entry/us-journalists-denied-entry-to-cpac-in-hungary_n_6287b162e4b05cfc268ba1ba.

2 Eddy Wax, and Sergey Goryashko, ‘EU Election 2024: New Poll Shows Right-wing Populist Surge’, Politico (24 January 2024), www.politico.eu/article/right-wing-populist-surge-eu-election-policy/.

3 Nick Schifrin, and Ethan Dodd, ‘Hungary’s Orbán Gives Trump an “Illiberal” Roadmap for American Conservatives’, PBS NewsHour, (8 March 2024), www.pbs.org/newshour/show/hungarys-orban-gives-trump-an-illiberal-roadmap-for-american-conservatives.

4 ‘ALDE Party Bureau statement on the participation of Mr Babiš at CPAC event,’ ALDE Party, www.aldeparty.eu/alde_party_bureau_statement_on_the_participation_of_ mr_babi_at_cpac_event, accessed 2 May 2024.

5 Ronald F. Inglehart, and Pippa Norris, ‘Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash’, Social Science Research Network (2016), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2818659.

6 Edgardo Pinell, ‘Los conservadores de Hungría y España se unen para “hacer a Occidente grande otra vez”’, El Debate (20 March 2024), www.eldebate.com/internacional/20240320/conservadores-hungria-espana-unen-hacer-occidente-grande-otra-vez_183513.html.

7 Jorge González-Gallarza, ‘The Left’s About-Face on Globalization’, Newsweek (25 January 2023), www.newsweek.com/lefts-about-face-globalization-opinion-1775907.

8 Flóra Garamvölgyi, ‘Viktor Orbán Tells CPAC the Path to Power Is to “Have Your Own Media”’, The Guardian (20 May 2022), www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/20/viktor-orban-cpac-republicans-hungary.

9 James Q. Whitman, ‘American Conservatives’ Pilgrimage to Hungary Is a Joke’, Los Angeles Times (19 May 2022), www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-19/cpac-hungary-viktor-orban-international-far-right-conservative-movement.

10 John Woods, ‘Biden Administration Interfering in Hungary’s 2022 General Elections, Says Hungarian Deputy State Secretary’, Daily News Hungary (26 October 2021), https://dailynewshungary.com/biden-administration-interfering-in-hungarys-2022-general-elections/.

11 Whitman, ‘American Conservatives’ Pilgrimage to Hungary Is a Joke’.

12 ‘Speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the Opening of the CPAC Hungary Conference’, Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister, 25 April 2024, https://miniszterelnok.hu/en/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-at-the-opening-of-the-cpac-hungary-conference-2024-04-26/.