And now Hungary. In a country supposedly so tightly held by its irremovable prime minister, even in this state where the “democrature” has been devised so extensively, a man breaking with the Orbán regime appears to be announcing the rebirth of a political life. Yesterday still unknown, Péter Magyar led an impressive demonstration in Budapest, on Saturday, denouncing the corruption of the authorities and announcing that he would present a list for the European elections in June. This change in the situation is all the more striking given that the exact same thing happened eight days earlier in Turkey.
There either, no one would have bet on the defeat of Recep Erdoğan, and yet the municipal elections have deprived his Justice and Development party of some of the country’s largest cities and even its Anatolian strongholds. In one fell swoop after another, Europe’s two most emblematic illiberal regimes have suddenly found themselves weakened after democrats returned to power in Poland last autumn and, in Great Britain, another “identitarian” right-wing, the Brexit right-wing is dying.
At a time when opinion polls show them making great strides in so many EU countries, the nationalist far rights are finding themselves seriously out of breath in four of the European capitals where they had long enjoyed a political monopoly. This is a complete paradox, but it is merely apparent, because – first conclusion – these forces are by no means immune to the wear and tear of power, which has finally hit them faster than it did the liberal left, centre and right to which they succeeded. Some six decades after the defeat of the Axis, the extreme rights made their comeback, but without signalling the end of the alternation of political power. History does not repeat itself, because while these forces flout all the democratic rules, they have never dared go so far as to break free from elections, which can always – as we can see – send them back into opposition.
However detestable they may be, “democratures” are not straightforward dictatorships. Orbán is not Putin. Nor is Erdoğan, and the second conclusion to be drawn from this weakening of identitarian currents is that there is no incompatibility between Islam and democracy. The Turkish drift towards autocracy had led many to say so, but no, the proof has just been provided in Istanbul, a Muslim people can obviously aspire to the punishment of economic ineptitude and to the respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.
The third conclusion to be drawn from this political sequence – we can see it in Hungary after having seen it in Poland – is that peoples can reject liberalism without rejecting freedom. In Central Europe, the brutality with which liberal parties inspired by Thatcherism had led the transition from a command economy to a market economy had for too long given the upper hand to reactionary forces hostile to the Enlightenment and political liberalism. This was not surprising, but it could not last forever either, for two reasons. The first is that the “shock therapies” of the 1990s are now history, and the second is that the Central European generations coming of age in this new century are increasingly similar to those in the rest of the Union, preferring full freedom to half-dictatorships.
The fourth conclusion to be drawn from these four political moments is that it is not sovereigntist demagoguery that ensures the strength of a country and the pre-eminence of a political current. The Polish PiS was the first to experience this. Viktor Orbán would do well to beware today, and history will remember that the Brexiters have caused Britain’s influence and its economy to shrink as never before.
As for the fifth conclusion to be drawn from this retreat of the “identitarian” right, it is that freedom, those fundamental freedoms of which the European Union is the stronghold, is indeed a universal value that all men share and cherish.
