In the spring of 2010, in Hungary, a right-wing coalition won a massive victory in the general election. Was it a mere electoral episode on the fringes of the depoliticised West? Certainly not. It was an epochal change for Hungary and the affirmation from the centre of Europe of a new political thought of continental dimension.
Fidesz and its allies obtained a two-thirds majority in Parliament, which allowed the adoption the following year of a new constitution—the cornerstone of the post-liberal state that still needed to be named. For Viktor Orbán, president of Fidesz and leader of the national-conservative camp, it was a dazzling revenge. Prime minister from 1998 to 2002, he revised his political project during eight years on the opposition benches. He is no longer the young anti-communist dissident or neophyte of the 1990s, but a head of state with a mature political vision and a strategy forged by study and experience.
Since 2022, Fidesz has served its fourth consecutive term in office with a constitutional two-thirds majority in Parliament. These repeated electoral successes make it the democratic expression of contemporary Hungary and pave the way for an alternative to the liberal model in crisis. Over the years, Hungary has provided an example of national development at odds with current European norms. The law is an adjunct to political sovereignty. The country’s economic development is extending the state authorities’ room for manoeuvre. National identity is enthusiastically and methodically celebrated in tandem with European civilisation. The traditional family is protected. And yet Hungary is a member of the European Union (EU), with a host of international commitments hanging over its head. What are the secrets of Hungary’s strategy? The book by Balázs Orbán (no relation to Viktor Orbán), The Hungarian Way of Strategy, reveals just what they are.
Balázs Orbán is not just a connoisseur of Hungarian politics. At 37, he is a rising star in Hungarian politics and has established himself as one of the prime minister’s closest advisers. A lawyer and political scientist by training, Balázs Orbán worked at the Ministry of Justice in 2012 and at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) from 2015 before becoming chairman of its board of trustees in 2020. Since 2018, Balázs Orbán has played a role in the executive, and since August 2021, he has been the prime minister’s political director—a coordinating task at the top of the decision-making chain.
After being translated from Hungarian to English, The Hungarian Way of Strategy is now published in French. What can it offer the French reader? The purpose of this preface is to evaluate it.
Under the barometer of the “global village”
A considerable difference in size makes a strict comparison between the political strategies of Hungary and France awkward. On the one hand, a country that is truncated and landlocked in the Carpathian basin; on the other, the exceptional position of the hexagon and a presence on five continents. Metropolitan France is six times larger and seven times more populous than Hungary. The gap is even greater in economic terms, with France’s nominal GDP in 2022 being 17 times greater than Hungary’s (only 1.33 times greater per capita in purchasing power parity). This quantitative gap conceals profound differences in the structure of the economy and society, as well as in the main representations that shape the imagination of the two peoples. To understand the propitious relationship between France and Hungary requires a fresh look at the past and at the immense perils of our near future.
Using the metaphor of breathing can help see obvious analogies between the two countries. Different organisms are subjected to the same ambient air. The common challenge of a political strategy is to breathe in a stifling time and under overwhelming international pressure. France and Hungary are caught in the same circumstances. The Hungarian strategy reveals the mysteries of an identity metabolism capable of oxygenating the people despite a vitiated atmosphere.
There has been an undeniable convergence between Paris and Budapest since the end of the Cold War and the integration of Central Europe into the Atlantic bloc. Hungary joined the EU in 2004 and, in an unprecedented way, returned to the traditional Western orientation from which it had been excluded by the Yalta Conference in 1945. Above all, the EU has been establishing a kind of continental unity through its institutions and an integrated economic area. A bland commercial mollusc has replaced the nationalist-riddled Europe of the first half of the 20th century and the American-Soviet joint dominion of the second half.
In this context, every nation runs the risk of dissolving into a post-national, American-inspired model with a globalist vocation. The nations of Europe are taking their cue from their metropolises and becoming Americanised: a country is defined as a land of permanent immigration, an indigenous people has no value other than as folklore or transitoriness, society exists only in terms of the individual guided by his own self-interest, and the meaning of history is identified with economic development without end or respite.
Parallel lives
Although France and Hungary share a common European civilisation, they are not evolving in the same timeframe. France is often unaware of its greatness as Central Europe still perceives it: France is the ‘great nation.’ It was at the genesis of the mediaeval world and then at the forefront of modern developments. While constantly asserting itself, it is also constantly surpassing itself. More than any other nation, France makes history. The Frankish royalty founded Western Christendom and shifted Europe’s centre of gravity from south to north. Half a millennium after Clovis, the Hungarians established their country as a kingdom within the Roman Catholic order. They joined what the Franks had founded: Europe.
From the Renaissance onwards, the national identity asserted itself at the same time as the denominational unity of the West disintegrated. Among the vernacular languages, the language of Paris became the classical idiom, replacing Latin. In the 18th century, the intellectual upheavals that were shaking Europe’s conscience found their most accomplished expression in France. Finally, with the Revolution of 1789, France undid what it had begun with the baptism of Clovis: the legitimacy of power no longer came from heaven but from the people. Here again, France was the instigator of a paradigm shift for the whole of Europe. This immense prestige makes the French decline all the more spectacular. The main paradox lies in the combined rise and fall of the people. After having crowned twenty-five million subjects as a sovereign people, France projected itself externally, championing universal rights that had little to do with the historical community that the kings had brought together over the centuries. The universality of the French language was matched by the universality of the French person.
In Hungary, on the other hand, the fear of disappearing and the awareness of a strong particularism maintain a national identity that is less permeable to the spells of universalism. The Kingdom of Hungary entered the European order around the year 1000 and quickly established itself as a major power in Christendom. It continued its efforts to establish itself when France was shaken by the Hundred Years’ War. In the second half of the 15th century, the reign of Matthias Corvinus can be compared to that of Philippe le Bel in France a century and a half earlier. It was the same assertion of royal power, the same point of equilibrium in the society of order, the same fragile apogee. But in 1526, the defeat at Mohács at the hands of the Ottoman Empire shattered Hungary: it would no longer be a great power and would share the fate of other vulnerable Central European nations. However, the Magyars successfully repelled Austrian absolutism, the main threat after the expulsion of the Turks at the end of the 17th century. The Hungarian nobility defended its national freedoms with its privileges and obtained a large measure of autonomy as part of the Austro-Hungarian compromise established in 1867. After the sumptuous half-century of the Dual Monarchy, Hungary suffered defeat in the two world wars of the 20th century, had its territory carved up under the Treaty of Trianon, and was subjected to communism during the Cold War.
For a thousand years, the Hungarian language has expressed the originality of a culture and the permanence of a nation. At the same time as they were taming the Greek, Roman, and Christian legacies, the Hungarians introduced the Magyar specificity into European civilisation. More than any other country, Hungary combines belonging to Europe with maintaining its own uniqueness. There is allegiance and resistance, both absorption of European elements and resorption of these neighbouring and related elements by the creative and persistent national genius. An ability to ‘Magyarise’ Europe is as much a way of proposing a local solution as an exercise in collective responsibility and freedom—a way of creating a nation, of creating Europe, in the most laudatory and accurate sense of the term.
Far from abdicating its national destiny over the last five centuries, Hungary has forged it through setbacks and lulls. At the end of the Cold War, when communism and Russian domination faded with one movement, a historic opportunity arose for the countries of the dislocated Soviet glacis. A kairos that the young Viktor Orbán immediately seized when he called for the departure of the Red Army on June 16, 1989.
Setting the pace
The prerequisite for a national renaissance has been to grasp the meaning of the historic shift of 1990. Indeed, the political order currently being developed in Hungary is based, above all, on a generational phenomenon. Young people are not only free from the yoke of communism but also free to seize their chance and steer the course of national history. Nothing was gained during the twenty years of interregnum. Fidesz had a liberal streak in its early days and was opposed to communism. In 1993, however, Viktor Orbán forced his party to take a national-conservative turn, and it lost many of its supporters. The dominant expression of post-communist youth was to be found among the liberals of the SZDSZ (Alliance of Free Democrats). They chose to join forces with the Socialists, heirs to the Communist Party, and entered government in 1994. At the time, national history seemed to be coming to terms with the communist legacy and taking on the mantle of Western globalism. The right-wing coalition led by Viktor Orbán, which won the 1998 elections, was of the opposite persuasion. The 35-year-old prime minister lacked the resources, experience, and radicalism. He lost power four years later without having significantly altered the country’s course. The negligence of the Liberal-Socialist governments and the difficult international situation led to the tidal wave of 2010. It was not just the outgoing government that was defeated, but everything it represented.
The national spirit has persisted through hostility to the communist system, and Fidesz has established itself as the great national force resisting the foreign steamroller. Like a seed buried in the ground, the stubborn refusal of several generations has enabled the people to reclaim their history. The conservative elite is taking ownership of the national narrative and setting itself up as a legitimate necessity. They see themselves as the generation of recovery, destined to be the foundation of a new century; it is up to them to prevail in the name of a thousand years of Hungarian history.
The breath of the people
A lucid observer of a Europe in dormancy, Dominique Venner, noted as early as 1990 what the collapse of the Eastern bloc made possible. The words of this meditative historian, taken from his Carnets rebelles are worth quoting:
The great movement that is exploding in Eastern Europe is not, as Western socialists pretend to believe, an aspiration towards a kind of social democracy as a substitute for communism. It is a fundamental movement, a sort of national-conservative revolution. The popular uprising that is developing signifies something else, which is not a ‘victory for liberalism’ either, as others would like to see. It is a movement that combines the rejection of the socialist lie, the fundamental demand for national identity, the reawakening of cultures, and religious sentiment. The movement that is emerging and does not yet have a name repudiates both liberalism and socialism. It is a return to the roots of the people. It is not from the West that help will come to the great freedom-supporting national uprising, but from this uprising itself, and it is this uprising that will perhaps help the West to free itself from its own lies and its own servitudes.
Once again, it’s a question of breath. The balance of power is akin to headwinds in the tumult of history. The prevailing wind does not blow alone; if it weakens, another takes over. Since the communist storm from Moscow died down, the struggle has been between the liberal-socialist Western wind and a local wind described as national-conservative. In Hungary, Fidesz is ensuring the deployment of this second potential.
Not that reality can be reduced to black and white. This simplification applies to the partisan debate and, politically, stems from the necessary distinction between friend and foe. Because reality has the abundance of life, not the Manichaeism of militants. So the art of politics consists in ordering reality, not dividing it. The ability to reconcile is the superior merit of politics. Concord is not an effect of weightlessness but a balance patiently achieved; the masterpiece seems easy because the artist has made the prodigious effort to overcome the difficulties of his art.
Hungarian political thought therefore consists of ‘making a people’ every day, in the midst of the antagonistic tendencies inherent in collective life. This kind of work requires much more than tact for the circumstances. Nowadays, a party in power generally gives a simple colouring to current events; it is a biased reflection of the undecided majority and is subject to the ascendancy of the economy and international hegemony. New legislation slowly imprints its consequences, which can often be revoked by other laws, but a new constitutional order guarantees more lasting trends. Thus finally, institutions have the privilege of structuring society, and through prolonged contact with this relief, the people adopt certain traits that survive generations. The landscape of institutions and traditions, patiently sedimented, imbues the country with a character of its own. The Hungarian elite deploys its strategy at this level, in addition to electoral or administrative matters, and this level of vision has no equivalent among the nations of Europe.
Viktor Orbán plays the role of catalyst and interpreter of the Hungarian national genius. He is the very opposite of a power inflicted on the people and separated from them. In contrast to any kind of militant idealism, Viktor Orbán embodies centrality, a certain ‘functional mainstream,’ and echoes the majority in all that is politically viable.
The current mandate, which began in 2022, guarantees Fidesz power until 2026; Viktor Orbán intends to stay the course until 2030 and is working to build a lasting order. He has now been in power for thirteen years since the changeover in 2010. The period that has elapsed is already an era. It goes beyond the Gaullist decade (1958-1969) when the foundations of functional French power were put in place for several decades. Sixteen years to 2026 would be a longer period than the restoration unsuccessfully attempted by Louis XVIII and Charles X. It would also be longer than the first period of the French Revolution and longer than the First, Second, and Fourth Republics.
Hungarian inspiration
The people of Árpád have the strongest sense of essential continuity, and Balázs Orbán outlines a strategy for ensuring this today. This work attracted the interest of the Institut Iliade pour la longue mémoire européenne, which made it possible for the book to be published in French in cooperation with La Nouvelle Librairie.
Our country can adjust its line of sight and its compass to the achievements of a current governing power in Europe. At the very least, we can hold Hungary up as a witness, a yardstick, or a practical case of what can be achieved today.
There is certainly a school of perseverance and lucidity in Hungary. And yet, in the midst of the confusion that reigns in France, many men of goodwill are asking themselves what they should remain faithful to and what they should be prepared to lose. The ‘great nation’ has eroded so much that there is not much left to hold on to. At this critical point in France’s history, the national future requires more fundamental archetypes and newer perspectives than the references mobilised by the Hungarian government.
The Magyar case teaches us that the future is not doomed as long as a people defined as an organised ethno-cultural community survives, even without a state, even in spite of or against the state. It is at the level of what a people is that France can, in the light of the Hungarian case, discover within itself a dormant force that it is up to it to revive, a new prevailing wind to oppose the prevailing wind of several decades. France needs to rediscover a sense of organic unity.
With the Hungarians, we can reconnect with a powerful simplicity. Their identity is mobilising; ours is often incapacitating. They know how to be direct and immediate; we are overwhelmed by mediation. They know how to name the danger and the enemy in order to act; we are dominated and divided by words. In a cycle of entropy, the assets of French power become a caricature of what they once were, and the elements that were supposed to unite cancel each other out. A quarrel thus arose between the advocates of identity and those of sovereignty. Broadly speaking, identity refers to ‘us’ and sovereignty to ‘decide.’ Separately, these terms are powerless. They must be combined to produce ‘we decide.’
The French people can also learn from the Hungarians that an organised minority must be ready to regain the ascendancy on the occasion of an historic event or to build a resounding majority consensus and release the vital energy of the people. Finally, one man must be the figure of that moment. No people can do without an elite and a leader. In the final analysis, political regeneration requires a royal figure who personifies it and attests to it for the political community itself.
This essay is the preface to the French edition of Balázs Orbán’s The Hungarian Way of Strategy, Comprendre la stratégie hongroise, which will be released on September 28th thanks to the cooperation of the publisher La Nouvelle Librairie.
EVENT: Book discussion with Thibaud Gibelin and Ferenc Almássy, Franco-Hungarian journalist and editor-in-chief of Visegrad Post
WHERE: La Nouvelle Librairie, 11 Rue Médicis 75006 Paris
WHEN: Thursday, September 28 at 7:00 p.m.
MORE INFORMATION: here
