Miklós Szánthó is a lawyer and political analyst, and the head of the Center for Fundamental Rights (Alapjogokért Központ), a conservative legal research institute founded in 2013.
When Alberto Núñez Feijóo was elected leader of the Partido Popular in Spain last year, he said he wanted his own course for the party without culture wars. Is it so difficult to understand that we are fighting a culture war?
I think it is not a cultural war, but rather a war for culture. That is what we should learn from Antonio Gramsci, who was right when he said that socialists had to win the struggle for culture before, or beyond, the political struggle. Culture is the most important part of social life, and if the Left dominates culture, it will eventually win the political struggle. This has happened, and now we see that the liberals are winning elections before the vote. They have a professional network that does cultural propaganda very well and that is able to convince people. It is not a tool or a direct political campaign; it is a soft instrument that uses Hollywood movies, series, pop songs, etc. By handling and using this popular culture, they promote political values: multiculturalism, immigration, gender, LGBT… and when they reach the political arena, all people are sensitized to these issues and vote for progressive or leftist parties.
However, this is not the case in Hungary.
What is happening in Hungary is a different story compared to that in Western Europe. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Hungarian political and social landscape was even worse than that of the United States today. Not only did the liberals dominate public life, we also had the communist heritage. The communists were able to transform their political capital and their network of influence into social, academic, economic, and media capital, and for that reason, all the relevant social substructures were dominated by this post-communist network. In 1994, in an absurd move, the heirs of the communists formed a coalition with the previously anti-communist liberals and progressives. To give you an example, in Hungary until the mid-2000s, 90% of the media supported the Left and only 10% the Right. But something started to change, when Fidesz and Viktor Orbán were in opposition, and conservative businessmen started to invest in the media. Of course, in 2010 with the victory of Fidesz again and with Viktor Orban as prime minister, the deconstruction of all post-communist networks and substructures accelerated. Now the situation is much more balanced in Hungary: for example, if we talk about the media, 55% support the Left and 45% the Right. However, the most popular newspaper, TV channel, and website are liberal or left-wing. It is therefore amusing that some people talk about the lack of media freedom in Hungary.
So, is the media the key?
Political courage is also needed. The Hungarian example shows us that it takes a lot of work and effort and media, but it also takes courage to stand up to the liberal mainstream—for example, as we saw in 2010, when the entire European mainstream started to criticise and defame the Orbán government for the changes in the constitution and the electoral system. I think most conservative or centre-Right governments would have stopped the reforms in such a situation, but the Hungarian Right stood firm in defence of its values and said “no.” This is how, slowly, the liberal idea can be contained, and a new conservative era can begin to be built.
And to take that step you have to re-sensitise society. Let me give you an example. The Hungarian government wants to build a God-fearing and pro-family society, to promote the family and encourage having more children, and to do that it uses direct tools, such as tax cuts, and soft tools, such as communication, to promote these values. This is the same thing the liberals have been doing and what Gramsci advised, winning the war for culture. In this way, the government, without changing the abortion laws that were adopted in the 1990s and are very liberal, has managed to halve the number of abortions in the last ten years. And this is because the social environment has changed.
Something Gramsci would surely have loved are the television platforms that bombard young people with progressive values. Is it possible to beat these media in the long run?
The most important thing about the Hungarian example is what Viktor Orbán said last year at CPAC: do not to follow the rules of the liberals.
In general, I am pessimistic about the future of the West because liberal awareness has reached a very high and very professional level. I don’t know if a return to European values and standards is possible. But on the other hand, this may not be a liberal and progressive virus with long-term consequences, but a fashion for young people that will come to an end sooner or later. Hungary is an example that, with state support and political intervention, values such as God, country, and family can be successfully promoted. The problem is that the so-called conservative or centre-Right forces in the West gave up and started playing by liberal rules, and in the end we have the sad story of Spain’s People’s Party, the CDU and CSU in Germany, the Republicans in France, and the Tories [in the UK].
You cited “God, country, family” as the values that the Hungarian government stands for. However, Hungary is not a very religious country.
When we talk about God, fatherland, and family in Hungary, we mean culture, traditions. I am a secularist, I am a poor Calvinist, and when we talk about God in public, in political terms, we do not talk directly about the Faith, but about our Judeo-Christian tradition, our national tradition, and our history. A history that we should be proud of in the face of the attempts of the cancellation culture to deny the whole past because it was built by white heterosexual men. And when we talk about family, we mean that the father is a man and the mother is a woman, and that those are the only biological sexes and there is no ‘gender.’
If you put these values in the constitution as Hungary has done, if you adhere to the protection of borders, if you adhere to the cultural heritage of your country, if you promote the family with hard and soft tools, then things can change. Things can change and the sign of success in Hungary is the four large majorities in the elections. Even people on the Left vote for Fidesz because the Hungarian Right is based on common sense—and so, we see that this is no longer a fight of ideologies, of Left or Right, this is a fight of common sense against the insanity and this stupidity of gender ideology.
