conservatives aligned with former President Donald Trump - exploit the same fear, Krastev says, "and this is the fear that there are not enough of us, that we're living in the world in which we are going to be replaced, in which our numbers are shrinking and in which we are going to lose our identity." The end of communism meant political and cultural choices for the people of Eastern Europe
The two groups - nationalists from behind the former Iron Curtain, and U.S. Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gives a press conference following a meeting of prime ministers of central Europe's informal body of cooperation, called the Visegrad Group (V4) in Budapest, Hungary, last month.Īnd next year, the American Conservative Union is planning to hold a version of its Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest. "He's trying to position himself to play the role that Fidel Castro played for the left in the 1970s," says political scientist Ivan Krastev, who with Stephen Holmes, co-wrote The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy, an examination of Eastern Europe's disillusionment with liberal democracy. Four years later, after his party won in a landslide election, he declared that "we have replaced a shipwrecked liberal democracy with a 21st-century Christian democracy" that supports tradition and security. Orbán first used the term in a 2014 speech promoting governance in the national interest, citing China, Russia and Turkey as examples.
Orbán is instead promoting "illiberal democracy," a term coined by journalist Fareed Zakaria to describe countries where elected leaders undermine checks on power. Its target in this culture war has been liberal democracy, which Orbán has tried to equate with leftist and "unpatriotic" beliefs. The Hungarian government has repeatedly clashed with Brussels over migration, multiculturalism, press freedom and, most recently, LGBTQ rights. Orbán and his Fidesz party have become the flag-bearers of this mindset during their decade in power. "We in the East are the ones protecting traditional European values, Christian values, while the West has gone crazy." Many in Eastern Europe have concluded that Western liberalism is not a good fit "And the border is the Iron Curtain," Magas says. The liberals want you to think Hungary doesn't know what democracy is because we don't share their beliefs."Įurope, he says, is ideologically divided between the conservative East and the more liberal West, something like red-and-blue America.
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The mainstream media is full of fake news about us. "The whole world is being misled about us. "Hungary is not the West's colony," says Magas, an Orbán supporter who echoes many of the prime minister's views. Biden once name-checked Hungary when referring to the "thugs of the world."īut Laszlo Magas, a retired professor who helped bring an end to communism in Hungary, chalks up his country's political isolation to one thing: Western liberal bias.
Washington and EU leaders in Brussels have repeatedly accused the country's ultranationalist government, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, of undermining democracy. Hungary, on the Eastern edge of the European Union, was not invited. Both men were anti-communists during the Soviet period and sought an opening to the West.īUDAPEST, Hungary - When President Biden greets scores of nations at his virtual "Summit for Democracy" this coming week, one member of the Western alliance won't be there. Laszlo Magas (left) and Laszlo Nagy stand near the Hungary-Austria border, which young protesters opened in 1989.
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