The publication of articles with titles like “I see light in the darkness – a backlash against bigotry is under way” which observe “signs that xenophobic populism is on the wane” might make us think that world politics is finally looking up for progressivism. And there has been no shortage of such articles following Viktor Orbán’s defeat in the recent Hungarian election.
The only issue is that the quoted article was published in October 2016, nearly ten years ago, by former Guardian columnist Natalie Nougayrède: she had noticed a surge in Hillary Clinton’s polling, a month before the 2016 US presidential election. The article was not vindicated, of course, by the eventual results, but it has a different legacy. It gave birth to a new journalistic genre.
For a decade now, journalists and intellectuals have been regularly publishing optimistic op-eds announcing that we have passed “peak populism”. These are often prompted by electoral setbacks for populist parties. From Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 victory, to the unravelling of Matteo Salvini’s government in 2019, time and time again hopeful centrists rushed to claim that the end of the tunnel was near. And as this week showed, the ‘peak populism’ genre is never more than one election in a medium-sized country away from being rekindled. After Peter Magyar’s victory in Hungary, Anne Applebaum was quick to declare “a real turning point” that “changed politics around the world”. Never mind the idiosyncrasies of Hungarian politics or of Peter Magyar’s campaign, this time, for real, populism is on the wane.
At their core, these pieces comprise wishful thinking from politically traumatised liberal intellectuals that have seen their worldview rocked by a decade of political upsets. These obituaries are not even targeting populism: left-wing populist parties such as Spain’s once-mighty Podemos or Britain’s surging Greens never really feature. Instead populism has become a short-hand for the larger galaxy of nationalist parties on the right across the West that seem created in a lab to offend their political sensibilities of what David Goodhart once called the “anywheres”. As a result, any setback, even minor, to the rising tide of western nationalism offers a breath of hope and these authors rush to express their relief.
Yet the trend since 2016 has been of relentless progression for right-wing populist parties, to the point where the hard right is now the dominant party type in European democracies. Their weight in political institutions, even in Brussels, has steadily grown. In France the Rassemblement National tops most polls for the 2027 presidential election and with a strong chance of winning a second round. Nigel Farage is the frontrunner for a future general election. Giorgia Meloni is leading Italy. The Austrian far-right has a 20-point lead in polls. Across Europe, nationalist parties are no longer fringe parties spoiling the old left-right divide, but dominant players who reshaped the political landscape. And the Economist points out that these parties continue to remain politically underrepresented relative to their electoral weight.
The hard fact for hopeful progressives is that the root causes of populism have not changed. Economic uncertainty remains a key driver of populism, and Europe is plagued by a combination of inflation and low growth. Low-skilled immigration from non-European countries strengthens nationalist parties and the growing demographic gap between Europe and Africa could power several 2015 style migration crises in the years to come. Rising housing costs driven by Nimby politics also have provided jet fuel to the electoral appeal of far-right parties among low-income renters. With none of these deeper trends having an end in sight, wishing away nationalist parties is a feel-good writing exercise rather than serious prospective thinking.
There is, however, something to be said about the mutations of ‘populism’ in Europe. In the last decade, many populist parties have tacked to the centre, whether on the EU, Russia or Donald Trump. Marine Le Pen in France has dropped “Frexit” and now just quibbles individual EU policies. Meloni has been remarkably malleable to EU and Nato orthodoxies. Nigel Farage in the UK has joined the fold of reasonable centrist politicians who believe that the triple lock can go on forever, while battling the Restore Britain insurgency on his right. The nearer they come to power, the less radical these nationalist parties become.
In European populism there is also, now, a very clear separation from Trump. After JD Vance’s kiss of death endorsement of Orbán, and following the disastrous military adventurism in the Middle East or the knuckle-headed threats over Greenland or trade, a vast majority of Europeans consider Trump’s America to be a threat to their continent, even ahead of Communist China. Nigel Farage in the UK managed to break ties – for now at least – with the equally radioactive Elon Musk. Le Pen, who only a few years ago was left to wait in the lobby of Trump Tower, is now rekindling the old anti-American streak so popular on the French right and denouncing Trump’s foreign policy.
Finally, it is clear that populism in Europe does not belong only to the Nationalists. Magyar’s campaign was resolutely populist, in the purest sense of the word. His Kossuth Square speech on 6 April was an exceptionally clear populist pitch to the electorate. Parts of it seem to draw from the famous left-wing theoretician of populism Chantal Mouffe. Just as Mouffe proposed in her seminal For a Left Populism (2018), Magyar transcended the left-right cleavage, even fiercely criticising it as a fictitious divide. If there is a lesson for anti-populists in the Hungarian result, it lies in Magyar’s razor focus on economic points and refusal to let Orbán typecast him as a soft liberal – Magyar even occasionally outflanked Orbán on the right on migration. His party, Tisza, stuck as close as possible to the median voter.
The divide Magyar drew on was that between Hungary’s “power elites” and the Hungarian people. He cast Orbán’s regime, with its network of vassals, as a form of “feudalism”. In the most quintessential drain the swamp style, Magyar went on to make the stakes of the election crystal clear: “today you can remove the criminals, you can switch to the side of the Hungarian people.” And the pitch got more feverish later on: “Hungarian children are not safe today, except for the offspring of the power elite.”
Still it remains unclear whether Magyar’s electoral success can last, let alone tip the balance against populism worldwide. Not least because it remains to be seen how Tisza’s motley ideological coalition can hold it together when confronted with inevitable conundrums of being in office and without the common cause of removing a corrupt Orbán administration, which had been in office for 16 years.
Hungary’s election is not the first, and certainly not the last, election that will get frenzied media attention and generate hope that right-wing nationalist parties are on the way out. But those pieces will continue to be high on partisan wishes and low on analysis.
[Further reading: Keir Starmer is right to put Brexit in the bin]
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