It is evident from Viktor Orbán’s recent State of the Nation address, delivered on March 22, that he views himself as riding high on the back of the momentum created by Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office. “We are on the high street of history,” he said, “while our opponents are wandering muddy back streets on the edge of town.” The sentiment is shared by his less sophisticated imitators, such as Slovakia’s Robert Fico. A former member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, he thundered at last month’s CPAC meeting about building “a barrier against dangerous woke ideologies,” together with the new U.S. administration.
But triumphalist rhetoric hides the fragility of the personalistic, only formally democratic, political systems that Orbán and Fico are striving to entrench in Hungary and Slovakia, as well as of the broader politics of nativism, grievance, kleptocracy, and phony social conservatism that the two prime ministers share with Trump.
Both Orbán’s and Fico’s international ambitions seem to be growing thanks to their inroads with the new U.S. administration, though those are largely imaginary in the Slovak case. As Orbán puts it, while Hungary was successful at mounting rebellions against Brussels in the past, “this time the aim is not to outwit, not to outsmart and not to survive, but to win.” Although not nearly as much of a household name as Orbán, Fico scored a meeting with Elon Musk during his trip to Washington, D.C. and is expecting the red carpet treatment when he visits Moscow for the second time in six months for the annual May 9 parade.
Read the full article at Persuasion
dalibor rohac
dalibor rohac