Israel and the United States, in particular, felt the impact of those waves.
The Hungarian strongman was the closest ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Europe and was embraced by the American right like no other foreign leader. Even Bibi.
Orbán and Netanyahu are the vanguards of national populism in Western politics.
Bibi’s ability to manipulate the Israeli political system, through both manoeuvring and demagoguery, made a perfect bookend to Orbán’s revolutionary illiberal democracy.
Both men undertook the co-optation and subordination of the judiciary and sought to directly control the media in their countries.
Orbán, like Netanyahu, used a clientelistic approach and electoral manipulation to maintain his hegemony, consistently employing racist scapegoats to maximum effect.
It remains to be seen whether the economic and political grievances that drove Hungarian voters to depose him will have the same effect on Donald Trump in this year’s mid-term elections.
Orbán and Israel
The symbolism of Orbán’s defeat is important to the rest of the world. But for Netanyahu, it represents an especially significant loss.
While other European countries, most notably Germany, have taken up Israel’s cause, no other EU member state was as automatic a counter to critical resolutions on Israel as Hungary.
Orbán was defeated by another right-wing politician, Peter Magyar, a former member of his own Fidesz party.
Among the reasons Magyar won was his desire to re-engage Hungary with Europe, including institutions such as the International Criminal Court.
Many things won’t change in Hungary. But if Magyar, who has described his intended approach to Israel as “balanced and pragmatic”, is to be believed, Hungary’s Middle East policy will most likely change.
That matters.
In early 2024, Hungary blocked two EU statements on Israel’s burgeoning genocide in Gaza that would have called for an immediate pause in the fighting, leading to a permanent ceasefire before Israel’s destruction of Rafah.
One can’t say what the result would have been. However, a consensus statement of that kind from the European Council would certainly have been used by opponents of the genocide within the Biden Administration to persuade the US president to change course.
This is a typical example of how Hungary blocked EU action on Palestine.
As with American veto power at the United Nations Security Council, I can report, from many conversations over the past decade with EU officials, that many more initiatives were abandoned because it was clear Hungary would block consensus.
That will no longer be automatic under Magyar. However, he was quick to reach out to Netanyahu and reassure him that Hungary would maintain a “special relationship with Israel”.
In fact, Magyar invited Netanyahu to Budapest to mark the 70th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising, the 1956 anti-Soviet revolt that was brutally crushed by the USSR, and became a symbol for nationalist movements in the Soviet bloc.
That invitation could pose a difficult decision for Magyar.
The prime minister-elect has said he intends to begin the process of rejoining the ICC immediately. That requires ratification by the Hungarian parliament, which can only occur after Orbán’s withdrawal, initiated last year, is completed on 2 June.
There is a 60-day waiting period before Hungary’s readmission would be official.
This could mean Hungary rejoins the ICC before the Uprising anniversary in October. If so, Hungary would be required to arrest Bibi, who remains a fugitive under the ICC’s arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Would Magyar rescind the invitation and risk a diplomatic incident with Netanyahu? Or would he risk running afoul of the ICC—and, not incidentally, incurring the wrath of his own constituency, who strongly supported his intention to re-engage with Europe and the international community, including the ICC—by allowing Netanyahu free access to Hungarian territory?
Israel will certainly do all it can to portray Magyar’s pragmatism as requiring the diplomatic and legal protection within the EU that Orbán provided. It will be a difficult tightrope for Magyar to walk. Regardless of how it goes, Israel will not be able to count on Hungary as it had before.
Orbán, the Maestro of Pro-Israel Antisemitism
Viktor Orbán was also an icon of the phenomenon of pro-Israel Antisemitism.
That made the populist a particularly useful tool for the Antisemitic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic American right that makes up Donald Trump’s core constituency.
Pro-Israel Antisemitism under Trump uses a version of Antisemitism—one that is almost entirely defined as criticism of Israel and nothing else—to crack down on dissent and on academic freedom.
These processes were initiated before Trump’s return to power, under Joe Biden, with the support of pro-Israel Democrats whose obsessive support of a state that was committing some of the worst crimes of the 21st century led them to attack the foundations of their own democracy.
As congressional hearings led by Republicans, but supported by some Democrats, pilloried academic institutions with false accusations of Antisemitism, Trump began cracking down hard on universities to pressure them to expel students protesting for Palestine.
That was simply an escalation of Biden’s policies. However, the Trump Administration took it further.
The US government began targeting foreign students on visas, as well as legal permanent residents, claiming that their opposition to American policy supporting Israel’s genocide was a threat to the administration’s interests.
This absurd thinking underpinned the efforts to expel prominent Palestine activists such as Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Momodou Taal, Leqaa Kordia, and many others. They even targeted one student, Rümeysa Öztürk, merely for writing an op-ed in a student newspaper.
Trump was following the Orbán model by attacking universities and attempting to have his lackeys consolidate control over the media, a process that is ongoing and succeeding, most prominently with Larry Ellison’s takeover of Paramount-Skydance.
Orbán used the spectre of George Soros, the famous Jewish philanthropist, as a target for populist rage and hate, often using Antisemitic tropes and imagery to bring the point home. That never bothered Israel or the United States, though.
In 2017, during Viktor Orbán’s re-election campaign, he used Soros and Antisemitic imagery to frighten people.
At first, Israel’s ambassador condemned the campaign, saying it evoked Hungary’s “sad memories” of the deportation of half a million Jews to Nazi concentration and death camps.
But hours later, the Israeli foreign ministry corrected its diplomat, blasting Soros for supporting organisations that fought for Palestinian and other human rights.
This model was useful for the Republicans.
Donald Trump blamed George Soros for everything from Democratic electoral victories to funding protests against Trump’s policies, even for legal cases against him while Trump was out of office.
Orbán’s defeat won’t mean that Trump and Netanyahu cannot continue to use pro-Israel Antisemitism, attacks on the media and education, and other elements of Orbán’s playbook to advance their policies and politics. But it does provide a blueprint for countering them.
Orbán used Hungary’s communist past to crush the left and make it impossible for progressive politics to coalesce and challenge his illiberal democracy. That can change now.
In Israel, political circumstances and Bibi’s strategies have done much the same to the left. But in the US, that process is not nearly as far along, even though the left in America is in a desperately disorganised state, often defeating itself, as it is in much of Europe.
Yet recent progressive victories, especially in New York City, indicate that the American left is, at least, not as beaten down as in Hungary or Israel.
As the Orbán model fails, Hungary is forced to turn to a party that is only marginally less right-wing. In the United States, we have the potential to do better.
Photograph courtesy of National Conservatism. Published under a Creative Commons license.
