Eastern European elections: the battle over liberal democracy

Last Sunday’s elections were a mixed bag for Europe’s populist right. On the one hand, the Polish electorate gave an enlarged mandate to Poland’s governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) at a general election. With an increased popular vote and a majority in the Sejm now likely to materialise, the party have seen this as a huge vote of confidence for them to continue pursuing their socially conservative, Catholic, and pro-national policies. Their hegemonic position in the country, where they have passed laws to take party political control of the judiciary and the state broadcaster, looks set to continue.

Meanwhile, in Hungary, voters turned out at local elections across the country to provide headaches for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz Party. The most significant setback for Fidesz was its loss of control over municipal power in Hungary’s cosmopolis, Budapest. Here, an opposition candidate backed by an alliance of liberal, left wing, and green parties won over 50 per cent of the votes, ousting Fidesz’s incumbent.

The importance of this event, however, resides not so much in its practical consequences, but in its symbolic power. It should not be taken as a sign that Orbán’s dominance in the country as a whole is under threat – the Mayor of Budapest holds many municipal powers, but this does not by itself signify a transformation of the political landscape. While Orbán’s position is weakened in several localities, his vote generally held up in the Hungarian countryside, where 245 of the 381 available seats in rural districts were carried by Fidesz.

One lesson which has become clear during the last decade is that national identities still matter. Ideologies, far from being dead, have returned to political life with a vengeance. These ideologies have to be taken seriously and examined with care – it is not enough to label them as “the far-right”. The tendency to do so has led many liberal Europeans to pass them off as a temporary regression, a passing spasm caused by globalisation, after which liberals will inevitably once again assert themselves and return to their natural position in technocratic government.

This complacency arises from a view of history which assumes that liberal ideals must inevitably emerge victorious with greater economic integration and education. This is a dangerous fantasy, because instead of encouraging most European liberals to reinvent the case for their ideals or to adapt their approaches to combat these ideologies on their own terms, it has increasingly caused them to underestimate the strength of their opposition. It has led repeatedly to major election defeats, such as that suffered by Poland’s centre-right Civic Platform on Sunday.

The most important ideology which is currently empowering Orbán in Hungary and the PiS, led by Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, is not a nebulous spirit of “populism” alone – its roots are deeply imbedded in the post-war histories and religious identities of the countries they govern. They articulate dominant cultural attitudes into a new politics in ways which will not vanish overnight.

While Kacsyński is now the face of the populist right, his political career began when he and his now deceased brother, Lech, joined the pro-Western liberal opposition to the communist government of General Jaruzelski in the 1970s. The brothers’ first taste of political office came in 1990-91 under Poland’s first democratically elected President, Lech Wałęsa, who oversaw the country’s transition to a market economy and a democratic political system.

The apotheosis of Orbán as a self-avowed “illiberal democrat” is more extraordinary. During the fall of communism in Hungary in 1989-1991, Orbán was also a member of the liberal dissident opposition. He founded Fidész in 1990 as a party of radical, centre-right neoliberal reformers and modernisers.

The support they offered for the transition from communism to sovereign government served to disguise the fact that the brothers Kacyński and Orbán were, at heart, Christian, national democrats and not internationalist liberals. Once the heady days of revolution were passed, they all began a journey rightwards.

Over the next two decades, they came to believe that the spirit of 1989-91 had been betrayed by liberals in league with the former communist elites. Frustrated by ineffectual stints in government, they came to conclude that these groups had corrupted the judiciary and the press against the people.

This is the key to illiberal democracy in Poland and Hungary – it is rooted in a narrative of decline, a sense of outrage at the perceived failure of the revolutions of 1989-91 to restore ownership of the nation to its people. It is reinforced by a defence of the national Church against the vacuous, secular ethics of the European Union. This provides a sense of belonging in a world where tradition is believed to be under attack by European integration. Illiberal democrats blame the EU in particular for the mismanagement of immigration, and “the West” in general for the advent of an “LGBT ideology” which is undermining the Christian family.

When interviewed by the New York Times, Ryszard Terlecki, one of Kaczynski’s confidants said that “For many Law and Justice supporters, ‘The West’ means moral nihilism.” The PiS, like Orbán’s Fidesz, champion a Gaullist “Europe of Nations” and seek to defy Emmanuel Macron’s vision of a “liberal Europe”.

At a speech delivered in July 2017 in Tusnádfürdő, Romania, Orbán announced his belief that “we can never show solidarity with ideologies, peoples and ethnic groups which are committed to the goal of changing the very European culture which forms the essence, meaning and purpose of the European way of life.”

What is fascinating, and disturbing, is that this same pessimistic language of decline and decay is now also increasingly a hallmark of those defending the European Project itself.

This September, the high priest of European liberalism, Guy Verhofstadt, proclaimed to the UK Liberal Democratic Party conference in Bournemouth that “The world order of tomorrow is not a world based on nations, states, or countries, it’s a world order that is based on empires”, urging his audience that “we Europeans, and you British, can only defend your interests, your way of life, by doing it together in a European framework and in the European Union.”

The interesting phenomenon here, is that where Verhofstadt calls himself a Liberal Democrat, Orbán identifies as an avowedly illiberal, Christian democrat. Yet their rhetoric is so similar in its tone and fundamentals – a deep-seated fear of globalisation, an unease with cultural changes to European tradition, a penchant for economic protectionism, and concern about relative population decline.

The difference is that where Orbán identifies Christian culture as being the root of the European tradition, Verhofstadt’s secularism is hollowed of religious content. In place of a commitment to a Christian nation state, Verhofstadt’s politics are aimed at the creation of a European federalism based upon a conviction that Europe is, and always has been, a civilisation with its own ancient culture. His vision is a secular theodicy, one which is no less spiritual for being bereft of the holy spirit.

Both men are shaped by the same psychology of decline and united by their authoritarian instincts. For, while Orbáns’s government has eroded the independence of the judiciary and the press in favour of majoritarian charismatic rule, Verhofstadt also effaces institutions with which he has political disagreements.

He played a central role in demeaning Greek political sovereignty when, between 2011-2015, he enthusiastically used his position in the European Parliament to promote deeply unpopular Troika-led austerity and privatisation programmes in the country as a condition for further debt bailouts, all while promoting the cause of ever closer union. “Much that passes as idealism”, as Bertrand Russell once declared, is ultimately a “disguised love of power.”

Where Orbán has stated a preference for democracy without liberalism, Verhofstadt could equally be thought of as promoting a form of liberalism without democracy. If one threatens to break the liberal protections which make a functioning democracy possible, then the other threatens to undermine the democratic foundations that bestow liberal policies with legitimacy.

The moral authority with which the EU confronts the governments in Poland and Hungary is further undermined by their own inconsistencies. The European Commission has triggered the application of Article 7 of the Treaty of the European Union to declare serious breaches of the rule of law in Poland and Hungary. Yet, they have been eerily quiet on potential abuses of power used to silence Catalonia’s independence movement. On such issues, the commission’s own hypocrisy threatens to preclude its credibility. Coercion is coercion, no matter who it is that perpetrates it. An iron fist is still the same when dressed in a velvet glove.

Ultimately, the two narratives – those of the EU and those of its nationalist opponents – thrive upon one another’s existence. They reflect one another like a dark mirror, with both sides showing the other its greatest fears and anxieties. Yet they also operate symbiotically, placing the delicate balance between liberalism and democracy under strain.

For while the architects of the European Project like to present their project as an embattled liberal technocracy engaged in the fight against nationalist populism, it is precisely their uncompromising and ideological pursuit of the principle of ever closer union which drives fears revolving around a loss of national sovereignty and local identity.

The results of recent elections in Poland and Hungary are another episode in an unfolding battle between illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism. They are not only born from an unease surrounding globalisation, they also remain powerfully shaped by the memory of twentieth century conflicts and communism. But even amongst these clouds there are glimmers of hope. So long as major cities such as Budapest can retain their integrity as centres of elected liberal government, they can provide small, symbolic beacons of hope in parts of a continent sliding into the grips of arbitrary power. It is a victory which is all the more precious, because it is all the more fragile.

Nonetheless, a searching question remains: for how long can democracy survive the defeat of the ideology and institutions which have sustained it?