CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Axis of Evil Suffers a Big Loss

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

In the universe of far-right politics, the three members of the Axis of Evil are Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orban. The first presides over the most powerful country in the world. The second launched the first major land invasion in Europe in over 75 years. The third has done his best to destroy the European Union from within.

On Sunday, the axis lost its littlest member. After 16 consecutive years as the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban—the joint-custody mini-me of Putin and Trump—went down for the count. His party, Fidesz, didn’t just lose the latest election. It lost bigly.

It wasn’t exactly a swing of the political pendulum in Hungary. The winning party, Tisza, is quite conservative in its outlook. It ran not so much on an ideological platform but against Orban’s corruption, authoritarianism, and deep-seated anti-Europeanism. Simply put, Hungarians had grown sick and tired of Orban’s excesses.

Only three political parties made it above the 5 percent threshold in the parliamentary elections. The opposition Tisza party captured a supermajority of parliamentary seats. Orban’s Fidesz came in a distant second. And the Our Homeland Movement, which is even further to the right than Fidesz, just squeaked in.

Significantly, all vaguely progressive or liberal parties have effectively disappeared from the Hungarian political landscape. This is perhaps Orban’s most ominous achievement, in addition to clinging to power for 16 years (which is a long time in any ostensibly democratic society but a veritable eternity in the quicksilver politics of East-Central Europe).

Like so many of his political brethren, Orban is a world-class opportunist. Long before Trump changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and before Putin traded in his communist credentials for nationalist ones, Orban sniffed the air and sensed an opportunity on the right side of the political spectrum. He swapped out the political identity of his liberal party for a nationalist, anti-immigrant, culturally conservative alternative.

In the 1990s, Orban served as the John the Baptist of illiberalism. Now that he has had his head served on a platter, it is tempting to conclude that Orban’s political end also heralds the end of an era. Of course, Orban could be resurrected in a few years, like Trump. Or, more deliciously, he could be jailed for his malfeasance, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Regardless of Orban’s specific fate, the more important question is: Will Trump and even Putin be next in line for their political comeuppance?

Orban’s Journey to the Right

I came of political age in a world defined by Viktor Orban.

In 1989, when I was living in Poland and trying to launch a career as a freelance journalist, Orban was a newly minted lawyer in Budapest. That year, the young Orban established his bona fides as an opposition leader at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the doomed Hungarian experiment in reform in 1956. That ceremony took place on June 16, 1989—several days after the Solidarity movement won Poland’s historic semi-free election—and symbolized the cutting edge of the reform process in Hungary. Orban, 26 years old at the time, tested the limits of the new reform by calling for the removal of Warsaw Pact troops from Hungary.

The previous year, Orban and his friends had put together Fidesz, the Alliance of Young Democrats, to combine the three most salient attributes of the anti-communist youth........

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