Hungary and the Crisis of the Left

On April 12, the FIDESZ government in Hungary fell. It was met with global fanfare. Yet the historical political bloc that sustained it — a right-wing, bourgeois-led coalition — hardly fell. The voters of this local historical-political bloc have cast their votes day after day for a long time on behalf of the suffocating and frenzied right-wing management of the neoliberal economic order. Let us not forget that even in Hungary, more than 2,460,000 people voted for them on the day of their great defeat. 

This bloc is now facing a local challenge from a more moderate right-wing, Macron-like formation (who weathered the hellish onslaught of Orbán’s propaganda and managed to organize society in rural areas, for which they deserve nothing but congratulations). On the one hand, they took votes away from the Orbán-style bloc; on the other, they mobilized previously non-voting youth (first-time voters or those in their twenties) and/or voters deeply disillusioned with the former disastrous opposition. A significant portion of the new members of the parliament come from the ranks of the pro-EU conservative-liberal historical-political bloc. Thus another neoliberal formation has been constructed without radical and provocative nationalists and the promise of some social care. With a pragmatic project and a heterogeneous mass of voters, the new Macronist formation succeeded in finishing the parliamentary demise of the left-liberal bloc.

What were the key reasons behind this change? First of all, Hungary has been struggling with an unfavorable economic structure of having a very open economy within the European Union, which in the 2000s got into a serious crisis. This was the second major blow to the verbally leftist bloc, which was hit already in the early 1990s and mid-1990s after finishing the privatization and firmly pushing Hungary further on a neoliberal trajectory. These two blows led to a massive distrust toward these parties (the socialists and the free democrats) creating an excellent opportunity for the FIDESZ party to stabilize and lead to victory its nationalist conservative bloc. The socialist-liberal bloc had only its agony during the Orbán era, so much enjoyed and used by FIDESZ.

The FIDESZ won by two thirds in 2010 and could maneuver itself to a strange combination of neoliberal policies coupled with some unorthodox views on economics based on state intervention. This later point needs some clarification as many observers read this as some kind of state buffering or even some kind of reembedding the economy under social control. But actually this was only a communication technique and not a real policy. FIDESZ government actually wanted to use the state to reshuffle some portion of resources for its own political clients and protégés seen as the national bourgeoisie. Actually this aim was the reason why they started using authoritarian techniques as the market could not be redivided without state intervention and direct state support through rechanneling EU and other incoming funds (seen as corruption by the public and the opposition). This was also the reason why originally FIDESZ moved against the EU as the EU was demanding “unfavorable” policies, for instance, concerning pension funds and the use of EU money. Ideology for them just mattered because they needed to have public support through election (using this for establishing electoral autocracy). FIDESZ then combined some radical neoconservative ideological moves with some “protection” concerning energy prices and against incoming “illegal” migrants coming from Western Asia or Africa. This was coupled with a Francoist, Salazarist conservative state propaganda suffocating all public discussions and even used to harass various social groups advocating “opposing” views. In its final development FIDESZ further moved toward those geopolitical powers which challenged the key Western powers (China and Russia). This was altogether a too complicated position both internally and externally and after inflation swallowed trust, political dynamics led to a change of public opinion and to severe communication mistakes by FIDESZ.

This later decline was utilized by an ex-FIDESZ person who for personal and political motives could become the leader of the challenge to Orbán and his regime. Péter Magyar, a conservative populist, made some original moves which helped him out of the traps of the Orbán propaganda and the poisoning political situation. First, he distanced himself from the previous opposition to show to FIDESZ and the wider public that he is a new politician. He also started going to small towns and villages to communicate with people disillusioned with the FIDESZ magic. This was a way to avoid the media poisoned by FIDESZ and to have direct contacts socially. Also his new formation established small circles in the Hungarian countryside to discuss public concerns and thus he was able to channel lower level professionals into his new populist movement. This was later a basis for selecting new politicians competing for parliamentary seats, which pool was combined with pro-NATO and pro-EU high ranking managerial professionals and technocrats. This is actually his new combo for tackling some major political institutional challenges (redemocratization), key economic problems in energy, economic structure, the dependence on German automotive industry, a mismanaged agricultural system with low profitability larger scale estates and, very importantly, crumbling — at some points collapsing — public services. A strange combo again and clearly it will lead to major political and social challenges without a firm support of a party. But the future cannot be told, especially in the current war-multiplying geopolitical scenario. What needs to be answered, then, is why the real left has not been able to take advantage of the rise of the FIDESZ-type right, not only in Hungary but globally as well.

How to be self-critical toward the left

Together with the above changes, the radical or systemic left — which had already been a faint memory anyway — also got to non-existence, at least in Hungarian everyday politics. With a new right-wing victory, we need to ask why this decline has happened.

First of all, this does not mean the death of the left either in Hungary or globally, since all the contradictions of the current system remain alive and are pushing problems and tensions toward the surface and toward further historical change. Also we hope that in Hungary, the plundering tactics of Orbán will not remain (the hijacking of left-wing tropes: see his opposition to the IMF, and his false criticism of globalization and big capital), and that it will not simply be replaced by a different kind of plundering, say, within a more liberal and supposedly more humanistic framework. That, too, would be a false alliance from the perspective of the left.

Nonetheless, regardless of the historical relevance, let’s admit it: the social left and leftist thought globally — and especially in our semi-peripheral reality, and first and foremost in Hungary — are lame ducks. At least in the sense that they do not exist as a social actor. That is to say, they cannot begin the renewal and responsible reconstruction of social formations, the overcoming of social contradictions through democratic and self-governing methods (which is the quintessence of the systemic left). Why do we have this global and local right-wing dominance instead? Why is there this lack of leftist alternatives in Hungary and globally?

This is a topic and problem which needs to be answered after the Hungarian political change. In this brief essay, I aim only to raise some brief points. So, I simply want to spark a debate in the best sense of the word. I have no ideological or conceptual magic stick; I really just want to ask everyone who isn’t caught up in some ideological madness, but who respects and upholds human society’s ability to develop and, over time, manage the significant transformation of the institutional order in the interest of a more stable and socially and ecologically sustainable — but not artificially constructed — future.

1.     The first major question concerns model-based thinking itself. Why and how was the knowledge lost that such future models exist, and that society itself will somehow work them out? I do not believe that the process has come to a halt and that social change is driven not by internal social forces but by the feverish dreams of utopian pseudo-intellectuals. Where have the truly dynamic, historically materialist-thinking and in-depth analyses of social processes themselves — which still existed in the 1970s — gone? Where has the critical economic history that evaluates long-term processes and economic modeling gone? I know such workshops still exist, but their voice is faint and cannot be considered a significant force. We have lost this critical scholarly perspective completely. Have we, as left-wing social researchers, lost all the resources available in this field to neoliberal self-management? Have the forces and states that once dedicated themselves to this type of intellectual and political work died out, and is that why we cannot move forward? Or is hard work undesirable in blog-producing societies, since everything is just a 15-minute performance?

2. Why do so many people express their critical inclinations — mockingly labeled as “leftist” — through selective ideological labelings of fascism, imperialism, or ethnic/national/religious mudslinging? Where does this hatred come from? Why has the debate shifted to the point where the leftist waving the flags of certain capitalist — and in many cases nationalist/fundamentalist — states and groups operating within the imperialist system (a world system that redistributes the market on the basis of capital power) has become dominant? In the complete absence of a leftist development, has the left become the advocate of certain (often murderous) groups and states, instead of examining the system itself — the state system and social development arising from the capitalist competitive order — as a whole? Must everything be settled with binary oppositions? It really is baffling.

3. If we’re talking about analysis, why do so many people indulge in aimless, shallow criticism of capitalism and become professional critics of capitalism? Is this some kind of forced wage-labor for them? Or is the genre of data-less, blog-style ramblings currently dominating the scene? Or we got used to reciting classic Marxist paragraphs about the perceived and real horrors of capitalism? Or the irrationality of social media prevails again?

4. Where has the tracking of the current biggest problem — marketization (the ever-deepening commodification of society) — and the exploration of its consequences gone? Why is only the fragmented work of a portion of the social science and sociology professions, squeezed into neoliberal projects, visible in this area? Why is there no more comprehensive framework — not just the chaotic spouting of the so-called classics’ clichés (oh, that is certainly deadly)? Is it because the market itself has already swallowed this field of study, and even sociological Marxism has become a market commodity? Or should we go through this market phase, reach the already untenable crisis of a massively individualized society, so that we may finally dare to ask about the conditions surrounding market-dependent, wage-earning, or domesticated workers living under exploitation?

5.   And finally: Do we now understand that the rise of the right in Hungary and around the world is actually the call of history for the left? Have we already assessed that, following liberal and then conservative/nationalist/chauvinist rule, the task of overcoming both together now falls to us — to groups that are critical of the system not on a utopian ground? A new kind of left is to be seen, which seeks, over time, to establish the institutional foundations of a self-governing and balanced mixed economy based on strongly individualized societies? To put it another way: should we be talking not about a crisis, but about tasks, as we seek the true driving forces of our era’s social transformation? I do not know, but it seems that even the collapse of the Orbán regime pushes us toward such questions. We should start answering them before it is too late.