Who Benefits From Far-Right Politics...And Its Defeat?
On Orban’s defeat in Hungary and the dilemmas of electoral remedy.
Much celebration in my corner of the internet about the crushing electoral defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary. After 16 years of ethnonationalist, patriarchal, reactionary politics, he’s out.
The reason for the celebration by people who have no connection to this small Eastern European country is simple: Orban was a far-right politician who tried to rig his own election and lost anyway, meaning that electoral democracy remains one path out of the fascistic nightmare looming over many Western countries.
More than that, Hungary was viewed by far-right politicos around the world as an incubator or testbed for how to govern as an elected dictator. “Anti-woke” blather, anti-communist hysteria (still), taking away women’s rights, colluding with other far-right forces abroad to form a literal Global Far Right—Hungary was considered ground zero for that project the past decade. Much of Trump’s Project 2025 was copied and pasted from Orban’s experience in Hungary. So much so that Budapest hosted the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2022, where a bunch of American national conservatives signed a manifesto of counter-revolution that we’ve seen in evidence since 2025.
It’s certainly good news that it’s at least possible to claw back a little democracy via the ballot box. It does give one hope, even if every country’s ability to appeal to electoral remedy will differ greatly. And as Lily Lynch writes, the election outcome does have implications outside Hungary.
But all is not well. Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party is center-right. There is no reason to think they will govern as anything other than Macron-esque neoliberals. We can expect less persecution of trans people, immigrants, and women. That’s something.
But if we think about who benefits under both far-right and neoliberal regimes, we see that Hungary’s election does not resolve—and is likely to perpetuate—the underlying economic precarity that gave rise to the far-right in the first place.
David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism describes neoliberalism as a project of a small section of the capitalist class that networked together through the Business Roundtable, Chambers of Commerce, the Global Business Network, and a patchwork of right-wing think tanks. The purpose of neoliberalism was to steer state power against organized labor and toward a regime of horizonless capital accumulation—ie, deregulation, privatization of public assets, tax cuts, and corporate welfare.
Because neoliberalism served primarily a small section of elites, it needed a popular political base with at least the prospect of being majoritarian. Right-wing identity politics was its popular base, putting neoliberal capitalists in league with the religious right. It was thus by design, not happenstance, that the rise of neoliberalism and the rise of the religious right both began in the 1970s.
But how do you continue to govern as neoliberals over time if the plight of the working classes keeps getting predictably worse (bespeaking the correctness of Harvey’s characterization of what neoliberalism is)? Well, that’s the entire point of far-right populism—exploit identity-politics grievances so that capitalists can hoard wealth even under deteriorating economic circumstances. It’s not trans athletes who are raising your rent, it’s your landlord. It’s not immigrants who are making the price of bread and gas go up; it’s your corrupt-ass government. But far-right identity politics distracts from those with power in favor of scapegoating.
Orban was radically far-right in terms of his social agenda. But his was also a fairly typical right-wing political regime in economic terms. And so it’s worth paying attention to who benefited and who suffered materially within his far-right fantasy.
According to the Financial Times, 13 close associates of Orban—actual oligarchs—enriched themselves via Orban’s allocations of state power. Tens of billions of Euros-worth of government contracts were routed to Orban’s friends (again, classic oligarchy shit). In analyzing 350k public contracts, those companies that supported Orban’s re-election campaigns were observably more likely to win business from the government:
The FT’s analysis shows that 14 per cent of all the funds awarded in state tenders under Orbán went to 42 companies owned by the 13 associates. They had won just 1 per cent between 2005 and his election in 2010. In total, they netted more than €28bn in government tenders from 2010 to late 2025, either alone or as part of consortiums — an average of €1.8bn a year. In the five years before Orbán took power combined, they won only a third of that annual average: €608mn.
If it’s the oligarchs who benefited from Orban’s regime, who paid? Everybody else. A separate analysis from the Financial Times showed Hungary’s economy to be vastly underperforming the EU average and the plight of workers was also vastly worse than the EU average:
It is definitionally impossible to have good governance under a far-right regime. But that’s the idea: far-right identity politics to facilitate class war (against workers). That is a logical extension of the bargain of neoliberalism itself. And the economic conditions that neoliberalism wrought are what incubated far-right “populism.”
So there’s a way in which we can look at Hungary’s electoral repudiation of Orbanism and read our hopes into its situation. But if we’re clear-eyed, what Hungary also shows is that any electoral path out of autocracy that simply replaces ethnonationalism with neoliberalism is accomplishing little more than promising the return of the far-right in mutated form.
Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.