by Stefano Bottoni
Stefano Bottoni is an associate professor in East European history at the University of Florence
Meloni and Orbán are often treated as closely comparable political actors. However, their trajectories are widely divergent, and this is reflected in their respective understanding of both domestic political action and international alliances.
The ideological and political trajectories of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have been the subject of many analyses in recent years. International commentators tend to lump them together under rubrics such as radical right, extreme right, or populist right – an interpretation that will only be reinforced by their shared unwillingness to support Ursula von der Leyen’s re-election as Commission President. Contrary to such interpretations, the liberal press in Hungary tends to depict Giorgia Meloni as a politician with democratic credibility these days, the kind of recognition that it denies to her Hungarian counterpart; in such organs, Meloni is often presented as a sincere democrat with conservative convictions who is not a reactionary autocrat like Viktor Orbán.
I think both approaches need to be corrected.
On closer examination, the trajectories of Meloni and Orbán turn out to be widely different, reflecting divergent personal histories and long-term strategies.
The aim of this article is therefore to account for what I believe unites and separates the two of them.
According to the broad definition proposed by Jason Stanley, throughout the last century fascism as an ideology and practice was based on a “politics of hierarchy,” a politics that pursues social and (quasi) biological ambitions. The fascists of yesterday and today share the belief in such politics.
They seek to recreate a mythical, glorious past by excluding from national culture those whom they deem unworthy.
At the same time, the fascist power system, or the ideological nature of a fascist-inspired party operating within a democracy, is best understood by defining fascism as a cultural code rather than a rigidly defined power structure.
Despite all the differences in their biographies, Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán share the fascist notion of hierarchy. They are both culturally right-wing; their convictions are fueled by their vocal – and sincere – rejection of liberal norms and social values. They also stand in opposition to the liberal, or rather the politically moderate Western consensus and perceive themselves as part of a broader global movement whose ultimate goal is to catapult – or restore, as they see it – the political right to a pivotal place in contemporary discourse. One might argue that both are offsprings of the rediscovery on the right of the communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, particularly his notion of cultural hegemony.
Moreover, while both Meloni and Orbán can be classified as nationalists in their respective countries, they both think in global terms while seeking to establish long-term hegemony in their national political spheres.
Having looked at the similarities in their political conceptions, let me examine the far from insignificant differences in their approach and the contexts in which they operate.
When it comes to the complex relationship between anti-systemic, radical, or extremist right-wing movements or parties and political power, three basic attitudes can be identified. Some such parties were born and remained outside the political and cultural consensus and on the fringes of the constitutional arc. Such was the case in Italy with the post-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, 1946-92), or in Hungary with Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (MIÉP, 1993-2006). The trajectory of the only systemic opposition party in Germany today, that of Alternative for Germany (AfD), appears to be much the same: it is a party that does not want to move towards the political center because it would thereby lose its raison d’être as a culturally anti-systemic movement. Also, the German “system,” from the security services to the media, does not allow the AfD to be normalized as this could bring it into the halls of power.
The second type includes those parties, such as the French National Front since the 1990s (later renamed the National Rally), or Alleanza Nazionale, the successor to the MSI, that tried to move from extreme positions to the center of the political spectrum. They did this in parts for purely tactical reasons, but also as a sign of their cultural repositioning and shift towards the post-liberal mainstream.
The third case, which may be intellectually more fascinating but is politically less manageable, concerns those parties that move in the opposite direction. They were not born extremist and indeed used to share a liberal political culture, which they later renounced in order to embrace a conservative or even reactionary one. In short, they move from the center (or even from the center-left) to the far right. As they shift their ideology, they also move their electorate toward radical positions.
The case of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s party, Fidesz, is peculiar in the context of the new global right, precisely because of its originally liberal cultural matrix.
Fidesz’s rightward shift since the second half of the 1990s has in fact dragged Hungary’s entire political culture with it. It is no coincidence then that the only political movement that truly threatens the hegemony of the party-state today is led by Péter Magyar who supported Fidesz in the past and shares many elements of Orbán’s political culture.
The striking differences in Orbán’s and Meloni’s respective understanding of both domestic political action and international alliance building can indeed be grasped by reference to their divergent ideological and cultural trajectories.
Meloni can be described as a fourth-generation fascist. Fratelli d’Italia, founded in 2012, is the direct, indeed the proud heir of a century of right-wing history that run from fascism in power (1922-45), through the Italian social movement on the fringes of republican politics (1946-92), to the “democratic normalization” and inclusion of Alleanza Nazionale in the various governments presided over by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi between 1994 and 2011 – and on to FdI. Meloni continues on a trajectory that belongs to the second type described above.
Orbán, on the contrary, clearly belongs to the third type: he led a liberal and then moderate conservative movement, he then positioned himself as a global influencer, even the spiritual leader of the anti-liberal counter-revolution. He did not move from the extreme right to the center to gain power, but relentlessly used the economic and logistical resources he gained access to on the basis of his “moderate” program in 2010, to build an autocratic state based on radical ideological premises. I am not suggesting that Giorgia Meloni and her government cannot pose a risk to democratic governance in Italy and the European Union in the coming years. I argue, however, that the checks and balances built into the Italian constitutional system and the country’s international positioning (from its anchoring in the European single currency to its bipartisan allegiance to the Euro-Atlantic axis amidst the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine) make it difficult to imagine a lasting, or even irreversible anti-democratic slide in Italy under Meloni’s leadership – and this difficulty is greatly reinforced by what separates her trajectory from that of Viktor Orbán.
