Dorit, thank you for joining us. I wanted to start with some of your research on Hungary and Viktor Orbán. You’ve written about how the Hungarian state’s authoritarian turn is inseparably linked to its political-economic model (and the crisis thereof) and the new political-economic model that Orbán crafted to ease that crisis. You call this model “ordonationalist.” What do you mean by this term? To what extent is this ordonationalist model a continuation of its neoliberal predecessor and to what extent is it a genuine break?
The main point I am trying to make with this term is that the Orbán regime has been innovative in forging a new model of state-market relations, breaking from the 1990s neoliberal blueprint. The (Third Way) Socialist party in Hungary, in the years immediately after the fall of state-socialism, adhered largely to the Washington Consensus blueprint. Hungary had already amassed considerable sovereign debt in the 1980s during the final state-socialist years, and debt to international lending institutions like the IMF only increased in the 1990s during the decade of rapid liberalization. Orbán and his allies, who were not part of this new liberal elite, watched these developments from the sidelines. In retrospect, it made no sense to them that state elites abandoned direct control of the state and of the economy in the name of liberalization.
Beyond a religious and cultural shift rightwards, when Orbán was elected in 2010, his vision for Hungary was to abandon the 1990s-2008 globalist consensus. The degree of the ambition, but also hubris, of Orbánism is reflected in a large-scale transformation of the Hungarian market into one which is, in certain respects, even more neoliberal on social dimensions, such as a vast reduction of workers’ rights and an intensification of economic inequality. Yet, on the other hand, it is a market economy where the national state, and its ruling party, dominate as the critical gatekeepers and managers of the national economy. The “ordo” is meant to reference this mode of top-down state-led economic management, while it is also hyper-nationalist and anti-globalist. But, that does not mean it is not neoliberal. On the contrary, it still is, but in methods and specific articulations which are a break from the 1990s-2008 model.
Orbánism transformed the Hungarian market into one which is in some ways even more neoliberal on social dimensions, yet where the national state, and its ruling party, dominate as the critical gatekeepers and managers of the national economy.
Following on that, to what extent is Hungary’s ordonationalist model parochial or on the contrary generalizable? Is this something that other right-wing or populist governments can employ in their own countries? I ask because we have seen quite a remarkable attraction to Hungary among right-wing actors in the West. Is their affinity at all related to the ordonationalism we’ve been discussing, or is it simply a product of shallow polarization over “culture wars”?
In Hungary, “culture wars” and populist discourse mask a more profound transformation: fundamentally retooling the state to concentrate executive powers and mobilize centralized state power.
Regimes outside Hungary have been moving in some parallel directions, even if specific articulations differ from country to country. There is a shallow polarization which can be described most simply as a reversion to “culture wars.” However, my argument about Hungary is that these shallow features, whether they are “culture wars,” or populist discourse, mask a more profound transformation. That transformation is fundamentally about retooling the state to concentrate executive powers and mobilize centralized state power for several goals. One of these goals is to enable the central state, and elites in power, to become the center of national economic competition, and without turning to democratic mechanisms in seeking the legitimacy for these concentrated powers.
Trumpism is one version of this. The motto of 2024 CPAC was “Where Globalism Dies.” This is a new version of conservatism for the United States, which is now explicitly about rejecting the “globalist” neoliberal consensus of the post-Cold War era. It includes rejecting the presumption that national states must adhere, for example to a series of bilateral trade agreements which decrease the discretionary power of a head of state. I observed the 2024 CPAC meetings in person and was struck by the almost complete erasure of Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Although the Saturday night gala dinner is still named after him, he was otherwise almost never mentioned over days of panels and speakers. “Reaganomics” is no longer the core ideology of the Republican party. It is the end of an era. We should not be distracted by the histrionics of a figure like Tucker Carlson, whose personal fame has been built on fanning culture wars. There is a more serious structural and state transformation underway, and Hungary is a model for others now.
Building on this question of generalizability, you wrote a piece last year criticizing Netanyahu’s government in Israel, specifically over the judicial reform, noting it was straight from Orbán’s playbook. Since then, and particularly since the start of the war on Gaza, we have seen the Israeli government pass a new “media law” that allows it to shut down foreign media outlets it deems security threats, and pursue a general crackdown on civil liberties, including by shutting down protests and arresting individuals for social media posts. Excluding the judicial reform, many of these measures are supported across the political spectrum. How close is Israel to becoming a Hungary 2.0 and could an Israeli democratic regression be even more thoroughgoing, given that these authoritarian tendencies are not concentrated inside one political party or figure, like Orbán, but rather across a wide swath of the Israeli political class and demos?
Prior to the war, Israel was on its way toward becoming Hungary 2.0. This was no coincidence. Netanyahu and his allies had watched and learned from Orbán’s methods of mobilizing the national parliament itself and various measures of selective privatization—with contracts given only to political allies—to create a theatre of democratic accountability, which, in practice, is a hollowing-out of democratic institutions. In Netanyahu’s version, this has especially focused on dismantling liberal veto points, such as the power of the Supreme Court, and expunging the political representation and power of secular Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
But, the situation in Israel is far more dynamic than in Hungary. Despite the legal framework of the European Union, Orbánism is deeply entrenched in Hungary, and so far, Orbán’s ingenious use of the law to hollow out Hungarian democracy has proven to be a difficult problem for the EU to overcome. Additionally, despite considerable opposition to Orbánism in Hungary, no viable countermovement has emerged. By contrast, Israeli society has been divided and in constant sectarian struggles since the founding of the State of Israel. The paradox of the ongoing military and security “situation” is that, for decades, it provided the one rationale for unity within an otherwise highly divided society. Prior to the current war, Netanyahu managed to coalesce something that looks like Hungary 2.0, but his project never achieved the depth and extent across Israel that Orbán succeeded in achieving in Hungary. Israel is a half-Hungary 2.0. The judicial coup prior to October 7, 2023, inflamed the other half. Then, for the first time in Israeli history, since October 7 a political leader has been leading a war that is not creating a sense of unity across the Jewish population of Israel. This is simply unprecedented.
While Netanyahu was trying to build a Hungary 2.0, the war is now putting so much in play that it is far from certain that Netanyahu will emerge victorious when the war finally ends. The problem, though, is that by now Netanyahu’s dominance is dependent on a perpetual state of emergency, and there is a possibility that he will prolong this perpetual state of emergency through an even deeper military occupation of the West Bank, and a quasi-reoccupation of Gaza. If this unfolds, then this will be a departure from Orbánism. One of the interesting features of Orbánism is that it has abstained from turning to military emergencies as a means of consolidating power. This means that the Orbán regime is more hegemonically entrenched than Netanyahu’s in Israel.
Moving on, I wanted to ask you a few questions about gender politics. You’ve written about Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National party, and the role that “gendered symbolism” plays in populist movements—which you consider hegemonically masculinist. What do you mean by this term gendered symbolism and what is its function in the populist repertoire? How does it relate to ideology? How is it that politicians like Marine Le Pen can simultaneously embody femininized and masculinized virtues?
First, I distinguish in this research between populism as a performative style, and the deeper substance of radical right ideologies. I side with those who see populism as a thin ideology, with nothing more than the basic features of political figures claiming to represent “the people,” and anti-elitism. This thin ideology is turned into a performative repertoire by a theatrical politician like Donald Trump using crass language to show he is of the people and is unlike the Washington elites, or a figure like Giorgia Meloni declaring that she is a mother, like all other mothers struggling to make ends meet. These shallow performative repertoires bind with, but are distinct from, the thick ideological content of radical right politics. The thick ideological content of the European radical right includes racism, anti-immigration sentiment, Islamophobia, in some cases antisemitism, increasingly ideas of a Muslim/migrant population replacement, EU-skepticism, and even anti-democratic ideology at its most extreme.
Gender relations at large produce feelings of attraction, love, disgust, or repugnance. Populist politicians today work on this level of desire and repugnance, and achieve their desired impact on followers by enacting hyper-femininity and/or masculinity.
This is where I see gender relations and “gendered symbolism” as crucial ingredients in today’s populist radical right politics. For the “populist” performative repertoire, gender comes heavily into play. A performative repertoire is only successful insofar as it resonates with the electorate. This resonance relies on subjective feelings of attraction, love, or disgust and repugnance. Gender relations at large—regardless of electoral politics—produce feelings of attraction, love, disgust, or repugnance. Populist politicians today, I argue, work on this level of desire and repugnance, and achieve their desired impact on followers by enacting hyper-femininity and/or masculinity. These gendered repertoires become linked to the thicker radical-right ideologies, acting as a glue between populist theatrics and the thicker substance of radical-right ideologies. For example, for a figure like Giorgia Meloni to emphasize her maternity, she is not only rendering herself as equivalent to all other mothers (of the people), but also emphasizing racial and ethnic bloodlines, the nation as kinship, and protective motherhood as against liberal proceduralism.
My ethnographic research on the French radical right focused on how Marine Le Pen was seen, from the bottom-up on the part of her supporters, as an extraordinary woman. I was struck by the language of desire, intimacy, and admiration supporters used to describe her. Rather than constantly discussing formal party platforms, the everyday world of her party activists cast her constantly as an object of desire; a mother protecting her children, a sexually active and independent and modern woman, a Joan of Arc for the twenty-first century. I could write an entire paper about discussions regarding her legs.
I was even more surprised, however, by their admiring descriptions of her as embodying masculinity, like being a military captain, the new Charles de Gaulle, and with an impressive masculine physicality in her towering height and deep voice. This duality was striking and is unusual in electoral politics, where in the past women suffered politically if they were seen as too masculine, or too feminine. From this I have argued that women on the populist radical right have a surprising range of gendered performances they can enact, including masculinity, and hyper-femininity. The right kind of femininity, and the right kind of masculinity, glues together populist repertoires with radical-right ideologies, delivering a powerful and appealing package to an electorate that is fed up with conventional party politics, and perhaps even tired of liberal democracy.
Women on the populist radical right have a surprising range of gendered performances they can enact, including masculinity, and hyper-femininity.
On this question of gender politics, I wanted to tie your concept of gendered symbolism back to Hungary’s political economy. As you say, gender has an important role in structuring the stylistic repertoire we call populism, but it also has an important role in structuring Orbán’s new political-economic model, perhaps most potently in the state’s carefare regime. What is the role of gender in the new ordonationalist model, and how do strictly defined conceptions of femininity, motherhood, etc. advance or undermine its goals?
Let’s begin by pointing out that the current government in Hungary is composed currently of the only ministerial cabinet in Europe without a single woman minister. The Fidesz party is unabashedly patriarchal. I would even say that, by now, this is a mark of pride for them. The only two women who had an important role in any Fidesz government resigned in 2024 following a political scandal for which they summarily became the scapegoats.
Beyond the all-male composition of the government, the concept of a “carefare regime” emphasizes a restructuring of the welfare state in Hungary. There is an interesting question among scholars of comparative welfare states whether there is a new type of illiberal welfare state emerging. This remains an unanswered question so far. But the idea of a “carefare regime,” suggests that there is an innovation in Hungary, reflecting what I describe in my ordonationalism article, which shows that Hungary has intensified some aspects of 1990s neoliberalism, but also has broken from it in other regards. In terms of women’s social citizenship, this has meant that women are expected to become mothers, especially middle-class non-Roma women. But, on the other hand, they are still expected to work, at least part-time, in the paid labor market. There is therefore an idealization of middle-class women as mothers and especially as demographic reproducers, yet without the investment in an extensive welfare state regime that supports women’s extended exit from the paid labor market as caregivers. Women who are mothers, and who also work, are supported by the state. But, these supports have also taken on new form, especially through financial instruments like subsidized mortgages, rather than straight-up cash transfers.
Therefore, gender is central to the new political-economic model promoted by Orbánism. The state is intensely male. Financial capital and access to capitalist profit are the domain of men. Whereas in some countries there has been the emergence of what some feminist critics have called “neoliberalism feminism,” wherein ideals of liberal feminism and its emphasis on autonomy were retooled to fit a neoliberal ethic of shifting reasonability for “success” onto women through the discourse of “women’s empowerment”—no such discourse exists in Hungary. Women are not to be “empowered” through the market. Rather, they are now encouraged to be satisfied. What is satisfaction? Motherhood, property ownership, a family car, money for summer vacations on the Croatian coast, and all this thanks to investment in a state-backed mortgage, some participation in paid labor, and marriage to a man who can largely support the family. It is a new patriarchal bargain.
Finally, we always end by asking our guests about the term associated with our Program, namely illiberalism. How do you understand this term and do you find that it has utility? How does illiberalism relate to the topics we’ve discussed today like ordonationalism, which is after all a kind of departure from previously hegemonic liberal ideas?
Well, I think the best article articulating a coherent thesis regarding “illiberalism” is by Marlène Laruelle. And no one paid me or cued me to respond this way, it’s the honest truth. I have assigned this article to students this past year at the University of Vienna. What I find especially useful in this theorization of illiberalism is in Laruelle’s distinction between illiberalism, anti-liberalism, and non-liberal regimes. The historical trajectory emphasized in the article is also critical; namely, that a regime needs to have gone through a period of liberalism to shift into illiberalism. I have been thinking about this theme of illiberalism not simply in relation to Hungary, but in a current short comparative piece I am writing. In it I develop a spectrum of radical right parties in Europe. There are so many by now, that I think especially for observers from outside Europe, they might all look the same, as if the same currents are sweeping all corners of Europe. But, in disaggregating the dimensions, or illiberal scripts Laruelle identifies as critical to illiberal ideology, a spectrum becomes apparent of parties that might even be described as supporting some elements of social liberalism, especially in vis-à-vis non-migrant women’s equality in society at large, to illiberal parties, to anti-liberal parties at the most extreme edges.
It seems to me that the political right is currently the most creative, organized, and ambitious in revisioning the future from the leftovers of this previous stage of neoliberalism. Illiberal regimes are one variant of retooling the past and creating something new.
Beyond this analysis of European radical right parties, in my view, it is clear that the neoliberal consensus from about 1990-2008 is over, and there are multiple fronts now where there is considerable rethinking and very serious ideological battles regarding what is next. It seems to me that the political right is currently the most creative, organized, and ambitious in revisioning the future from the leftovers of this previous stage of neoliberalism. Illiberal regimes are one variant of retooling the past and creating something new.
Dorit Geva is Professor for Politics and Gender at the University of Vienna. She studies far-right politics, the radicalization of conservatism, and the rise of neoliberal authoritarianism and its transformations of the neoliberal state. Her recent publications focus on the gender politics of the far right in Europe, anti-gender politics in France, the rise of what she calls an “ordonationalist” regime in Hungary, and right-wing transformations of higher education.
