A Global Chaos
Cuts through the week's noise.
In this week's newsletter: Jude Jones, editor-in-chief of GAY45, cuts through the week's noise exclusively for subscribers, plus our essential recommendations.
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The Week in Sharp Relief
A Global Chaos
By Jude Jones, editor-in-chief
Next month, Viktor Orbán – the Hungarian prime minister who attempted to purge Pride, whose country has become a petri dish for global illiberalism – will be up for re-election in what Politico Europe has called “the most important election of 2026”. If current polls are to be believed, he will suffer an embarrassing loss to Péter Magyar’s pro-European Tisza Party, founded in 2020.
Orbán has ruled Hungary since 2010, during which time he has pulled the country away from Europe and toward both authoritarianism and authoritarians. He is a noted confidant of Vladimir Putin’s – just this week he blocked a €90bn EU defence loan for Ukraine as President Vlodymyr Zelenskyy watched on, ghost-faced – and an “inspiration” behind Donald Trump’s dismemberment of democracy in America (Hungarian conservatives proudly call themselves “Trump before Trump”). He has turned his nation into one of the most dangerous for journalists in Europe and one of the continent’s most corrupt. An FT investigation just this week revealed €28bn in government tender he has divvied to his friends during his decade-and-a-half in power.
But when global conservative leaders gathered in Budapest this week, a special Hungarian edition of CPAC – described on its website as “the one global jamboree that is anti-globalist” – a who’s who of political depravity endorsed the “Viktator”.
Marine Le Pen, who has been barred from running for election over embezzlement convictions and whose far-right National Rally were one of the “losers” of this week’s elections, endorsed him as an “exceptional leader”. Geert Wilders of the Dutch right-wing, recently defeated for the country’s top job by a gay centrist, lauded him as a “lion on a continent led by sheep”.
Trump even FaceTimed in, presumably in between picking names at random from a money bag to decide which country to attack next as part of Operation [INSERT STUPID HYPER-MACHO NAME HERE], to praise Orbán for having “shown the entire world what’s possible when you defend your borders, your culture, your heritage, your sovereignty and your values.” Iran and Venezuela, I’d imagine, had gone about all the above the wrong way in the Orange Man’s opinion.
Europe’s right-wing is desperate for Orbán, perhaps its most powerful member, to remain in power. In January, the likes of Le Pen, Austria’s Herbert Kickl and Germany’s Alice Weidel put together a promotional video package for Orbán to plead “Europe needs Viktor Orbán”. Russia, in a very Russian move, have been mobilising pro-Orbán bots en masse. “If we fall,” the organisers of CPAC Hungary stated on their website, “Europe will fall too.”
American conservatives are also flexing as much muscle as they can muster: beyond the CPAC instalment, there was the Marco Rubio endorsement last month (“your success is our success,” spoke ‘Liddle Marco’), the J.D. Vance visit scheduled early next month. Orbán’s regime has provided the ideological architecture for American Trumpism; Orbán’s defeat risks not only signalling the right’s waning momentum but a premonition of the Don’s downfall as betting markets favour him to lose the Senate and approval ratings reach all-time lows (his war in Iran is already more unpopular than the Vietnam War was at its nadir).
But already Orbán is being kicked in the shins. This week, liberal Robert Golob was re-elected as Prime Minister of Slovenia, the first post-Soviet country to legalise gay marriage, by defeating far-right firebrand and Orbán ally Janez Janša in an unstable flash finish which might still fall through. This loss could dislodge the right-wing bloc that sedimented last year with Czechoslovakia’s election of billionaire populist Andrej Babiš, and which also includes Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. The vanquishing of Orbán could cause this wall to crumble – and would be a symbolic humiliation for those who have rallied around him.
That, of course, isn’t to say that a new supreme will not rise should Orbán fall. Far-right parties are still pushing up the polls in Germany, the UK, Spain and, most worringly, France, where a presidential election against the impossibly unpopular Emmanuel Macron next year could sweep Le Pen’s National Rally to power (though the damp squib performance in the Hexagon’s regional elections gives some hope).
But what Hungary does show is what happens when you elect a right-winger and give him free rein: an apathetic kleptocracy where LGBTQ+ rights are put on the prisoner’s row. Let’s just hope the next one doesn’t rule for 16 years.
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