Jan-Werner Müller

Just like after the US presidential election in 2016, we are hearing endless exhortations from pundits (and some Democratic politicians) to make an effort to understand Trump supporters, to earn their respect, to be curious about them, not to be condescending etc. There are two obvious problems with this kind of rhetoric: first, nobody asked Trump voters after 2020 to show empathy with, let’s say, African American women and try to comprehend why they had strongly supported Biden. As so often, the lazy talk of ‘polarisation’ obscures a profoundly asymmetrical situation. Second, the ‘arrogance’ of liberal elites is largely an invention of right-wing media.

Analogies with 20th-century fascism are not particularly helpful for understanding our times, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they’ve had enough of democracy; it is elites, and economic elites in particular. Blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived by sleeper car from Milan because the leading strata of the Italian state had invited him to govern. People today also often take their cues from business leaders, in particular a pop culture figure like Musk. All the self-serving talk of ‘disruption’ can be adapted to make Trump acceptable, as can the studied neutrality of oligarchs who not only own their own rockets, but their own newspapers: refusing to endorse Harris sends a signal that it’s rational to be intimidated by Trump.    

Everything appears to be going according to plan for Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian prime minister was re-elected on 6 April; after another week of counting absentee ballots and the votes of newly enfranchised ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring states, it is now clear that Orbán’s Fidesz party will retain its two-thirds majority in parliament – enough to change the constitution at any time it sees fit. Such concentration of power is unusual in Europe. But it conforms to the political vision Orbán outlined in a speech in 2009: Hungary, he claimed then, needed a dominant ‘central force’ to overcome not only the legacies of state socialism, but also what Orbán portrays as a failed transition after 1989.