20 Feb 2026 | Austria, Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News, Slovakia
When I left Hungary on Sunday, the US secretary of state Marco Rubio had just arrived in Budapest for talks with the prime minister Viktor Orbán to give him the USA’s full-throttled support. Hungary has been somewhat of a touchstone for the MAGA movement and Rubio told Orbán that US Hungarian relations were entering “a golden age” and that if Orbán needed anything, the US would consider providing it. There are elections in Hungary just after Easter and it looks likely, if the polls are to be believed, that the more pro-EU opposition leader Péter Magyar will win. There is restrained optimism among many liberals in Budapest although nothing in this part of the world is a done deal. The week I was there, Magyar was going big on the theme that he had been lured into a honey trap and some Kompromat video Russian-style was going to be released. Only a grainy black and white still of a double-bed captured by a ceiling camera ever emerged. Even with a Magyar win, it will be difficult to unravel the total capture of institutions (universities, the media and the cultural centres) by billionaires and those loyal to Orbán’s Fidesz. I heard some 30-something American men in black bomber jackets in Budapest’s Jewish quarter loudly complaining in English that the “young people” in Hungary wanted to tax those billionaires, but they simply didn’t understand how the country relied on them. We are examining the implications on freedom of expression of all these Hungarian developments in the next magazine.
This part of Europe, which was once the Habsburg Empire, feels in flux. People, and particularly young people, are fighting back to claim their rights to be heard. Liberal forces in Slovakia are mobilising, even while the far-right leader Robert Fico is attempting to “normalise” the cultural sector, taking money away from any arts institution considered to be too “activist”. Meanwhile in Vienna, the situation to the east is waved away in the coffee houses as being unimportant, or at least an issue which will resolve itself. A famous saying about the city is: “When the world comes to an end, move to Vienna because everything happens there 20 years later.” There are fears here about an over-dependence on an increasingly unfriendly USA, particularly when it comes to digital platforms and servers – the USA could turn them all off with a flick of a switch if Europe doesn’t toe the line – and a frustration that France and Germany are not working as one to build European solidarity against hostile forces in China and Russia. And then there is a question of the rise of the far-right parties in Europe, including in Austria itself. From the end of World War Two, it was the USA which acted as a liberal guarantor for free expression in western and then eastern Europe. The old order is breaking up, the EU is weakened and ordinary people are having to decide whether those rights are still worth fighting for.
8 Jan 2026 | Belgium, Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News
It should now be clear to everyone that the year 2026 will be marked by the march of the far right further into the mainstream of European politics. Each of the major European powers now has an ultra-nationalist party capable of taking at least a share of power in a democratic election. In Italy it has already formed the government.
What’s more, these Far Right revivalists claim they are defending the key enlightenment value of free speech – although they can be highly selective in its application.
The movement is driven by its hostility towards a well-defined common enemy, not Russia or China, but the European project itself. “The real threat does not come from Moscow or Beijing or from troll farms in St Petersburg. It comes from Brussels.” This, in a nutshell, was the message of the Battle for the Soul of Europe, a conference organised in the Belgian capital in December by MCC Brussels, a thinktank devoted to the downfall of the European Union.
MCC stands for Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian institution with close links to Viktor Orbán (Corvinus himself was a 15th century expansionist king of Hungary). Politico has described the organisation as, “The EU’s most prominent hard-right pressure group.” The speaker was Norman Lewis, a visiting fellow at MCC Brussels and a former director of management consultants PwC, who perfectly embodies the ease with which the corporate world can embrace so-called National Conservatism.
The repeated message at Battle for the Soul of Europe was clear and coherent, if somewhat monotonous: European civilisation is under threat from the combined forces of mass immigration and wokery. Patriots of sovereign nations need to wake up and fight for the Christian values of the West and make peace with Russia. Just a week after the conference, US President Donald Trump made it clear that his national security strategy is based on precisely the same principles.
Many participants felt their voices were being silenced by the liberal European establishment.
Virginie Joron, MEP for the French far-right party Rassemblement National (National Rally) expressed her horror that, in her view, the Macron government was planning to label disinformation and “malicious advertising” with the help of the NGO Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and she said felt this was an attempt to target French TV channels sympathetic to the far right. Joron’s views reflect a feud going back several years. In 2024, RSF claimed there were concerted attempts to discredit them – for defending French law on fact-based broadcasting – led by the right-wing media group Vivendi with the support of far-right politicians.
Joron went on to attack Google, George Soros and the EU’s planned Centre for Democratic Resilience as part of a wider threat to free speech disguised as initiatives to tackle fake news. She claimed there now exists a cartel of authorised speech run by Brussels and militant NGOs. “No to the Macron-Brussels globalist Ministry of Truth,” she said, in a final rhetorical flourish.
If this weren’t hyperbolic enough, the French MEP was followed on stage by Adam Starzynski, the editor of Visegrad 24, an online pro-Orbán, pro-Trump news outlet. Starzynski claimed the censorship of stories about Hunter Biden, the son of the former US President Joe Biden, represented “the suppression of news on a whole new scale.” But he did not stop there, for Starzynski, UK far-right anti-immigration activist and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson was a dissident figure in the fight for free-speech rights.
Almost to a man and woman (and there were certainly no non-binary categories here), there was a disciplined “line to take”. The one dissenting voice at the conference, Vaclav Klaus, had been a genuine dissident during the Cold War and later became Prime Minister and President of the Czech Republic. Klaus has impeccable anti-European credentials and began by saying that Brussels was “everything a democrat should disagree with”. He added that it had been a tragic mistake to confuse Europe with the European Union. For him, Europe was just a conglomeration of nation states which sometimes had common interests.
But he took issue with the very concept of the conference: “There is not a common history of Europe,” he said. People should not artificially invent a European “soul”.
The new European Far Right baulk at being called “fascists”. But this is something of a distraction. Most are happy to be considered “hard right” or “patriotic right” or “National Conservative”.
They are for the most part, united and disciplined, where their liberal opponents are confused and disorganised. Their message is simple, clear and seductive. And now it has the backing of the White House it cannot be ignored.
18 Dec 2025
Marci Mehringer is a Hungarian musician who appeared on the 10th season of Hungary’s X-Factor and whose music has been critical of the country’s government.
