The Hungarian was defeated by a coalition that united right and center-left behind the candidacy of Péter Magyar, a dissident from the prime minister’s party who governed the country for 16 years, to the point of becoming a model for the global extreme right.
Unexpected for analysts who already took for granted the country’s inclusion in the list of electoral autocracies, Magyar’s victory already encourages the discussion about the nature and depth of the political changes promoted by far-right populism when it gets there, as well as about the continuity of the system. After all, the same electoral rules created by Orbán to guarantee himself in power allowed the devastating triumph of the democratic opposition.
Recently, the website Persuasion, run by political scientist Yascha Mounk, from Johns Hopkins University, published a post by professor Damon Linker, from the University of Pennsylvania, entitled “Populism is already part of our political fabric”.
In it, the author argues that, since the mid-2010s, we have lived in a populist era in which governments and established institutions face recurring waves of popular disgust. There is thus an oscillation: sometimes liberals govern and become the target of populist insurgencies, sometimes populists come to power and are challenged by liberal opponents.
Linker points out that there would be nothing inherent in the substantive positions of the populist right — such as immigration restrictions, economic protectionism and social conservatism — that would require manipulating democratic rules. Thus, the central conflict today would place face to face no longer traditional left and right, but liberals and right-wing populists. Both, however, would be legitimate in democratic terms, as long as they agreed to compete in free and fair elections, alternate in power and submit to accountability.
Implicit in the argument is the idea that the democratic game can moderate extremist populism. The evidence, however, is far from definitive. Populists have conformed to the democratic rules of alternation in power according to electoral results in Italy, Poland and, now, . The same, however, did not happen with , who never acknowledged his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020; much less with the Venezuelan, who clung to the position by promoting scandalous electoral fraud. And much less so with Jair Bolsonaro, who tried to stay in power through a coup.
What distinguishes populists is not just the retrograde agenda that can bring them closer to that right-wing acclimatized to democratic life. Its hallmark is the attack on the institutions of representative liberal democracy: on institutional checks and balances; freedom of the press; the autonomy of civil society; and the very acceptance of alternation in power.
The circumstances under which they would accept adverse electoral results are not yet well understood. Until they are, it is not possible to bet that, if elected, a candidate with a far-right pedigree — a , for example — will choose moderation, even when he flirts with it for electoral reasons. Because, if you don’t do so, the bill will be too high for Brazilians.
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