The Italian Option

By Dalibor Rohac

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

 

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, recently visited Washington, with the aim of aligning her country more closely with the United States — and laying the groundwork for pulling out of the China-led Belt and Road Initiative. American conservatives should take note.

 

Many in the Republican Party, encouraged by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and by the success of “populist” and “far-right” parties across Europe, would like to reshape American conservative politics in the European image. National conservatives, integralists, and many others are trying to put policy meat on the bones of Trump’s moment in American politics. All of them would be well advised to take a closer look at Meloni and right-wing leaders in countries such as Sweden, Finland, and Poland, instead of remaining fixated on Meloni’s influential Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orbán.

 

Orbán has received much acclaim from supporters of Trump and Ron DeSantis. He’s been given a rock star’s welcome at various CPAC conferences, and in fact one of his government-funded NGOs, the Center for Fundamental Rights, hosted such a conference in Budapest this year. With his unique ability to “own the libs” and fund visiting fellowships, university chairs, and swanky conferences, Orbán has seized the imaginations of the New Right’s opinion leaders — not least Tucker Carlson and Rod Dreher — like no other European politician.

 

Arguably, the combination of Orbán’s outsized influence and his pro-Russian positions — rejection of lethal aid to Ukraine, opposition to sanctions against Russia, and deepening of Hungary’s energy ties to Russia — has played some role in the decline of Western support for helping Ukraine in its war.

 

That is just one reason why America’s New Right must move beyond its current Hungarian fixation. And as Meloni’s example underlines, Orbán is not the only game in town.

 

Forget about policies on Russia and Ukraine for a moment. If America’s conservatives, old or new, care about our geopolitical competition with China, they cannot ignore the role that Hungary has played as a vehicle for Chinese interests in Europe. It has served as a long-standing logistical center for Huawei, and its government has opposed all European efforts to hold Beijing accountable for human-rights violations. In fact, it takes pride in being a “a pillar of the Belt and Road Initiative,” as Orbán put it.

 

There is also Hungary’s flourishing relationship with Iran, whose students enjoy privileged access to Hungarian universities, with around 2,000 of them studying in Hungary at the moment, and whom Hungary’s foreign minister praised last year for its “constructive role” in the current war in Ukraine.

 

Orbán is skillful at telling different audiences, including American conservatives, exactly what they want to hear. Yet, in reality, the relatively secular Hungary is not a particularly exciting model for social conservatives. Like in most European countries, abortion is legal up to twelve weeks (20 in special circumstances), and the government has made little effort in its 13 years in office to tighten the existing restrictions. Although new legislation banning displays of homosexuality in materials targeted at minors made headlines in the West in 2021 and was even compared to an earlier “gay propaganda” law in Russia, Hungarians of all political stripes seem distinctly relaxed about the subject. With little fuss, the country introduced same-sex partnerships — still nonexistent to this day in neighboring Slovakia, Romania, and Serbia — in 2009. It is telling that Orbán has not used his overwhelming political mandate to roll the institution back.

 

In the crisis of 2015, Orbán portrayed himself as an arch-enemy of illegal immigration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. Yet, unlike Italy, Hungary has never been a target destination for asylum seekers and illegal migrants. Meloni has to do more than just bloviate, and besides draconian punishments for people-smugglers, she has pushed the EU to negotiate a hard-nosed deal with Tunisia to stop the flows across the Mediterranean.

 

To be sure, Meloni’s Italy recognizes same-sex partnerships, too, but the government is keen to push back the existing legal protections, and has recently revoked the birth certificates of children born to lesbian couples. Accused by activists of pursuing a “medieval vision” of family life, Meloni delivers at least as much on the culture-war front as Orbán, if not more. Yet, she manages to do so without his geopolitical toxicity. In fact, on Ukraine, she has grown into one of Europe’s most impassioned supporters of arming the country, as “Ukrainians are defending the values of freedom and democracy on which our civilization is based, and the very foundations of international law.”

 

America’s New Right may also look at Poland, governed by the Law and Justice Party (PiS). Arguably America’s premier European ally, Poles are poised to spend over 4 percent of their GDP on defense this year. Ninety percent Catholic, it features a self-styled Catholic integralist as a member of its government’s cabinet (Zbigniew Ziobro, the justice minister), abortion is effectively banned, and there is no recognition of same-sex partnerships — not even those concluded elsewhere in the EU, as the European Court of Justice ordered member states to do. Needless to say, Poland has provided home to millions of Ukrainian refugees and aid that far outpaces, in relative terms, U.S. assistance, and its political leadership and opposition are essentially unanimous about the importance of Ukraine’s eventual victory.

 

Alternatively, New Right conservatives may ask members of the Sweden Democrats or the Finns Party, both “far-right” parties currently in governing coalitions in their respective countries, about their plans on immigration or crime. They will hear a rejection of illegal migratory flows, an intention to restrict asylum (to essentially zero, in the case of Sweden Democrats), and a commitment to stronger law enforcement. In both Nordic parties, as in PiS and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, there is also good will toward the United States and a clear-eyed understanding of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the stakes of the war in Ukraine — all of them absent in Orbán’s FIDESZ.

 

On either side of the Atlantic, there is no putting the populist genie back into the bottle. But populist politics can take on more or less responsible forms, particularly in areas of foreign affairs and security. The sooner American acolytes of the New Right break with of their current obsession with Orbán’s Hungary and find an alternative avatar — at a minimum, one who is friendly to the United States, like Meloni — the better for them and for the future of our nation.