The Western take-over of Hungary

The story of how Western corporate and financial interests, and the US pro-war lobby, co-opted Orbán’s populist narrative to dismantle his sovereigntist project

Forget everything you’ve heard about the new Hungarian government. Peter Magyar’s is not a liberal government in any meaningful sense, nor is it simply Orbánism with a different face. Instead, it is a government in which Western corporate and financial interests — above all, US energy interests — along with the US pro-war lobby, have co-opted elements of Orbán’s populist narrative so as to dismantle his sovereigntist project.

In my latest piece for Compact, I explain the deeper logic of Magyar’s political project: who is behind it, what interests it represents and what it is therefore likely to do. The answer lies not in the new prime minister’s biography or campaign slogans but in the three figures who now control Hungary’s economy, foreign affairs and public finances. All three have built their career inside Western multinational corporations, and in the cases of two of them with deep connections to American energy interests.

This intersects with an equally important geopolitical dimension — one that is embodied, above all, in the figure of Anita Orbán, Hungary’s new foreign minister. She doesn’t merely represent Western energy interests; she is a committed Atlanticist with deep, institutionally embedded ties to the US national security establishment and neoconservative lobby.

In short, three key ministries in the new Peter Magyar government — energy, foreign affairs and finance — are now led by people who built their careers inside Western multinational corporations, all of them linked to two of the most powerful actors in the global economy, BlackRock and Vanguard, and in one case with strong ties to the US security state as well. This means that Western corporate interests in general, and American energy interests in particular, now have direct representation at the highest levels of the Hungarian state.

There is truth in the charge that Orbán’s government cultivated a domestic class of “oligarchs” and concentrated economic power in loyal hands. But Hungary’s domestic capitalist class pales next to what is poised to replace it. Whereas the corruption of local strongmen is visible, nameable, prosecutable in principle, the institutionalised influence of global capital is none of these things.

Companies like Shell (from which the new energy minister hails), along with the asset management funds that own them, have hijacked democratic decision-making across the Western world. They call it lobbying rather than corruption — but the distinction, in terms of outcomes for ordinary people, is largely cosmetic.

As former MP and Green Party co-founder (which he has since left) András Schiffer has asked, will the feudal power of domestically controlled capitalism simply be replaced by the more anonymous, more pervasive and far less accountable power of global big capital — with a liberal gloss applied over the transfer?

In light of the above, the trajectory of the Magyar government is not difficult to predict: energy diversification towards US LNG, financial opening towards Western institutions and corporate interests, and a foreign policy recalibrated towards Brussels and the Atlanticist establishment.

Read my deep dive into the new Hungarian power elite here.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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