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Boris Kagarlitsky on Hungary’s Election

Reflections on right-wing populism’s dead end and the window of opportunity for the left.

Boris Kagarlitsky, Russia’s most prominent leftist intellectual and Marxist critic of both Western imperialism and Putin’s domestic authoritarianism, is two years and two months into a five-year prison sentence for his outspoken opposition to the war in Ukraine and the Putin regime. He is confined to Penal Colony No. 4—yet he is anything but idle. From his cell he maintains an extensive correspondence, produces essays and articles on current political questions, and is at work on larger projects: a rethinking of imperialist conflicts and the crisis of the left, a major essay on the significance of 1968–73 as a moment of missed revolutionary opportunities, and sketches of a book about his time in prison.

His mood is good and he remains fully engaged with the world. He has no access to the Internet—his sole source of news is the official Russian television channel, plus letters from friernds and colleagues. That makes his political analysis all the more striking, given the conditions under which it was written. His articles reach us in portions, sent out across multiple letters—and are sometimes lost in transit, forcing him to rewrite everything two or three times over.

We are pleased to publish his latest piece: a reflection prompted by the Hungarian elections, in which Kagarlitsky examines the dead end of right-wing populism and the window of opportunity it may yet open for the left. Boris argues that right-wing populists succeeded by absorbing the redistributive language of the left while abandoning any structural challenge to property relations. That speaks directly to political dilemmas far beyond Hungary. Kagarlitsky concludes that the left has yet to fill the vacuum it left behind, and that we still must pass through what he calls “the desert of political uncertainty.”

The defeat of Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian parliamentary elections was unanimously assessed by all commentators as bad news for the Kremlin, which has lost its main ally in Europe. At the same time, Orbán’s failure was also a blow to Donald Trump’s prestige, as the American president publicly expressed support for the Hungarian prime minister, and Vice President Vance actually campaigned on his behalf. It made no difference: Hungarians rejected the ruling party at the polls.

And yet, when Hungarian citizens went to the polls, geopolitics was probably not their primary concern. For many years, while Orbán kept a firm grip on the country, he had maintained considerable support—which suddenly seemed to evaporate. What happened? To understand this, we need to think carefully about the socio-political nature of national-populist movements, of which Orbán was a typical representative.

In the early years of this century, left-wing movements virtually disappeared as a political force across Eastern Europe. This corresponds to the general trend of left decline observable almost everywhere, but in Eastern and Central Europe the process reached a scale that led to a complete redrawing of the entire political landscape.. The vacuum created by the........

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