How Viktor Orbán Plays to Win : The Resurgence of Central Europe / Thibaud Gibelin ; foreword by Rod Dreher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gibelin, Thibaud, author.

Contributor:

Dreher, Rod, writer of foreword.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

International relations.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (166 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Washington, DC : Academica Press, [2024]

Summary:

With Brexit complete, the European Union unbalanced, and populist national conservatism on the march across the continent, winds of rebellion continue to blow from Central Europe, where Hungary’s dynamic leader Viktor Orbán has been building a political alternative to neoliberal statism. Prime Minister of Hungary from 1998 to 2002, Orbán’s continuation in power since 2010 has marked a real European turning point as he transcends conventional divisions. He is an advocate of European unity, but a nemesis of the Brussels superstate. He is both democratic and illiberal, rigorous in economics, yet opposed to global free trade, a defender of the Christian West while eager to engage with China, Russia, and Iran. What will Orbán’s legacy be in a Europe that he continues not merely to confound, but to lead? Thibaud Gibelin explores the recent trends to explain what is happening not only in Central Europe but across Europe today and sheds light on one of the most criticized – and yet most experienced – statesmen on the European scene.

Contents:

How Viktor Orbán Plays To Win:The Resurgence of Central Europe

Thibaud Gibelin

Foreword by Rod Dreher

How Viktor Orbán Plays To Win:The Resurgence of Central Europe

Academica PressWashington~London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gibelin, Thibaud (author)

Title: How viktor orban plays to win : the resurgence of central Europe | Gibelin, Thibaud

Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2025. | Includes references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024945076 | ISBN 9781680533194 (hardcover) | 9781680533200 (e-book)

Copyright 2025 Thibaud Gibelin

Contents

Exordium xi

Foreword xiii

Introduction 1

The European Union facing a repressed Europe 1

The twists and turns of an encrypted Europe 6

Changing centuries 11

I. What is Central Europe? 13

Double membership 13

Bohemia in the Holy Roman Empire 16

Hungary and the Ottoman Empire n 19

Poland between Moscow and Berlin 23

II. First steps in the rubble 29

An anti-communist dissident 30

Hungary torn apart, or necessaryaccommodation to the international order 35

III. Asserting a civic Hungary 39

Neither right nor left 39

Conservatism against Reaction 40

A party of national interest 44

IV. The school of adversity 51

Modern experiences 51

Reasons for defeat 53

Political vulnerability in Central Europe 57

The end of the tunnel 58

V. The peaceful revolution 63

Rebuilding a sovereign state 63

Asserting ourselves on the international stage 67

What's left of nationalism? 69

Central Europe's resources in the current situation 74

VI. The new battlefield 77

A raw antagonism 77

The rule of law in question 79

Revealing the great energy game 82

VII. The tipping point of the migration crisis 85.

Crash and tsunami in the Mediterranean 85

The rebirth of the Visegrád group 89

Hungarian disinhibition and Western deprivation 92

VIII. What's left of liberalism 99

The European superiority complex 99

Confronting George Soros 101

Liberalism: a spectre haunting Europe 105

IX. The face of theater is changing 109

2016-2020: Western marginalizationand national room for maneuver 109

2019: the challenges of an electoral transformation 114

Germany, a power for nothing? 117

France between inertia and aggiornamento 120

The populist leaven in Italy 124

X. Towards a new age of order 127

The metamorphoses of the void 128

The economy or the burden of contemporary man 130

Illiberal emancipation by itself 134

Conclusion 141

Bibliography 145

Index 147

Exordium

"An extraordinary imagination animated this cold politician: he wouldn't have been what he was if the muse hadn't been there

reason fulfilled the poet's ideas. All these men with great lives are always a compound of two natures, for they must be capable of inspiration and action: one gives birth to the project, the other accomplishes it."

François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'outre-tombe

People walk on their land and under the stars, and only secondarily on asphalt and under streetlights. One's origins never disappear, tradition never dies out

we reconnect with both. These eclipses, after all, are as necessary as winters: the most thankless historical circumstances reveal invincible permanences.

Viktor Orbán has found himself the medium of a sensibility that was thought to have disappeared. In him, disparate traditions have regained an intelligible meaning.

the sense of origins has found the blossoming of becoming. Just when history was supposed to come to an end, it resumed its course in a land of misfortune and in a dissident who rallied to the change of regime in 1989. Viktor Orbán represents more than he is. He draws his strength from a tradition that is opposed to and strengthened

Foreword

Rod Dreher

Hungary's Viktor Orbán is the longest continuously serving leader of a Western democracy, and easily the most controversial. It is not hard to understand why. As a nationalist and populist of the political right, Orbán's convictions and governing policies typically run counter to the liberal governing consensus in Europe and North America.

When most of Europe opened its borders to masses of third world refugees in 2015, Orbán said no. He didn't refuse because he has a hard heart. He did it because he understood well that most of these people were not actual refugees, but third world men looking for a permanent foothold in Europe. And he knew then, as he knows now, that the survival of distinct European nations depends on stopping the unregulated flow of migrants.

When elites throughout the West changed laws to permit same-sex marriage, and to allow for teaching children - in schools and in popular culture - about the so-called virtues of homosexuality and gender ideology, Orbán put his foot down. Not here in Hungary, he said. The traditional family is the basis of civilization. Childhood innocence should be protected.

When NATO carried out its proxy war with Russia, via Ukraine, Orbán refused to allow Hungary to get involved. They called him "Putin's lapdog." In fact, Orbán knew that Ukraine could not prevail against Russia, that the West had unwisely provoked the conflict, and that continuing the war would not only destroy Ukraine, but impoverish Europe, and possibly lead to a wider conflagration.

So, here's the standard portrait of Viktor Orban, as seen without question in the Western media: a right-wing bully, dictator, and bigot who is Putin's European cat's paw. They also claim that Orbán's Hungary is a semi-fascist state where freedom is under siege, and the independent media faces clampdown.

Funny, but that's not how it looks from Budapest, where I have lived for the past three years. And it's not how it looks to many first-time visitors from elsewhere in the West.

While Western European capitals are ridden with migrant crime and dirt, Budapest is safe and clean. A man in from Germany said to me that unlike back home, there is active and joyful street life in Budapest

in German cities, people have withdrawn over fears of violent crime. A visitor from Paris told me on an after-dinner stroll through downtown, "I feel like I'm back in Europe again."

Where children in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries that have promoted LGBTQ+ ideology are suffering from off-the-charts anxiety, the mental health of Hungarian children is comparatively stable. Perhaps owing to the Orbán government's generous policies encouraging childbearing, marriage rates in Hungary have doubled over the last ten years, even as they have mostly collapsed elsewhere in Europe.

And now, as the Russia-Ukraine war grinds on into its third gruesome year, with the Russian economy booming and most of the world having defied the West's calls for a crusade, the Hungarian leader's early warnings about the foolishness of Western meddling have been borne out by events.

In the late summer of 2024, Britain was rocked by anti-migrant rioting that spurred a sharply authoritarian response from UK authorities. Judges began sending Britons to jail for having posted disfavored memes and comments on social media. Even as mobs of Muslim men rampaged through city streets shouting, "Allahu akbar" and looking for lone, Union Jack-sporting white Englishmen to beat up, the government and the media raged against alleged right-wing hooligans for causing the trouble, and fumed

None of this happened in Hungary. The country is safe and calm because the Orbán government - unlike successive UK governments - listens to and respects the will of the electorate, which says no to migration. And unlike in Britain, the birthplace of liberal democracy, no Hungarian has ever been thrown in jail for complaining about migrants on social media.

Plainly, Viktor Orbán is doing something right. His enemies in other countries can't admit it, because doing so raises an obvious question: why are they failing?

In my time in Hungary, I have encouraged American conservative leaders to visit Hungary and learn from Orbán's strategies. In How Viktor Orbán Plays To Win, Thibaud Gibelin, a French writer who has also been living in Hungary and observing Orbán's strategy up close, explains that the Hungarian prime minister is a visionary whose understanding of how the contemporary world works is based on a way of seeing it in a fundamentally different way from the globalist politicians and theorists of the pos.

Orbán believes that the world is facing a realignment the likes of which hasn't been seen in five centuries. He believes that the survival of Western peoples, and their thriving, depends on the strength of individual nations. That, in turn, requires strong families, and cohesive communities made up of people who believe in their ancestral faith and in the goodness of their own people and cultural traditions.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781680533200

1680533207