One culture war

When 45-year-old Péter Magyar deposed 62-year-old Victor Orbán as Hungary’s head of state, a long chain of extreme rightwing, populist, illiberal orgs weakened across a large part of the world. It was not merely a passage from one generation to the next in Hungary.

It was, rather, an electoral win that may have signaled a considerably deep cultural rejection of white supremacist impunity in and, more importantly, beyond Hungary.

Because that long rightwing chain included, notably, the most perverse Christian nationalist groups in the United States, the impact of this weakening on Trumpian projects was immediately profound. It is ongoing.

Among other projects outside Hungary, former PM Orbán’s ethnonationalism gave financial and intellectual support — provided “philosophical” ballast — to the Talibanic American Project 2025 and its authors and enablers. The support included subsidizing intra-national and cross border colloquia and political networks.

In Hungary, what took a hit with Magyar’s success is that “space of masculine white Hungarianness created by the PM,” as described by scholar Katalin Halász in an essay for the European Journal of Cultural Studies in 2025.

Referring to PM Orbán, Halász discusses this aggressively idealized whiteness as “…displayed and made in four key themes — power, war, borders, the sacred family — …in the service of protecting the nation, Christianity, heteronormative family, subordinated white womanhood in the service of reproducing the nation [which] are driving principles in the ways in which Viktor Orbán…” governed.

In the US, Project 2025 was implemented in draconian fashion within a year of the 2^nd Trump presidency. The plan was summarized in the website of The Heritage Foundation, where it is outright said that in “…2022, The Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank, and 140 former Trump staffers authored Project 2025 — a roadmap for how to replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals.”

There is nothing veiled about the ethnic cleansing planned for what many of today’s authoritarians uphold as white Christian nations. Trump’s ICE murdered — executed — two white Americans in its sweep to throw out brown and black people.

The racist regimes of Hungary and the US have buttressed a network of authoritarians who thrive on anti-diversity (anti immigration, anti-LGBTQ, anti-women) agenda, fear-mongering, and corruption.

These include countries that have been tilted to orient positively for Russia and China. Among the leaders prominent in this network are France’s Marine Le Pen, the Spanish leader of the Vox Party Santiago Abascal, Italy’s Deputy PM and head of the Lega Party Matteo Salvini, Alice Weidel who heads the German AfD, and the Dutch Geert Wilders who heads this country’s Party for Freedom,

The UK’s Nigel Farage, waiting in the wings while PM Keir Starmer fumbles, has said admiringly that Orbán is “the strongest leader in Europe and the EU’s biggest nightmare.” Orbán’s closest European ally, Slovak PM Robert Fico thinks the EU as a “massage parlor” and said: “Viktor Orbán is politically right,” adding that “[Ukrainian PM Volodomyr] Zelensky cannot run the European Union.”

This is exactly what US Secretary of State Marco Rubio means when he said: “Under President Trump, it is our expectation that every nation on earth is going to act in their national interest.”

This so-called national interest is a culture, rather than an ideology alone, that holds up aggressive power wielded by a single ethnic group over all others, as the overdetermining sense of nation. Any Other is shunted outside nation or tolerated within it as a minority culture with less privileges than the dominant ethnicity.

The phenomenon playing out today subordinates ideological/political praxis to an aggressive cultural aspiration. The angry longing to return to a world in which the rule of a privileged ethnicity is a legitimate demand requires brute force to enforce. In a world that has made tremendous — if uneven — progress in institutionalizing human rights, multi-culturalism, and inclusivity over the last century, imperial ambition will meet with resistance.

The EU is the antagonist created by the far right in the current global culture war. Of course, the EU is by no means homogenous culturally. It only appears homogenous from the perspective of a far-right world view that needs an enemy.

Still, as a work-in-progress, the EU has inclined towards institution-building around democracy and secularism.

The EU does not cohere around fundamentalist religion. Nor does it conflate illiberalism with the right of might. If the EU is not decimated by a war expanded from the Russo-Ukrainian war, its development can be expected to be maintained as enhancement to a culture of freedom, social democracy, inclusivity, and human rights.

Nevertheless, whatever happens next, a Manichean, black and white cultural contest cannot be a useful frame of discussion.

To go back to Péter Magyar. He is not a leftwing politician. He was with Orbán’s party for decades. His success was a cultural rejection of a corrupt, authoritarian figure. But Magyar will have to be recognized as progressive in ways very different indeed from left-of-center ideological shadings.

Magyar’s arrival on the global stage (and in a very different way, Zohran Mamdani of New York City) indicates the scale of complexity of cultural wars — which cannot be simplified as ideological battles.

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.