Hungarian Conservative

‘This is why the model pioneered by Viktor Orbán and Fidesz matters so much to Western conservatives. Orbán understood a long time ago that powerful private actors—especially George Soros and his Open Society Foundations—exercise disproportionate power over Hungarian affairs, or at least seek to do so. Similarly, public institutions that have been captured by illiberal progressives operate as if they have a natural right to evade scrutiny and accountability. And if leaders of the political Right are too shackled by their right-liberal convictions to take the fight to them, why shouldn’t the cultural socialists do whatever they think is necessary to win?’

NATO accession, defending the countries of Central Europe, success in academia and standing up for one’s heritage. These topics interest many these days, and Joanna Siekiera is an expert on them. In this interview she discusses the ‘blocking’ of Swedish NATO accession, the influence of smaller EU countries globally, academia and cybersecurity.

‘As a PhD student, I was very shocked to see that Harvard has had chairs of all sorts of relatively small nationalities (Slovak, Greek, Ukrainian, and so on), except Hungarian. These departments and chairs can only be created through international cooperation and the involvement of the business world, that is would need advocacy and money. We would need Hungarian academic departments and Hungarian professors in North America again.’

The blossoming of conservative institutions infuriated the Left so much that it started to label their work as ’pseudo-scientific’ and ’ideological’, an attempt to ’hijack’ science and— of course—democracy, by ’bypassing’ the so called ’official’ repositories of science: the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and universities.