The EU is managed by lobbies and is ever more distant from the people, but things are changing… I want to be part of an international front that includes Donald Trump, who will be re-elected, Boris Johnson, [Brazil’s] Jair Bolsonaro and [Israel’s] Benjamin Netanyahu.
MATTEO SALVINI, December 20191
In April 2016, Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s secessionist Northern League, attended a Donald Trump campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. At the time, Salvini, a charismatic 43-year-old with the physique of a rugby player, was already one of the leading figures on the Italian far right. In the Mohegan Sun Arena in Wilkes-Barre, he sat among a group of supporters holding a banner that read ‘Make America Great Again’.2
Afterwards Trump and Salvini chatted and posed for a photograph beside an American flag. Trump was in trademark campaign mode – broad smile, thumb up, blond thatch reflecting the harsh overhead light. Salvini had the air of an expectant schoolboy. The top button of his shirt was undone, tie askew. He grinned widely. Salvini told Italian reporters that Trump had confided, “Matteo, I hope you become prime minister of Italy soon.”3
Trump later denied meeting Salvini at all.4 But the digital-savvy Italian, making the most of his brief moment, had already tweeted the picture out to his army of followers. Steve Bannon noticed it. Within 48 hours, Salvini was in Washington with the man who would become Donald Trump’s chief strategist.5 Bannon would later talk of Salvini as a brother-in-arms at the vanguard of a global right-wing populist resurgence.
Before the 2018 Italian election, Salvini rebranded his party as the League. The party’s xenophobic, anti-EU message was now pitched at all of Italy, not just the prosperous north. Voters responded positively. The League took almost a fifth of the vote and ended up in an anti-establishment coalition government with the Five Star Movement.
Afterwards, Bannon provided a pen portrait of Salvini for Time’s list of 2019’s most influential people. “He came, he saw, he Facebooked – live,” Bannon wrote of Italy’s then deputy prime minister and interior minister. “The most unconventional of politicians ran the most unconventional of campaigns, a whirlwind of rallies, speeches, energy, all captured live in the moment on social media, financed on a shoestring, with grit and determination and a message.”6
The depiction of Salvini – and fellow travellers across Europe such as France’s Marine Le Pen, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and, of course, Nigel Farage – as grassroots insurgents storming the citadel with little more than an Internet connection and a nativist dream is compelling. Certainly, this new generation of nationalists have tapped into a deep well of popular anger and frustration with the status quo. Their advance, however, is also undergirded by networks of dark money and hidden influence, much as we have seen in Britain. Armies of digital supporters spread disinformation across the borderless Internet. Electoral rules, where they exist, are there to be broken.
Europe’s populists often share similar campaigning styles and talking points, too. While pro-Brexit campaigns conjured up images of hordes of Turks arriving on British shores ahead of the 2016 referendum, Europe’s far-right insurgents have been even more explicit in playing on fears around immigration and identity. Matteo Salvini has claimed that Jewish financier George Soros “wants to fill Italy and Europe with migrants”. For Viktor Orbán Muslim immigration threatens the future of a “Christian Hungary in a Christian Europe”.
Increasingly, across the continent, nationalist leaders such as Salvini and Orbán are using the language of religion and identity to pursue culture wars characterised not only by racism, but by sexism, homophobia and aggressive anti-environmentalism. At the same time, many of these populists benefit from networks of funding and support that cross national frontiers, through pressure groups and opaque campaign finance vehicles.
A revealing example of this is the way in which an obscure religious movement set up by American and Russian ultra-conservatives in the late 1990s became a hugely influential network supporting organisations on Europe’s radical right. Meet the World Congress of Families.
*
In late March 2019, almost three years to the day since meeting Donald Trump in the green room in that Pennsylvania ice hockey stadium, Matteo Salvini strode onto the stage to a hero’s welcome at the 13th meeting of the now-annual World Congress of Families at Gran Guardia Palace in Verona. In front of him sat the elite of the global conservative right: American anti-abortionists, Australian supporters of gay conversion therapy, Russian Orthodox priests, delegates from Brazilian prime minister Jair Bolsonaro’s misnamed Social Liberal Party, and the various factions of Europe’s far right.7
Salvini did not disappoint. With the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, the League’s leader railed against Islamic extremism, population decline and Europe’s crisis of “empty cribs”. The crowd applauded wildly when Salvini pulled on a dark blue and white t-shirt with silhouettes of a man, a woman and two small children. “You are the vanguard… that keeps the flame alive for what 99.9 per cent of people want,” he declared.8
In front of Salvini sat a few hundred ultra-conservative activists (as well as a couple of undercover reporters from openDemocracy’s ‘Tracking the Backlash’ project). Outside the conference centre thousands of protesters against the Congress swarmed Verona’s cobblestone streets, carrying colourful banners and chanting slogans against racism and fascism. Italian riot police and paramilitary carabinieri formed a human wall around the beautiful 17th-century Gran Guardia Palace.9
After Salvini, other speakers claimed that the “natural family” was under such systematic assault that the West was on the precipice of a “demographic winter” because not enough babies will be born.10 At an informal press conference on the venue’s steps, an Italian neo-fascist party announced the launch of a campaign for a referendum to overturn the country’s abortion law.11 (In the US, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist movements, has described the World Congress of Families as an “anti-LGBT hate group”.)
Salvini is an unlikely figure to be proclaiming the virtues of family life. He is not known as a particularly god-fearing man. He is divorced, with two children by different women, and has a girlfriend 20 years his junior. He once posed half-naked for a series of “sexy” photos that were auctioned on eBay for charities including an anti-abortion group.12
But, like many of Europe’s (and America’s) far-right politicians, Salvini has used the language of religion for political expediency, even setting himself up in opposition to the relatively liberal Pope Francis. In Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet, Salvini played the penitent sinner. Before an applauding audience, he talked up his personal failings while also presenting himself as the strongman who could save Italy from homosexuals, feminists, immigrants and Muslims. The pitch was crude, xenophobic and very successful. By the time the World Congress of Families arrived in Verona, the League was ahead in the polls.
Salvini’s best-known policy was a punitive ban on migrant rescue boats entering Italy’s waters. Refugees were left to fend for themselves in overcrowded small boats on the open sea. Countless numbers perished. In one night in July 2019 alone, almost 150 died when their dilapidated boat sank off the north African coast.13 Those that survived were returned to Libya, where migrants have been held in brutal detention centres. Salvini even criminalised Italians who helped migrants with food and shelter. A Catholic priest who had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work supporting refugees was placed under police investigation.14
This might not sound very Christian, yet it chimes with the World Congress of Families’ philosophical outlook. Founded in 1997 after meetings between ultra-conservative religious figures in the US and Russia, the Congress is the closest Europe’s radical right has to Davos. Dozens of far-right politicians have attended over the last decade, as have cardinals, bishops and a ragtag crew of minor continental royalty.15
Princess Gloria of Thurn und Taxis was once famous for her wild parties and even wilder punk mohawk hair; latterly, she is better known as a WCF regular and a friend of Steve Bannon.16 Bannon had hoped Princess Gloria would offer the use of her family castle in Regensburg, Germany, for a summer school to educate and train right-wing Catholics, but the aristocrat demurred.*
The Congress’s brand of social conservatism has also become part of the new political discourse that is fast becoming normal in many countries. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has vowed to defend “Christian Europe” from Muslim migration. Poland’s Law and Justice party have put in place restrictive limits on women’s access to contraception and demonised LGBT people. This has enthusiastic support from Poland’s Catholic establishment, which warns of a “rainbow plague” that has replaced the “red plague” which blighted the country in the communist era.17 Matteo Salvini – who was upbraided by Pope Francis, who urged Italy to reopen its ports to boats carrying migrants – has claimed that he is “the last of the good Christians”.18 Support for the League among practising Catholics is high. In America, more than 80 per cent of evangelical Christians voted for the thrice-married Donald Trump in 2016.
Many explanations have been offered to account for this rising tide of reaction: economic uncertainty; cultural anxiety; a backlash against liberal attitudes to religion and sexuality. The failures of market capitalism, especially in Eastern Europe. Austerity measures introduced after the financial crisis. The migration crisis on Europe’s borders. What is often missed, however, is the role that global flows of political money and influence have played in bringing once diffuse nativist movements together for set-piece occasions such as the gathering in Verona.
The WCF network’s support has come primarily from two supposed mortal enemies: the US and Russia. One of the key figures is Konstantin Malofeev, a Kremlin-linked oligarch who made a fortune in private equity then set up his own right-wing think tank.19 Malofeev, who was placed on international sanctions lists for his support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, is closely aligned with Vladimir Putin. The billionaire businessman’s television station spreads a conservative message laced with disinformation. Frequent guests on his programmes include influential Putin acolyte Aleksandr Dugin, a neo-fascist thinker and proponent of ‘Eurasianism’ – a dream of a revived Russian empire radically opposed to liberal values – and the rabble-rousing fantasist Alex Jones of Infowars.
The World Congress of Families has also attracted influential figures from America’s powerful religious conservative movements. The WCF’s head, Brian Brown, is a father of nine who was raised a Quaker but converted to Catholicism as an adult and made his name fighting against marriage equality in his native California. (Brown once declared that gay marriage could lead to “a serious push to normalise paedophilia”, the kind of statement considered normal in this alternative world.)20 Brown chose Verona to host the 2019 Congress after the League-led local government defied Italy’s abortion laws to declare itself a “pro-life city” and gave public funding to anti-abortion groups.21
From the stage in Verona, Brown told delegates that the Congress theme was “the Winds of Change” because “we’re seeing a lot of good indications” from countries like Hungary “standing up for the family”. Another American, a Missouri lawyer and Republican activist named Ed Marton, arrived at the podium in a red MAGA hat and declared that “Brexit, the Bible and borders” would “make Europe great again”.22
American ultra-conservatives have a long history of trying to influence international politics.† They have backed homophobic campaigns in Africa and supported draconian anti-abortion laws across Latin America. In Europe, conservative evangelists and libertarians have sent teams of lobbyists to Brussels to petition EU officials and challenge laws against discrimination and hate speech in European courts.23 They have supported campaigns against LGBT rights in the Czech Republic and Romania, and funded a network of ‘grassroots’ anti-abortion campaigns in Italy and Spain.
Some of the richest organisations on the US Christian right have spent tens of millions of dollars in Europe: the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; the Alliance Defending Freedom; the American Center for Law and Justice. The latter group, which praised Vladimir Putin’s laws banning “gay propaganda”, is particularly well connected to the Trump White House – its chief counsel Jay Sekulow was on Trump’s legal team during the high-profile Mueller inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
As in the US, much of the funding for the Christian right’s outreach comes from plutocrats and corporations. The Alliance Defending Freedom has received money from the billionaire Prince family of Betsy DeVos, appointed as Trump’s education secretary, and her brother Erik Prince, founder of the huge Blackwater security firm.24 Prince is yet another convert to a defiantly traditionalist version of Catholicism, which he combines with a notably uncharitable vision of the state’s social obligations.
US conservative money has had a very tangible impact on Europe’s streets. If you are a woman in Italy who unexpectedly becomes pregnant, you might find yourself in one of numerous free counselling services that have popped up across the country run by an Italian charity called Movimento Per la Vita (Movement for Life), modelled on the ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ in the US. In the clinics, Italian women are told that having an abortion causes cancer and promised financial help if they do not have a termination.25 These Italian clinics are supported and partly funded from thousands of miles away in Columbus, Ohio, by an organisation called Heartbeat International.
Another high-spending US Christian funder in Europe, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, was involved through its Italian branch in Steve Bannon’s ill-fated plans to turn an ancient abbey into what he called a “gladiator school” for the “next generation of nationalist and populist leaders”. From an 800-year-old hilltop monastery in Trisulti, nearly two hours outside Rome, Bannon hoped to propagate populism across Europe. He had already encouraged Salvini to undermine Pope Francis.26 (These movements are full of ardent Catholics who hate their own Pope.)
Day-to-day operations at Bannon’s “Academy for the Judeo-Christian West” were handled by the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, an anti-abortion group set up by Bannon’s friend Benjamin Harnwell while he worked for former British Conservative MEP Nirj Deva in the European Parliament.27 The academy never got off the ground. Acton’s founder publicly distanced himself from Bannon, saying that the Rome office had acted without his knowledge in supporting the project.28
But much of the coverage of the controversy surrounding Bannon’s scheme missed a significant point about Acton’s work. The think tank has an explicit mission to fuse support for free market capitalism with social conservatism. Its funders have included a foundation belonging to the Kochs, the oil magnates who have spent billions pushing libertarian causes and climate change denial in the US. The unholy alliance of fundamentalist Christianity and pro-corporate lobbying has been part of American political life for decades.29
Steve Bannon wanted to set himself up as the key broker in the transatlantic conservative network. After his meeting with Matteo Salvini in Washington in April 2016, Bannon and his acolytes stayed in contact with the rising star of the Italian far right. Ted Malloch, an American professor and friend of Nigel Farage based in England, met Salvini on a number of occasions. Ahead of the Brexit referendum, Salvini met Farage and promised to celebrate the demise of the European Union if the UK voted to leave.30
In America, intermediaries between the League and Donald Trump’s entourage attempted to engineer a second, more substantial encounter between the pair. It never came to pass, but Bannon and Salvini did meet again, in Milan in March 2018. The timing was significant. Just five days earlier, the League had recorded its best performance in an Italian general election. Bannon actively encouraged Salvini to go into the coalition with the Five Star Movement. “I had gone over [to Italy] and pitched quite hard to Salvini to put the Five Star and the League together, to form a coalition government, because I thought they were both populists,” Bannon told me.
Ultimately, Bannon’s direct influence on European electoral politics was muted, despite his typically overblown claims. When Bannon announced that he had set up “the Movement” to unite the far right ahead of the 2019 European elections, there was fevered press speculation that Trumpism was coming to Europe. But Salvini and other right-wingers snubbed Bannon’s advances. “We don’t need him,” said Jörg Meuthen, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany.31 Europe’s populists had already learned what they needed from Bannon: how to create political momentum by combining fears about immigration with conservative rhetoric about ‘family values’, and were canny enough to know that an explicit association with Trump and his fixers could be electoral poison in Europe.
Populists were widely expected to make historic gains in the European elections in May 2019. They did win a record number of seats in the European Parliament; however, as a bloc they fell short of their most optimistic predictions, not least because many traditional right and centrist parties adopted similarly hardline stances on immigration in order to draw the sting of their proto-fascist rivals. But in Italy, the openly racist League topped the poll for the first time in its history. Salvini celebrated by holding up a rosary and kissing a small crucifix.
Brian Brown claimed partial credit for what he called the League’s “huge victory”.32 The World Congress of Families was on the rise.
*
Among the most effective speakers in Verona was a telegenic Spaniard with salt-and-pepper stubble named Ignacio Arsuaga. A World Congress of Families veteran, Arsuaga knew how to work the ultra-conservative room for applause. In slow, deliberate tones he told delegates that they were fighting a global “culture war” against “cultural Marxists”, “radical feminists” and “LGBT totalitarians”.33 The only way to win was by taking power directly through “parties and elected officials” – and, indirectly, by shifting public opinion. Just as Richard Fink had advised the Kochs four decades earlier, Arsuaga told his audience that they must change the subjects discussed by politicians and voters, making ultra-conservative ideas the new common sense of the 21st century.
Europe’s ultra-conservatives had long been planning their rise.In January 2013, around twenty pro-life leaders from Europe and the US met for a retreat in London. There were two issues up for discussion: establishing a Christian-inspired European think tank, and developing ways of advancing conservative policies across the continent. The network – which christened itself Agenda Europe – proposed that lobbyists petition governments to repeal all legislation allowing for divorce, civil partnerships or same-sex adoption, according to a private document called Restoring the Natural Order.34 “Anti-sodomy” laws should be introduced, and all LGBT organisations defunded. By 2018, Agenda Europe had grown to over 100 organisations in more than 30 countries,35 meeting in secret to implement “a detailed strategy to roll back human rights”.36
As in the US, Agenda Europe’s professional advocacy has had successes. Prohibitions on marriage equality were passed in several Central European countries; the EU created a special envoy on religious discrimination and intolerance (the post was filled by an Agenda Europe member); the Polish government introduced a bill to ban abortion in all cases (which ultimately failed amid mass women’s protests).
Ignacio Arsuaga founded one of the most influential groups in these networks: CitizenGo. Launched after the 2013 Congress in Madrid, CitizenGo is the European religious right’s answer to online campaign platforms like Avaaz and Change.org that have been popular on the progressive left. CitizenGo has often promoted online petitions around conservative causes. One petition called for a boycott of Netflix after the streaming service announced that it was supporting opponents of a draconian anti-abortion bill in the US state of Georgia. Another asked Disneyland Paris to cancel a gay pride parade.37 (The Walt Disney Company refused.)
CitizenGo has a presence in a number of European states and is close to conservative American think tanks such as the Leadership Institute. But it is most active in Arsuaga’s homeland, where it is known as HazteOir (‘Make yourself heard’). When Spain’s parliament proposed a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, the group hired a plane to carry a banner warning: “They are coming for your children.”38
HazteOir helped popularise the phrase ‘gender ideology’, a faux academic catch-all term that depicts feminists and supporters of gay and transgender rights as ideological extremists out to subvert traditional family values. Buses with the word “feminazis” emblazoned across the side, next to an image of Adolf Hitler wearing lipstick, have been driven across Spanish cities. In 2019, HazteOir lost its charitable status after the Spanish government ruled that it “denigrated and devalued” gay people.39
Although nominally non-party political, CitizenGo is particularly close to Spain’s far-right party, Vox. Since the fall of the dictatorship in the mid-1970s, Spain had been one of the few European states without a serious ultra-conservative political force. That changed in 2014 when a small group of radicals broke away from the conservative Popular Party – which had long contained people nostalgic for the Franco regime – to form Vox.40
The new party rose quickly. It captured headlines, promising to deport extremist imams and crush the “criminal” separatist government in Catalonia that was pushing for independence. Vox would take back Gibraltar and reassert Spain’s Catholic identity. Hacer España grande otra vez: Make Spain great again.
Vox quickly built international alliances. Steve Bannon was, unsurprisingly, a fan. And in an indication of the rightward drift of Britain’s historic party of government, Vox was given an audience by British Conservatives. In early 2019, Vox’s international spokesperson Ivan Espinosa de los Monteros met with a trio of Tory MPs, including Brexit Minister Chris Heaton-Harris. Afterwards, Espinosa de los Montero told me that he wanted to “establish relationships with parties such as the Conservatives, which I think is our natural ally in the UK”.41
But while Vox was making friends and influencing people abroad, domestic matters were pressing. By the time the WCF arrived in Verona in late March 2019, Spain was facing a snap general election. Vox needed to raise money, fast.
Spain, like most European countries, has strict political finance laws that cap spending and usually require donor transparency. One way to circumvent funding limits is through third-party campaign groups that can lobby for a party’s policies without being formally aligned to them.
In Verona, a senior Vox official told an undercover journalist from openDemocracy – posing as an upper-class Scot with a recently acquired inheritance – that he could support the party by giving money “indirectly” to CitizenGo.42 The Vox staff member compared CitizenGo to a super Pac, the election vehicles that can spend limitless amounts of dark money in American elections without having to reveal their donors.
There have been other signs of super Pac-style dark money on Europe’s far right. The Alternative for Germany has been embroiled in a number of funding scandals, including receiving anonymous donations routed through Swiss companies and €150,000 from an obscure Dutch political organisation called the European Identity Foundation.43 In Germany, donations from non-EU states are prohibited and there are tight controls on anonymous political contributions. AfD was issued with a hefty fine. (The party appealed.)44
Third-party campaigns can help political parties in other ways. In Verona, CitizenGo’s president Ignacio Arsuaga told the undercover reporter that his funders included Patrick Slim, son of Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos, Mexico’s richest man, and that the group was planning a pre-election advertising blitz that would attack negative comments other leaders had made about Vox and support the party’s policies on abortion and same-sex marriage.45 “We’re never going to ask people to vote for Vox,” Arsuaga said, “but the campaign is going to help Vox indirectly.”
CitizenGo’s ad campaign was launched a few weeks later. On polling day in April 2019, Vox won 10 per cent of the vote and its first ever seats in parliament. (Arsuaga told openDemocracy that “the destination of our funds has always been legal and public”.)
CitizenGo exemplifies the ultra-conservative movement’s transnationalism. Its board includes the World Congress of Families’ Brian Brown and Alexey Komov, a close business associate of the so-called ‘Orthodox Oligarch’ Konstantin Malofeev. The American political consultant Darian Rafie gave CitizenGo advice on digital campaigning. In Verona, Rafie, a specialist in running clandestine political influence campaigns, boasted to openDemocracy’s undercover reporter about his connections with Trump’s campaign and far-right parties across Europe.46
American political consultants have often brought the most hard-nosed techniques to European politics. During Ireland’s abortion referendum in 2018, US conservatives targeted Irish voters on social media, though their efforts seem to have had little impact on the outcome. In Verona, Rafie bragged about the ways in which voters’ mobile phone data could be extracted for targeted advertising in the 2020 elections in the US. “There is a lot of stuff to be done with mobile phones and geo-fencing areas,’ he told the reporter, adding:
Say there’s a rally somewhere, like one of these big Trump campaign rallies, what we’ll do is we’ll draw a polygon around that event and then we’ll register all the phones that were there… Then we follow those phones home, and then we know who they are, and what they do, and now I know what your Netflix unique ID is, and I’ve got your Facebook unique ID, so then I can communicate with you through a whole variety of ways.
Rafie said of this technology: “We can do it in Europe, too.” In a later email, he said that his company’s approach was the same as “many political campaigns and businesses in the United States”, adding that “we should all be frightened by the amount of data routinely collected, collated and sold by ad networks”.47
Rafie is right. Google, Facebook and a host of other big tech giants are constantly surveilling us. Our phones track us wherever we go. Political campaigns are already trying to use this surveillance to their advantage. The Trump 2020 campaign was reported to be working with a firm that specialises in the mass collection of smartphone location data for targeted political advertising.48 (A Democratic campaign had previously hired the same company.) The scope for invisible influence campaigns like the ones Rafie outlined is terrifyingly vast.
Shortly after the World Congress of Families, I called up a man who knows a lot about the corrosive effect of dark money in politics. Former US Democratic senator Russ Feingold spent years trying to clean up American finance laws with his Republican counterpart John McCain. Their bipartisan legislation, which severely curtailed the scope for dark money in American politics, was hailed as a major advance in the early years of this century.
What became known as the McCain–Feingold Act did not last long, however. Citizens United – a ‘political action committee’ that funded conservative causes – challenged the law. In 2010, the US Supreme Court decided that corporations and rich foundations should be treated as individuals whose free speech needed protection, paving the way for unlimited anonymous political spending and ushering in the super Pac revolution in American politics. In 2016, super Pacs in the US spent more than $1.4 billion on political campaigns.
Feingold, who has a friendly demeanour and a thick Midwestern drawl, highlighted the contradiction between the nativist appeals of Europe’s insurgent far right and their reliance on international networks of finance and patronage.
They are trying to appeal to ultra-nationalist sentiments, but they are using tactics that are completely contrary to the sovereignty of those countries. These are international actors, oligarchs and others who are trying to control the political processes of these countries. Even if you are a nationalist, one would think you would be a little bit concerned about that.
Feingold told me that Europe needed to be wary of making “the same mistakes that were made here in the United States”.
It might be too late for that. Already the use of supposedly independent pressure groups to push party political messages and act as super Pacs is making it harder to trace where political funding is coming from. Europe’s nativist surge has not just benefited from international money and expertise. It is also aided by a sprawling, global network of far-right activists online who have sought to manipulate and distort elections at home and abroad.
*
In early February 2018, Luca Traini drove his black Alfa Romeo into the centre of Macerata, a small city in central Italy. Over the course of two mid-morning hours, he shot six African migrants. A Ghanaian man on his way to get a haircut was hit in the chest. People fled for their lives through busy shopping streets. Remarkably, nobody was killed.49
Police quickly apprehended Traini, parked in front of a monumental archway built during the Mussolini era. He was wrapped in an Italian flag and had a neo-Nazi tattoo on his forehead. When police searched his home, they found a copy of Mein Kampf.50
Three days earlier, the body of an Italian teenage girl had been found mutilated, hidden in two suitcases, allegedly murdered by a Nigerian drug dealer. Traini, a 28-year-old former local election candidate for the League, had vowed to take revenge.
The reaction to Traini’s shooting spree was deeply partisan. Many blamed the victims for the racist attack that had targeted them. On the general election campaign trail, Matteo Salvini said that Traini had been provoked by an influx of “hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants”.51 Traini was hailed as a hero on the websites and forums where far-right supporters from around the world increasingly congregate. The spike in traffic on neo-Nazi message boards in the immediate aftermath of the attack was so pronounced that far-right activists dubbed it the ‘Traini effect’. This was the new reactionary internationalism in action. The gunman who killed 51 at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019 had scrawled Traini’s name on a rifle cartridge used in the massacre.52
The Traini effect was not confined to the darkest reaches of white nationalism. In the aftermath of the shooting, memes quickly spread across mainstream social media lionising Traini as the “god” of a coming race war. Far-right activists from across Europe and the US pushed depictions of Traini as Neo, the protagonist of The Matrix.53 Italian fascists even copied the format of an American far-right campus campaign – “It’s OK to be white” – and encouraged supporters to circulate fliers with Traini’s image in universities, in an attempt to spark confrontations with left-wing students. In the US, the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer ran articles in praise of Traini. (The American alt-right has often used the prospect of racially motivated violence in Europe, and exaggerated its extent, to build support at home.)
Traini fed into an unprecedented surge in online far-right activity ahead of Italy’s general election. The same Italian extremist groups who had vaunted Traini as a “god of war” pushed out fascist comments and slogans on the messaging app Telegram. Far-right articles, memes and hashtags fanned out across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.54 The aim was, in a US alt-right phrase lifted from The Matrix, to ‘red pill the normies’ – radicalise the mainstream.
Online activity fed offline influence operations, too. Far-right supporters organised street stalls, especially on campuses, to support both the League and the Brothers of Italy, a party that emerged from Italy’s post-fascist right and was a member of the same European Parliament group as the British Conservatives before Brexit.
The Italian far right also had international assistance. Message boards on 4chan and 8chan served as multilingual global hubs. An analysis by the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue concluded that the 2018 Italian election campaign showed “the maturation of an international consciousness around tactics which have previously worked well for extreme-right activists”.55
The League were the main beneficiaries. Memes superimposed Matteo Salvini onto Pepe the Frog. (In alt-right circles, being depicted as this green, anthropomorphic cartoon character is a high honour.) One Italian far-right activist told his colleagues: “I have redpilled my friends, so we have six more votes for Matteo.”56
Salvini himself has long been a master social media manipulator. As he demonstrated with Donald Trump, his campaign trick is the smiling selfie. “Salvini is a chameleon who learned how to control consensus through social media,” says Italian investigative journalist Jacopo Iacoboni. Steve Bannon told me that Salvini is a “real master” of online organisation “like Bolsonaro and Farage”.
The League spent heavily on targeted Facebook ads playing on Salvini’s personal brand. This mix of mainstream coverage for the League’s anti-system, anti-immigrant, anti-EU message and its more shadowy far-right online support helped the party more than triple its share of the vote to over 17 per cent in the 2018 Italian general election. Afterwards, Salvini declared, “Thank God for the Internet, thank God for social media, thank God for Facebook.”57
He was not the only xenophobic politician to be grateful to the god of Facebook. In Spain, Vox consciously bypassed traditional media outlets to appeal directly to voters with emotive images. Ultra-nationalist videos told frightening stories about immigration.58 Others provided a hopeful vision of the future; Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal on horseback or standing in the rain looking out over fields and vineyards.59
This dual digital strategy has been very successful, especially with young people, who are often thought less likely to be attracted to conservative politics. Vox has more followers on Instagram than the Socialists and the left-wing Podemos combined.60
In a second Spanish general election in November 2019, Vox put the “menace” of migrant children at the centre of an aggressively racist campaign.61 Amid widespread disillusionment at the country’s gridlocked politics, the far-right party’s support surged. Vox finished third, more than doubling its seats in parliament.
Xavier Arbos, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Barcelona, said that Vox had tapped a growing wave of reaction. “Just as happened with Trump in the US and with Brexit in Britain, there are obviously Spaniards who feel isolated by the political system in an era of globalisation,” he told the Independent.62
Vox also benefited from a huge social media reach that exhibited some suspicious characteristics. Many of the most prolific pro-Vox accounts displayed behaviour that digital researchers would call unusual, according to research published in early 2019. Over the course of a year, some 3,000 Twitter accounts sent four and a half million pro-Vox and anti-Islamic tweets.63 They often published identical posts that were designed to look spontaneous but were in fact coordinated disinformation. In one instance, a raft of pro-Vox accounts tweeted images of a riot said to be happening in a Muslim district in France. The photographs were actually of anti-government protests in Algeria.
Vox supporters were particularly likely to share conspiracy theories. There were stories about “white genocide” and myriad mentions of Jewish billionaire George Soros, who had barely featured in Spanish politics until Vox started talking about him. Similar hyper-partisan political news sites had also proliferated in Italy and Brazil ahead of their elections in 2018. In both countries, these far-right portals amplified narratives – about immigration in Italy, corruption in Brazil – before they had become part of the mainstream discourse.
“Americans will recognise these types of sites,” Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote of Vox’s anonymous digital boosters. “They function not unlike Infowars, Breitbart, the infamous partisan sites that operated from Macedonia during the U.S. presidential campaign or, indeed, the Facebook pages created by Russian military intelligence, all of which produced hypercharged, conspiratorial, partisan news and outraged headlines that could then be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial echo chambers.”64
Many of Vox’s digital echo chambers pushed religiously tinged disinformation. Muslims wanted to take Spain back to the time of the Moors. Leftists were encouraging children to have abortions. Highly emotive messages about moral issues – especially those that spark feelings of fear – are a particularly effective way to spread disinformation. Similar tactics were used during the 2016 presidential election, when pro-Kremlin accounts appealed directly to Christian fundamentalists by sharing images that showed Hillary Clinton, devil horns protruding, arm-wrestling with Jesus.65 Religion, as digital expert Claire Wardle explained to me, “is one of the best ways to spread disinformation online.”
*
Digital disinformation and wealthy foreign donors are not the only sources of electoral interference. States often meddle in each other’s politics. Between 1946 and 1989, the US intervened in more than 60 international elections, mostly in secret without announcing their covert operations to the world.66 Britain and France routinely interfered in their former colonies. The Soviet Union funded communist parties around the world. Eastern bloc intelligence services even bought up pliant British Labour MPs. More recently, of course, Russia has been implicated in a spate of high-profile foreign electoral influence campaigns.
Aside from the 2016 US presidential election, Moscow’s best-documented external electoral interest is in Europe’s populist right. French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen took €11 million in loans from Russian banks, including one close to the Kremlin. (She insisted that the deal was commercial, not political.) Ahead of the 2016 EU referendum, Brexit’s most generous backer, Arron Banks, discussed lucrative gold and diamond investment deals offered through the Russian embassy in London. Banks has said that he declined the offers. The leader of Austria’s far-right FPÖ party, Heinz-Christian Strache, was forced to resign in 2019 after being filmed in an elaborate sting operation discussing the exchange of public contracts for Russian campaign support.67
The Kremlin is particularly well connected to Matteo Salvini and the League. The party has long courted Russian influence. The openly fascist Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has often been invited to League events in Italy. After Salvini took over the leadership in late 2013, the party became more overtly pro-Kremlin.68
In February 2014, Salvini established a cultural association to build links with Moscow. Its honorary chair was Aleksey Komov, Russia’s representative at the World Congress of Families. The association’s president, Gianluca Savoini, a journalist and advisor on Russia for the League, said the goal was to make the Italian public aware that “it is absurd and counterproductive for the EU to view Russia as an enemy and not as a fundamental geopolitical, military, as well as economic ally”.69
The League’s affinities with Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian state were hardly a secret. In 2014, Salvini led a party delegation on a visit to Crimea, by then annexed by Russia. He travelled to Moscow numerous times and met Putin to discuss the “absurd sanctions against Russia” imposed by the EU. In early 2017, Salvini returned to Russia to sign a cooperation agreement between the League and the United Russia party.70 Putin’s party had signed similar pacts with the Austrian Freedom Party.‡
The relationship between the League and the Kremlin seems to have extended beyond fraternal visits. In October 2018, three Russian officials and three Italians, including Gianluca Savoini from the League’s Russian cultural association, convened in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel to discuss plans for a “great alliance”. In an espresso-fuelled conversation in the hotel lobby, the men negotiated the terms of a deal to covertly channel tens of millions of dollars of Russian money to the League. At least three million metric tonnes of diesel fuel would be sold at a discount to an Italian oil company by a group close to Putin’s government. The profits – estimated at $65 million – would be secretly funnelled to the League, via intermediaries, to fund its political campaign ahead of the European elections.71
It is not clear if the oil deal was ever done. Salvini – who did not attend the meeting himself but was in Moscow at the time – dismissed the story as “fake news” when reports originally surfaced in the Italian media in early 2019. But Buzzfeed later released a tape of a detailed conversation between the Russians and Italians that discussed clandestine political funding. Savoini can be heard saying that the Italian party wanted “a new Europe” that is “close to Russia”.72
That private chat in the Metropol Hotel was politically explosive. Italian electoral law bans political parties from accepting foreign donations. Amid questions about Russian influence, Salvini walked out of government in August 2019, in an attempt to force a general election. He failed. The Five Star Movement formed a new coalition partnership with the centre-left, leaving the League in the cold.
Salvini, it seemed, had over-reached. He had shown himself to be callow and prone to political misjudgements. “I don’t think he played it right,” Steve Bannon said of his one-time mentee. “He made a couple of tactical mistakes.”
But there is little sign that the allegations about Kremlin interference have cost the League very much in electoral terms. “Even though he’s out of government he is more popular than ever,” Bannon said of Salvini. In October 2019, a League-led coalition swept into power in Umbria, ending half a century of left-wing rule in that region.
Yet Salvini’s grip on power in Italy has been shaky. At the end of 2019, he was in opposition, still competing with other parties for control of Italy’s democratic institutions. We don’t have to look far, however, to find a European state where disinformation and targeted influence campaigns have already created a much more solidly grounded ‘illiberal democracy’.
*
In late 2017, I arrived in an icy Budapest to give a journalism workshop at the Central European University. One of the first things I noticed when I disembarked from the airport bus in the centre of the Hungarian capital was the posters. They seemed to be everywhere. From billboards and bus shelters a craggy, ageing face framed by a thin smile and an aquiline nose looked down. I recognised it instantly as the CEU’s Hungarian-born founder George Soros. Next to the image was a line of text: “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh.”73
This propaganda drive cost the Hungarian government almost €20 million. For Viktor Orbán, it was small change in his almost decade-long campaign to portray Soros as the number one enemy of the Hungarian people. Its success inspired far-right leaders and activists around the world.
Orbán, a well-built man with the broad shoulders of a weightlifter, has revelled in his status as Europe’s most successful nationalist demagogue. As Brussels looks askance, Orbán has built barbed wire fences to repel immigrants. Laws have been introduced to protect ‘family values’: marriage is defined as solely between a man and a woman; human life begins at the moment of conception; large families get mortgage breaks; there are tax incentives for stay-at-home mums. Hungary’s media and civil society are tightly controlled, too. Many of the institutions that Soros funded – including the Central European University – have effectively been forced out of the country.
A few months after I gave my talk at the CEU in Budapest, Orbán made a pre-election address in front of the Hungarian parliament. Even by Orbán’s standards it was more foghorn than dog whistle. The prime minister told his compatriots that they were “fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding. Not straightforward but crafty. Not honest but unprincipled. Not national but international. Does not believe in working but speculates with money. Does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.”74
Orbán’s words could have been lifted from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When Jewish leaders accused him of anti-Semitism, Orbán decried them as enemies of free speech.75 In April 2018, his Fidesz party won a third consecutive term in office.
It is easy to forget that in the late 1980s, Viktor Orbán was one of the most articulate voices of a new liberal generation railing against the moribund communist system. He began working at the Central European Research Group, which was funded by the Soros Foundation. Orbán soon received a Soros-funded scholarship to study at Oxford, but only stayed in England for three months before returning to Hungary to run in the first free elections in 1990,76 winning a seat for the recently created Fidesz. He was just 26. Within eight years, he was prime minister and widely seen as one of the most trenchant anti-authoritarian voices in Eastern European politics. But after a single term, he lost power in 2002.
Defeat hit Orbán hard. Out of office and languishing in opposition, he vowed to regain power. The one-time Hayekian libertarian reinvented himself as the nationalist protector of Hungarian minorities in neighbouring states. He made stirring speeches defending the Catholic Church. “Personally, Orbán has never been very religious,” says Kim Lane Scheppele, a legal scholar at Princeton who studies Hungary and first met Orbán in the 1990s. “He used this new uniform as a route to power. That’s all that matters to him. Power.”
Orbán’s ultra-conservative reinvention was not an overnight success. In 2006, Fidesz unexpectedly lost a second successive election. Now, Orbán looked abroad for strategic advice, to the world of highly paid political consultants. Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu introduced his Hungarian friend to the legendary US pollster Arthur J. Finkelstein.77
Few lobbyists were as well connected in Republican politics as Finkelstein. Having worked for Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and once shared a college radio show with the radical libertarian Ayn Rand, Finkelstein had begun running a consultancy that specialised in working in post-communist states in Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, Finkelstein introduced another veteran Republican lobbyist, Paul Manafort, to pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs.§
A long-time New York associate of Donald Trump, Finkelstein also had a hand in Manafort becoming the Republican candidate’s campaign chair for five months in 2016. (Manafort was later given a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to fraud and conspiracy in his lobbying for pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine. A federal judge in Washington denounced him as a man who “spent a significant portion of his career gaming the system”.78)
Finkelstein made Hungary the centre of his political consulting empire. He relocated to Budapest and began working for Viktor Orbán. Just like Vote Leave’s Thomas Borwick, ‘Finkie’, as Orbán liked to call him, believed that the most successful political campaigns united voters against a clearly defined enemy.
It wasn’t hard to find a villain in crisis-stricken Hungary. The country was a financial mess. In 2008, Hungary was bailed out by the ‘Troika’ – the World Bank, the EU and the International Monetary Fund – who demanded harsh austerity measures. Finkelstein and his protégé and business partner George Birnbaum told Orbán to target “the bureaucrats” and “foreign capital”.79
The strategy was a huge success. In 2010, Orbán won two-thirds of the vote. Safely returned as prime minister, he now sought to consolidate his rule. “We had an incumbent with a historic majority, something that had never happened in Hungary before,” George Birnbaum later told Swiss journalist Hannes Grassegger.80 “You need to keep the base energised, make sure that on Election Day they have a reason to go out and vote.”
Finkelstein set about finding a new foe for Orbán. This time, however, the adversary would have a face. “Arthur always said that you did not fight against the Nazis but against Adolf Hitler. Not against al-Qaeda, but against Osama bin Laden,” Birnbaum said.81 Finkelstein had an idea for the perfect guy in the black hat. Someone who was hated by the right as a Jewish funder of progressive causes, and despised by the left as the embodiment of big capital: George Soros. Orbán’s friendship with Netanyahu and vocal support for Israel gave political cover against accusations of anti-Semitism.
With uncanny prescience, Finkelstein had come up with a “campaign idea, so big and so Mephistophelian, that it will outlive itself”. It was a grim irony that the Soros bogeyman was created by two Jews whose families had fled Europe. Birnbaum’s father was an Auschwitz survivor.
Soros was already a hate figure on the American right by the time Finkelstein pitched up in Budapest. He had spent huge sums funding political movements around the world, including in the US. Soros first attracted the attention of the Republican right after speaking out against the Iraq War and donating money to the Democrats against George W. Bush in 2004. On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly described Soros as “an extremist who wants open borders, a one-world foreign policy, legalised drugs, euthanasia, and on and on”.82
Orbán went further. With Finkelstein’s guidance, he constructed Soros as an existential threat to Hungary’s very way of life. Soros’s support for democracy and open societies was really a stalking horse for a globalist plot to destroy the nation state itself. This was a new model for attack politics in an era of global division, one that the far right would exploit to devastating effect.83
During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Soros went from obscure Fox News talking point to moral panic. As I drove across the United States in the months before the election, I was bewildered by the number of voters who mentioned Soros. His name came up in blue-collar bars in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and outside upmarket shopping malls in Cleveland, Ohio.
At the time, I was barely aware of Soros. I knew he had ‘broken the Bank of England’, making $1 billion on Black Wednesday in 1992 as Britain was forced to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. I knew he was a major philanthropist. But that was about it. By the end of my reporting trip through America, I was a Soros aficionado. I had seen his face surrounded by flames in a poster in the window of a suburban house and been told that he was masterminding a communist takeover of America. Trump’s final TV ad featured Soros as a visual representative of “global special interests”.
It subsequently emerged that accounts connected to the GRU, the Kremlin’s military-intelligence agency, were pushing Soros conspiracy theories on Facebook ahead of the presidential election.84 Russia had long criticised Soros, wary of the democratic revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and other post-communist states on its borders that it believed Soros had supported.85 In office, Trump would often spread anti-Soros propaganda, mendaciously accusing him of funding a caravan of migrants on America’s southern border.
Soros has also emerged as a cipher in British political debate. He openly spent millions funding anti-Brexit campaigns after the EU referendum, much to the chagrin of right-wing newspapers. During the 2019 British general election, Conservative candidates were accused of having shared Soros conspiracy theories on social media.86 Labour was also embroiled in a long-running controversy over anti-Semitism in the party.
All of this would be familiar to watchers of Hungarian politics. Orbán, as his confidant Steve Bannon pointed out, was “Trump before Trump”. He was the only EU leader to endorse Trump in 2016, and he had taken the anti-Soros mythology and run with it. After Orbán’s re-election in 2018, the crackdown on Soros-funded organisations intensified. An Act of Parliament was passed to change the licensing of foreign universities and limit international-funded non-governmental organisations. Vladimir Putin had done the very same. Orbán’s move was directed very precisely at Soros-funded institutions.
The Central European University, which had promoted independent academic research in the region since 1991, eventually announced that it was moving much of its operations to Vienna, though the Budapest campus remains open. “In Hungary, the law is a tool of power,” Michael Ignatieff, the university’s rector, said at the time.87 The Hungarian office of Open Society Foundations, the main vehicle for Soros’s philanthropy, closed.
The relentless focus on Soros gave Orbán the cover to dismantle the pillars of Hungarian democracy. In 2011, a year after re-election, he introduced an entirely new constitution in just nine days.88 Veteran judges on the constitutional court were forced to retire so that their seats could be filled with more Fidesz-friendly jurists.89 Most of the media was taken over by the party’s oligarch supporters.
Laws were introduced that distorted the popular ballot. Orbán gerrymandered electoral districts to ensure his dominance. Liberal strongholds, predominantly in cities, were divided so that large numbers of voters were packed into a handful of parliamentary seats, while districts in Hungary’s conservative countryside have far fewer people. Fake parties were created to split the anti-Fidesz vote.90
In 2014, Fidesz received fewer votes than it had in 2002 and 2006, when it lost elections, but it ended up with the parliamentary supermajority that it needed to push through radical constitutional changes.91 In 2018, Fidesz won more than two-thirds of the seats in the Hungarian parliament despite taking less than half of the vote. “Orbán combined American-style gerrymandering with the British first-past-the-post system,” legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele told me. “He has turned Hungary into a dictatorship in plain sight.”
Orbán is a master of distraction and political sleight of hand. Often when he introduces a legislative change that cements his power, it has been accompanied by a contentious symbolic gesture that flames Hungary’s culture wars and grabs the attention of the opposition and international media. “When Orbán wants to do something in Parliament, he will announce that he is building a statue to a wartime anti-Semite or something equally appalling, and everyone runs off to cover that,” said Lane Scheppele. “It’s the same tactics that Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings use in Britain.”
Ahead of the 2018 general election, Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube was reportedly involved in a campaign to discredit Hungarian NGOs, especially those linked to Soros. Black Cube agents using false identities secretly recorded prominent civil society activists.92 The tapes were released to a Hungarian government-controlled daily newspaper three weeks before the vote. Orbán used the revelations to attack civil society organisations.
Black Cube had previously been hired by disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein to collect information on actresses and journalists investigating his sexual predations, but this was the first time that the firm, created by former Israeli intelligence officers, had been cited in an election campaign. Black Cube refused to confirm or deny whether it had worked in Hungary but said it fully complied with the law and took “legal advice from the world’s leading law firms”.
Orbán’s political takeover – buttressed by a German industrial lobby that relies on cheap labour in Hungarian plants – has largely been bankrolled by cash plundered from the European Union that he rails so fervently against. A 2019 New York Times investigation found that Orbán uses billions of euros in EU subsidies as a patronage fund that enriches his allies, protects his political interests and punishes his rivals.93 “The ideology is a ruse. The money is where the action is,” said Lane Scheppele.
Brussels has done little to stem the tide of Hungary’s rampant corruption. Instead, Orbán has treated his frequent public dressing-downs in the European Parliament as a PR opportunity. He smiles for the cameras as Western politicians berate him. His florid responses – anti-liberal, anti-globalist, anti-EU – are clipped and circulated across social media.
It is a message that chimed with voters across post-communist Europe, frustrated after decades of being told that there was no alternative to a market-led liberal democracy that often enriched the elite and left the majority disenfranchised and alienated. As Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev and US law professor Stephen Holmes wrote: “The very conceit that ‘there is no other way’ provided an independent motive for the wave of populist xenophobia and reactionary nativism that began in central and eastern Europe, and is now washing across much of the world.”94
Europe’s migration crisis gave Orbán the chance to take his message of ‘illiberal democracy’ to an international stage. In July 2015, as the number of Syrians coming through Turkey and Greece increased, Orbán adopted a very aggressive stance against accepting refugees. As the Hungarian government hastily erected holding centres along its border with Serbia, he warned of invading Muslim hordes. When Angela Merkel announced that Germany would admit hundreds of thousands of refugees, Orbán and other leaders of the so-called Visegrád group – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – publicly rejected the German prime minister’s humanitarian appeal. “I think it is just bullshit,” said Mária Schmidt, one of Orbán’s closest political advisors.95
For most refugees, Hungary was only a staging point on the way to Western Europe. The numbers settling in Central and Eastern Europe have been relatively small. But immigration plays into wider demographic concerns in many post-socialist states. More citizens have left the EU’s eastern states in the wake of the 2009 financial crisis than have arrived as migrants.96 Images of crowds of migrants outside Budapest’s Keleti train station fed a perception that Hungary was being overrun.
Orbán declared that the gravest threat to the survival of the white Christian majority in Europe was the incapacity of Western societies to defend themselves. Hungary’s government passed a series of anti-immigration measures, including a ‘Stop Soros’ bill in 2018, which makes it a criminal offence to provide assistance to undocumented migrants applying for asylum or residency permits.
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights organisation, has accused Orbán of systematically denying food to failed asylum seekers held in detention camps on Hungary’s border – an action it described as “an unprecedented human rights violation in 21st-century Europe”. He has also made homelessness a criminal offence.97
The migration crisis elevated Orbán’s status among global ultra-conservatives. When the World Congress of Families met in Budapest in 2017, Orbán was met with rapt applause. Playing to both his domestic audience and the Christian gallery, Orbán announced that he was setting up a think tank to address the biggest issue facing Europe – white people not having enough children. Afterwards, he posed for photographs with WCF chief Brian Brown.
Orbán’s appeals to ‘Christian liberty’ may be just rhetoric, but he has actively sought to turn Budapest into a capital of conservative thought. American white nationalist Richard Spencer has been a frequent guest, as have numerous leading Russian conservatives and former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott. Steve Bannon told me that he was “very close” to Orbán and had to cancel a scheduled visit to Budapest in late 2019 to assist President Trump’s battle against impeachment.
British Tories looked eastwards, too. Conservative MPs such as Daniel Kawczynski expressed their admiration for Orbán’s regime. A group of pro-Brexit libertarians, including leading figures from the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute, lobbied for the establishment of a Museum of Communist Terror in London inspired by the similarly titled Budapest attraction.** Elsewhere, former Thatcher speech writer John O’Sullivan – a prominent advocate of the Anglosphere at the turn of the millennium – has run the Orbán-friendly Danube Institute think tank in Budapest.
In December 2019, shortly after the British general election, Tim Montgomerie, an advisor on social justice to Boris Johnson, addressed a Danube Institute meeting in Budapest. Montgomerie praised Hungary’s “interesting early thinking” on “the limits of liberalism”. “I think we are seeing that in the UK as well,” he said, adding that Britain should forge a “special relationship” with Hungary after Brexit.98 It’s hard not to see traces of Orbán’s ostentatious populism in Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Orbán, however, demurred when Brexiters called on him to come to their aid. Despite pleas from his long-time ally Nigel Farage, Orbán refused to block the European Union’s extension to Brexit in September 2019.
That same month, at an international demography conference in Budapest, Orbán returned to his favourite themes: immigration and George Soros. “Political forces”, he said, wanted to replace the white European population with “others”. What more openly fascist thinkers call ‘the great replacement’ is promoted by the Hungarian head of state.
“The political vision nurtured by the World Congress of Families has become frighteningly mainstream,” says my openDemocracy colleague Claire Provost, an investigative journalist who has spent years tracking the backlash against rights for women, LGBTQI people and minorities. “The longer I spend with these groups, the less I think they’re actually fixated on specific issues like abortion. While they talk a lot about women’s wombs, theirs is a much wider political project, to support authoritarian societies led by ‘strongmen’.”
*
As this book has looked primarily at the effect of dark money and disinformation on Britain, this chapter has focused on examples of the nativist surge in some of the UK’s European neighbours: Italy, Spain and Hungary. In all three, nationalist appeals to religion and identity have been underpinned by international networks of political influence and digital disinformation. The effects of this can be seen most dramatically in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has shown how quickly supposedly liberal democratic norms and conventions can be defanged and dismantled.
Of course, autocrats are also on the rise in many other parts of the world, bolstered by many of the same American and Russian networks and socio-political dynamics that are helping to upend politics in Europe. From the Philippines and Brazil to Turkey and India, a new generation of strongmen has emerged. They often use similar tactics – weaponising religion and mobilising fear of the ‘other’ – but have adapted these strategies to local circumstances.
The authoritarian model “moves around not as a caravan but as spare parts”, says Princeton legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele. Populists take inspiration from one another but also buy advice from “political consultants that go from place to place and help the new autocrats set up shop”. Steve Bannon boasted to me in early 2020 that he talked to Europe’s populist leaders “on a fairly regular basis” and was “still working behind the scenes driving stuff”.
Dark money and demagogic online campaigns have been particularly effective in societies where democracy is comparatively young (although, as this book has explored, this offers no grounds for complacency in so-called ‘established’ democracies like the UK and the US). We often assume that, in Europe, 1945 was a kind of year zero in which fascist, anti-Semitic and other political traditions of the pre-war right were eradicated, but that was far from the case. In painting George Soros as a mortal enemy of the Hungarian people, Orbán draws on local fears of the Jewish ‘other’ that are centuries old.
Like the Law and Justice Party in Poland, Fidesz has tapped into traditions of anti-Semitism that are deeply rooted in these staunchly Catholic, largely rural societies. Orbán often celebrates Hungary’s inter-war dictatorship, in which anti-Semitism was rampant. The post-war seizure of power by a Stalinist clique backed by the Red Army did little more than drive those attitudes underground, out of sight but not out of mind. In the Soviet Union and across the Eastern Bloc, ‘cosmopolitanism’ was often a synonym for Jews. Orbán’s rhetoric is less sui generis and more a product of deep, divisive histories.
Similarly, in Italy and Spain the fascist past has in many important respects never been fully faced. After the war, Italy eschewed any serious process of restitution. Bureaucrats and lawyers loyal to the regime continued in post. Neo-fascist parties were allowed to operate openly. Shrines to Mussolini can still be found all over the country. All the while, there was a single party in power with enormous scope for patronage and corruption. Italy was a very qualified democracy in which the main opposition party could never attain power.
Since the 1990s, there has been a determined effort to push back Italy’s post-war anti-fascist consensus, which permeated literature and culture more generally but was never really shared by the dominant Christian Democratic Party. Matteo Salvini draws on this history and is supported by a flourishing subculture of identitarian grouplets and magazines and football fan clubs. (Silvio Berlusconi pioneered much of this strategy in the early 1990s, whipping up rage against a corrupt and incompetent political elite just as Trump did two decades later.)
In Spain, Vox draws from a barely repressed legacy of Franco, which remains politically incendiary. In October 2019, protests broke out when El Caudillo’s body was exhumed from a monumental state-built mausoleum and reburied in a low-key municipal cemetery;99 two weeks later, Vox won 15 per cent of the vote in the general election.
There is often a temptation to believe that your country is immune, or at least inoculated, from the worst authoritarian excesses. I watched the early hours of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 in a bar in New York’s East Village, surrounded by young liberals. As Republican victories mounted up and Clinton’s path to the White House became ever more vertiginous, one turned to me and said, “Even if Trump wins, it doesn’t matter that much. The constitution will protect us.”
I heard a similar sentiment dozens of times in the hours and days that followed. But in truth, the American system of checks and balances had already been eroded long before Trump arrived on Pennsylvania Avenue. Previous presidents routinely used executive orders to bypass Congress, especially after the end of the Cold War.
In the UK, the limits of an uncodified constitution have become increasingly apparent. Brexit has seen executive power increase markedly. In the name of popular sovereignty, long-held conventions of British parliamentary politics have been abrogated. The Supreme Court may have ruled it unlawful, but many voters seem to have little problem with a prime minister misleading the Queen, as Boris Johnson did when proroguing Parliament in late 2019. The end, it seems, justifies the means.
As the rise of nativist movements in Europe graphically shows, hard-won political battles can quickly be reversed. Change does not always mean progress: it can bring fewer rights, freedoms and opportunities. Dark money and shadowy, unaccountable networks of political influence and persuasion, empowered and amplified by powerful and largely unregulated technology, are swiftly bending democracy out of shape. Worse still, they are destroying faith in the idea that politics can and should be transparent, and accountable to citizens.
What, if anything, can be done to reverse the crisis in democracy? Can we halt the seemingly unstoppable rise of disinformation and dirty politics? Or has democracy already gone dark?
* The princess is also close to Hillary Clinton and was one of about a dozen women to attend her birthday party in 2016.
† The influence of American religious conservatives on European politics extends far beyond the confines of obscure conferences and seminars. In early 2019, another openDemocracy investigation found that a dozen groups on the US religious right had spent at least $50 million in Europe, on various causes, over the previous decade. The pattern is similar to the dark money that has long flowed through Washington’s sprawling libertarian think tanks. Funds are often raised from anonymous sources. Official filings give very limited insight into how much is really being spent, or where the money is coming from. The true figures are likely to be much higher, but the payments offer a glimpse into how these funds have contributed to the nativist political shift across the Atlantic.
‡ The Freedom Party and the League are sister parties, but fell out in 2018 when the Austrians proposed allowing German speakers in the Italian province of South Tyrol to apply for Austrian passports. Despite all the talk of international populist alliances, Europe’s nationalists are still, well, nationalists.
§ Manafort went on to advise Ukraine’s then president Viktor Yanukovych. The American political consultant told Yanukovych, an old-school autocrat from the Russian-speaking east, to play on the country’s geographic and linguistic divisions to foster grievances. In 2014, Yanukovych was overthrown in a revolution that continues to divide Ukraine. As chair of the Trump campaign in 2016, Manafort encouraged the Republican presidential nominee to adopt similarly divisive tactics, playing on America’s ethnic and racial tensions.
** The House of Terror in Budapest has been criticised for largely blaming Communist crimes on foreigners, principally Russians, and for failing to accurately portray the fate of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews who perished during the Holocaust.