After the global financial crisis of 2008, Hungary’s Fidesz government was one of the first to adopt a partially heterodox, national-conservative set of economic policies. It was to become a role model for many nationalist right-wing parties. By 2015, the Law and Justice party (PiS) administration in Poland was seeking to emulate it.
This made Hungary and Poland forerunners of novel forms of right-wing nationalism that blended concepts of nationalist neoliberalism in selective ways with neoconservative ideas. What can the experience of these two countries tell us about the viability of this approach to managing capitalist economies, as the nationalist right continues to advance across Europe and North America?
From the 1980s up to the 2008 crash, neoliberal economic policy concepts dominated on the nationalist right, including Fidesz and PiS. Those concepts aim to shield economic policymaking from popular pressures.
In this framework, parliaments are expected to play a limited role in economic policymaking, with trade unions and tripartite bodies sidelined while technocratic structures are empowered. Under neoliberalism, economic policies are to be based on rules that ensure permanent austerity and keep income and corporate taxes low.
From the 1980s up to the 2008 crash, neoliberal economic policy concepts dominated on the nationalist right, including Fidesz and PiS.
One can incorporate nationalist elements into a neoliberal setup. In core economies, free trade policies might serve to strengthen the international position of domestic firms. In semi-peripheral economies, on the other hand, nationalist neoliberals seek to retain national policy spaces in order to lower social and ecological standards (as well as tax rates) with the aim of attracting foreign capital and enhancing international competitiveness.
The national-conservative approach takes its distance from this depoliticized form of economic policymaking. Its project of building a “party state,”…
Auteur: Joachim Becker
