In October 2019, as president of the International Federation for Human Rights, I took part in an international civil society donor meeting. Knowing that I’m Greek, one of the participants, extremely influential and well-informed, asked me: “Is there any point in supporting civil society in Greece for it seems that it will end up like Hungary?”
I must confess that the question shocked me. A super-rich philanthropist, whose foundation funds civil society organisations all over the world, was bluntly telling me that ‘your country is going to turn into Hungary, so I’m packing up and leaving’. I answered him that prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government stands on two planks: one comprises the traditional popular Right faction and the other the neoliberal European centre-Right establishment, which the ruling party, New Democracy, has consistently served since the day it was founded. New Democracy is the primary pro-European political party in Greece, and, in that sense, I could hardly imagine that the party of ‘anything European is good’ could mutate into a Viktor Orbán-like caricature of the ethnopopulist Right. This successful synthesis is why I believe that some popular left-wing readings of New Democracy as a ‘far-Right’ party in Greece are misdirected.
My interlocutor responded that Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, had started off similarly, as the Hungarian version of a transition to a liberal democracy, and ultimately ended up what he is today.
