A few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, Viktor Orban visited Vladimir Putin in Moscow. While Putin’s other meetings with western leaders were tense and adversarial, the atmosphere between the Hungarian prime minister and Russian president was almost jovial.
Orban’s government was in the midst of a confrontation with the rest of the EU over accusations that it is undermining democracy and the rule of law. “Difficult times, but we are in very good company,” remarked Orban at the closing press conference, drawing a laugh from Putin. The Hungarian, who is now the longest-serving leader in the EU, boasted of his many meetings with Putin. “I’m not planning to leave,” he chuckled. “I have good hopes that for many years we can work together.”
Orban’s expectation that he will continue to run Hungary long into the future is likely to be confirmed this weekend. The Fidesz party that he leads is expected to win a close election — benefiting from an electoral and media system that is now so deeply stacked in Orban’s favour that Hungary is classed as only “partly free” by Freedom House, a US think-tank.
Hungary’s election and its domination by Orban is a reminder that the strongman style of politics — so closely associated with Putin — has adherents all over the world, including within the established democracies of the west.
Since 2000, the rise of the strongman leader has become a central feature of global politics. In capitals as diverse as Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Ankara, Budapest, Manila, Washington, Riyadh and Brasília, self-styled “strongmen” (and, so far, they are all men) have risen to power.
Typically, these leaders are nationalists and cultural conservatives, with little tolerance for minorities, dissent or the interests of foreigners. At home, they claim to be standing up for the common man against the “globalist” elites. Overseas, they posture as the embodiment of their nations. And, everywhere they go, they encourage a cult of personality.
It is possible that the catastrophe of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will permanently discredit the strongman style of politics. But those hopes should be balanced by the knowledge that this is a movement — and a political style — that has put down deep roots over the past 20 years.
The Age of the Strongman began on December 31 1999, when Putin was sworn in as president of Russia. It is all too symbolic that he took power at the onset of the 21st century — for Putin became the archetype for a new type of strongman ruler that would reshape global politics over the next generation.
Over the following 20 years, the Russian leader became an important symbol and even an inspiration for a generation of authoritarians who admired his nationalism, his daring, his violent rhetoric and his contempt for “political correctness”.
In 2003, Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister of Turkey. I first encountered him at a press conference in Brussels in 2004, where Erdogan was pressing Turkey’s case to join the EU. When I asked if he was worried by opposition to Turkish membership, he gave an answer that was well tailored to liberal western sensibilities: “If the EU has decided to be a Christian club, rather than one of shared values, then let it say so now.”
Eighteen years later, the idea that Erdogan shares a set of liberal values with the EU would be regarded as absurd in both Turkey and Brussels. Over the intervening years, the president of Turkey has become increasingly authoritarian and stridently anti-western in his rhetoric. He has imprisoned journalists and political opponents and now runs his country from a huge new presidential palace constructed for him in Ankara.
A similar process of disillusionment has set in with Xi Jinping. When I met him in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2013, a year after he had taken power, Xi’s message to a small group of western visitors was deliberately reassuring. Speaking calmly, with a huge mural of the Great Wall of China behind him, Xi proclaimed: “The argument that strong countries are bound to seek hegemony does not apply to China.”
But, within a year, China had begun to construct military bases right across the disputed waters of the South China Sea. At home, Xi has moved China away from a collective model of leadership and encouraged a cult of personality around “Xi dada” (“Uncle Xi”). The shift towards strongman leadership was cemented when presidential term limits were abolished in 2018 — potentially allowing Xi to rule for life.
The distinction between the state and the leader is eroded — making the strongman’s replacement with a lesser mortal seem inconceivable
The refusal to leave power is a trademark of strongman rule. Putin and Erdogan have also changed their countries’ constitutions to allow them to extend their period at the top. Donald Trump “joked” several times that the US should also change its constitution to allow him to rule for longer as president than the two terms mandated by the constitution. His refusal to accept electoral defeat led directly to the attempt by Trump devotees to storm the Capitol on January 6 2021.
Strongman leaders need to be regarded as indispensable. Their goal is to convince people that they alone can save the nation. The distinction between the state and the leader is eroded — making the strongman’s replacement with a lesser mortal seem dangerous or inconceivable.
India also took the strongman path in 2014, with the election of Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party. Like Putin, Modi has cultivated an image as a macho man — boasting of the size of his chest and of his willingness to use violence against India’s enemies. During his successful 2019 re-election campaign, Modi assured voters: “When you vote for Lotus [his party symbol], you are not pushing a button on a machine but pressing a trigger to shoot terrorists.”
Modi’s defenders dismiss criticism of this kind of rhetoric as liberal hand-wringing. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, once told me very firmly that Modi’s foreign and domestic critics had to understand the depth of the prime minister’s relationship with the India that lies beyond Delhi.
Modi — like Xi, Putin and Erdogan — has encouraged a cult of personality. The BJP’s electoral campaigns have centred on his claims to wisdom, strength and personal morality. As Ramachandra Guha, a leading historian of India, has put it: “Since May 2014, the vast resources of the state have been devoted to making the prime minister the face of every programme, every advertisement, every poster. Modi is India, India is Modi.”
That style of politics was once thought to be alien to the mature democracies of the west. But strongman politics triumphed in the US with the election of Trump, who spoke of “American carnage” and told the Republican party convention in 2016: “I alone can fix it.”
The unique economic and cultural power of the US meant that Trump’s ascent changed the atmosphere of global politics — strengthening and legitimising the strongman style and giving rise to a wave of emulators. Trump himself clearly admired other strongman leaders and liked their company. Ahead of a summit with Kim Jong Un, one of Trump’s aides remarked to me, with a slightly sheepish smile: “The president enjoys dealing face to face with authoritarian leaders.” And, indeed, Trump’s first overseas visit as president was to Saudi Arabia in May 2017, where he bonded with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of the country.
“MBS”, as he became known, was hailed by some in the west as just the kind of strongman reformer that Saudi Arabia needed — until the murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents shocked the crown prince’s western fans. When MBS was high-fived by a laughing Vladimir Putin at the next G20 summit, the image seemed to sum up the lawlessness and impunity of the Age of the Strongman.
As a result of this international movement towards personalised politics, it became harder to maintain a clear line between the authoritarian and democratic worlds. Traditionally, US presidents have drawn a dramatic distinction between “the free world” (led by the US) and undemocratic countries. But Trump played down this distinction. When it was put to him in 2015 that Putin (whom he had just praised) had killed journalists and political opponents, Trump replied: “I think our country does plenty of killing too.” As president, he mused to journalist Bob Woodward: “I get along very well with Erdogan . . . The tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them.”
The erasure of a clear line between leadership in democratic and authoritarian systems has been a key goal of the authoritarians for decades. Early in Putin’s long reign in Russia, I met his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, in the Kremlin. The screensaver on Peskov’s computer was a series of revolving quotations from George Orwell’s 1984 — “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery” and so on. When I asked Peskov about some of Putin’s recent repressive acts, he smilingly replied that “all our systems are imperfect”.
Trump’s discourse seemed to confirm this longstanding Russian and Chinese position. Here was an American president willing to say: we also lie, we also kill, our media is fake, our elections are rigged, our courts are dishonest.
Because Putin was the archetype for many of the strongman rulers who followed him, the consequences of his success or failure will be truly global
Strongman leaders frequently justify their ruthless ways by portraying their countries as in crises so deep that they can no longer afford to respect liberal ideals, such as the rule of law. The strongmen also often play on a deep fear that a dominant majority is about to be displaced — suffering enormous cultural and economic losses in the process.
Modi’s BJP has warned of a “love jihad” — an alleged Muslim plot to erode India’s majority Hindu status through intermarriage. Orban has argued that mass migration poses a threat to the very survival of the Hungarian people. The prospect that the US will become “majority-minority” by 2045 helped to fuel the social and racial anxiety that drove the rise of Trump.
The willingness to “get tough” with foreigners — or minority groups such as migrants or Muslims — is integral to the appeal of the strongmen. Their macho posturing also makes them likely to appeal to traditional ideas of male strength and to scorn feminism and LGBT rights.
Putin successfully cultivated support among cultural conservatives in the west by regularly decrying the follies of “political correctness” — with a particular focus on gay rights and feminism. When, in 2019, I asked Konstantin Malofeev, one of the ideologues of Putinism, what he regarded as the essence of western liberalism, he replied: “No borders between countries and no distinction between men and women.”
But probably the strongest common factor among all the strongman leaders is nostalgic nationalism. In different ways, they almost all use variants of Trump’s famous promise to “make America great again”. President Xi’s promise of a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people” is, essentially, a promise to make China great again — restoring the nation to its rightful position as the Middle Kingdom. Modi leads a nationalist movement that appeals to Hindu pride in a glorious and sometimes mythologised past — before the British and the Mughal empires.
Orban has talked of one day regaining the territories that Hungary lost after the first world war. Erdogan seeks inspiration from the glories of the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed after the first world war. Even in the UK, Boris Johnson’s plan for a “Global Britain” draws on nostalgia for the period when Britain was a great imperial power rather than just one member of a European club.
However, the single most dangerous expression of nostalgic nationalism has come from the original strongman himself — Putin. The invasion of Ukraine was a logical culmination of many of the worst aspects of strongman rule: the appeal to a supposed national emergency that justifies radical action; the veneration of strength and violence; contempt for liberalism and law; and personalised rule that shuts out criticism and contrary advice.
Because Putin was the archetype for many of the strongman rulers who followed him, the consequences of his success or failure will be truly global. The western response to Russia’s invasion was swifter and stronger than Putin probably anticipated. That, combined with Russia’s military difficulties, have raised hopes that he and the strongman style he represents could be permanently discredited by the war in Ukraine.
The longer a strongman ruler is in power, the more likely he is to succumb to paranoia or megalomania
Those hopes are legitimate. But it should be noted that other members of the Strongman International have remained studiously neutral on the war — refusing to condemn Putin and steering clear of the international sanctions effort. The fence-sitters include Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, MBS in Saudi Arabia and even Trump himself, who praised Putin as a strategic genius on the eve of the invasion. The most important ally for Putin is Xi — who met the Russian leader in Beijing just weeks before the invasion of Ukraine.
And then there is Orban. The Hungarian leader has gone along with EU sanctions on Russia. But he has been accused by Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, of blocking weapons supplies to Ukraine and pursuing an “openly pro-Russian” position. Vereshchuk even speculated that Orban might have his own designs on Ukrainian territory and “silently dream of our Transcarpathia”.
Those kinds of concerns reflect the fact that strongman rule has historically been closely associated with violence, conquest and international anarchy. The strongman era of the 1930s saw Mussolini, Franco, Stalin and Hitler plunge their nations and the world into wars.
Putin is now repeating this deadly pattern. His invasion of Ukraine has finally provoked the US and the EU to attempt to fight back against strongman authoritarianism. Joe Biden’s exhortation, “For God’s sake, this man cannot stay in power,” has been much criticised. But it reflects the US president’s often-expressed belief that the world is once again locked into an era-defining struggle between autocracy and democracy.
There are good reasons to believe that the liberal democratic world will ultimately prevail. Strongman rule is an inherently flawed model. It cannot deal with the problem of succession and it lacks the checks and balances that allow democracies to ditch failed policies and rulers. The longer a strongman ruler is in power, the more likely he is to succumb to paranoia or megalomania. Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine exemplifies that danger.
But strongmen are very hard to lever out of power. The Age of the Strongman has taken hold over the course of a generation. There may be a lot more turmoil and suffering before it is consigned to history.
Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022
