What role do sexism, racism, and climate denial play in the regime of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán? Hanna Zelma Horányi describes how Orbán is legitimising his power through ‘petro-masculinity’
In the centre of Budapest, before the Hungarian parliament building, lies Kossuth Lajos Square. Paved with dark stones, it hosts revisionist monuments, statues of statesmen past, and a gigantic flagpole. What does this space tell us about the Orbán regime’s image of Hungary? While much has been written about the Square’s role in memory politics, I would like to draw attention to a different aspect. The square – which was renovated between 2012 and 2014 – features exclusively white, masculine figures. It represents the deliberate control and erasure of greenery, an untenable decision on a boiling planet.
This blend of climate denial, racism, and misogyny is characteristic of emerging Western authoritarian movements. The feminist political ecologist Cara Daggett offers the concept of petro-masculinity to explain the phenomenon. In her work, Daggett focuses on the ‘historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule’. She argues that climate denial, racism, and misogyny are not separate issues but instead rooted in anthropocene anxieties. As white patriarchal rule crumbles, ‘violent compensatory practices’ – such as the wasteful and excessive use of fossil fuel – offer some form of catharsis.
Daggett's research focuses on the US – but petro-masculinity manifests in Eastern Europe, too. In Orbán’s Hungary, we see it in the regime's reliance on Russian fuel, in the paving over of green urban spaces, and in its condemnation of postmodern lifestyles.
Russia generates more than half its Gross National Income from fossil fuel exports. To protest Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many European states took steps to ‘decouple’, and reduce their dependence on Russian energy.
Any state that continues to rely on Russian gas is thus directly funding Putin’s war. One such is Hungary, which has, since 2022, increased its imports, spending over €15 billion on Russian fossil fuel. This increase is in part the result of Hungary’s exports to Slovakia and Serbia; Orbán has essentially become a regional distributor of Russian fuel.
Much of Europe has ‘decoupled’ from its dependence on Russian gas. Hungary, meanwhile, has increased its imports of Russia’s fossil fuel
For Daggett, climate denial is a reaction against a world in which ‘oil-soaked and coal-dusted’ lifestyles no longer make sense. Alexander Etkind applies this idea to Ukraine, arguing that it is ‘one battle in the larger war of the Anthropocene’. And Hungary – the ‘biggest financer of Putin’s war in the EU’ – is propping up Russia’s murderous operation. While it might not have its own fuel to extract, it experiences a ‘vicarious release of frustrated patriarchal vigour’ through the exploitative and aggressive actions of a stronger state.
In the face of the climate crisis, many countries are greening up their urban environments. But not Hungary, where, under the climate change-denying Orbán regime, stone-covered public spaces continue to expand. The design of Kossuth Lajos Square makes no sense on a warming planet. But Orbán's anthropocene anxiety means he struggles to let go of the 'old world'. There is the spectre of clientelism, too. The Orbán family – and patriarch Győző as its head – made much of its wealth through the quarry business.
While many European states seek to green up their urban environments, the Fidesz regime continues to pave over Hungary's green spaces
Klaus Theweleit proposes a third reason for the regime’s love of stone. His book Male Fantasies argues that rigidity is central to male authoritarian desires. ‘The damming up of the authoritarian body… against desire is justified as necessary to guard its strength, and to properly direct its energy into productive pathways’, writes Daggett about Theweleit’s book. ‘Too much flow, too much desire, saps its “energy”… threatening to make it soft and effeminate.’
From this perspective, the design of Kossuth Lajos Square sends a clear message: an unruly planet and its unruly inhabitants will be disciplined.
Why does a Google image search bring up so many pictures of Németh Szilárd, vice president of Fidesz, eating tripe? Why did Orbán participate in a widely publicised pig slaughter in the lead-up to the 2022 elections? These spectacles of meat consumption accord with the Orbán regime’s climate denial, and bolster its image of simple, down-to-earth masculinity. It also excludes the opposition, which the regime portrays as urban and effeminate. To burnish his macho credentials, in September 2024 Orbán even posted a picture of himself training at the gym alongside screen hardman Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Indeed, that same year, Orbán decried the ‘liberal, slimfit-wearing, latte avocado-drinking’ young people who do not vote for him. A few weeks later, the Minister of Construction likened the urban-rural divide to the choice between latte avocado and quince pálinka, reemphasising Fidesz as a party of the ‘real people’.
The promotion of anti-postmodern lifestyles also serves xenophobic and racist objectives. At a festival celebrating the craft of butchery, the Speaker of the National Assembly talked about a choice between ‘ham, trotter, sausage or mealworm, cricket, and locust’, suggesting that the adoption of ‘foreign diets’ is a threat to white identity. As the Minister of Agriculture explained: ‘Hungarian people simply do not eat insects. But if they dilute our values, the values of Christian Europe… then comes something else. All those ways of being different… and you just lose your sense of direction’.
Orbán employs petro-masculinity’s blend of climate denial, racism, and misogyny to legitimise his regime. Daggett recognises that in the anxious reality of the Anthropocene, denying change and disciplining the unruly ‘other’ offers much-needed release. She also points out that petro-masculinity ‘feels good because it bursts the constraints of liberal, Western hypocrisy’. As centuries of wanton extraction of finite natural resources catches up with the Western world, Orbán and his ilk find perverse pleasure in extravagant consumption.
But most importantly, Hungary – unlike the US – is a country of only 9.5 million people, without significant resources of its own. When this lack is compounded by the insecurities of late capitalism, there is not much Orbán’s regime can offer its supporters. So it turns to masculinity, and meat.
No.40 in a thread on the ‘illiberal wave’ 🌊 sweeping world politics
This blog piece was written for the course 'Gendering Illiberalism', co-designed and co-taught by Andrea Pető (with TA Irfana Khatoon) and Alina Dragolea (with TA Oana Dervis) sponsored by CIVICA alliance universities Central European University (CEU) and the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (SNSPA).
