Senior Australian conservative figures continue to attend conferences backed by illiberal Hungarian leader Viktor Orban. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) hosted its 2023 London Summit in late June, featuring Alexander Downer and Greg Sheridan as two of the five speakers. Australians must focus on connections between our Right and Hungarian fascistic politics.

Peter Browne of Inside Story recounted in early June that Greg Sheridan had just spent a week in Budapest again as a visiting fellow to the Orban-backed Danube Institute. This stay was followed by an effusive celebration of Orbans illiberal Hungary in The Australian (3/6). Sheridan has previously appeared on the Orban speaking circuit, and was a notable part of its first appearance in Melbourne in 2016.

The MCC is superficially an educational institution that fosters conservative students and thinkers.

In fact it functions as a key part of Orbans efforts to establish a Western and Christian bulwark that proclaims itself a staunch defender of traditional values. These nouns are dogwhistle codes meaning white, anti-Muslim and staunchly anti-LGBTQIA+. It is also antisemitic. George Soros, Hungarian expat and Jewish Holocaust survivor is demonised as public enemy No.1.

The MCC is part think tank aiming to push anti-EU and far right positions in Brussels. A Hungarian opposition party member described it as a key part of Orbans alt-right intellectual universe. It is also part indoctrinator of conservative youth.

Frank Furedi, director of the institution, described a goal in 2022 to be the publication of an annual Fear Barometer measuring What European people fear. Orbans Political Director chairs the MCCs Board of Trustees.

In 2021, while Hungarys health system struggled to cope with Covid19, Orban gifted USD1.7 billion worth of funds and assets or the equivalent of 1% of the nations GDP to the MCC. This act was described as part of his unfettered kleptocratic corruption. He is replacing an open tertiary education sector with one that fosters only the ultra-conservative values he endorses. The 11 public universities in Hungary are overseen by his political confederates. The grant ensured that MCC now controls assets worth more than the annual budget of the countrys entire higher education system.

The London MCC event was a celebration of the power of nationalism. The Hungarian account of Downers private speech translates to say that he asserts migration policy is used against nations. Migration that does not endorse the culturally dominant population brings electoral defeat, threatens political stability and gives way to extremism. In a previous Budapest speech, Downer slammed immigrant Bantustans.

Downer decried the Lefts divisiveness. His derisive use here of the term identity politics is another Right canard that aims to silence once again those who were erased from our public square in the past. The voices of women, Queer people, non-white and non-Christian people were not welcome in the shaping of our society; the Right fears the joyous vitality of polyvocality.

Downer depicts the refusal of the Other to accept dictates from a Christian rump about our lives as silencing Christians because their views are not politically correct. (In fact, most are delighted for Christians to practise their faith as long as they cease to grant their beliefs the status of divine mandate over us.)

In words that would delight Orban, Greg Sheridan celebrated the power of the strong nation, apparently describing national weakness as provocative. He located that strength in Christianity with Western Civilisation its treasured child. Liberalism, he apparently observed, goes crazy without its roots.

Presumably that craziness is manifest in another of his targets at the event: the green madness which is the new religion taught in schools.

The account of the event has Sheridan criticise the EUs ability to restrict whether idea a or b is more sympathetic to a nation. This account of Sheridans contribution does not mention which Orban-style authoritarian oppression objected to by the EU ought to have been allowed.

Former Israeli general Yosef Kuperwasser appeared to summarise the events theme in describing the nation state as a political entity that serves the common good. He characterises that as a people united by a common land, a common culture and a common language. He depicts the enemies of this national idea as both globalisation, but also Islamism. In a warning that core to Orbanism, he describes the threat of Islamisation of Europe, with those who aim to Islamise the world treating people who reject nationalism as useful idiots. Kuperwassers sentiments echo the violent ultranationalists in Netanyahus government in Israel.

Ron De Santis, presidential hopeful and Florida governor, has made importing Orbans fascistic politics into America his modus operandi. The broader influence of the European traditionalists has been intermingling with the American Christian Nationalist Right for years.

Nostalgia for past greatness and a mythical racial monoculture are imposing challenges on national and global politics. Australia is less damaged by this culture war so far: the US and UK are savaged by the impact.

We need to be watching the Australian names that embrace the Orban illiberal war on modernity: Quadrant, the Australian conservative journal, has been firmly entrenched within the Orban circuit. Former Quadrant editor and contributor, Brit John OSullivan is also the president of the Danube Institute. Reverend Peter Kurti from the Centre for Independent Studies and Notre Dame university is one who speaks in Hungary, listed with a whos who of the Radical Right. He depicts tolerance as a tyrannous threat to religious liberty. Andrew Cooper also pays homage in Budapest. He co-founded Australias offshoot of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a body at the heart of Trumpist politics.

The fact that our emeritus politicians, Trumpist activists and strategists are joined by one of our most senior Murdoch journalists, Greg Sheridan, in this circuit ought to be deeply concerning. Surely this should be high on the list of points to be tackled by a Murdoch Royal Commission.

(NB: When Morrison joined the Orban-celebrating IDU, it was listed on the Danube Institute page as a partner organisation. It has since been scrubbed, as is often the case with awkward publicity. Now the only partner organisation listed on the Danube Institute page is the grotesque Heritage Foundation.)