In Hungary, Victor Orbán’s fourth landslide election victory has overturned all expectations and appalled those who united in an effort to throw his party from power. At Unherd, Aris Roussinos offers a useful, nuanced guide to what on earth is going on.

Ironically enough, Orbán’s playbook is in many ways an inversion of the left’s long march elsewhere: seizing cultural power through the co-optation of institutions.

“Where conservatives in Britain and America can win elections but find their governance impeded by a liberal powerbase in the media, NGOs and the judiciary (termed by conservative Hungarian intellectuals as an anti-democratic “juristocracy”), in Orbán’s Hungary the liberal intelligentsia’s political powerbase has been dismantled and replaced with a confident new conservative elite. A wealth of glossy conservative magazines, universities, think tanks and NGOs are the lavishly-funded product of Orbán’s Gramscian conservativism.“

The long-term costs of cultural warfare, by either side, are considerable. I wrote in my book about why such a counter-march is inconceivable and undesirable in Britain. It is fascinating to see the experiment pursued with such energy and success, and there is much to admire in any spirited refusal to admit defeat. But it comes with many well-publicised downsides, in terms of corruption but perhaps more importantly through delusion and distraction from the real task.

Hungary has in its time produced an extraordinary range of world-class talent out of all proportion to its size. But it’s not clear that Orbán’s regime is unleashing any kind of cultural flowering. There is, after all, nothing Western about a static, insulated culture nursing past glories. Indeed, that is very much the oriental caricature against which the West used to enjoy defining itself.

Still, what is happening in Budapest does show that other futures are possible. A competitive pluralism between power centres has always been one of the West’s great strengths. In that sense, Orbán’s determination to hew to his particular vision of the national interest against progressive imperialist claims from without, that seek to constrain how any country should be run, is indeed a sign of hope.