Commentary
The putinism already inside us
All this fortification of external borders and war plans distract attention from the advance of the radical right-wing political forces which show affinity with the autocrat in the Kremlin.
The friendly meetings between Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin are now a well-established habit. Officially focused on limited economic topics, they certainly include much more that is left unsaid – and from which European institutions prefer to avert their gaze.
Never fully addressed, Budapest’s dissent is certainly less isolated today than it once was. The evident affinity between Orbán and Putin now openly reveals a substantial identity of views between the two that the European Union prefers to overlook, so as not to show the fragility and contradictions that undermine its “unified” commitment to support Ukraine.
All public discourse – even before the budgetary policies of the Union’s countries – revolves around the scenario of an upcoming Russian aggression against Western Europe. Pharaonic rearmament programs are being launched, detailed war plans are drawn up, military exercises are being organized in the heart of cities, students are instructed on war scenarios, infrastructure is being adapted to army needs and “preventive” hybrid attacks against Moscow are being planned. All this without spending a single word on why Russia would invade Western countries, or on the reasons for a military enterprise that – even given the current state of armaments and geopolitical balances – would be more than hazardous; it would be impossible.
In the background, there is nothing beyond the reference to a generic will to power that certainly fits with Vladimir Putin’s personality, but doesn’t fit a realistic consideration of the facts.
All this fortification of external borders, these weapons capable of striking thousands of kilometers away, these war plans – they distract attention from what more concretely threatens Western political systems and that modicum of democratic principles and civil rights the European Union still guarantees. That is, the advance of the radical right-wing political forces which, like Hungary’s Orbán, show affinity with (and, not infrequently, open friendship towards) the autocrat in the Kremlin.
Aren’t the patriotic, religious, muscular and disciplinary values dear to the European far right forces identical to those propagandized by the neo-Tsar? Doesn’t the plebiscitary and decisionist transformation of parliamentary democracy resemble the Russian Federation? Isn’t the exaltation of national sovereignties against the increasingly feeble supranational aspirations of the Union and the exhausted principles of international law, at bottom, exquisitely Putinist?
The final aggression against what was the post-war European political culture – and the intense struggles that were its lifeblood and marked its course – will not be the work of Russian tanks and drones. There is no need for them. The political forces of the extreme right – from Germany to France, from the Netherlands to Italy, from the U.K. to Greece – will be the ones making Europe a welcome interlocutor for Putin’s Russia. They will set up a chorus that sings his same language and shares the same “values.” After all, the reciprocal sympathies – and in several cases direct political support – are no mystery to anyone. It won’t be “Russia” (whose culture cannot in any case be expunged from the history of Europe), but Putinist fascism which will easily expand its influence in European countries via this path.
The militarist course that the European Union has undertaken, with the repeated and obtuse complicity of the declining social democracies, will do nothing but second the cultural counter-revolution of the right – of which Vladimir Putin is an undisputed champion. Rearmament is entering an endless spiral (Russia has said it will invest further enormous resources in it) that will bleed European societies dry and multiply the risks of war on the Old Continent. But worst of all, it tends to cause a change in public opinion and in the collective perception of Europeans, conditioned by a politics of emergency with close ties to dictatorship. Putin is winning and consolidating his power at home and in the world precisely thanks to the governments out of touch with reality that are rearming against him.
The parallel growth of arsenals and far-right political forces is not just the sign of a sinister ideological coherence. Rearmament, which remains essentially on a national basis, entails a principle of competition even among allies that can always slide toward the conflictuality typical of nationalisms. In preparing for war, the European Union isn’t moving toward greater cohesion but toward its opposite. One can already see it well on its eastern flank, in the deep division between the pro-Russian Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks and the Baltic hawks (and, more prudently, Poland), whose anti-Russian resentment would want to push the entire Europe toward positions of direct confrontation with Moscow. To complicate the picture further, there is Donald Trump’s support for both the extreme right and for military spending in their common and poisonous trend of growth.
This may sound like an appeal from another time, but in the face of the threats looming over the Old Continent today, it would be wise to resort to an old combination: anti-fascism and anti-militarism. And, obviously, adapting one’s actions to a context where fascism and rearmament are permeating current ways of life and production (not always in immediately recognizable form).
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-putinismo-che-e-gia-dentro-di-noi on 2025-12-03