Populism as a departure from neoliberalism in Hungary and Israel
University of Chicago Press Journals
At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, write the authors of a new article from Polity, neoliberalism was “consolidated as the only legitimate form of doing politics.” But in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and with the entrenchment of far-right governments across the world, neoliberalism’s dominance was threatened by the rise of populism. And while some analyses of populism present the phenomenon as a continuation of neoliberalism, Asaf Yakir and Doron Navot argue that it in fact represents a rupture with the neoliberal order. In “Right Wing Populist Re-Politicization and the ‘Hollowing Out’ of the Neoliberal State,” Yakir and Navot use Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel as case studies to demonstrate neoliberalism’s vulnerability to populist rule.
Neoliberalism is often theorized as a withdrawal of the state from the economy, but, argue Yakir and Navot, it can be more accurately characterized as state intervention into markets for the benefit of private profit. And although right-wing populism as enacted by the Orbán and Netanyahu governments also necessitates increased state intervention, its strategies differ than those of neoliberalism in their rejection of bureaucracy, their re-politicization of state policy, and their subversion of institutional independence.
Viktor Orbán was once involved in Hungary’s neoliberalization program following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But since his election in 2010, Orbán has instituted political reforms that clash with neoliberalism’s technocratic tendencies. His government replaced 274 judges with sympathetic allies, and solidified parliament as an extension of the executive branch, rather than an organ with any power of oversight. Orbán also reduced the independence of the Hungarian central bank, and, during an economic downturn in 2011, shifted significant capital into a “workfare” program that provided jobs to the nation’s unemployed at salaries above welfare benefits but below minimum wage. All of these initiatives align, write Yakir and Navot, with the populist insistence on enacting policy agenda even at the cost of a heavier fiscal burden and a greater entanglement of the state and the market.
Benjamin Netanyahu, too, write the authors, has challenged neoliberal governance through his transformations of the Israeli government. In 2015, the Israeli Prime Minister appointed his populist ally Moshe Kahlon to the head of the Ministry of Finance, an agency long viewed as the “cornerstone of the neoliberal Israeli state.” Under Kahlon, Netanyahu’s government involved itself in a controversial plan to address the nation’s housing crisis. The state sold land below market price to contractors and provided housing grants to buyers in lower-income districts that had supported Netanyahu’s party in the election. This program increased the country’s budget deficit and incurred the criticism of the International Monetary Fund, who “encouraged Israeli authorities to adopt supply-side measures that are more adaptable to the tenets of neoliberalism.”
Both Orbán’s and Netanyahu’s governments are conservative ones, guided by a populism that is right-wing in its “declared commitment to the well-being of ordinary people at the expense of other sections of society.” And as such, write the article authors, their brand of populism, unlike a left-leaning one like that of the Syriza party in Greece, poses “no threat to capitalism.” Nonetheless, Yakir and Navot conclude, the success of these populist overhauls shows that the neoliberal regime “could be more fragile than previously assumed by critics and sympathizers alike,” and undermines “the apparent solidity of the state, unmasking its existence as a contradictory form of social relations.”
Journal
Polity
Article Title
Right-Wing Populist Re-Politicization and the “Hollowing Out” of the Neoliberal State
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