Hungary and the Nordic Countries: Five Ways the Darlings of the American Right and Left

America may be “the city on a hill,” but that has not stopped American politicians and pundits from drawing on the examples of other countries in domestic political debates. Two of the most animating figures of the American Left in the past decade — Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — frequently point to the Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland) as successful models of their policy proposals in action. On the American Right, Hungary has emerged as a favorite in recent years. Star Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken opportunities to boost the conservative government of the central European country, broadcasting from Budapest and sitting down for an interview with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2021. Conservative writer Rod Dreher wrote last month that “the intellectual right in the West is discovering that all roads lead to Budapest.”

While Hungary and the Nordic countries undoubtedly differ in many respects, they share some striking political resemblances that may come as a surprise to the casual American observer. The following five issues are illustrative.

Immigration

During Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, Hungary earned a reputation as a hardliner on immigration. It built a fence on its southern border and refused to allow a mass flow of migrants into the country. The strategy was widely criticized by fellow EU members.

The fall of 2022 featured some interesting developments in the atmosphere surrounding immigration in Scandinavia. In Sweden’s election in September, the populist migrant-skeptic Sweden Democrats had their best showing ever, finishing in second place with 20 percent of the vote and leading the right-wing coalition to a narrow victory. Sweden opened its doors wide to immigration in the 2010s, taking in more immigrants per capita than any EU nation. There is a sense, though, that the public is souring on the approach, especially as violence has increased in migrant neighborhoods.

“We had this change in the rhetoric in 2015,” says Arvid Hallén, program director for Oikos, a Swedish conservative think tank, of the immigration debate in Sweden. “Until then, basically, if you had argued that immigration can in any way be a problem, you were branded as a reactionary and as a racist, actually. And since then, the debate has shifted entirely.”

He notes that this rightward shift on the immigration issue has taken place even among party leaders on the Left. He points to former center-left Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s endorsement of the new right-wing government’s plans as clear evidence.

The story is similar in Denmark, where migration policies are not expected to tilt left despite the national election victory of the center-left Social Democrats and their coalition of parties from the political center. Even though Denmark’s populist parties did not have the same strong result as the Sweden Democrats — the Danish People’s Party, in fact, lost seats in both 2019 and 2022 — stricter stances on immigration have become mainstream and have been adopted even by the center-left.

In Finland, the percentage of the population that is foreign-born is comparable to Hungary’s (7 percent and 5.8 percent, respectively) and is much lower than Sweden’s (19.5 percent). The United States, meanwhile, stands at 13.6 percent. Until 2019, Finland had a highly restrictive annual asylum quota of 750 refugees. Norway also had fairly conservative policies under a right-wing coalition from 2013–2021.

Gender

Perhaps the controversy for which Hungary has drawn the most blowback has been its stance on gender issues. Its 2021 decision to ban the teaching of LGBT ideology in schools led center-right Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to declare his intent to “bring Hungary to its knees on this issue.”

Scandinavian societies, though often among the most progressive in the world on questions of sexuality, have recently shown signs of a willingness to depart from left-wing consensus. Over the last couple of years in Sweden — which in 1972 became the first country to allow people to legally declare a change in gender — the government’s National Board of Health and Welfare has moved to update its guidelines on the treatment of children with gender dysphoria, discouraging the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and some surgeries. It is a reversal from a previously “strong recommendation” to use hormones on children as young as 8 and is partially due to concern over the sharp increase in children seeking transition and the prevalence of transition regret. Finland has taken similar steps, citing a lack of evidence for the benefits of medical intervention. Surgeries are not part of Finland’s medical guidelines and puberty blockers are strongly discouraged.

Hallén acknowledges that Sweden is far from socially conservative, but believes that the country “reached peak wokeness in 2015.”

“I think the big catalyst for this is actually the immigration issue,” he says. “If the powers that be were wrong about this big issue, what about other issues?”

He argues that transgenderism is a far less sensitive subject in Sweden than in the U.S., pointing to the recent uproar against Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s views on the issue. “It’s pretty hard to comprehend that’s actually happening because it seems so absurd,” he says.

National Sovereignty

In Hungary, the conservative Fidesz party’s 12-plus years of leadership have been marked by regular tussles with the European Union. On immigration, LGBT ideology, economic sanctions against Russia, and other issues, Hungary has chosen to forge its own path. It has even led some western European leaders to call for its removal from the Union. Situated at the crossroads of competing empires for over a thousand years, Hungarians have developed a fierce independent streak. Viktor Orbán regularly portrays himself as a defender of Hungarian interests against outside forces.

The Nordic countries have also shown a strong regard for their national sovereignty and a certain degree of skepticism toward supernational organizations. Sweden and Denmark, for example, are the largest economies in the European Union that have chosen not to adopt the Euro despite meeting the criteria required to do so. Norway and Iceland, both of which rank in the top three on the Human Development Index, have declined EU membership altogether. Finland and Sweden are not NATO members and their accession was not seriously considered until the escalation of war in Ukraine last year. Similarly, Denmark had opted out of the EU’s defense pact until a referendum this past summer. A 2015 survey showed Swedes and Finns are the Europeans most likely to say that they would be willing to fight to protect their country.

“Norwegians have their oil, they are very rich, they can do whatever they feel like,” says Hallén. “Swedes, I think, feel that they’ve found the sweet spot, not having to be in a monetary union with countries like Germany and Greece, but [they] can still be in the free trade zone.”

Perhaps the clearest example of a Nordic country charting its own path was the Swedish approach to COVID, which largely eschewed lockdowns, masking, and vaccine mandates. According to Hallén, it came from a uniquely Swedish form of national exceptionalism.

“This idea that our politicians and experts say that something is right and the rest of the entire world says that it’s wrong and the Swedish public unquestioningly [accepted] this says something about our country.”

Family Policy

For the American Left, support for parents and children in countries like Sweden and Denmark is seen as laudable benefits of a generous social safety net. They offer substantial paid parental leave — up to 16 months in Sweden — and subsidize childcare, as in Denmark where cost is reduced by 75 percent. In Finland, families receive a maternity package, or “baby box,” filled with clothing and other supplies with the birth of each child. In Norway, families receive roughly $160 a month for each child under the age of 6 in the household. All but Iceland ranked in the top ten best places to raise a kid in 2022, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Measures like these also animate some of Hungary’s biggest American proponents, suggesting that this is a policy area on which the Left and Right may find common ground. The Fidesz government has offered significant tax reductions, loan opportunities, and cash payments for families with children.

Hungary’s efforts are aimed at boosting its lackluster birthrate and stagnating population. Attitudes in the Nordic countries are mixed. While Denmark ran a pro-natalist ad campaign in the mid-2010s, Annika Strandhäll of Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats party compared Hungary’s pro-natalist family policy to Nazi Germany in 2019. Whatever the rationale, both are…