“You just need to look at Hungary, look at what happened to Orbán, to Fidesz. I think if you can’t bring growth, whatever your ideology is, it will lose,” he added.
Badenoch’s Conservative Party suffered its worst-ever defeat in the 2024 UK general election after 14 years in power, and is struggling to make a comeback. like Nigel Farage’s far-right reforms in Britain are showing up in the polls.
But Badenoch said the rise of Magyar, who he described as “very accurate, in some places more extreme,” reflects the cultural economy of the right wing and the ideology “reinforces itself.”
Discontent has been “eating away at the heart of Western Europe,” Badenoch said, describing it as “the biggest disease in Europe.”
He singled out former German Chancellor Angela Merkel for particular criticism.
“I think there was a lot of complacency. The invitation to one million Syrian immigrants to Germany was one of the reasons why people were more skeptical about the European Union project. It was one of the triggers for Brexit,” he added.
