I was in Brussels this week to host an EPICENTER event for the launch of Timbro’s Authoritarian Populism Index. EPICENTER is a network of ten European free market think tanks, including Timbro and the IEA of course.
It just so happened that this was the same day the National Conservatives were holding a conference in the Belgian capital. While our panellists discussed the harm populism is causing Europeans, Viktor Orban, Nigel Farage, and Eric Zemmour discussed the merits of powerful national governments and the Hungarian model of ‘illiberal democracy’.
Or at least they were meant to be. The Mayor of a Brussels district tried to ban the conference and sent the police to shut it down on the basis that the ideas being discussed were a disturbance to peace. On Tuesday, the police barricaded the venue, preventing anyone, including many speakers, from entering while only allowing those inside to leave.
National Conservative ideas are very different from my classical liberal beliefs. However, in a free society, robust debates are meant to be held, and ideas should be openly discussed, irrespective of disagreement. While our conference was successful and undisturbed, the same privilege should have been extended to NatCon participants.
Without freedom of speech, it becomes much more difficult to expose how bad the ideas of National Conservatives are in reality. For example, whilst NatCons claim to continue the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan, in reality, their ideas expand the scope of government, which becomes more expensive to maintain.
According to a recent study examining the economic effects of authoritarian populist parties in power, 15 years of populist rule lower a nation’s per capita GDP by 10 per cent compared to non-populist rule. My home country, Hungary, ruled by the National Conservative Viktor Orban, is slowly becoming one of the poorest EU member states from one of the richest new EU members that joined in 2004.
Populism has become a norm in European politics, albeit Britain is a positive outlier so far – mainly thanks to our first-past-the-post electoral system. However, no country is immune to collectivist ideas, and classical liberals always need to make the case again and again, why free societies and free market principles are the best political way forward.
This is why I signed – alongside dozens of notable classical liberal thought leaders – this letter calling for the protection of freedom of speech. In the end, the NatCon conference was allowed to proceed following the Belgium court overturning the mayor's earlier decision. The saying ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ applies to NatCon too, even if I spend my days fighting their ideas!
