MOSCOW –

Viktor Orban has said many silly and sinister things during his long tenure as Hungary’s prime minister.

But his recent speech arguing that Europeans do not want to live in “mixed race” countries — and that European countries that allowed their native bloodlines to blend with other races were “no longer nations” — definitely represents a new low. In his speech, Orban declared that Hungarians were willing to “mix” socially with others but “do not want to become a mixed race.” Instead of being ostracized for his racist demarche, Orban gave the keynote speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the premier American right-wing meeting in Dallas.

Orban’s speech was a moment of remarkable candor for the Hungarian prime minister who, over the past dozen years, has mostly tried to disguise his race-baiting and anti-Semitic tendencies. His comments, made during a meeting with members of the Hungarian community in Romania, were so reviled that they caused his longtime adviser, Zsuzsa Hegedus, to announce her resignation after two decades by his side.

Hegedus did not mince words when discussing Orban’s screed. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she decried Orban’s speech as a “pure Nazi text” that was “worthy of Goebbels.” While denouncing the European Union’s new plans to curtail natural gas imports from Russia, Orban found a way to crack a joke about the Nazi gas chambers — “the Germans know a lot about that” — a comment that undoubtedly contributed to Hegedus’s decision to break with him.

For much of the last decade, leaders of the global far-right like Orban have been content to communicate their innate racism through code words, nudges and winks. Donald Trump — always willing to let his racist instincts take flight — was the exception, but more disciplined populists like France’s Marine Le Pen have expended considerable effort running away from their movements’ racist and fascist pasts.

In Le Pen’s case, that past was created by her race-baiting father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper in the Algerian War and convicted Holocaust denier. Upon taking over the National Front from her father, Le Pen rebranded it the National Rally, a name that seeks to evoke memories of Charles de Gaulle rather than Benito Mussolini.

But populist leaders apparently no longer feel the need to conceal their racism in order to gain power. Giorgia Meloni, the charismatic leader of the self-described “post-fascist” Brothers of Italy — and the current favorite to become Italy’s prime minister — doesn’t have to bother with code words to reassure racist voters because her party can trace its ancestry back to Mussolini. So she presents herself as a dynamic game changer, courting Italians tired of the country’s economic decline and the political establishment’s excuses for it while promoting extreme anti-immigration views.

In the United States, open racism and anti-Semitism are now on full display thanks to the path-breaking disruptions of Trump’s presidency. The former president infamously proclaimed that there were “very fine people, on both sides” following the 2017 white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where tiki torch-wielding neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us”; and his would-be successors and acolytes are even more forthright.

Take Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania. Mastriano is an unabashed white Christian nationalist. A diehard Make America Great Again Trumpist, Mastriano is not only a vehement promoter of Trump’s "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; he actually joined the mob that marched on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Mastriano was quick to say that he did not break into the Capitol, but the contempt that he demonstrated for U.S. democracy on that day still matters, as U.S. governors have a lot of power over how elections are run in their states.)

No surprise, then, that Mastriano’s gubernatorial campaign seems even more unhinged and divisive than Trump’s. He is said to refuse to speak to journalists and media organizations that are not avowedly Christian, and he has reportedly paid Gab, a social media platform known as a haven for white nationalists — and whose founder and leader, Andrew Torba, is one of America’s most prominent anti-Semites — for “consulting” services. Mastriano appears to have attempted to use Gab to drum up political support among far-right voters who may help him defeat his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, who happens to be Jewish.

Behind most of the rhetoric of a “stolen election” is the notion that minority communities are the prime source of what ails America. Blake Masters, the ex-venture capitalist and disciple of the alt-right billionaire Peter Thiel, who won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Arizona this month, blames minorities not only for Trump’s electoral loss but also for gun violence.

Was this cocktail of racism, chauvinism and anti-Semitism always present, bubbling beneath the surface, just waiting for someone like Trump to give it the greenlight? Or is this the result of a more profound shift? The culture wars, long used by the right to gain electoral advantage and inflamed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch to boost their profits, may have poisoned so many minds that some politicians now believe that being openly racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ is the surest path to victory.

In any case, it appears that far-right populists have finally dropped the mask of respectability. By showing their racist cards, they are revealing the real forces that animate their movement.

Nina L. Khrushcheva, professor of international affairs at The New School, is the co-author (with Jeffrey Tayler) of "In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones" (St. Martin’s Press, 2019). © Project Syndicate, 2022