The nationalist Right has delivered debt cancellation better than the progressive left.

Evidence

To date, however, there is scant evidence that conscious, progressive grassroots strategies of debt refusal and risk reallocation can be as consequential as the 2008 domino chain of mortgage foreclosures. Paradoxically, as Melinda Cooper (2020) shows, over the last decade, a surging nationalist Right has been more effective in championing and delivering debt canceling. In Hungary, for instance, Viktor Orbán has unilaterally canceled a quarter of foreign-exchange household debt, acting in apparent disregard for central bank independence. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 311

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for essay: Why anti-capitalist debt refusal politics gets outperformed by right-wing debt cancellation.
• XREF: Supports the reader’s financialized-populism thesis directly: Orbán as speculative-populist debt canceller.