Everyone says they are against Trump’s wall: yet we ignore the anti-immigrant fences of Hungary...
THE three young men waiting for a bus outside the Hungarian town of Perbal a few days ago so alarmed one local resident that he called the police.
Surely these were illegal migrants. However, they were anything but. They were students from Sri Lanka, working as volunteers at a home for the mentally disabled. A minor misunderstanding, perhaps. Except that it is part of a familiar pattern.
A few weeks earlier, death threats were sent to a man, and his car tyres were slashed, after villagers complained that he was offering a family of migrants a free break at his motel.
International condemnation of this incident in Ocseny in southern Hungary was swift but the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, assured the villagers that they had his sympathy. But then, the right-wing leader himself has been accused of xenophobia – and even anti-Semitism – as a result of his government’s campaign against EUimposed migrant quotas.
Such is the reality of life on the other side of the EU.
The EU leadership and the European Commission are far too preoccupied with political chaos in Germany and with Brexit to deal with a much greater threat to their European dream.
Instead of a serene and harmonious Europe of Tuscan villas, Provencal markets, German opera and Bavarian beer halls, we are witnessing rancorous divisions over migration, economic stagnation and incipient independence movements.
And the bitter truth is that in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, there is now a stridently anti-Brussels, antimigrant and anti-establishment movement with the increasingly angry peoples of these nations convinced they are being treated as second-class citizens. This is a different Europe, too, which has never known multiculturalism and is in no mood to start embracing it now.
Hence this month’s Independence Day celebrations in Warsaw featured a torch-lit procession by tens of thousands of people celebrating their ancient Christian heritage. They chanted ‘We want God’ and waved banners with messages such as ‘White Europe’. That same mood was reflected in the recent elections in Austria and the Czech Republic. Both countries have elected right-wing Eurosceptic governments – in the wake of the sudden rise of the hardright Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.
Indeed, AfD emerged as the third-largest party in September’s elections – meaning Angela Merkel has been unable to form a government and is fighting for her political life.
Even in France, where the shock election victory by Emmanuel Macron’s centreleft En Marche grabbed headlines, the fact that the far-right National Front gained ground while the grand old political party machines collapsed was all but ignored.
The ineluctable fact is that Europe is shifting to the right. Which is why I am in Hungary, because it is the next EU nation to go to the polls and is emblematic of the new mood in central and eastern Europe.
Implications
There is no chance of a lurch to the right here, come April’s vote, because Hungary lurched that way long ago. Its leader is hated by liberal commentators – not least for the Trumpstyle border fence he has built to keep out migrants. But Orbán, like Trump, couldn’t care less. He has no problem with being called ‘populist’, though he prefers the term ‘plebeian’. Even his friends call him ‘The Viktator’.
And he is well on course for victory in next spring’s election, which will carry profound implications for Brussels.
Few doubt that Orbán will be returned to power with anything less than an overall majority. Indeed, he is fast becoming the de facto leader of the alternative EU.
Predictably, Brussels is dismissing the Hungarian leader as an authoritarian right-wing fruitcake.
Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, has called him a ‘dictator’ and gave him a half-joking slap on the cheek at an EU summit in 2015. But you do not last as long as Orbán (he’s already been PM for a total of 11 years) without shrewd political instincts. This former professional soccer player – a God-fearing father of five who makes sausages by slaughtering his own pigs – had his first stint as prime minister back in 1998.
He made his name as a young firebrand bravely demanding multi-party elections in Hungary while the Iron Curtain was still standing. Those who like to paint central Europe’s dramatic turn to the right as a dark reprise of Germany in the Thirties are missing the point.
No, what goes to the core of Orbán’s political DNA – and the current shift across the whole east European region – is a hatred of communism. These are people who remember living under a totalitarian empire less than 30 years ago. Many now regard Brussels, its unelected Commission and unaccountable courts as the new Moscow.
John O’Sullivan, president of the Budapest-based think tank the Danube Institute, says that outsiders fail to understand how deep the scars of communism go.
His biography of Orban recounts how, significantly, the politician was arrested in 1988 as he tried to create his movement. He says Orban’s experience of life under Communist rule has made him ‘much more critical of elites the higher he has risen.’
Indeed, Orban’s great modern heroes are those who brought about the pulling down of theBerlin Wall in 1989. If Orban and his Fidesz party win a fourth term, as everyone expects, the old European elite can no longer dismiss what is happening here as mere ‘populism’. A clear dividing line now runs from the Baltic to the Danube and the Black Sea.
On one side are the EU’s wealthier, liberal, multicultural nations such as France and Germany. On the other are those whose democracies are, in most cases, virtually brand new — the so-called Borscht Belt, the Goulash Gang, call them what you will — whose social outlook on everything from gay rights to immigration is very different.
In last month’s Czech elections, an Islamophobic party which urged voters to walk pigs past a mosque to protect what it called the country’s ‘democratic way of life and the heritage of our ancestors from Islam’ won 10.7 per cent of the vote.
When Orbán started building his razor wire fence along Hungary’s southern border during the migration crisis of 2015, he was condemned.
Migrants
Hundreds of thousands who crossed from Turkey into Greece were heading west via Serbia and Hungary. Some fled civil war, but many were economic migrants.
Mrs Merkel was hailed as the ‘angel of Europe’ for saying that Germany would welcome the lot. For his part, Orbán was branded the villain for closing the door. Today, the memory of the chaos of 2015 and subsequent terrorist incidents by Muslim extremists across Europe mean few here question Orbán’s decision.
‘Migration is the big issue here, and the EU is now following Orban on migration,’ says Zsolt Jesenszky, a wellknown Hungarian entrepreneur. ‘The Left were totally against the fence when it went up saying: “It won’t work”. And guess what? It works.’ Jesenszky, 45, says that the younger generations want leaders who stand up to Brussels, not people who go on bended knee. ‘Hungary likes a guy who stands up to the big bully,’ he says. But Orban is more than happy to be attacked by the ‘old’ nations of the EU because they are playing into his hands.