The EU’s imploding as nation after nation turns to the ugly far Right. But Brussels and Remainers just won’t talk about it

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 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 Orban, assured the villagers that they had his sympathy. But then, the Rightwing leader himself has been accused of xenophobia — and even anti- semitism — as a result of his government’s campaign against EU-imposed 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 grand European dream.

In Britain, bitter Remoaners are fighting a forlorn rearguard battle to try to stop Brexit and sneer at Leavers for their stupidity, seemingly oblivious to the convulsions in the east of the EU. 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.

Banners

Hence this month’s Independence Day celebrations in Warsaw featured a torch-lit procession by tens of thousands celebrating their ancient Christian heritage. They chanted ‘We want God’ and waved banners with messages such as ‘White Europe’.

Commentators less attuned to Polish traditions and history were quick to accuse these protesters of ‘fascism’. Here in Central Europe, though, the response has been different. According to Poland’s robustly nationalist government, it was ‘a great celebration of Poles’.

The 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 this summer’s shock election victory by Emmanuel Macron’s centre-Left En Marche movement grabbed the 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 antiBrussels mood in Central and Eastern Europe.

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 Trump-style border fence he has built to keep out migrants. But Orban, 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 Orban 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, just as the Brussels establishment belittled Brexiteers ahead of last summer’s EU referendum, it is now dismissing the Hungarian leader as an authoritarian Right-wing fruitcake.

Slaughtering

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. The thirsty archEurocrat has never forgotten that it was Orban and David Cameron who were the only EU leaders who dared to oppose his appointment.

But you do not last as long as Orban (he’s already been PM for a total of 11 years) without shrewd political instincts. This former professional footballer — a God-fearing father of five who makes sausages by slaughtering his own pigs — had his first stint as prime minister as long ago as 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