THE NEW SCHISM
Forget Brexit. Fed up with mass immigration and being treated as populist morons by a bullying Brussels, the leaders of four countries are threatening to tear the EU asunder . . .
TO LISTEN to the remorseless banging of the Remoaner drums — yet another call for a second EU referendum from Tony Blair; a plot to overturn the first one via the Lords; more warnings of plague and famine — you might imagine that the Eurocrats of Brussels are still fighting Brexit all the way. Utter nonsense. Though it may be hard for tearful true believers in the Remain camp to swallow, those fickle Europeans just don’t care any more. Neither Brussels nor the rest of the EU want to hear about Britain’s internal squabbles any longer.
This week, an Oxford University study revealed a ‘general lack of anxiety’ about Brexit across Europe. Au revoir, Britain. Europe has moved on, even if our Remoaners have not.
That is because the EU is steeling itself for a much greater conflict than a mere cross-Channel tiff.
It is one which will be fought along a faultline stretching from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. And Europe is about to feel a very substantial jolt. Former Lib Dem leader Sir Nick Clegg touched on it in his honest — if breathtakingly hypocritical — speech in which he admitted Brussels harboured a ‘sneering disregard’ for the ‘politics of patriotism’.
That fact is already abundantly clear to what has become the EU’s new awkward squad — the selfstyled ‘ bad boys’ of Europe who include Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Between them, they have their own club — the Visegrad Four — after the castle town in Hungary where it was formed. But it now enjoys common cause with an increasing number of Central European nations, including Austria and Italy.
They are preparing to shake up the cosy EU status quo in a way that will make Brexit feel like a small headache.
These countries disagree on many things. But they are united in one regard: their hostility to the diktats and overmighty attitude of a European Commission and a Brussels political class that regards them as ghastly populist morons.
And unlike Britain, which is strong enough to go its own way, this lot are not inclined to leave anytime soon. Rather, they intend to shake things up from within.
Tomorrow’s general election in Hungary represents a further landmark in that process.
Battle plans are being drawn up for the great confrontation.
On one side is the Brussels old guard, cheered by the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has finally managed to cobble together a coalition government six months on from last year’s dismal election performance — a result entirely down to her disastrous decision to let a million migrants into her country unchecked. O
N THE other side, however, is the new existential threat to the Brussels elite. And it has nothing at all to do with those pesky British and their irritating little referendum. Instead, it is this nationalist, anti- immigration, avowedly Eurosceptic bloc that represents the great challenge.
Unlike the UK, this lot will not vanish after a couple of years of illtempered negotiations. They have no intention of leaving an institution that has funnelled billions into their economies and they are determined to challenge France and Germany’s arrogant claim to choose the future direction of Europe.
Fiercely opposed to this vision of ever-closer integration, they are diehard believers in the sovereignty of the nation state. Some may be very unpleasant indeed, but they epitomise Clegg’s ‘politics of patriotism’.
And they are expected to receive a substantial boost tomorrow as Hungary goes to the polls.
This weekend, billboards and newspaper advertisements across the country feature queues of nonwhite migrants stretching into the distance. Superimposed over them is a big red badge saying ‘STOP’.
It is the sort of tactic we might associate with far-Right extremists, such as the anti-migrant, pro-Russian party, Alternative fur Deutschland, which surged into third place in last year’s general election in Germany. The adverts carry no explanation, except the small print which states that this is an official government message.
They have been endorsed by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban — the most authoritarian and politically incorrect leader in the EU and a good chum of Vladimir Putin. The posters carry no mention of Mr Orban or his Fidesz party. Nor do they urge people to vote for them. But then there is no need to.
Mr Orban has made the election — indeed, his entire leadership — about one thing: fear of outsiders.
He has warned that ‘countries that don’t stop immigration will be lost’ and believes tomorrow’s vote is part of an existential battle for the survival of his country and Europe as a whole.
‘Africa wants to kick down our door, and Brussels is not defending us. Europe is under invasion already, and they are simply wringing their hands,’ he told a Budapest rally the other day.
As far as Mr Orban is concerned, it is only him and his ilk who are defending Western civilisation. ‘At times, we feel as if someone is shooting us in the back for defending the interests of the whole of Europe,’ he wailed recently.
With a thumping great lead in the opinion polls — and the sort of approval ratings that most Western politicians can only dream of — Mr Orban is known to friends as the ‘Viktator’.
He is the longest- serving national leader in Europe, apart from Mrs Merkel. Unlike her, however, he has not had to worry about coalitions in recent years. He currently has a hefty majority and all the signs are he will win another one tomorrow.
This is the man who has already built a Trump- style, anti-migrant fence along Hungary’s southern border, to popular acclaim.
Much as liberal elites all over Europe might want to write him off as a fascistic
loon who makes Mr Trump look cuddly, they know they cannot. For this Oxford-educated former lawyer is about to reinforce his status as one of the most powerful political figures in the EU.
You only have to travel to his home village, Felcsut, in the winegrowing countryside west of Budapest, to realise that.
Aware that Mr Orban had built a football ground next to his house ( with help from EU funds, of course), I had imagined it would be rather like the one which rock star Rod Stewart maintains in the grounds of his Essex home — a tidy seven-a-side pitch.
In fact, it is one of the most extraordinary stadiums I have ever seen. On the outside, it is built in the same architectural style as a grand country house in the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Inside, it is like a cathedral with soaring wooden pillars fanning out to create a vaulted effect all round.
A team of groundsmen are mowing and rolling a perfect croquet lawn of a pitch. Though the official capacity is 3,800 — more than double the population of this tiny village — it could fit many more were it not for the sumptuous executive boxes either side.
It is like finding a brand new Olympic venue in Great Snoring.
Not content with his own sporting palace, Mr Orban has built a new railway line linking the football ground to the neighbouring village and a nearby country park.
A sign proudly states that it has been built with £2 million of EU money. It has a pretty little station with a full-time station master.
I wait for a train. It has a driver, two conductors — and just one passenger plus a dog. The financial losses must be exorbitant.
Yet no one here wants to discuss Mr Orban, except to heap praise on him. ‘Hungary needs a leader like him and all the good developments here are because of him,’ says 29-year-old van driver Daniel. A
CCORDING to a regional corporate analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity: ‘The nationalist gene is so strong in Hungarians and Orban knows just how to play it.’
Indeed, the Hungarian PM, he says, is a sharp-eyed admirer of the way his friend Putin runs Russia and is pursuing similar tactics — shutting down criticism, annexing big business to the leadership and presenting himself as the lone warrior against a meddling world.
Just look at the current balance of power in Europe.
In the past year, major EU member states — the Netherlands, France, Germany and Italy — have gone to the polls. The one common denominator is a marked rise in the popularity of Right- wing Euroscepticism and a hammering of the status quo.
France saw the collapse of its two grand old parties in the final showdown between Emmanuel Macron’s new centrist movement and the National Front.
Though a flabby Dutch coalition saw off the far-Right Geert Wilders, his party increased its vote and forced the election campaign to follow his agenda. Spain, meanwhile, is so convulsed by catalonia’s separatists it is reduced to pursuing its own politicians through the extradition courts of fellow EU countries.
As for Italy, its most popular party is now the new Eurosceptic Five Star Movement, founded by an anarchist clown.
compare all this uncertainty to the bumptious confidence in central and Eastern Europe, where strong nationalist governments are no longer prepared to follow the Brussels line, despite trousering billions in EU grants.
To explore this new momentum, I first went to Poland. Mr Orban was there three months ago to express solidarity with the Poles and announce ‘a year of great battles’ against EU multiculturalism.
European proposals to force all EU nations to accept a quota of migrants are at the root of all this resurgent nationalist sentiment. Yet, over three days in Poland, I failed to meet a single migrant. I found huge numbers of Poles queueing to look round the impressive museum dedicated to the 1944 Warsaw Rising, the heroic but disastrous attempt to prise the capital from the Nazis before the belated arrival of the Soviet Red Army.
Britain aside, Poland is the only EU country which is perfectly happy mentioning the war. The ruling party incorporates it into most political discourse to legitimise the anti- German, anti- EU, antimigrant tone of its rhetoric.
Poland is a source of particular alarm in Brussels. It is not only the largest ex-communist nation in the EU, with a population of nearly 40million, but the European commission is now threatening to make it a pariah state.
First, Poland declined to join the euro and led the way in refusing to accept refugees under EU migrant quotas.
Then, at the end of last year, it implemented legal reforms intended to speed up its judicial process, cut corruption and remove from the judiciary all vestiges of the country’s communist past.
Outraged at the perceived politicisation of justice, Brussels and the European commission took the unprecedented step of invoking its ‘nuclear option’, a three- step process that would ultimately deprive Poland of both its voting rights and its subsidies.
This is the sledgehammer sanction reserved for nations guilty of a ‘serious and persistent breach’ of EU values. In effect, Brussels was calling for Poland to be humiliated and ostracised.
Not even the ghastly British at their Eurosceptic worst ever got this treatment.
Yet the more that the President of the European commission, Jean- claude Juncker, and his Brussels commissars beat Poland with a big stick, the more defiant Poland becomes.
In Hungary, Viktor Orban is playing the anti-EU, anti-migrant card for all it’s worth.
‘There are a lot of people who want to see the end of christian Europe as we know it today. They think if they move in millions who have not come from the christian family tree, they will change Europe positively,’ he told a tame interviewer last week, adding that ‘internationalists’ loyal to Brussels were trying to tear down his fence on the Serbian border.
Even his old foes in the opposition movement, Jobbik (which not long ago included its own paramilitary police, neo-Nazi uniforms and regular outbursts of sub-cor by nista anti-Semitism), now accuse Mr Orban of xenophobia.
‘Orban is stirring up hatred with all his talk of migrants,’ says Lupa Janos, a Jobbik parliamentary candidate in Tokol, an industrial town a short drive south of Budapest. ‘We are, instead, fighting poverty and corruption and chaotic traffic and a non- existent healthcare system.’
It is fascinating to see how Hungary’s former far-Right has reinvented itself as a centre-Left movement in comparison to Mr Orban. J
ANOS, a 51- year- old father- of-two, is a mildmannered part- time Protestant minister and director of an arts school. I find him outside his local supermarket handing out leaflets that do not mention immigration at all.
Arpad Sukely, a 50- year- old electrical engineer, stops to chat and says Mr Janos has his vote.
‘I am a nationalist, but I want nationalism that brings people together,’ he says. ‘ Orban is all about dividing us.’
Meanwhile, back in Felcsut, Mr Orban’s home village, another massive new sports arena (an indoor one) is taking shape — as if the 1,600 residents didn’t have enough sporting facilities already.
Drop in if you’re passing. Since it is paid for with unspecified truckloads of EU subsidies, every UK taxpayer will have chipped in to this ludicrous vanity project.
You have to hand it to Viktor Orban. He keeps on kicking the Brussels elite. He keeps on accusing them of destroying his country. And they keep on signing the cheques.
Yet Brussels wonders why Britain is leaving the EU?