Hungary opposition leader vows to restore nation’s alliances with West
HODMEZOVASARHELY, HUNGARY >> Hungary’s opposition leader wants to restore his country’s frayed ties with the West — and also has a message for American fans of right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
“Let me state very strongly for all Americans that to be a part of Putin’s fan club doesn’t make you a conservative,” said Peter Marki-Zay, a self-described conservative Christian running against Orban in next year’s elections, in an interview with The Associated Press.
“Orban is betraying Europe, Orban is betraying NATO, Orban is betraying the United States,” he said.
Marki-Zay, the 49-yearold mayor of the small city of Hodmezovasarhely, is leading a diverse coalition of six opposition parties aiming to defeat Hungary’s hard-line leader and his ruling Fidesz party in parliamentary
elections scheduled for April.
If elected, Marki-Zay says, he will reverse the closer ties Orban has pursued with autocracies in Russia and China, and improve his country’s relations with the European Union and other Western allies.
“I still stand for Western values, and we cannot accept a corrupt thug ... who betrays Western values and who is now a servant of Communist China and Russia,” he said.
Governing Hungary with a two-thirds majority in parliament since 2010, the right-wing populist Orban and his anti-immigration party have dominated the fractured opposition in all subsequent elections, and cemented their power through changes to election laws, stacking institutions with loyalists and dominating large portions of Hungary’s media.
While Orban’s critics in Europe have warned of an alarming erosion of democracy in Hungary as its relations with EU have frayed, some of his policies — like his staunch rejection of refugees and generous financial support to families with children — have attracted glowing praise from rightwing American commentators.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson broadcast from Budapest for a week this summer, and praised Orban’s migration policy and rejection of the EU’s liberal mainstream. Rod Dreher, senior editor of U.S. publication The American Conservative, spent several months in Budapest this year on a fellowship financed by a right-wing think tank close to Orban’s government.
But Marki-Zay, a devout Catholic with seven children and a former Fidesz voter himself, says that despite Orban’s proclamations of building an illiberal “Christian democracy” in the Central European country, he considers the leader neither a Christian, nor a conservative, nor even a democrat.
“Real conservatives consider Christianity to be something very much (the) opposite” of Orban’s policies, he said.
Orban’s party has accused Marki-Zay of being a left-wing candidate posing as a conservative, a charge stemming from his cooperation with several left-ofcenter parties in the opposition coalition.