Anti-EU campaign poised to pay off
Nationalistic and anti-Muslim rhetoric is set to deliver Hungary’s leader another election victory.
Hungary is preparing to elect Viktor Orban today for his fourth term as prime minister, after a campaign characterised by his anti-Brussels rhetoric, xenophobia and a demonisation of billionaire financier George Soros.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s governing party, flew to Budapest to lend his support to Orban, his closest ideological partner. The two share a conservative, nationalistic Euroscepticism and have been a thorn in the side of Brussels by forming an alliance to resist the distribution of migrants across the European Union.
Orban, greeting the Polish leader, said: ‘‘We believe Poles and Hungarians have a common path, common fight and common goal: to build and defend our homeland in the form that we like it: Christian and with national values.
‘‘With all due modesty, I must say that 27 years ago, we said Europe is our future. Today, we can say we are Europe’s future.’’
About 8.2 million Hungarians are expected to return Orban and his Fidesz party to office, beating far-right nationalist party Jobbik as well as liberal and socialist opposition.
Pollsters believe that Orban’s pledges to resist the EU refugee settlement programme and his increasingly nationalistic and antiMuslim rhetoric will give him a comfortable majority. He has closed the country’s borders to keep out illegal migrants, a move believed to be popular with many voters.
In a clear snub to Brussels, which is trying to cope with the biggest exodus of migrants since World War II, Orban has lambasted Muslims during the campaign and displayed images of refugees borrowed from UK Independence Party posters under the word ‘‘Stop’’.
He said in one campaign speech: ‘‘If the dike collapses and the water flows in, the cultural conquest will become irreversible.’’
Zoltan Kovacs, Orban’s spokesman, said western Europe was ‘‘trying to sell us rotten merchandise’’.
‘‘[German Chancellor] Angela Merkel admits there are no-go zones in Germany, and we want to avoid that,’’ he said.
‘‘Here at the crossroads of history, we have lived next door to Islam, and there has been no integration. A Western form of Islam is impossible.’’
Orban has been in office for eight years, during which he has built a fence along the border with Serbia and tightened his grip on Hungary’s media, judiciary, churches and universities.
He has also targeted Soros, the billionaire philanthropist of Jewish-Hungarian origin who has invested US$400 million in Hungarian social programmes since 1989 and has opened his own university. Orban has accused him of favouring Muslim migration to undermine Hungary’s white Christian culture.
Daniel Makonnen, a spokesman for Soros’s Open Society Foundation, dismissed the idea.
‘‘We fund 50 charities, of which just four work with recognised refugees – the government’s message is crazy,’’ he said.
Last year the government posted millions of voters a questionnaire asking them if they approved of Soros’s ‘‘plan’’ to settle a million migrants a year in Europe. Soros said that a million refugees should be let in at the height of the Syrian war in 2015.
Under Orban’s leadership, Hungary forced through a new law compelling charities to publish any foreign funding they received, which led to a Soros-backed group being banned in the town of Pecs. The charity trained clowns to perform for children in hospitals.
If Orban’s party wins two-thirds of the seats in parliament, a new government would be able pass a second law to ban charities from operating in the country altogether.
Makonnen said: ‘‘Many human rights groups were pushed out of Russia by a similar law. In Hungary, the media and judiciary have been muzzled and the political opposition is weak, so NGOs are the only critical voices left.’’
Ironically, Orban was himself the beneficiary of a Soros grant to attend Oxford University in 1989, after he applied to study the key role of ‘‘civil society’’ in Hungary’s shift to democracy at the end of the Cold War. As head of the Hungarian opposition in 2006, he was defended by Hungary’s Civil Liberties Union – another Sorosbacked organisation – when he was sued by the government for slander.
In the course of his four nonconsecutive terms in office, Orban has increasingly alarmed EU leaders, who give Hungary about €5 billion a year in funding and are angered by his refusal to allow migrants into Hungary.
Budapest’s Corruption Research Centre claims that up to a quarter of the EU cash given to Hungary has been stolen. Critics claim that Orban’s relatives and close friends have been handed lucrative EUfunded contracts. Attention has focused on Lorinc Meszaros, a former gasfitter and a friend of Orban who is now one of Hungary’s richest men.
Orban’s spokesman has dismissed the allegations. The Times