No one talks about it. But a disturbing wave of support for the far-Right is sweeping Europe
T HE 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 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 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.
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 arch-Eurocrat has never forgotten that it was Orban and David Cameron who were the only EU leaders who dared to oppose his appointment.
Slaughtering
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 dark reprise of Germany in the Thirties are missing the point.
No, what goes to the core of Orban’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 and its unelected Commission and unaccountable courts as the new Moscow.
John O’Sullivan, former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher and now 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 the Berlin Wall in 1989 — notably German chancellor Helmut Kohl, US president Ronald Reagan and Thatcher. It is a popular sentiment around here, as I discover in Budapest’s Liberty Square where Orban has erected a bronze statue of Reagan.
Looking closely, I see it is in need of repair. A crack has
now turned into a hole in Reagan’s outstretched hand — because so many people come here to shake it. 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 (where, in 2015, Merkel controversially — and to her bitter cost — invited more than a million refugees).
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. (That is a great deal more than the 7.4 per cent achieved by the Lib Dems in Britain four months earlier.)
The default response in the Western half of Europe is to demand that these ghastly people become better Europeans. But the fact is that these ghastly people are no longer afraid of squaring up to Brussels.
Barely noticed, thanks to the general obsession with Brexit and Catalonia’s bid for independence, has been a recent summit of Central European leaders in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava. It had been convened to tackle a festering cause of anger and injured pride. The specific indignity was the discovery that sub-standard foods had been exported to the former Eastern Bloc which had not been sold in Western Europe.
Orban’s government has described it as the ‘biggest scandal of the recent past’. Just imagine the protests and smashed windows in Scotland if Sainsbury’s was flogging sub-standard food north of the Border but not in Surrey. The Bulgarian prime minister calls this ‘food apartheid’.
Although this controversy was about food, it symbolised to East Europeans how they were being abused by Brussels. Stung in to action, Brussels has promised to introduce a new food testing regime from next year. Too late. The damage has been done.
It is just yet another example of why Brussels-bashing is so prevalent to the east of the Alps, particularly here in Hungary.
For when Orban started building his razor wire fence along Hungary’s southern border during the migration crisis of 2015, he was roundly attacked.
Hundreds of thousands who had crossed from Turkey into Greece were heading West via Serbia and Hungary. Some were fleeing the Syrian 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, Orban 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 Orban’s decision.
‘Migration is the big issue here, and the EU is now following Orban on migration,’ says Zsolt Jesenszky, a well-known 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. ‘They’d never vote for a guy like Macron who spends a fortune on make-up.’ (Many here remember that the imageconscious French president, who spent £24,000 on a makeup artist in his first three months in office, has been a stern critic of Hungary and Poland.) But Orban is more than happy to be attacked by the ‘old’ nations of the EU because they are playing into his hands.
He has now consolidated his position by outflanking the notorious Hungarian nationalist movement Jobbik, infamous for its fascist uniforms and its anti-semitic, anti-gyspy rhetoric.
Jobbik has just performed a U-turn in search of votes from the Left. It is Orban and his Fidesz movement who are now playing the xenophobia card.
Even some of his supporters think that he has gone too far by leafletting eight million households and erecting posters as part of a campaign against Budapest-born billionaire George Soros. They claim the 87-year-old gave Brussels a plan to flood Hungary with migrants in order to meet labour market needs and bolster the voter base of Left-wing groups.
Orban has ordered Hungary’s security services to investigate a so-called ‘Soros network’ which it is claimed is pulling strings in Brussels.
As a result, Orban has been accused of anti-semitism for his demonisation of the great philanthropist.
BORn into a Hungarian Jewish family shortly before the war, Soros only survived the German occupation of Budapest with the use of forged papers.
Though now based in America, Soros has been a very generous benefactor to countless Hungarians, having built the Central European University in Budapest. There, I met students and staff appalled to find themselves at the centre of political controversy.
Earlier this year, in a very disturbing development, Orban’s government introduced laws effectively forcing the university to re-apply for its licence to operate. That approval has still not been granted.
It is a bewildering situation. But the new mood in Central and East Europe has its roots in a proud nationalism that Brussels, for years, has tried to marginalise with its vision of a European super-state.
There’s a message for Britain, too. Perhaps all those Remoaners accusing the Brexiteers of being blinkered should open their eyes and look at just how rotten much of the EU is now.