When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

You've reached your limit of one free article.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime .

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Exclusive International news coverage

Ad-free experience NEW

Weekly digital Magazine NEW

9 daily & weekly Newsletters

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Free trial

30-days free access, then $2.90
per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
Hungary

Viktor Orban's Assault On Democracy Quietly Got Much Scarier This Summer

Not the same imminent threat as Vladimir Putin, but the Hungarian prime minister is posing a bold challenge to the West, with a troubling speech in Romania that flew below the radar.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban
Jacques Schuster

BUDAPEST — Since his 2010 election victory, the words of Viktor Orban have been seen by the West as a bitter pill that must be swallowed.

When the Hungarian Prime Minister, for example, claimed that the "Magyar race" was in "serious danger," the phrase may have seemed cut from World War II propaganda reels. Still, Western observers weren’t unduly worried, repeatedly succumbing to Orban’s virtuosity with double meanings.

When speaking English, he can can seem very affable, his language full of irony and a graceful willingness to seem harmless. In Hungarian, on the other hand, Orban's sentences have a snap as tight as the click of a cellar door lock. Hardly anybody speaks Hungarian in Europe, however. So things stayed relatively calm in Brussels and Berlin — also out of respect for the fact that Orban had after all been democratically elected.

Progressively, some of his decisions began to cause more than a little concern as divisions of power in Hungary were gradually worn away, judges were disempowered, pressure on the free press built up and cultural life was hemmed in.

But despite all reservations, it was not forgotten in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Vienna that a government with power of absolute majority clearly has the right to implement reforms — although admittedly they saw this in terms of European values. And there was something else: Hungary is a small country that is easily overlooked when there are major crises and wars elsewhere.

The hotter the crisis in Ukraine got, the less European Union member states were inclined to focus on Hungary.

All of this may help explain why people are only now beginning to wrap their minds around a speech Orban gave in late July in the Romanian town of Baile Tusnad. Quite frankly, it goes well beyond anything the prime minister has ever said before. Worse: It’s not only a declaration of war against the EU and Europe, but against Western democracies and their foundations. Nothing that Europe stands for, what it fought for, what it suffered for, inhabits Orban’s speech.

Instead, this is essentially a democratically elected head of government pledging to discard the core ideals of the American and French Revolutions, in order to ring in an age of idolization of narrowly defined peoples and races that has nothing to do with tolerance, liberalism and individual freedom.

[rebelmouse-image 27088201 alt="""" original_size="1024x683" expand=1]

Budapest's Hungarian Parliament Building — Photo: Jason Halsall

According to Orban, Hungary must turn towards societies that are "not Western, not liberal, that are not liberal democracies in fact, maybe not democracies at all." Liberal democrats are not capable of "protecting the necessary public assets for the self-preservation of the nation" and the "interests of people that must be seen as being closely linked to the life of the community, the life of the nation."

During the high point of his speech, Orban declares that his government was in a position to eradicate liberalism in Hungary and to create an "illiberal state" based on "our own, national approach."

Democracy without democrats

The prime minister remains vague on exactly how this state and its society would look. However there would probably no longer be civil rights movements and associations that monitor rule of law. Most NGOs — "political activists paid by foreign interests" — wouldn’t survive either. They already have to be monitored and controlled just the way it has become customary to do in Putin’s Russia.

Indeed, states like Russia, China and Turkey are "stars," as Orban calls them. "Dogmas and ideologies accepted in Western Europe" are of no interest to them. That these very "dogmas and ideologies" underlie the fact that Hungary since the early 1990s has become one of the largest net recipients of European aid and has since 2004 received some 25 billion euros from Brussels is wisely left unmentioned.

Then again the prime minister appears unconcerned with the pettiness of daily doings when grand visions of the future are at stake. Anything is possible in the future, Orban said at the end of his speech instilling hope in his audience, Romania’s Hungarian minority. The "Hungarian community in the Carpathian Basin" should not lose heart: Since anything is possible "it’s quite possible our time will come."

This may make some Germans recall something that Reich Chancellor Hermann Müller wrote in 1930: "A democracy without democrats represents a danger both on the inside and the outside."

But one doesn’t need to go back to the darkest chapter in German history, particularly as it wouldn’t be fair to today’s Hungary. Suffice it to say that there is an ongoing “Putinization” or “Erdoganization” of Hungarian society, the aim of which is a conservative Christian-Magyar revolution that subjugates individuals to the power of the nation. It would have nothing in common with the democratic-center-right conservatism of Europe — let alone the core Western value system.

Perhaps for this reason alone Europe's center-right parties, including the European People’s Party (EPP), should openly debate whether Viktor Orban’s Fidesz still belongs to their political family or not.

After his summer speech in Romania, one thing is crystal clear: In Budapest, the flag of democracy is at half-mast. We must ensure that some sad day it isn’t taken down altogether.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

FOCUS: Israel-Palestine War

How Biden's Mideast Stance Weakens Israel And Emboldens Iran

The West's decision to pressure Israel over Gaza, and indulge Iran's violent and troublesome regime, follows the U.S. Democrats' line with the Middle East: just keep us out of your murderous affairs.

Photo of demonstration against U.S President Joe Biden in Iran

Demonstration against U.S President Joe Biden in Iran.

Bahram Farrokhi

-OpEd-

The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is weak both structurally and for its dismal popularity level, which has made it take some contradictory, or erratic, decisions in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.

Other factors influencing its decisions include the pressures of the families of Hamas hostages, and the U.S. administration's lukewarm support for this government and entirely reactive response to the military provocations and "hit-and-run" incidents orchestrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, which include Hamas. Israel has also failed to mobilize international opinion behind its war on regional terrorism, in what might be termed a full-blown public relations disaster.

The administration led by President Joe Biden has, by repeating the Democrats' favored, and some might say feeble, policy of appeasing Iran's revolutionary regime, duly nullified the effects of Western sanctions imposed on that regime. By delisting its proxies, the Houthis of Yemen, as terrorists, the administration has allowed them to devote their energies to firing drones and missiles across the Red Sea and even indulging in piracy. The general picture is of a moment of pitiful weakness for the West, in which Iran and other members of the Axis - of Evil or Resistance, take your pick - are daily cocking a snook at the Western powers.

You wonder: how could the United States, given its military and technological resources, fail to spot tankers smuggling out banned Iranian oil through the Persian Gulf to finance the regime's foreign entanglements, while Iran is able to track Israeli-owned ships as far aways as the Indian Ocean? The answer, rather simply, lies in the Biden administration's decision to indulge the ayatollahs and hope for the best.

Keep reading...Show less

The latest