Orban is far from being fascist
GREG SHERIDAN

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been protrayed by left-liberal elites as leading a fascist government — the reality is much more benign.

The Kiosk Budapest doesn’t much resemble the Grand Budapest Hotel of Academy Award-winning film fame. There is no fin-de-siecle foreboding or wistful nostalgia here. Instead, the joint is bopping. Hard floors, high ceilings, big outdoors area and an only slightly quieter indoors.

I am there to meet a dozen Hungarian 20-somethings. They have been convened by the MCC think tank, which organises tuition, leadership classes, civic activities and conferences from a conservative viewpoint for school and tertiary students. It’s cultivating a future national leadership.

Everyone I meet at Kiosk Budapest seems to be pursuing postgraduate degrees and working multiple jobs. Ben is a psychologist who also has founded a commercial online newspaper. Esther is a teacher who is also an administrator who is also a researcher at a university think tank (not MCC). As well as being proud Hungarians they are all matter-of-fact Europeans. Olivia is just back from Spain. One big young bloke regrets his groggy state as he laments the bus ride from Split in Croatia to Budapest. Next to me a bearded young guy is just back from a semester in Adelaide, where he mixed a lot with Hungarian Australians.

One thing strikes me. Though we talk about politics, and they are all, I guess, more or less conservative, and some tell me they are Christians, the name of Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, doesn’t come up in conversation.


Yet according to the high organs of international liberalism, Orban is a fascist. Surely fascist leaders promote a cult of personality? Yet there are no statues of him in Budapest, no great memorials, and supporters of his government seem to be just like supporters of any other government.

In a piece of truly sublime silliness in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Franklin Foer seriously compared Orban with Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin. Really?

Another high priestess of Western interpretations of Eastern and central Europe, Anne Applebaum, writes with only marginally less hysteria. One key mistake of her analysis is to present the right-of-centre, moderately nationalist governments of Hungary and Poland as not only vastly more right wing than they are but also as representing a kind of terrible mental disease that broke out spontaneously and is destroying healthy left-liberal group think in line with EU orthodoxy.

In much of her writing Applebaum doesn’t credit the EU with a single mistake in the way it has developed or the policies it has tried to force on reluctant national member states.

Instead, the central Europeans were good liberals when her husband helped run things in Poland, now they are bad reactionaries, and this black-and-white transformation arises entirely from their own moral perfidy.

In fact, Orban’s government has been remarkably successful. Hungary, a nation of millennium-long history, struggled with its post-communist transformation in the early 1990s.

Its first post-communist government was composed of good people who didn’t know how to run anything. Then the communists, under a marginally different name, were amazingly re-elected.

There followed a period where Hungarians, and other central and east Europeans, craved EU and NATO membership above all and were prepared to follow almost any advice they got from the West.

In retrospect, a lot of the advice from the West was bad. It included sudden and chaotic economic liberalisation and sudden and chaotic social liberalisation.

The illusion of prosperity suffused Hungary for a while when its citizens were encouraged to take out foreign currency denominated loans, which led to a bitter harvest when the global financial crisis hit.

Hungarians suddenly found they owed twice what they had borrowed and international policy was designed to protect their creditors, not them.

After an unsuccessful earlier premiership, Orban came back to office in 2004 and since then has followed what you might call enlightened nationalism in economic policy.

Economic growth was 5 per cent last year and this year will be more than 4 per cent. Unemployment has fallen to 3 per cent. More important, the workforce participation rate has risen from 53 per cent in 2010 to not far under 70 per cent now. Wages and salaries last year rose by about 10 per cent.

In the past eight years, 800,000 jobs have been created in a society of just 10 million people. Investment is attracted by the corporate tax rate of 9 per cent.

Hungary has achieved this growth partly by integrating itself into the engine of German manufacturing. The transfer funds it receives as still one of the lower income EU nations are helpful but not remotely crucial.

But Orban has certainly defied EU orthodoxy on a host of issues. What seems to have happened, and what the coercive liberal elite of the EU and east coast US cannot quite cope with, is that a certain clear cycle in central and east European politics has come to an end. These governments want to remain a vibrant part of the EU but they no longer accept West European advice as gospel.

In particular, they no longer pay lip service to the increasingly extreme and unreal bromides that constitute the left-liberal consensus. They don’t think belonging to the EU means they have to give up their sovereignty or their right to make national policy.

So that whole cycle is over. What comes next? Orban’s government has rejected EU and left-liberal orthodoxy on a number of substantial grounds. It wants to control its borders and not accept large numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

It is interventionist in economic policy in its own interests. It has explicitly re-embraced the idea of Christian values as lying at the heart of European democracy, and rejected the increasingly intolerant secularism now orthodox in Western Europe.

It has reformed its electoral system so the winning party is more likely to secure a majority, though it has never won an election with as small a percentage of the vote as Tony Blair did in his last win in Britain. It respects the rights of gay citizens (there was a big gay pride march through Budapest the week before I arrived) but it won’t adopt the LGBTI agenda and it defines marriage as being between a man and woman.

These are all positions a reasonable person could disagree with. They do not remotely constitute fascism. The Orban government is criticised not just on rational grounds but on plainly irrational grounds. It is accused of racism because it insists on controlling its borders. And it is accused of anti-Semitism.

So I went to see the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Hungary, Shlomo Koves, and asked him a simple question: Is the Orban government anti-Semitic?

Budapest has the largest synagogue in central Europe and one of the largest Jewish communities — at about 100,000 — in Europe after Britain and France. Soon it will host the international Jewish Maccabiah Games. The idea that the international Jewish community would hold these games in the capital city of an anti-Semitic government is ridiculous.

Here is what Koves says: “Hungary’s Jewish community is one of the safest and best treated in Europe. First of all, it’s very safe to be Jewish in Hungary, and that’s no small thing in Europe.” He compares the handful of anti-Jewish assaults, mostly verbal or online, per year in Hungary with the hundreds and hundreds of such incidents in France: “It’s very important for this government to give the Jewish community outstanding treatment.

“This government, for example, amended the constitution to make it easier to stand up against anti-Semitism.

“Many in the Western media call the Hungarian government extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic. In my view this is total nonsense and just part of the language games of left liberals.”

And the Israeli government, which is no slouch in identifying anti-Semitism, thinks the Orban government is not anti-Semitic.

How does the rabbi feel about the government’s talk of being a Christian democracy: “Often they talk of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and that’s very cool. One of the main European parties in Germany is called the Christian Democrats and that’s fine. In the 1920s and 30s if a Hungarian politician said he’s a Christian politician, he probably meant he’s not Jewish. But if a politician says he’s a Christian politician today he means he’s not secular, he doesn’t follow the religion of secular liberalism.

“But I also believe it’s entirely legitimate to acknowledge that Europe and Hungary are embedded in Christian traditions. Hungary has been a Christian nation for a thousand years.”

And, he points out, Christian values such as universal human dignity, the respect for family, the importance of tradition, themselves emerge from Jewish values.

The only concrete evidence anyone ever brings against the Orban government is that it has criticised billionaire political funder George Soros.

Soros funds left-liberal causes around the world. He comes from a Hungarian Jewish background but his Jewishness is not a part of his public identity. Soros criticised the Orban government for trying to maintain control of its borders and lavishly funded a lot of groups in Hungary. He financed the Central European University, which in a ludicrously hagiographic piece describes him as being an agent for the ideology of an open society, which in Soros’s terms has meant open borders. The Orban government changed the rules and so the CEU is moving to Vienna. This does not represent death of the human spirit.

Says Koves: “I don’t like it (the anti-Soros campaign). It’s pretty primitive. But it’s not anti-Semitic. Soros doesn’t identify as Jewish. He’s not a symbol of Jewishness to the Hungarian people.

“Only a tiny proportion of Hungarians in polls identify him as Jewish. No part of the campaign against him has any Jewish content. But it’s obviously good for Soros and his defenders to say this is not only a disgusting campaign but is anti-Semitic.”

What about immigration, which provokes wild cries that Hungary is racist? In truth, Budapest’s policies on controlling its borders are somewhat milder than Australia’s.

I meet Balazs Orban (no relation to the Prime Minister) in a Budapest cafe to ask him about it. He seems to me absurdly young (but that reflects on me, I suppose) to be the Strategic State Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office, effectively a minister within the Prime Minister’s portfolio.

“In 2015, some 400,000 people marched across our territory without permission, invitation or any co-operation with the Hungarian authorities,” he tells me.

Pause to think for a moment how Australia would react to that.

He continues: “The scope of the problem changed, the sending countries changed, we changed. The government immediately undertook consultation with the Hungarian people.”

More than 80 per cent, he said, wanted Hungary to control its own borders.

“We made the decision to establish a physical barrier on our southern border and established a similar legal framework as Australia did. We decided you don’t have the right to come to Hungary illegally. If you apply for asylum you have to wait in a transit centre until a decision has been made.

“So we needed a fence and we needed a huge paradigm shift. We were highly criticised by the EU. But we decided we are a sovereign country. Every nation in the EU has the right to decide what it wants in immigration policy.

“We also believed our policy is good for the EU because a huge influx would destabilise Europe generally. We want to bring illegal immigration to zero.”

Hungary hosts some hundreds of thousands of workers from nearby countries such as Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and other neighbours. But it was not prepared to be a transit country for a huge and never-ending trek from the Middle East to Germany and Scandinavia, and it was not prepared to permanently resettle large numbers of people from the Middle East and North Africa.

Those are policies liberal Hungarians are entitled to disagree with. They are not racist or fascist policies.

What about the idea that is perhaps most offensive to Western left-liberal ears — the idea of Hungary trying to reshape itself as a Christian democracy?

This most certainly does not mean coercion in terms of religious practice or belief. Maybe 10 or 15 per cent of Hungarians are regular churchgoers, but the society overall has backed a government that has backed Hungary’s Christian traditions.

Andras Lanczi, a warm, earthy man, the rector of Budapest’s Corvinus University and one of Hungary’s most important political philosophers, offers a relatively modest interpretation of this ambition: “Most people realise that modern democratic policymaking is more often than not chaotic.

“It always gets back to the feeling that you need order, but what is order, where does it come from? You have to resort to the ideas of religion, to the experience and wisdom of the Bible.

“ In the midst of abrupt change, people need constant elements: what am I, what is my life? The ancient sources of wisdom come to the fore. People don’t find the answers only in politics.

“A government like the Hungarian government can at least give a boost to the people — yes, look for that wisdom.”

Miklos Szantho, director of the Budapest Centre for Fundamental Rights, offers a slightly more trenchant version: “There are human rights fundamentalists. Their core motivation is to create human rights out of human desires.

“This progressive human rights fundamentalism is quite popular in the West, but we are trying to counter this. We believe that the true concept of human rights is found in natural rights, that everyone is equal before God, and equal before the law, equal before the courts. But that does not mean an equality for all cultural behaviour, for all social behaviour.

“We believe in the inalienable rights given us by God, like human dignity and equal rights for every individual, but this approach should be based on the concept of natural hierarchy deriving from creation. Our centre is trying to find a healthy balance between individual rights and the general interest of society.

“The Orban government is trying to introduce a new model in Europe, or at least it intends to shape the models offered by the West to its own image.

“It does not seek to follow word by word the contemporary European social policies based on political correctness, but tries to find its own way. We can label it Christian democracy, illiberal democracy or conservative democracy.

“But for sure, it is questioning the ruling mainstream progressive interpretation of democracy.”

Europe, surely, has room for diversity.

Greg Sheridan visited Hungary as a guest of the MCC Hungarian think tank.