Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán says he does not know if he should “laugh or cry” when his national conservative government is attacked by liberals from multicultural countries where “statues are being toppled” and there are “gang wars” in the streets.
“Liberal imperialism reigns in western Europe, and they are trying to force their worldview on countries that think differently. American Democrats and often international courts are also involved in this,” said the Hungarian leader, in reference to a recent ruling by EU judges that Hungarian regulations requiring NGOs funded by George Soros and other overseas donors to be transparent about their funding are unlawful.
“There is this international trend in politics which is aimed at weakening and eliminating national governments and nations, and bundling them into some imperial order,” added the conservative leader, who has faced heavy criticism from the global left for his rejection of mass migration and multiculturalism and promotion of policies to support traditional families and child-rearing.
“This [liberal imperialism] is now pursued not only by states, but also by supranational global organisations, and is operated by business people and money people who finance this scheme and who see themselves as supranational entities,” Orbán warned.
Recalling the 1980s, when Hungary was still under the communist yoke and he was a young pro-democracy activist, Orbán told Kossuth Radio he could “clearly remember that when someone uttered the word ‘West’ back then, it only had positive connotations.”
“When we heard the Soviet propaganda that blacks are beaten in America we laughed it off, and the propaganda about young people in the West grovelling in a Coca Cola stupor. This was all that socialism could say about the West as criticism,” he explained.
Thirty years later, however, he said several Western countries appeared to be heading for “financial ruin” as “sovereign debts are running up to and above 120 per cent” — and, perhaps more importantly, they are suffering problems with widespread disorder and a breakdown of social cohesion.
“[A] wave of violence is sweeping through these countries. Statues are being toppled,” Orbán said, referencing the vandalisation of war memorials and monuments to historic figures including Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington which has been sweeping Britain, America, and much of Europe since Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd morphed into a global movement against “systemic racism” and Western identity more generally.
Moreover, Orbán added, there are now “gang wars being fought in the streets of the beautiful small towns of Western European countries” between different ethnic groups — likely a reference to dramatic footage of Chechen and Algerian gangs battling it out on the streets of Dijon, France, which was much more widely reported in Central and Eastern Europe than in the West.
“I take a look at the countries which keep sending us messages about how to live our lives correctly, and how to govern and to operate a democracy well, and I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry,” the Hungarian added dryly.