World View: Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party Victory in Hungary Signals European Move Right

This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

• Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz anti-migrant party wins overwhelming victory in Hungary
• Europe as a whole moves steadily to the right

Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz anti-migrant party wins overwhelming victory in Hungary

Anti-immigrant leaders in Europe: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán (R) with Poland’s premier Mateusz Morawiecki at the most recent EU summit (consilium.europa.eu)

On Sunday, Hungary’s right-wing, anti-immigrant, and anti-EU Fidesz party won an overwhelming political victory on a high turnout, giving Viktor Orbán his third consecutive term as prime minister of Hungary.

With almost all the votes counted, Fidesz has won 134 seats in the 199 seat parliament, giving Fidesz a two-thirds “super-majority.” With this super-majority, Orbán will be able to modify Hungary’s constitution to give himself additional powers, possibly dictatorial powers, and to make sure that he will be reelected for many years to come.

In celebrating his victory, Orbán said:

There is a big battle behind us. We have won. Today Hungary had a decisive victory. We have the chance to defend Hungary.

By “defend Hungary,” Orbán meant defend it from migrants.

Poland is congratulating Orbán on his victory. Poland’s deputy foreign minister and envoy to the European Union, Konrad Szymanski said:

It’s a confirmation of Central Europe’s emancipation policy. Emancipation not directed at fighting anybody but at making Central Europe visible as a very constructive European and European Union partner.

By “emancipation,” Szymanski is not talking about freeing some slaves. He is talking about emancipating Poland from the policies of Brussels, particularly policies about resettling migrants that arrive in Greece or Italy. Poland’s nationalist government shares Orbán’s view that Muslim migrants threaten Europe’s “Christian” heritage.

In 2015, the EU adopted a migrant quota system last year that was supposed to relocate 160,000 refugees from Greece and Italy to other EU countries. The plan fell apart because few countries were willing to accept their quotas, and several countries, led by Hungary and Poland, refused to resettle any refugees at all. In the end, only about 30,000 refugees were ever resettled under this plan.

Some observers have accused Orbán of using anti-semitic “dog whistle” remarks during the campaign. They point to Orbán’s frequent use in campaign ads of the Hungarian Jewish billionaire George Soros as the symbol of foreign influence in Hungary. In March, Orbán said:

We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.

Many observers believe that these remarks were anti-semitic, intended to target Soros as a Jew. Reuters and Forward and BBC

Europe as a whole moves steadily to the right

Orbán’s Fidesz party won an overwhelming victory with a 134 seat super-majority in the 199 seat parliament.

In second place was the Jobbik Party, with 25 seats. Jobbik is considered to be even farther right than Fidesz, though in recent years the party leaders have tried to move the party towards the center and to shed its anti-semitic and xenophobic image.

In third place, with 20 seats, was the center-left Socialist party. The significance of this situation is that in Hungary, the two major parties are both on the right, and the center-left in Europe is in collapse.

EuroIntelligence summarized the situation as follows:

The slide of the social democratic party from its peak of power in 2006 is both a long-term trend in Hungary and a broader trend in the EU as a whole. Hungary is now one of a long list of countries where the two main parties are both on the right, because the collapsing social democrats have not been replaced by a party on the left but one on the right. Poland and the Netherlands are firmly in that list. Whether to include France and Italy depends on where one puts Macron’s En Marche and the Five Star Movement, but asked about the right-wing economic policies of his government Édouard Philippe quipped “what did you expect?” Spain and Austria – and even Germany – seem to be moving in the same direction. In many of these cases – Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Austria – the party replacing the social democrats could be classed as far-right. This doesn’t look like a Europe where Orbán should feel particularly uncomfortable.

Hungary-based Péter Krekó of Capital Institute agrees, saying that Orbán is providing support to populist tendencies in western Europe: “The populist right wing in western Europe deems Orbán as a hero, he represents an alternative model for Europe. He is the ‘anti-Merkel’ and that makes him popular with many.”

However, Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn says that won a clear election victory because of a “tumor” of scaremongering: “Today it is Hungary and Poland, tomorrow others in eastern and central Europe, even a big founding country of the EU, could develop a taste for undermining values and scaremongering.”

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, the atrocities that occur in one generational crisis war appear again in similar forms decades later in the next generational crisis war, as the survivors of the last war die off. With Europe’s shift to the right, we are beginning to see the revival of the xenophobia that brought about World War II, such as xenophobic attitudes towards Jews, Muslims and Roma Gypsies. As the next world war approaches, we may see a return to the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes that occurred in World War II, and which we are already seeing to some extent in the Mideast. EuroIntelligence and EU Observer and Budapest Business Journal and AP

Related Articles

• Hungary’s Viktor Orbán defends ‘Christian culture’ (18-Sep-2015)
• Refugee crisis: Turkey ridicules Europe as Hungary closes Croatia border (17-Oct-2015)
• As expected, Austria follows Hungary in saying ‘No more migrants’ (07-Sep-2015)
• Hungary’s Viktor Orbán defeated in attempt to ban refugee quotas (09-Nov-2016)
• Despite growing migration crises, European Union bitterly divided over policy (15-Dec-2017)
• European nations split on the future of Europe (02-Mar-2017)

KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Hungary, Viktor Orbán, Fidesz, Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, Konrad Szymanski, Greece, Italy, George Soros, Jobbik, Socialist, Péter Krekó, Capital Institute, Luxembourg, Jean Asselborn
Permanent web link to this article
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail