Viktor Orban wants to “harm the Brussels technocratic elite”.
IMAGO/Italy Photo Press
After months of blaming the European Union for all its ills, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban takes over the rotating presidency on Monday, more isolated than ever by his position on the war in Ukraine.
The bloc’s longest-serving leader, who was given a “dictator salute!” by Jean-Claude Juncker in 2015, has recently toughened his rhetoric against the “Brussels technocratic elite”, saying he is “racking his brains to harm them”.
“It’s as if a defendant in a trial suddenly found himself in the place of the prosecutor, it’s a grotesque situation,” summarizes Paul Lendvai. The author of a book on Viktor Orban, however, calls for “not to overestimate the importance” of this presidency of the Council of the European Union, which will last 6 months.
Close to Trump and Beijing
Budapest will continue to block key cases and “try to ease restrictions” on the rule of law to get its money back, he said, as there are multiple disputes and billions of euros in funds frozen due to concerns about corruption and repeated attacks on democracy in the central European country.
On geopolitical issues, too, there is total discord. Contrary to his partners, Orban supports former US President Donald Trump, from whom he borrowed the slogan for the next six months – “Make Europe Great Again”. Close to Chinese head of state Xi Jinping, he also cultivates ties with the Kremlin, and refuses to support Kiev militarily.
Against the “decadence of the West”
However, it was as a young liberal that, at the age of 26, he made a name for himself when he challenged the communist regime in Budapest with a fiery tirade, in June 1989, for freedom, during a tribute to the victims of the 1956 uprising. against the Red Army.
Co-founder a year earlier of the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz), he became the symbol of Hungary’s aspirations to free itself from totalitarianism and adopt Western values.
A thousand miles from his beginnings, Viktor Orban today denounces “the decadence of the West”, in the face of the “LGBT+ lobby” and the influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, regularly assimilated to potential “terrorists”. The culmination of a long process of moving towards the extreme right.
“Over the past 14 years, Orban has aligned himself with Putin’s ideology of a West in chaos” and of a reining in of counter-powers, Stefano Bottoni, an Italian-Hungarian historian at the University of Florence, analyses for AFP. Listening to the 61-year-old leader, it is not so much Moscow, but NATO and the EU that have provoked a “global conflagration”.
A position that increasingly irritates his allies. “He does not realize how toxic it is,” the expert believes, because “for many countries, the war in Ukraine is the most important issue of the moment in the redefinition of Europe.” Even within the extreme right, this leads him “into a strategic impasse.”
Prime minister in 1998, at only 35 years old, he had to relinquish power four years later, defeated at the polls by the socialists. When he returned to power in 2010, he decided to cement his hold so as to never again have to suffer what he experienced as a humiliation.
The emergence of a new rival
Comfortably re-elected in each legislative session since then, this father of five children claims the exercise of “illiberal democracy”. However, he is now challenged by the emergence of a new rival, the conservative Peter Magyar, a pure product of the Orban system which has entered into dissidence.
But it doesn’t matter, says Andrea Peto, an analyst at the Central European University (CEU): bad news “never reaches the ears of his voters,” who are inundated with propaganda, she says. He has only one goal: “To maintain control” over the country with his close circle of oligarchs.
(afp)
