Hungary’s Politics of Hate
While journalists flocked to cover the chaos at Budapest’s Keleti Station and thousands of refugees marched on foot along the M1 motorway toward the Austrian border, Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, was watching the Hungary-Romania soccer match from his V.I.P. box in the Budapest football stadium.
Before the kickoff, Hungarian and Romanian “ultras” shouted Nazi slogans and fought one another at the stadium, after having warmed up by harassing, insulting and beating up hundreds of hopelessly exhausted refugees, who, in their panic, had mistaken the noise of fireworks for gunshots.
Mr. Orban, who recently built a $20 million dollar soccer stadium next door to his summer cottage — with seats for 4,000 people in a village with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants — had cut short a meeting with foreign leaders in Prague in order to get back to Budapest in time for the match.… Seguir leyendo »