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. His behavior recalled the habit of Nicolae Ceausescu, the one-time Romanian Communist dictator, who never allowed social unrest to disturb his favorite pastime.

Hungary’s Politics of HateWhat is happening in Hungary is not just about the global refugee crisis and its consequences for Europe. It is also the beginning of the 2018 Hungarian election campaign. And it provides a cautionary tale about what could happen in Europe, and not only in Europe, when radical, nationalist populists take over the state.

Mr. Orban recently announced in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that his aim is “to keep Europe Christian.” He began his xenophobic campaign eight months ago in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He chose the massive demonstration in Paris on Jan. 11 as the most appropriate occasion to announce the need to stop the influx of non-Christian migrants to Europe.

For him the massacre demonstrated that migration inevitably leads to terror — despite the fact that the killers were not recent immigrants but long-settled French citizens. He insists that European political correctness and decadent moral relativism make it impossible to address this threat.

At the end of this unusually hot and tragic summer, he announced: “We are experiencing the end of a spiritual-intellectual era. The era of liberalism.” But this, Mr. Orban declared, “provides the opportunity for the national-Christian thinking to regain its dominance not only in Hungary, but in the whole of Europe.” To defend European Christendom, Hungary — together with the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania — voted last week against distributing 120,000 mostly Muslim asylum seekers among the European Union’s member states. Never mind that the Hungarian minister of the interior announced in January 2014 that Hungary would be easily capable of accommodating 170,000 Hungarian-speaking Ukrainians, who are predominantly Christians, if they ever had to flee.

In early 2015, the popularity of the ruling party declined dramatically due to major corruption scandals involving the government and Mr. Orban’s family. Voters started shifting toward the neo-Nazi Jobbik party — which is, distressingly, the only serious opposition to Mr. Orban’s government. These neo-Nazis have been moralizing about anticorruption policies and defending the rights and interests of what they call true-born Hungarians.

Raising the refugee issue provided Mr. Orban’s beleaguered government with a unique opportunity to mount a nationalist, racist, xenophobic campaign of its own — while of course taking care to distinguish itself from the neo-Nazis by refusing to spout hatred about either the Jews or the Roma.

Following a nationwide billboard campaign over the summer that incited hatred and spread fear with slogans like “If you come to Hungary, you must respect our culture,” the country — as if it were at war — is now flooded with huge posters: “The people decided, we must defend our country.” Faced with Mr. Orban’s radicalism, the neo-Nazis look faint-hearted and indecisive. Had Jobbik done what the prime minister is doing now, it would have been widely denounced. But the prime minister is posing as the Christian savior of Europe.

According to the official history books — and there are only officially-approved history books in Hungarian schools today — Hungary has always been the last bastion of Christianity in Europe: against the Mongols in the 13th century, against the Ottomans in the 16th and 17th, and against the Bolsheviks during World War II.

Now, according to this narrative, Hungary is being forced to defend the same values as the West lapses into moral relativism, multiculturalism and same-sex marriage. Sometimes, according to the logic of Hungarian foreign policy, the only way to defend the traditions of Christianity is to make an alliance with the East, joining Vladimir Putin’s crusade against the decadent West.

The country’s top Catholic clergy is doing its part to arouse enmity, too. Cardinal Peter Erdo, who is also president of the Council of European Bishops, said that if the church provided asylum to the refugees, it would amount to becoming people-smugglers. The bishop of Szeged, Laszlo Kiss-Rigo, responded to Pope Francis’ plea to show mercy to the refugees by asserting: “The pope does not know what he says.” The church and government seem to have forgotten the hospitality Hungarian refugees experienced in the West when they fled after the Soviets crushed the 1956 revolution.

Hungary has already built a razor-wire fence along the Serbian border; it is now constructing another along the frontier with Croatia. Relations with neighboring countries haven’t been worse since the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918. A new law passed by the ruling party with neo-Nazi support authorizes the government to introduce a state of emergency, mobilize military reservists, and treat illegal border crossing as a crime punishable by several years in prison.

Mr. Orban is bolstering his popularity by spreading fear and inciting hatred — not only against refugees, but against the thousands of Hungarians who have helped them day and night, in heat and rain. The country has turned into a fenced fortress that imagines it is fighting an enemy at the gates, and also an enemy within: the good-hearted Hungarians who dare to show solidarity with refugees, who are ashamed of their government, and who remember what happened to our Jewish Hungarian compatriots in 1944.

Hungarian democrats now find themselves unwelcome refugees in their own country, ruled by a government that would gladly transport them to the Austrian border.

Istvan Rev is a historian and the director of the Open Society Archives.

Deja una respuesta

Tu dirección de correo electrónico no será publicada. Los campos obligatorios están marcados con *