The Nationalist Revival by John B. Judis

Author:John B. Judis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780999745410
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2018-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

In 2015, after Orban had won reelection and another two-thirds majority, he found a new kind of foreign invader to single out. Refugees from the Middle East began streaming across Hungary’s southern border. In the first six months, 50,000 migrants entered Hungary looking for asylum in the EU. In June, Orban began building a fence across Hungary’s border to keep out the migrants, but they kept coming. By September, they were in Budapest’s rail station and on its highways trying to move northward to Germany. When the European Commission decided at Germany’s behest to establish quotas of migrants for each nation and allotted Hungary 1,294, Orban refused to accept them.

Orban’s rejection of the refugees and of those who championed and sponsored them crystalized his case for Hungarian nationalism. “The crisis offers the chance for the national Christian ideology to retain supremacy not only in Hungary, but in the whole of Europe,” he said. He warned that the refugees were “overrunning us and threatening our civilization.” “We do not want to see in our midst any minorities whose cultural background differs from our own. We want to keep Hungary for the Hungarians.” Orban and Fidesz’s stance on refugees was very popular in Hungary. According to a 2016 Pew poll, 76 percent of Hungarians thought the influx of migrants increased “the likelihood of terrorism.”

In this crusade he found an enemy in George Soros, a Hungarian Jew who had migrated to New York and made billions as a currency speculator. Soros’s Open Society Foundation had funded educational and human rights campaigns in Hungary for decades. In 1989, Orban himself had gone to school in England on a Soros grant. In September 2015, Soros had written a column recommending that the EU “accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future.”

Orban launched a campaign against Soros with the premise, resting on little evidence, that Soros was behind a plan to turn Hungary into a haven for the refugees at the expense of its inhabitants. He took out hundreds of billboards in Budapest and throughout the countryside; one showed a smiling Soros and was captioned, “Let’s not let Soros have the last laugh.” Another read, “Soros wants to transplant millions from Africa and the Middle East. Stop Soros.” I found the billboards extremely disturbing, as did people I interviewed from Budapest’s Jewish community. With the April 2018 election approaching, Orban stepped up his attacks against the press and against the organizations and the university that Soros funded.

In the wake of Orban’s 2018 election victory, several hundred academics from Europe and the United States signed an open letter to Merkel calling on her to dissociate herself and her party from Orban. “The price that Europe will have to pay for the failure to stand up to Orban is also much higher than you seem to realize,” the letter read. “The European Union is founded on values including democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. By allowing the Hungarian government to destroy

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