All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 22, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
44:43
John Morgan: "Hungary: Illiberal Democracy in Action" (2019)
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Our next speaker is John Morgan.
He has been active in the meta-political right for more than a decade.
And he was editor-in-chief of Arctos Media from 2009 and 2016.
And since then, he has been very active for counter-currents publishing.
And he's also a regular...
Host on the Guide to Culture, which is a podcast on which he appears with Frody Midyord.
Frody Midyord is a great guy who holds regularly what is called the Skansa Forum.
It's really an excellent group, much like ours in Europe.
Mr. Morgan follows Hungarian politics very closely, and today he's going to talk about illiberal democracy in action.
So please welcome John Morgan.
Thank you, Jared.
Thanks, Jared.
Well, I think it's appropriate that I'm going to talk about Hungary today, because the last time I spoke here was in 2014, and I also spoke about Hungary then.
But, of course, both Hungary and Europe, the political situation has transformed almost beyond recognition since then.
I mean, after all, in 2014, the migrant crisis was only a twinkle in George Soros' eyes.
So, things are very different now.
So what is it like in Hungary today?
Well, I'm sorry to say, Hungary lies under a pall of darkness.
Its citizens are kept in thrall by being fed a steady diet of fear and imaginary threats, unbridled racism, and cynical hate-mongering through the government's relentless propaganda.
The people are cowed and starving.
But dare not speak out as the government brutally cracks down on even the slightest dissent.
Alternatives to the official narrative are smothered.
Hopelessness and despair are rampant.
But a small handful of resistors, supported with funds provided by noble and selfless oligarchs, are waging a desperate battle to overthrow the oppressive regime and put Hungary back in the hands of the wise men and women of Brussels.
who want nothing but to guide the country away from dictatorship and towards the utopia the European Union wants to grace it with in its infinite benevolence.
I'm just kidding, of course.
Hungary today is a very nice place.
And given that the opposition regularly holds demonstrations challenging the government that are tolerated by the authorities, and the fact that its capital, Budapest, is just as cosmopolitan as any Western European city, the idea that Hungary is a dictatorship...
It's a fantasy dreamed up by the same sort of people who equate Donald Trump with Hitler.
But this is the image that the Hungarian opposition, and of course the international media, wants people to have of the country, most especially abroad, as they want help from Western governments, including the U.S., in undermining Hungary's ruling party, Fidesz, and its prime minister,
Viktor Orban.
But while they have been very successful in convincing the rest of the world that Hungary is a dictatorship, So far, they haven't enjoyed very much success at home, given that Orban remains very popular in Hungary, that most Hungarians don't trust the opposition, and simply because the opposition is so incompetent,
but I'll get more into that later.
In 2015, when the migrant crisis erupted, or perhaps it's better to say accelerated since mass immigration has been a growing problem in Europe for at least half a century, Viktor Orban chose to take the lead in resisting the invasion.
And since then, has openly established Hungary as a haven from the ravages of mass immigration and neoliberal cultural insanity that's afflicting the West.
In my opinion, Orban is the most inspirational political leader today, and Hungary should serve as an example of the fact that it's not impossible to stand up to the neoliberal globalist order when there is the political will to do so.
When Steve Bannon was in Budapest last year, he said that Orban had been I would counter that Orban is what Donald Trump would be if Trump were actually like how his friends imagine him.
Thank you.
Hungary is a tiny country of 10 million citizens.
Its military is negligible.
And its economy is nowhere near the level of the Western European nations, the large ones anyway.
And yet Orban has managed to leverage Hungary into becoming one of the most important movers and shakers on the European stage by taking the lead in opposing Brussels' stand on immigration and culture.
Orban today serves an inspiration to critics of immigration and multiculturalism and populists around the world as Mr. Legalu.
Most especially in Europe, where he has become an important symbol for rightists everywhere.
And really, where Hungary is already at today, socially speaking, is where we are still working to get in America and Western Europe.
Orban has referred to his doctrine as illiberal democracy.
What this term means exactly remains unclear.
There is no illiberal democratic manifesto as of yet.
Although in interviews, Orban has described it as a type of politics which refuses the regime of political correctness which prevails in Western Europe, and which acknowledges that Europe's peoples have a distinct culture rooted in Christianity, which is our duty to preserve.
Also in 2014, Orban said of illiberal democracy that, quote, the Hungarian nation is not an aggregate of individuals, but a community that we must organize, strengthen, and uplift as well.
Earlier this year, he said, But in order to understand how Hungary got to this point,
I should say a few words about Hungarian history, and how this has forged the unique identity...
On the timescale of history, Hungarians are relative newcomers in Europe, having only arrived as nomadic raiders from the Central Asian steppes in the 9th century.
And it wasn't until their conversion to Christianity at the end of the 10th century that they began to settle down and become good Europeans.
But this unique origin means that to this day, Hungarians see themselves as distinct even from other European peoples.
This is nowhere more evident than in their language, which is not Indo-European and bears no connection to any other European language whatsoever.
Well, Finnish slightly.
Given the fact that Hungarian has always been limited to Hungary itself, this has served and continues to serve as something which isolates the country to a certain extent and, despite their immersion in Europe for over a thousand years, continues to give Hungarians a culture and an identity very unlike any other and I think contributes...
Both to their strong sense of self-preservation, as well as to their innate suspicion of outsiders.
Even today, Hungary has one of the lowest levels of English proficiency in Europe, and many Hungarians find it annoying when they encounter people in their own country who don't know their language.
On top of this, Hungarian history is the story of the many empires which have overrun it over the centuries, and Hungary has been on the losing side of every major war it has been involved in during modern times.
Hungary was fiercely attacked by the Mongols in the 13th century, and then much of the country was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in the 16th, after which the Turks ruled for more than a century before being evicted by a pan-European army.
This left Hungary under the dominion of the Habsburgs, who they rebelled against during the 1848 revolution, only to be crushed by combined Russian and Austrian forces.
This led to the period of the dual monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which any Hungarian would tell you was the golden age of Hungarian history, but which was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War when Hungary fought with the central powers.
The victorious allies, who sought to break up the allegedly oppressive Austro-Hungarian Empire by encouraging ethno-nationalism among the minority peoples in Central Europe and the Balkans, Chose to be particularly harsh with Hungary in the aftermath of the war.
The Treaty of Trianon, which was signed in 1920, was even harsher than the terms dictated to Germany at Versailles, and Hungary lost nearly 70% of its territory as a result, and 30% of ethnic Hungarians were left outside Hungary's borders.
A shock which unleashed ethno-nationalist sentiments across the region, and it is something that Central Europe is still struggling to recover from a century later.
The enmity between Hungarians and Romanians over Transylvania is still a running sore that continues to divide the region.
In the Second World War, Hungary fought with the Axis and was briefly annexed by the Third Reich in 1944 and 1945, when the Germans overthrew the government of Miklos Horthy after he attempted to negotiate a separate peace with Stalin.
This led to Hungary becoming a battlefield where the Axis and the Soviet Union fought it out, and much of the country, including Budapest, The aftermath of the war saw Hungary under Soviet domination, which they famously rebelled against in 1956,
only to be crushed yet again after the Western help that had been promised in CIA radio broadcasts failed to materialize.
Communism in Hungary ended in 1989, as it did throughout the Soviet bloc, and the Russian occupation ended soon after.
But in 2004, Hungary joined the European Union, which seemed enticing at first, but which many Hungarians, as well as government propaganda, have begun to describe as being something akin to the Soviet Union, with their many diktats on how Hungarians should
run their country.
So as you can see from all of that, it's not surprising that Hungarians are deeply suspicious of outsiders and foreign powers.
There's a very apt title of A History of Hungary, which was written by a liberal author, unfortunately, but the title nonetheless remains accurate.
Hungary, a thousand years of victory in defeat.
Even among other Europeans, Hungarians have a reputation for having a strong sense of their identity.
This is doubtless born out of the fact that their identity has been under existential threat throughout so much of their history.
As one Hungarian friend of mine put it, whenever there have been a lot of foreigners around, that has always meant that something bad was happening to them.
Thus, the sight of the thousands of migrants camped out around Keleti train station in Budapest in the summer of 2015 was extremely shocking and disturbing to the average Hungarian.
Indeed, when Orban and Fidesz ran for re-election in the national elections last year, opposition to mass immigration was essentially their only campaign issue, and they won handily.
This should tell you all you need to know about Hungarians' feelings about the possibility of becoming an immigrant country.
A term which Fides frequently uses to describe Western European nations.
But the nature of the Hungarians' conception of their own identity can sometimes be difficult for Westerners to grasp.
I believe this is traceable to Hungary's long history as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
You have to keep in mind that Hungary and many of the other nations of Central Europe have only been nation-states for barely a century.
The concept of identity that arose in the late 18th and 19th centuries in Western Europe and the United States was very much tied to the rise of the nation-state, which sought to unite all peoples of a common language, culture, and later race under one political roof.
But Hungary and Central Europe persisted as an empire until after the First World War.
As such, the idea of Hungarian-ness as something tied to race is still something quite foreign to the Hungarian mentality.
As in much of the rest of continental Europe, you rarely hear Hungarians use the term white to describe themselves.
They think of themselves as Hungarians, first and foremost, rather than primarily as part of a wider race.
I have occasionally heard Hungarians use the term white, and it's occasionally cropping up in right-wing political discourse there these days, but I think this represents something new that is emerging as Hungarians become increasingly aware of the threat posed by non-whites.
The concept of whiteness is something that emerges in countries where there are a lot of non-whites, and that's simply never been the case in Hungary.
Hungary today is still de facto an ethnostate, not because of government policies, but simply because they've never had mass immigration from outside, with the possible exception of the gypsies, but that's another matter.
Once I was walking the streets of Budapest with a friend from Italy, who happily explained, this is like going back to the 1970s, demographically speaking.
Which to a Hungarian would be quite amusing, since central Budapest is the most diverse, to use modern parlance, area of Hungary.
But to return to the issue of Hungarian identity, their unique sense of themselves is not to say that Hungarians don't identify with Europe or with Western civilization.
They absolutely do.
But they see themselves as something distinct within that group.
A good illustration of what I'm talking about is perhaps Transylvania, which until it was ceded to Romania in the Trianon Treaty in 1920, was in many ways the cultural heart of the Kingdom of Hungary, even though it was home to three major groups, Romanians, Hungarians,
and Germans.
My mother's grandparents were Transylvania Saxons, the largest group of ethnic Germans in the region, and they were born before the Trianon Treaty.
Thus, although their primary language, customs, and religion were German, They were nonetheless subjects of the Hungarian kingdom, as were all of the peoples of Transylvania at that time.
This did not mean, however, that there was an expectation that the Germans and Romanians of Transylvania would adopt the Hungarian language and customs as their own, as is expected of foreigners in a nation-state, integration, and so forth.
A Transylvania Saxon would, of course, speak Hungarian, Romanian, and other languages as well, but would understand his own language and culture to be German.
And at that time, all of the towns and villages of Transylvania were legally required to have a Hungarian, a Romanian, and a German name.
Regardless, however, each ethnic group had its own schools, community authorities, and even laws that were distinct from the others.
And despite the fact that these were very different peoples, they were living side by side.
And generally, at least until the 19th century, this was rarely seen as a cause for friction.
It was only then, with the rise of the nation-state, That calls for ethnically pure communities began to be heard in Transylvania and throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
And this led to a great deal of strife throughout the region.
Indeed, while those of us here tend to think of ethno-nationalism as a good thing, and I'm not saying it's a negative thing, I think it's questionable whether ethno-nationalism was a good thing for Central Europe.
Most Hungarian conservatives today, in looking back on their history, acknowledge that the Habsburg Empire was the best time for their region, and that in hindsight...
The Hungarians' numerous attempts to secede from the empire were short-sighted and ill-conceived.
And the Habsburg Empire certainly shows that even very different peoples, when they have certain cultural fundamentals in common, where central authority tends to be loose and most power is reserved for local communities, and where there are not lots of ethnic aliens,
as in today's Europe, can live together in harmony within such a structure.
Compare that with the efforts of the European Union to attain the same result today, albeit without any acknowledgement that the European Union actually needs to consist of Europeans.
And of course, despite living as separate communities, when the Mongols or the Turks attacked, which they did frequently, nobody had any hesitation about where they should stand on the battlefield and understood the need to come together.
Historical Transylvania is an example of true multiculturalism, Corporate version of it.
Unity in diversity, but remaining rooted and distinct, not a vague universalism.
And related to this is why the notion of racial purity, which has long been so popular among Western, European, and American nationalists, tends to be quite alien to the Hungarian consciousness.
This is not because of their Asian origins, as some Westerners tend to believe.
In my experience, the idea that Hungarians are deeply rooted in Asia is generally limited to some very esoteric and romantic groups on the fringes of the culture.
And indeed, a recent genetic study showed that the average Hungarian has only 4% Asian DNA.
I've only ever once met a Hungarian who claimed 100% Magyar ancestry.
The fact is that after centuries of living in the ethnic hodgepodge of Central Europe, most Hungarians are a heady mix of many different European ethnicities, not unlike white Americans, of course.
And it's been my observation that Hungarians tend to be more like Americans in their attitudes, sense of humor, and sense of individualism and so forth even than most Western Europeans.
And this is perhaps the reason why.
A typical Hungarian will tell you that his ancestors are Czech.
German, Croatian, Greek, and Hungarian, for example.
In his mind, however, he's no different from any other Hungarian, being united with them by language, culture, and history.
Central European identity is really something that needs to be explored more by the right.
But to get back to Orban and Fidesz, when the Soviet Empire in Europe collapsed in 1989, Orban was a student activist whose main causes were the dismantling of the communist state and the expulsion of Soviet troops from Hungary.
Viktor Orban, who was born in 1963, came from a rural background, which gave him a more practical approach to problems than many of his anti-communist colleagues, who tended to be more urban and intellectual, and thus it was easier for him to become dominant in the party.
Indeed, when Chuck Norris made a visit to Orban last year, Orban acted as Chuck's driver and told him that, like him, he's a street fighter.
Fides, of which Orban is an original member, had been founded the previous year, 1988.
And Orban, who was working as a sociologist in the Ministry of Agriculture at the time, quickly made a name for himself as a charismatic speaker.
Like most of the emerging leaders of the anti-communist opposition in the Soviet bloc at that time, he could be described as a liberal, liberal in the economic sense, believing that opening up Hungary to free-market globalism and adopting Western-style institutions would solve everything.
Perhaps needless to say, he's since repudiated these views.
Fidesz even received funding from George Soros' organizations in its early years.
Which has given rise to conspiracy theories in some circles, although I've never understood why we shouldn't grant politicians the same right to be able to change their minds and beliefs in the same way we do anyone else.
In 1993, Orban became president of Fidesz and began to move away from liberalism and toward a center-right position, which was what defined the party for more than 20 years thereafter.
In 1998, he was elected Prime Minister at the tender age of 35, but lost that position in the next election, in 2002, to the Liberal Socialist Party, the MSP, when they formed a coalition with another Liberal Party.
But it was the socialists' gross mismanagement of the country which led to some very dramatic events that completely transformed the Hungarian political landscape in 2006.
The socialists completely bankrupted the Hungarian economy.
But lied about the figures to the public in order to secure re-election in 2006.
Afterwards, the Socialist Party leadership held a secret meeting at which the then Prime Minister, Ferenc Gershan, admitted in rather crude terms that they had lied in order to win.
Unfortunately for them, however, the meeting was being secretly recorded and was later broadcast across the Hungarian mass media, which led to months of protests, rioting, and clashes with the police by nationalists.
It was in the street fighting that the formerly radical nationalist party, Jowek, first came to prominence, but I'll have a few words to say about them later.
Fidesz positioned themselves as the right-wing parliamentary opposition.
The socialists managed to hold on to power until the next election in 2010, but by then their reputation had been thoroughly destroyed.
In 2008...
Hungary was forced to take out loans from the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank just to keep the economy afloat.
In 2010, Orbán and Fidesz easily won the election, and even won a supermajority in Parliament, which gave them the ability to create a new constitution without having to consult any of the other parties, something they put to considerable use.
Hungary hadn't had a new constitution since the end of communism.
So Fidesz quickly remedied that.
And in it they enshrined Christianity as the basis of Hungarian culture, establishing their conservative intentions.
And Orban has frequently said that Christianity must be at the basis of Europe as a whole if it is to survive.
In statements, however, he has clarified that he doesn't mean that Hungary should literally enact Christian laws or bring religious authority into politics, as some American conservatives are fond of calling for.
But rather, that Hungary should seek to preserve institutions which were founded on Christian values, which he sees as being an expression of the Hungarian and European consciousness.
Fidesz began to take on the role of defining Hungarian identity in terms of its pre-communist traditions and customs.
This was something sorely lacking in Hungary, as any talk of a traditional Hungarian identity was squelched.
During the communist period.
And no other party took up the issue during the first two decades after communism ended.
In the same election, Jobek, which had previously not even been in parliament, emerged as the second largest opposition party and began to exert influence on the political atmosphere.
And this is more or less the state of affairs that has persisted since then.
The liberal left has still not been able to return to the political stage in any significant way in Hungary.
Orban immediately found himself in quite a predicament, however, with the country's economy in a shambles when he took over.
He had first requested a delay in repayment from the European Union, which was denied.
And this was Orban's first indication that Brussels wasn't going to be very friendly towards his government.
The IMF suggested an austerity program for Hungary, similar to what was done in Greece, which would have essentially turned Hungary into a ward of the international banks.
Orban rejected this, however, and instituted a radical economic program.
Which included cutting taxes, raising the minimum wage, and most importantly, taxing multinational corporations in Hungary.
In spite of the dire predictions of Orban critics, this got Hungary out of the red quickly, and in fact they managed to repay their debt to the IMF early in 2013.
In 2011, Fidesz also passed a series of laws which gave the state greater authority over regulating the mass media.
Which allowed their own messages to dominate in the public sphere.
This is obviously something very crucial for any political movement that seeks comprehensive change.
But it's also one of the main things which the opposition and international liberalism use to condemn Orban for being anti-democratic.
When the EU has attacked Orban over this, he has replied that these laws are not significantly different from those that exist in Western European countries.
And in fact, he's right.
Although in Western Europe, such laws are generally used to suppress right-wing and nationalist discourse, which goes to show that it's not the law, but what it protects, that is the crucial issue for liberals.
But the fact is, the opposition still has plenty of opportunities to get its viewpoint out in Hungary, given that they have many of their own newspapers, magazines, websites, and even the largest television network in Hungary, not to mention their frequent public demonstrations.
The government's viewpoint certainly dominates in Hungary.
And they have definitely taken steps to preserve and extend that dominance.
But the image of jackbooted stormtroopers raiding opposition media offices and shutting them down is simply false.
When liberals claim that something is undemocratic, what they really mean is that a viewpoint other than their own is being communicated.
Democracy, in their view, only prevails when theirs is the only permissible message.
But during Orbán's second term, Fidesz was really a center-right party.
With Jobik occupying the radical spectrum.
It was the start of the migrant crisis in 2015 which changed everything.
Hungary lies along the Balkan route which the migrants used to get to Western Europe from Greece through its border with Serbia.
When the migrants started flowing through, Hungary at first did nothing since the migrants only wanted to transit through Hungary to richer pickings in the West.
And it was quite evident from the rhetoric coming from Brussels and Western European leaders that they wanted to take the migrants in.
But Orban soon recognized that migration was still a threat to Hungary, considering that once they're inside Europe's Schengen zone, where there are no border checks for travel between countries, there should be no way to prevent the migrants from returning to Hungary at a later time.
Likewise, Orban recognized that the fate of Europe today is a collective one.
If Western Europe loses its majority in identity as a result of mass immigration, That will be devastating for Europe as a whole.
So he's taken the lead in articulating this danger, since few in Western Europe are willing to do so.
And moreover, Orban saw it as a political opportunity.
As I mentioned before, by establishing himself as the center of the anti-migration right in Europe today, he has managed to leverage Hungary into a much more influential position than it would otherwise have.
I should note that some Hungarian critics have countered that Orban uses the immigration issue to distract from domestic problems, and there might be some truth to this, quite honestly.
But at the same time, he recognizes that immigration and demography are the crucial issues of our age.
So in September 2015, Hungary completed its fence on the Serbian border and passed a number of laws to assist its functioning, such as making damaging the fence a criminal act.
Angela Merkel agreed to take in the migrants that were already camped out in Budapest, and they were soon packed off.
Having been an eyewitness, I can tell you that it was really something quite remarkable.
The center of Budapest went from teeming with thousands of migrants to there being no migrants at all within a few days after the fence was completed.
It just goes to show that immigration is a problem that can be dealt with when there is the will to do so.
Whenever people tell me that a wall on the Mexican border won't solve our immigration problems, I just say it worked for Hungary.
But the fight against the migrants wasn't over yet, and isn't.
The EU soon began demanding that all of its member states accept quotas of migrants so that they could be more evenly distributed and not concentrated in the border states.
Orban refused.
Saying that when Hungary agreed to join the EU, there was nothing in the agreement which said that Brussels would get the right to decide who could live in Hungary and who couldn't.
In October 2016, Orban put the measure to a national referendum.
The liberal parties boycotted it, but of those who participated, over 98% voted against the EU's demand.
As I mentioned before in their campaign for the 2018 national elections, opposition to immigration...
And their concurrent struggles with Brussels and the Soros network were more or less Fides' only campaign platform.
It was widely expected that they would win, but as the opposition was highly motivated, many expected that Fides would at least fail to attain a parliamentary supermajority again.
The skeptics were wrong, however, and Fides won with the supermajority, showing that most Hungarians agree with Orbán's insistence that Hungary will never become an immigrant country.
Immigration isn't the only area in which Fidesz has made its mark as a right-wing force, however.
Last year, Vides enacted legislation which defunded gender studies programs in all Hungarian institutions, which it condemned as a pseudoscience.
Thank you.
Orban himself has repeatedly condemned the values of the 1968 generation, as he calls them.
And in February, Orban announced an ambitious new program to promote an increase in the Hungarian birth rate, including the elimination of taxes for women who give birth to four or more children for the rest of their lives.
Orban, it seems, has the radical notion that the solution to the much-discussed labor shortages and economic growth that Western countries are so obsessed with, and that they say justifies mass immigration, Is maybe to have more Hungarian babies rather than to bring in people from the Third World.
A bizarre notion, I know.
And Soros has become something of an antichrist for Fidesz and their propaganda.
There's been some really hilarious anti-Soros posters all over Hungary for years now.
And Fides has been pressing the attack against the Soros network by passing what was termed the Stop Soros Bill last year, which had the aim of driving the open society foundations from the country by, among other things, imposing huge fines for providing aid and services to illegal immigrants.
Upon the passage of the bill, the OSF didn't even try to fight it and announced that they were moving their operations to Berlin.
Fides has also famously been in conflict with Central European University.
An institution founded and funded by Soros, which was granting American degrees in Budapest, and acting as a vector for Western liberal opposition to Orban.
I don't have time to go into the details now, but suffice to say, Fidesz passed legislation which forced CEU to close most of its operations in Budapest and move them to Vienna.
Likewise, Orban has been establishing himself as an integral part of the international right.
He maintains close ties with Vladimir Putin to the EU and America's chagrin and has been cultivating close economic ties with China and Turkey and with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, who actually came to his aid during his conflict with Soros in 2017.
Within Europe, he is close to Matteo Salvini in Italy, who he recently welcomed to Hungary, as well as to the ruling PIS party in Poland.
Poland and Hungary, as they always have historically against other enemies, have a mutual aid policy in their respective conflicts with Brussels, and want many of the same things today.
From all this, it should be clear that Orban is pursuing a powerful line intended to preserve Hungary's sovereignty and identity.
He is frequently derided in the West for being a radical or worse, But the fact that his rhetoric and actions are seen as in any way radical is only an indication of how far to the left the West has gravitated in recent decades.
In my opinion, Fidesz is not at all radical.
Surely, these would have all been seen as sensible moves to most people only half a century ago.
And indeed, I think the term illiberal democracy itself is a bit of a misnomer, as Frank Furedi has suggested in his book Populism and the European Culture Wars, which is primarily about Hungary.
I can highly recommend it, by the way.
It's a book that's been recommended by Orban himself.
The irony of Hungary's supposed illiberalism is that it is actually Brussels and the globalists, more generally, who are being illiberal.
Their liberalism is not that of John Stuart Mill and so forth.
Rather, liberalism today is a set of dogmas that are militantly imposed by force, if necessary, on anyone who dissents from them.
Orban wants to set Hungary outside of these dogmas and is skeptical of the Western approach to immigration.
In a truly liberal viewpoint, his desire to resent alternatives would be tolerated, but he is instead derided for being a dictator by his opponents for daring to propose a unique path forward for his people.
Thus, his illiberalism should be seen as a rejection of attempts to make Hungary submit to the demands of globalization, rather than as a rejection of the values of classical liberalism.
The fact that this is being condemned by our international elites is a sign of how much trouble we're in.
And as an aside, I'll mention that just this week, Facebook deplatformed MediaWorks, which is Fides' biggest media distributor, probably not coincidentally the week before the European elections.
And unfortunately, we also have to see the United States as part of the opposition to Hungary's agenda.
The situation has gotten slightly better than it was under Obama when John McCain lambasted Orban for being a dictator on the floor of the Senate and when the then-acting U.S. ambassador to Hungary, Andrzej Goodfriend, openly encouraged anti-Orban protesters.
But the situation still isn't good.
During the 2018 election campaign, the U.S. State Department funded the opposition media in Hungary.
And just on Monday, Orban was invited to meet President Trump at the White House.
The first such invitation Orban has received since the Clinton administration.
Trump praised Orban, but at the same time that they were meeting, State Department officials were meeting with leaders of the Hungarian opposition.
And on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that sanctions are being readied in Washington that will target members of the Hungarian government if they don't comply with American demands.
So don't believe, if any of you still do, that Trump has changed anything in Washington.
The U.S. still acts against right-wing movements around the world.
I still think the meeting was a victory for Orban, however, because the goal of the meeting for the neocons in Trump's administration was to try to convince him to stop getting so chummy with Russia and China.
He won't do this, but he does get the added legitimacy of having met with the American president.
So really, Orban got something while the U.S. got nothing.
Well, I think Orban has been very good for Hungary.
I don't want to give the impression that I think Fidesz is perfect.
There are crises in the public health and education systems in Hungary that are in dire need of being addressed.
And the biggest problem they have is the brain drain westward, a problem which afflicts all of the former communist states in Europe.
It's been estimated that upwards of a million Hungarians are currently living and working outside of Hungary, mostly in Western Europe, in pursuit of higher wages.
And this, of course, includes many of their most skilled workers.
So for Hungary to be truly viable going into the future, Orban needs to figure out a way to convince many of those to come back and to keep skilled young people from leaving.
It's a difficult problem, to be sure, but one that needs to be solved.
Certainly, Fides wants to retain its huge popularity.
I should also say a few words about Jóbex, since I talked about them the last time I was here, and I was full of praise for them back then, because I didn't, and I don't think anybody could have anticipated, that they would...
Become essentially the opposite of what they once were.
I don't have time to go into all the details now, but in brief, Jobeck had some successes in local elections in early 2015.
Their popularity hit 30%, and it really looked like they had a chance of unseating Fidesz in the next election.
But when the migrant crisis hit and Orban took the lead, it put Jobeck in the unenviable position of only nodding their heads in agreement with what he was doing.
Orban won back the momentum, so Jobeck countered by reinventing itself as what I call the Anyone But Orban Party, presenting themselves to everyone who hates Orban above all else as the ones with the best chance of defeating him.
In essence, they swapped places with Fidesz on the political spectrum, which then became the Radical Rights Party, ironically.
Since 2015, Jobeck has reversed themselves on almost every position that they held prior to that time, trying to reestablish themselves as centrists.
In doing this, they sought to link up the Hungarian radical right, their original base, with the liberal left.
They succeeded in winning the support of at least some of the liberals.
It's true, but most of their original base has abandoned them.
As a result, Jobik did do fairly well in the election, becoming the largest opposition party, but they fell far short of challenging Fides' dominance, let alone of winning.
Nowadays, Jobik openly participates in demonstrations with the liberal left-wing parties.
Attacks Orban and Fidesz for allegedly trying to bring Hungary out of the EU, a position they themselves once advocated, and has announced its intention of forming a single parliamentary list along with some of the liberal parties to compete in the upcoming local elections in Hungary in October.
I'm sorry, not parliamentary, in the local city and town elections.
Thus, Jobbik can no longer be considered a rightist party in any true sense.
Jobek's popularity has plummeted in the last year, and if present trends continue, I think we'd expect them to vanish as a significant political force after the 2022 elections.
There is a new party that was born out of the ashes of the old Jobek, however, and that is Nihozank, which means our homeland, which was founded by Laszlo Torecki, the mayor of Ashotola, which is a town on Hungary's border with Serbia.
He was the one who first called for the border fence there.
And with a long history of right-wing activism, he commands a lot of respect on the right in Hungary.
They haven't even been going for a year yet, and they're still polling in the low single digits, so it's unclear what their future will be.
So far, they've been trying to distinguish themselves by talking about issues Fides doesn't like to address, such as gypsy crime.
It's possible they might gain enough support to enter parliament, but ideally they could provide the right-wing critique of Fidesz that Jobeck used to provide and help to influence Fidesz further to the right, but only time will tell.
So what does the future hold for Mr. Orban?
His future certainly seems bright.
The opposition in Hungary remains in total disarray, and it's only by working with Jobek that they can hope to make any headway at all.
In December of last year, in response to what the opposition dubbed the slavery law, which were new employment regulations enacted by Fidesz, The liberal left groups organized protests around the country with the intention of discrediting Orban in the eyes of the Western media.
They also tried to provoke a strong reaction from the authorities by having liberal members of parliament try to break into the public television station, and in some instances even by attacking the police, hoping to incite violence.
which they could then film and use it to lend credence to their claim that Orban is a dictator.
The authorities didn't take the bait, however, and the opposition was undone by its own incompetence, with opposition leaders being filmed talking about how to present the most shocking images to the media, and one such leader being foiled from entering the television station when she was knocked over by running into a closing door,
which was filmed.
Needless to say, their case wasn't very impressive to most Hungarians, and so, for now at least, The Remain is going to stay out of power.
But a good indication of how successful Fidesz is will come with the European parliamentary elections, which will happen in just a few days.
Right-wing populists are expected to do very well across Europe, as has already been discussed.
Fidesz included, with immigration remaining a hot issue, and Orban is very much at the center of those developments.
Fidesz has aroused some controversy within the European People's Party, which is the largest bloc in Brussels, and that's allegedly a conservative party.
But which recently censured Fidesz for being anti-democratic.
Indeed, the party's president, Manfred Weber, who is running for re-election, said that he would rather lose than receive Fidesz's support.
Orban responded by saying, OK, then Fidesz will not support Weber for the presidency.
Given that the EPP includes a lot of right-wing populist parties, such as Salvini's Lega and Poland's PIS, and that these look to Orban for guidance.
It's very possible that Orban has made himself something of a kingmaker within the EPP, and hopefully after the election, they can take some steps towards reversing Europe's suicidal policies in relation to immigration.
There's plenty more I could say, but I think I've covered the most important points.
In conclusion, I'll just say that Viktor Orban should serve as a beacon of hope for defenders of Western civilization everywhere.
As he's made a lot of headway against the neoliberals, despite coming from such a small and comparatively weak country.
Nevertheless, his enemies are on the lookout to exploit any weakness they can in order to undermine him.
Orban said something recently that I think many of us in this room can relate to, and I quote, Although we're convinced that we're right factually and morally, and that we represent Europe's interests, Perhaps no prime minister in country has ever had a reputation in Western Europe which is as bad as mine and Hungary's today.
Someone must come along with us, because we can hold out for a while, but we cannot hold out forever.
Mr. Orban's dream is the same as ours, a Europe and a West more generally that retains its sovereignty and its identity, and we're all fighting as best we can, but eventually we need more powerful forces to come to our aid.
The most important power, however, is the people, and across the West today, we see that our peoples are starting to wake up.
Let's hope that in 50 years, all of our nations will be following Hungary's example and refuse to submit to any invader.
Thank you.
So, questions?
So David Irving wrote a book, and you can just answer this question, yes or no.
He wrote a book in 1956 about the Hungarian Revolution.
Yes. He said it was not a revolution against the Soviets, but it was a revolution against an ethnic group that was installed by the Soviets to rule over them.
And you mentioned Brussels, IMF, George Soros, Wall Street Journal.
Can I connect the dots here and say that this is still the same ethnic struggle going on in Hungary that was going on in 1956?
Well, I can certainly tell you that many Hungarians see it that way.
In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, Orban was interviewed by, I forget his name, the French leftist intellectual who's very popular.
But anyway, he was being very aggressive with Orban and accusing him of being a racist and an anti-Semite.
And he asked Orban, you know, what was the reason for so much anti-Semitism in Hungary?
And he said, well, that's easy.
It's because of the Bellecune Revolution in 1919.
And that's still a very strong memory for many Hungarians.
And they actually coexisted with Jews quite peacefully before that.
But definitely the communist legacy is something that contributes to anti-Semitism in Hungary.
Now, Fidesz, the party, is not anti-Semitic at all.
I mean, they enjoy a very good relationship with the Jewish community both in Hungary and also in Israel.
But yeah, I definitely think Hungarians in general...
Definitely associate communism with that.
Drawing on your closing sentiment that you hope that many other countries would follow Viktor Orban's example, in your experience, have you seen in any of the neighboring countries, especially those in the Visegrad group, like Austria and Poland, are they drawing any influence at all from Orban in terms of social policy and just the notable ones that Hungary has set forth?
In particular, the incentivization of birth rates through tax that you mentioned?
I haven't heard of any specific program targeting birth rates in other countries, but it must be something that they're thinking about.
But I really think Hungary is the best example because Poland, for example, has been bringing in Pakistanis and other third-world workers to make up for their labor shortfalls, even while they're claiming to be very anti-immigration.
▲
Export Selection