Can Orbán be described as synonymous with “spoiler”, when revealing an important plot development in a film or book can diminish the surprise or suspense for a first-time viewer or reader? That is, does Orbán belong to an already-seen category of “soft dictators” and enlightened absolutists? In any case, Orbán has already earned the nickname “Viktator” for his 14-year rule of Hungary. Even though he is only the head of a Central European country with 10 million citizens, he is still impossible to ignore
Author: Stojan Sinadinov
When the reputable portal “Politico” published the annual ranking of the most influential people in Europe for 2024, it was no surprise the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was third on the list in the group of disrupters, right behind “Putin’s banker” Elvira Nabiullina and the Catalan separatist Carles Puigdemont. “Politico” categorizes the European influentials into three groups—doers, disrupters, and dreamers. As part of the group of politicians who actively obstruct an activity or process, causing a disruption or problem, Orbán received the descriptive rating “spoiler.”
Can Orbán be described as synonymous with “spoiler”, when revealing an important plot development in a film or book can diminish the surprise or suspense for a first-time viewer or reader? That is, does Orbán belong to an already-seen category of “soft dictators” and enlightened absolutists? In any case, Orbán has already earned the nickname “Viktator” for his 14-year rule of Hungary.
Since the beginning of his second stint as Hungarian leader in 2010, Viktor Orbán has rolled back the rule of law and media freedoms at home, clashed with the EU’s institutions, held Brussels hostage by vetoing policies in an effort to extract cash, and developed something of a bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin. With the European parliamentary election around the corner, the threat of the far right rising around the bloc and war on Brussels’ doorstep, Hungary’s strongman is on track to continue or act as the EU’s spoiler, “Politico” assessed.
Drawing a portrait of Orbán in the eve of taking over the rotating EU presidency in July of this year, “Politico” hinted at his possible strategy after losing an ideological ally in Poland in the form and work of the nationalist Law and Justice political party, with which he has long avoided the European Commission’s harshest penalty by threatening to veto internal penalties under Article 7, which suspends the voting rights of the EU governments when there is a breach of the Union’s fundamental values. (Although rights may be suspended, there is no mechanism for expelling a state from the Union.)
Even though Orbán is only the head of a Central European country with 10 million citizens and poor natural resources, he is still impossible to ignore.
Love him or hate him—and most people do one or the other—you have to pay need to him. Indifference is not an option, writes “Politico,” in an article titled “The Conservative Subversive”
Why is this the case?
From liberal to “Putinist” and “Erdoğanist”
The youngest Prime Minister (at 35 in 2010) of an EU member state, Orbán, according to the BBC, transformed Hungary into what the European Parliament condemned as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy,” while he himself describes it as a mixture of “illiberal democracy” and “Christian liberty.” In constant conflict with other EU member states over the migrant issue and the war in Ukraine, Orbán pushed his ideological “brand” made up of the ideas of the French far-right (National Front), the Spanish left (Podemos), the new conservative leaders of Poland, Italian Socialist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, the Tories in Britain and Donald Trump in the United States.
Orbánism resembles the other -isms taking root on Europe’s edges—in Russia (Putinism) and Turkey (Erdoğanism). His variety is, to be sure, diluted: not bluntly authoritarian, broadly in line with EU norms. Still, his government has kneecapped NGOs, independent media and the judiciary in ways that Putin and Erdoğan would admire. Like them, his confrontational style with his opponents, domestic and foreign, has strengthened his popular position at home, writes “Politico.”
Orbán says his people prefer stability and strong leadership to liberalism, the decadent alternative that since the fall of the Berlin Wall has turned, as he says in an interview with “Politico,” into a tyranny of “political correctness” and “mainstream politics.”
Orbán believes that liberal democracy is no longer globally competitive, pointing to Singapore, Russia, Turkey, India and China as successful non-Western and liberal political systems.
We have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world, says Orbán.
Such a system always needs enemies, mostly imaginary ones. The choice of George Soros as the enemy of the “new values” in Hungary was not Orbán’s, however.
Orbán’s self-declared illiberalism, just like Putin’s attacks on “obsolete liberalism,” laid a trap: instead of focusing on his party’s systematic capture of the state and economy—creating an oligarchy-friendly autocracy that in many ways resembles Russia—critics were dragged (or belligerently entered) on to Orbán’s preferred battleground: culture and morality. He and his allies could triumphantly charge that the very liberals celebrating diversity and tolerance were zealots determined to destroy conservative ways of life. Never mind that “liberal nihilists” (Orbán’s words) in Brussels do not dictate to EU member states how to regulate abortion or, for that matter, immigration—like so many far-right populists, Orbán has been adept at creating a community defined by imaginary common victimhood. Those allegedly intent on victimizing Hungary could change over time—one year, it was migrants, then George Soros, then Brussels. What had to remain constant was a sense of moral threat, where national existence is at stake day and night, writes Jan-Werner Müller for “The Guardian.”
Antisemitism will never die
Political consultants George Birnbaum and Arthur Finkelstein from the US gave Orbán the idea to target George Soros as an enemy. Soros was a good target for demonization, according to Birnbaum, because enough people in Hungary didn’t like the idea of the billionaire controlling policies and processes from behind the curtain. Of course, that demonization is not only local, on the contrary.
According to the idea of Birnbaum and Finkelstein—although both of them are of Jewish origin, they choose the Hungarian Jew Soros as a target, because they think that anti-Semitism will never die, so why not use it!—Orbán accused George Soros’ civic groups of “covertly and with foreign money trying to influence Hungarian politics,” while the Central European University, founded by Soros in 1991 when Hungary introduced democracy, was forced to move most of its activity in Vienna in 2019. By the way, Orbán was also a scholarship recipient of the Soros Foundation “Open Society” as a young man, and as a fighter against anti-Semitism, he gave one of his daughters the “Jewish” name Ráhel. Analysts consider her to be among the most powerful women in Hungary today: she and her husband are constantly enriching the family business portfolio by buying vineyards, wineries, real estate and tourism acquisitions, not only in Hungary, but also in the region.
The lover of western films, because they are not complicated (“Once Upon a Time in the West” by Sergio Leone is his favorite), with Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl as his political idols, also believes that it is impossible for someone not to be Hungarian. When Orbán posted a photo on Instagram two years ago of himself wearing a red-white-green scarf with a map of “Greater Hungary” (Hungary’s borders from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919), which includes parts of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine, it caused an avalanche of reactions (“Greater Hungary” is also called “Saint Stephen’s Hungary,” after the first Hungarian king at the beginning of the 11th century, Stephen, who was later canonized). Two years before that, Orbán took a picture with the map of that “Greater Hungary” at a session of the presidency of his Fidesz party, and at the unveiling of the “Hungarian Calvary” monument marking the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Trianon, one of the memorial plaques read “Fiume-tengerre Magyar” (“Rijeka—Hungarian Sea”).
Analyzing the “small” imperialisms in the region, the economist Branko Milanovic points out two problems with the Eastern European intellectual elites.
They are: nationalism and parochialism … East European nationalisms always define themselves as “emancipatory” and “liberal” when dealing with stronger powers, while, once themselves in power, in regard to those who are weaker or less numerous, they behave imperially, reproducing the very same traits of which they are critical in others.
It is now somewhat strange how Orbán became the main “cat’s paw” of Russia and China in Europe?
The “Trojan horse” of Russia and China in Europe
If there is one thing that cannot be denied to Orbán, it is persistence. A decade ago, for him, the region became too small for political “competition,” so on the wave of the migrant crisis in 2015, Orbán started a campaign to be a factor on the European continent.
A hard stance on migration is one plank of an ideology that Orbán likes to call “Christian Democracy.” It centers on traditional conceptions of the family alongside nationalism; it is also explicitly defined in opposition to liberalism, which allegedly promotes unrestrained freedom and egotism. Orbán is comfortable using these principles to restrict rights, but he also insists they have a popular mandate: his party, Fidesz, has won two-thirds majority in Hungary’s parliament in four consecutive elections (albeit with plenty of manipulations), analyzes Jan-Werner Müller in “The New York Review.”
But when the great migrant wave passed, Orbán turned to new “tools” for manipulation after using up “Christian democracy,” even though his political party Fidesz fell short of his expectations in this year’s European elections. The presidency of the EU from July of this year, with Trump’s open motto “Make Europe Great Again” was supposed to be the crown of his campaign.
Undeterred, he took a new course, rebranding himself as an international peacemaker and vowing to end the war in Ukraine. When he assumed the presidency, he made surprise visits to Kyiv, Moscow and Beijing, and met with Donald Trump in Florida. Other European leaders were horrified by this unauthorized display of solo diplomacy, and especially by his obliging meeting with Putin. They quickly clarified that the renegade politician was not acting on behalf of the EU in the alleged “peacekeeping mission,” analyzes Müller.
Although one of the most unpopular politicians in Europe, Orbán does not give up easily. In parallel with the constant blockades of the European economic and military aid to Ukraine and other important geopolitical moves of the Union, which serve to haggle over the unblocking of the money frozen in the EU funds due to non-compliance with the rules, this summer Orbán is again threatening to make the EU security porous with the “Golden Visa” program that does not exclude citizens of the Russian Federation and Belarus. The defeatism he spreads with his panegyrics on the “hyper-rational” Russian leadership and the conviction that Ukraine will never be able to become a member of the EU and NATO is complemented by the prediction that global power will shift from the “irrational” West to Asia (China above all) and Russia, all while NATO is doomed to suicide.
North Macedonia’s “greatest” friend
Practicing “pimping” for Chinese investments in the countries of the Western Balkans, Orbán’s policy actually hinders their European integration, allowing the penetration of Chinese “soft power” in large quantities. North Macedonia is also on that geopolitical route.
The idyllic “bromance” with continuity of a decade and a half—between Orbán and the ruling VMRO-DPMNE (International Macedonian Revolutionary Organization—Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity) was also confirmed during the recent visit of the Hungarian Prime Minister to the country, on the 27th of September of this year. Among the announcements for the finalization of Corridor 10 and the realization of the Athens-Skopje-Belgrade-Budapest high-speed railway, Orbán also revealed that this was his 18th meeting with Mickoski, and that his party Fidesz and VMRO-DPMNE are partnering parties and it is good that two partnering parties are in power and cooperating. This “bromance” now rests on a loan of 500 million euros from Hungary to North Macedonia, with an announcement for the same amount of money in the next period if the country needs it.
We should give an Оrder to Viktor Orbán and declare him a hero for helping us. This special economic cooperation came about because of my personal friendship with Orbán as well, and it was also discussed during the time when we were in opposition and plans were made for how we would work if we came to power, said Mickoski in an interview for “Telma”, announcing Orbán’s visit.
That Order would be another piece of the honors around Orbán’s neck that his political like-minded people from the Balkans placed on him, like Vucic’s Serbia two years ago and Milorad Dodik’s Republika Srpska this year. However, Mickoski is 9 years late: as if it is forgotten that the former president Gjorge Ivanov already awarded Orbán in 2013 as a sign of gratitude for Hungary’s friendly relationship, for its strong support in fulfilling the country’s strategic goals and for its principled attitude towards the constitutional name.
This decision by President Ivanov is an act of expressing gratitude to the Hungarian state, the Hungarian people and all previous Hungarian leaders, Ivanov’s Cabinet announced at the time.
A year later, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and the People’s Republic of China—within the framework of the Third Meeting of Heads of Government of China and Central and Eastern European Countries—signed an agreement on mutual customs cooperation. The agreement stipulates that the customs of all four countries cooperate in the area of exchange of information and documents, to recognize the customs clearance and the procedure of customs, as well as to deepen the cooperation. The then Deputy Prime Minister of Finance Zoran Stavreski assessed it is a large and significant project for the region, which has a good potential to help the economic development of our country and all the countries in the region.
On the other hand, Hungary acts as a cover for China in providing a loan of 500 million euros to North Macedonia. This, as reported by the portal “360 Degrees”, is claimed by Szabolcs Panyi, the Chief Investigative Journalist and Editor of the investigative portal “VSquare” based in Budapest, whose focus is, among other things, Russian and Chinese influence.
In any case, attention to Orbán must be paid since indifference to the “conservative subversive” is not an option…
