“With its silence, the EU supports Orbán institutionally, morally and financially… If you think that the EU can survive with authoritarian regimes in its midst, you are the victim of a delusion.”
Zsuszanna Szelényi, Hungarian political scientist
Helsinki
Hungary under Viktor Orbán has long been a tragedy, but before the EU’s special summit this Thursday, looks like a farce that takes up far too much of Europe’s time. The farce consists in the fact that, at the end of June, the EU instigator Orbán will take over the presidency of the EU and thus the day-to-day control – if the member states will otherwise accept it – of the union’s internal and external affairs.
It is a monstrosity that the majority of the heads of state and government cannot ignore at their summit, convened to grant Ukraine a billion sum despite Orbán’s loudly announced sabotage, an affair that even Robert Fico, the like-minded of the gangster-like Hungarians in neighboring Slovakia, hesitant to take seriously.
If the heads of state and government want to leave Brussels later this week with their political integrity intact, they must pull Orbán, this slimy eel, out of the mud of the Danube and show him to the public for what he is, a threat to Europe. Fico is less punchy but no less slimy. With their indulgence about warmonger Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, the two Central Europeans are reminiscent of England’s Neville Chamberlain, who returned to London after a meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1938 and announced: “Peace in our time.” The difference is that where Chamberlain was naive, Orbán and Fico were cunning, the former more than the latter.
There is no peace in our time. Everyone knows that in Finland. The government in Helsinki has closed the border with fascist Russia and in these weeks is looking for hundreds of so-called moles – more or less secret agents – that the regime in Moscow is supposed to have smuggled into the neighboring country. Everyone also knows that in the 20th century, the nation only barely survived two bloody wars with Russia, then and now an erratic superpower. Few Finns doubt that the fascist Vladimir Putin, with his attack on Ukraine, is trying to restore the empire of evil from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, which a communist Russia lost in 1989, and that both Orbán and Fico are in town for Putin. Everyone knows that the purpose of especially Orbán’s massive abuse of the EU’s rules is to empty the EU’s coffers of money and to destroy the West’s rule-based democracies. Both Orbán and Fico are repeating the maneuvers with which Hitler’s Nazis undermined the weak German democracy almost a hundred years ago with fatal consequences for Europe and the world.
In Helsinki, I read Hungarian political scientist Zsuszanna Szelényi’s book “Tainted Democracy” (London, 2022). She has known Orbán since both of their young days but broke up with him as a result of his over-the-top madness for power. “With its silence, the EU supports Orbán institutionally, morally and financially,” writes Szelényi. “If you think that the EU can survive with authoritarian regimes in its midst, you are the victim of a delusion.” Can it be said more clearly? Not known to me.
The summit in Brussels allows the EU leaders to show themselves as statesmen and stateswomen. They can expel Orbán from their circle, if not formally, then in practice. Fico can probably be knocked into place. Can Orbán? Maybe. The Hungarian head of government is not in the best political shape after his contubernal in Putin’s antechamber, Turkish President Erdogan, has given up his opposition to Sweden’s membership of Nato. Orbán must be made to guarantee that his handpicked parliament will follow Turkey’s example when it meets in Budapest on February 26. If he stands on his hind legs, the red-hot irons must be used. The EU’s majority must make it clear that Ukraine and Moldova must be admitted as soon as possible both to the union and to Nato, a repetition of the historic grandeur with which then-Chancellor Kohl in 1990 opened the Federal Republic to the remnants of the communist East Germany and made Europe a better continent. It is intolerable that one or more small states – which the EU finances with billions of dollars – can derail what dozens of serious member states consider to be the continent’s right and necessary course.
There is a need for a tightening of the EU’s rules to the extent that these can no longer be used against Europe’s security, prosperity, and democracy. The right of veto must be gradually removed and the right of the majority strengthened. The Union is about bringing Europe together. In the always sober Helsinki, a comment is heard: “If you don’t want the smoke in the kitchen, you can, like Great Britain, leave the stove.”
Author: Per Nyholm
Danish journalist since 1960, based in Austria, columnist and foreign correspondent at the liberal Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten. This text was translated and adapted for The Ukrainian Review by Stanislav Kinka.
