“EU leaders should isolate the Hungarian pocket dictator at their summit in Brussels. He does not belong in democratic Europe.”
Budapest
Morning train out of Vienna, three hours pleasant drive to Budapest. The big city is slipping behind, first the military arsenal of the long gone empire, designed by the Danish starchitect Theofilus Hansen (in Austria: Freiherr von Hansen with his own grave of honor at the capital’s Central Cementary), then the mess of the suburbs, later the open expanses up to Marchfeld in the north, a landscape as important to the understanding of Central Europe as the Cossack lands to the understanding of Ukraine.
At Marchfeld, Romans and Barbarians, Mongols and Christians, Slavic and Germanic tribes met. In the Battle of Marchfeld in 1278, the Premyslide king Ottokar lost his life and his kingdom, which stretched from the Elbe to the Adriatic Sea. After this, the German-Roman Empire dominated around the Popes in Rome and the Habsburgs in Vienna. The steppe follows, the flat land that ends at the Pacific Ocean, the fullness of Europe being replaced by the emptiness of Russia.
After the European revolution in 1989, Budapest was the liveliest capital of the continent, full of ideas and optimism. Brilliant years. Not so anymore. The capital of the Magyars seems despondent. Rakoczi Boulevard tells its postmodern story: closed shops, dilapidated facades, backyards full of garbage, the traffic thin. The Covid epidemic has taken its toll. The rest is Prime Minister Orbán’s work.
Viktor Orbán, first a young communist, then a self-proclaimed liberal critic of communist Russia and its henchmen in Budapest, and as such the hero of bourgeois Europe, is now an agent of fascist, warmongering Russia in the West, a scandal that calls for action, preferably at the EU summit in Brussels later this week. The other day, EU President Charles Michel was in Budapest to talk sense to Orbán. He was sent home with a message that Hungary would torpedo the commission’s proposal to open accession talks with Ukraine and send 50 billion euros in aid to the Kyiv government, covering the period up to and including 2027.
Orbán also wants to sabotage the West’s sanctions against Russia and delay or completely prevent Sweden’s membership in Nato. Orbán has expelled the highly regarded Central European University from Budapest but allows the Kremlin’s so-called International Investment Bank, also known as the Bank of Russian spies, to operate freely, its personnel enjoying diplomatic immunity and consequently visa-free access to Schengen Europe. The EU has provided Orbán’s Hungary with billions of euros and is considering, before the summit in Brussels, to pay this unscrupulous pocket dictator the sum of 900 million euros for his goodwill with regard to Ukraine and Sweden, a serious and humiliating scandal. Most recently, Orbán embarrassed his Nato-allies by declaring, in Switzerland, his love for the neutral countries: “Unfortunately, we are members of Nato,” he said publicly. “We would love to be neutral… we love the neutral countries.”
In terms of security policy, there is no mistaking it: On behalf of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, Orbán is driving a wedge into Europe’s soft diaphragm, reaching from the Balkans to Central Europe and on via Austria and Switzerland to the border of France. His enemy is the democratic EU, not Putin’s Russia.
Hungary is not what Hungary was, a brave, small nation, endowed with good intellectuals and strong politicians like Imre Nagy, who led the uprising against the Soviet occupying power in 1956, after which he was hanged — at the request of Moscow — along with other heroic figures such as former Defence Minister of Pál Máleter and the journalist Miklós Gimes. In the 1980s, Hungary inspired the East and gained the admiration of the West. Orbán is the opposite, one of Europe’s most corrupt, most manipulative, and most untrustworthy leaders, specializing in winning elections, which may look democratic on the surface, but are rotten at the core.
The other EU leaders circle Orbán like the cat circles a pot of hot porridge. They have allowed Orbán — assisted by his nationalist, mainly provincial voters – to turn Hungary into a so-called illiberal democracy, an absurd contradiction. Most recently, the Orbán-government launched a national consultation. Voters are asked to answer questions like this: Do you agree with the EU rehousing millions of emigrants and refugees in Hungary? The intention is not to gage the state of the nation, but to create an atmosphere of fear, confusion sand lies that Orbán can exploit at home and in Brussels.
Over lunch in one of Budapest’s good restaurants – there are still many – I discuss with a Hungarian friend the tragedy that Hungary, which rose against communist Russia in 1956 and again in 1989, is failing itself and Europe under Orbán. “Everyone knows that Orbán mistreats this country, but how many can think? How many will think? We have come to a standstill,” says my friend, who prefers to remain anonymous, but about whom I would like to say that he is a linguist of international standing and a member of that increasingly rare species, called the independent intelligentsia. What will happen in Budapest, I ask him, if Putin’s regime collapses under the pressure of the war in Ukraine? “Putin is a gangster and murderer,” he answers. “Orbán is a gangster, not yet a murderer, but could soon become one. If Putin falls, Orbán falls. The result will be chaos. I look forward to it.”
A leading European diplomat has sent me his thoughts on Orbán. “The Hungarian Prime Minister,” he writes, “has developed into an even problematic fascist dictator, who does not belong in the European family, but who, with turn to the right of European politics, may be difficult to get rid of. The EU has brought economic progress to Hungary, but miraculously this progress has benefited Orbán and his gang in particular and only to a lesser extent society as a whole. We’ll see how far Orbán will go. Most likely, in the well-known EU fashion, the summit will push the problems, caused by Orbán, forward until the next summit or even until July, when Hungary takes over the presidency. Yes, it is depressing.”
I submit these outside thoughts to my Hungarian friend. He agrees with the consideration and believes, just like the diplomat, that the EU will once again shy away from this fatal fact that a Russian-orientated fascist and marauder, in the form of Viktor Orbán, is included in the top European leadership and in six months later will take over the EU-presidency. All according to the rules, of course, but the rules in this case must, in the interest of democracy, be discarded. In practice, the majority of the commission and the council can boycott the Orbán-led presidency and meet outside the formal frameworks of the union. It cannot be that the declared enemy of Europe, Vladimir Putin in Moscow, through Viktor Orbán, his strawman in Europe, undermines Europe and deals another blow at Ukraine, which is Europe and defends Europe. The Putinists will scream and yell. So be it. A boycott of the Russian agent Orbán will be dramatic, but the situation is dramatic and needs a dramatic solution.
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.
Per Nyholm´s latest book, “Journeys in the Land of Blood” (Barcelona and Copenhagen, 2023), is freely available to any serious Ukrainian publisher, who might want to publish it.
