In July, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban proclaimed a desire to “preserve Europe for Europeans.” During the ensuing months, he resolutely enforced the implied aggression of that slogan against tens of thousands of migrants — including many refugees from Syria’s civil war who continue to seek passage through Hungary to the more economically secure western Europe and Germany in particular. On September 15, Hungary went so far as to pass an emergency law that criminalizes crossing its border without proper documents. Since then, troops armed with rubber bullets, net guns, and tear gas have been sent to the frontier.
Ostensibly, Orban’s anti-migration measures are wrapped in a nationalist and Islamophobic agenda. He has characterized Hungary as the frontline state defending Europe’s Christian heritage from uncivilized Muslim infiltration. Before MPs voted to escalate non-lethal force at the border, he told them: “Our borders are under threat, our life based on a respect for laws…and the whole of Europe. We are being run over.” He alternatively accuses migrants of merely pursuing higher material living standards and of bringing terrorism to Europe. “We like to have kebab kiosks, to buy lamb from the Syrian butcher at Easter, but we don’t want to see the numbers (of Muslims) suddenly radically rise,” he said to Hungarian ambassadors in early September.
But the prime minister’s ideological rhetoric conceals a single-minded quest to sustain his own power. Historically, he has continuously moved across the political spectrum to manipulate his country’s fractured public opinion. His radical anti-immigration stance was conceived primarily to save his ruling party from a slide in popularity — and it is working. Consequently the European Union’s ideological condemnations of Orban, unsupported by actions to match his muscularity, operate in a false framework and are effectively useless.
Orban’s idiosyncratic political trajectory reveals him to be far less of an ideologue than his current xenophobic, European-preservationist position may suggest. He ascended to the international stage as a student activist in 1989, when he gave a charismatic speech demanding free elections and the end of Communist rule in Hungary. After the Iron Curtain fell, he went on to study British liberal philosophy at Oxford. Understandably, some observers of Hungarian politics expected him to return as the archetypical, post-soviet liberal and modernizing leader.
His university roommate and former friend Gabor Fodor — with whom he co-founded the Fidesz Party, originally the “Alliance of Young Democrats” — has described their early attitudes as “alternative, liberal, and radical.” They rebelled against both the church and the Communist Party. But once the Soviet Union collapsed, Orban’s views diverged from his companion’s. Fodor said: “Orban recognized that Hungary was lacking a modern conservative party and began steering Fidesz in that direction. One has to recognize that now as having been very far-sighted.” Today Fodor belongs to the desperately splintered Hungarian Liberal Party, and the two are no longer on speaking terms.
Orban was elected prime minister in 1998. He lost the next election amidst a corruption scandal but won by a landslide in 2010, with a two-thirds Fidesz majority in parliament. Back in power, he enacted electoral and justice system reforms that drew criticism for suppressing the opposition of courts and media. His contradictory governance culminates in paradox: the same figure who once fought for democratic rights and individual freedoms in Communist Eastern Europe spoke last year of making Hungary an “illiberal democracy,” modeled on Russia or China. This record decidedly undercuts the ideological foundation he claims to back his aggression against refugees.
Orban has consistently and skillfully navigated the Hungarian political landscape to protect his personal power. He founded Fidesz as a libertarian party, but subsequently followed voters to the right. At a moment when slow economic growth, renewed allegations of corruption battered his ratings, and the far-right Jobbik party gained influence, Orban seized political opportunity in the migrant crisis. He became a nationalist to appeal to rampant anti-Muslim prejudice in Hungary; his ratings responded accordingly. Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton professor and specialist in Hungarian law and politics, speculates: “If the left were stronger in Hungary, he would probably tack left to undercut them.”
EU leaders recoil from Orban’s neo-fascist disposition with countering ideology that covers up for their own lack of decisive action. European council president Donald Tusk called him “unchristian,” saying: “Referring to Christianity in a public debate on migration must mean in the first place the readiness to show solidarity and sacrifice.” President of the European commission Jean-Claude Juncker and head of the European parliament Martin Schulz have also condemned his behavior. One EU diplomat claimed: “His excessive measures are absolutely isolated […] he is his own man.”
Beyond its grimaces and righteous head shaking, though, the EU is disinclined to actually compel a change in Orban’s policies. Speaking at the start of September, Frans Timmermans of the European commission affirmed his reluctance to sanction the Hungarian government. One such measure was taken against Austria in the 1990s, when the extreme right leader Jörg Haider came to office and Brussels invoked EU treaty provisions to revoke the member state’s voting rights. This resort was seen as a political response, backfired, and “weakened the EU’s capacity to react.”
The political party system in the EU further diminishes governments’ capacities to effectually isolate each other. Despite Orban’s increasing gravitation toward the far right, Fidesz belongs to the assemblage of Christian Democrats that comprises the European People’s Party in the European parliament. Notwithstanding the fierce criticism between Orban and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, her Christian Democratic Union Party has hardly dared put pressure on him.
EU leaders have yet to adopt a unified position to stand against Orban’s on the migrant crisis. The institution is paralyzed by outdated protocols and a leadership vacuum. In a certain sense, the ideologically fueled debate between Orban and much of the EU is illusory. Beneath the nationalist, religious, and moralistic rhetoric, each side strives foremost to protect its own control and power bases. While hundreds of thousands of refugees flee terror, civil war and devastation for a minimal chance at life, Europe preserves power for power.