BUDAPEST—Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has come to be known as President Putin’s “Trojan horse” inside the European Union. He is the continent’s biggest hater of the U.S. Democratic Party, referring to liberals as his “enemies,” and he was the only European leader who congratulated Putin on his record fifth inauguration this month. The signs are growing that Orbán is following Putin’s path deeper and deeper into an autocracy that could shake up Europe.
In Budapest, there is an unmistakable authoritarian atmosphere. As someone who lived in Russia through most of Putin’s reign, the memories evoked include Nashi, the Kremlin’s far-right youth propaganda movement. Billboards across the city show the faces of Orbán’s opponents covered by huge dollar signs and accompanied by slogans that read: “They sold themselves by the thousands.” We saw many similar signs in Moscow starting around 2011 when Putin began a crackdown on the opposition that would entrench him in power and ultimately lead to the disastrous invasion of Ukraine.
It’s not just Putin inspiring Orbán. He welcomed President Xi Jinping to Budapest this month and declared China to be one of the “pillars of the new world order.” If China is dreaming of a 21st century dominated by autocrats not democrats, then Orbán wants to get on board. Xi’s appearance in Hungary underlined the growing “strategic partnership” between the nations who announced a host of new economic, diplomatic and business agreements. Putin was in Beijing this month to make a host of similar pronouncements himself.
Moscow is watching the destabilizing divisions within Europe—some of which are stoked by Orbán in his role as a nay-sayer with a veto within the European Union—with great interest. The newly appointed Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov highlighted recently that Russia does have allies in the West: “There are elites and important social layers in the West, who are promoting traditional values; and Russia, perhaps, is their life-raft, which will help them protect at least something.”
Orbán, head of the right-wing Fidesz party, is clinging to that “life-raft” and Russia makes him work for its support; whether it’s blocking European aid for Ukraine, vetoing an EU plan to use frozen Russian assets, or speaking out against the European consensus on helping Ukraine win the war.
Even the other conservative parties see Orbán as selling out his country. The president of the Jobbik party, Marton Gyongyosi, told The Daily Beast: “Orbán is selling his role as ‘the trojan horse’ in the EU to both Putin and Xi.”
Orbán is benefitting from a growing number of deals with Russia and China. Gazprom recently stepped in to sponsor the country’s biggest soccer team, Russian loans have backed big state projects and—in return—it has been reported that Hungary is now a “safe haven” in Europe for FSB spies.
Gyongyosi says Hungarians are already paying the price for Orbán’s great game: “Nobody trusts us any longer,” he explained. “NATO is not sharing information with Orbán; Austria and Slovakia control their border with us; Hungary’s universities lose grants, funds for scientific research and a chance to take part in exchange programs available for other member states of the European Union.”
As he grows ever more isolated from Europe and the U.S. so he clings tighter to his authoritarian friends.
His cult of personality and iron-grip on Hungary is coming to resemble an authoritarian. The most recent survey conducted by the Hungarian government claimed that more than 98 percent of Hungarians support Orbán’s vetoes against EU aid for Ukraine and “believe that ceasefire and peace is needed for Ukraine, instead of weapons and bank transfers.”
He has also created a bill “protecting national sovereignty”—which looks as if it was dreamt up by Russia’s own banning-machine—that helps security services to go after anyone criticizing the government.
Orbán has now been in power for 14 years and easily won a landslide re-election in April 2022, just weeks after Putin sent troops to Ukraine.
Peter Kreko, one of the leading experts on Hungarian state disinformation, said Orbán’s domestic propaganda landscape was becoming eerily similar to Putin’s.
“Orbán likes to enjoy all the benefits of EU membership, while politically capitalizing on the anti-EU rhetoric: George Soros and Brussels have become some kind of axiomatic enemies in governmental communication, the ultimate cause of all evil. Putin’s and Orbán’s anti-EU rhetoric is very similar,” he told The Daily Beast. “They both say that the EU is increasingly a puppet of the United States—the ‘colonialization’ narrative grows widespread; they both say that this is a hotbed of the LGBTQ ‘rainbow propaganda,’ and that the EU went too far from its original moral values; they espouse trinity of values; nation, God, and family.”
If you walk around Budapest’s Liberty Square—the home of the U.S. Embassy—there is a strange collection of monuments to Ronald Reagan, to the Soviet liberation of Hungary in the World War II and to Harry Hill Bandholts, a U.S. Army general, who became famous in Hungary in 1919 when he refused to allow the Romanian military to steal Transylvanian treasures from the national museum. You will not find any monuments to the victims of homophobia. There is no memorial to the victims of autocrats; thousands of civilians were murdered under the rule of the fascist Arrow Cross Party in 1944-1945; and later thousands more were killed during 45 years of the Soviet occupation.
Propaganda billboards talk about Hungary’s successful development under Orbán’s government, restaurants, cafes and galleries around the square are full of respectable looking businesses and there is no reminder about the war raging in a neighboring country—Hungary and Ukraine share a short, 84-mile border.
History goes in circles in Hungary. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Orbán’s party Fidesz espoused strong anti-Russian views. “Orbán practically reversed the thinking of his own voters, turned them increasingly pro-Russian,” Kreko told The Daily Beast. “If you ask Fidesz voters these days who they blame for the war, they first blame the U.S., second Ukraine, and Russia would be only third.”
And yet it was within living memory that 1,000 Soviet tanks rolled along the streets of Budapest killing hundreds of civilians during a 12-day-long uprising against Stalinist rule. Soviet troops didn’t leave Hungary until 1991.
One of the deadly tanks used in 1956 is now exhibited at the House of Terror Museum in the center of Budapest. “Nobody explains to Hungarians at the House of Terror that Putin is bringing Stalinism back, one day you are proud of the revolution of 1956 and then 70 years later you are with Russia managed by the KGB,” said Istvan Hegedus, once a leading member of the Fidesz party, who knew Orbán well.
Hegedus, who is now chairman of the Hungarian Europe Society think tank, left the party when he saw Orbán turning towards the right. “Orbán’s behavior is irrational, he spreads anti-Soros propaganda, showing off his brutal methods— his doctrine is based on frustrating, he hates his own allies in the EU and blackmails them,” he told The Daily Beast.
He explained that the war in Ukraine is helping Orbán to persuade Hungarians to follow his plunge towards autocracy as he emulates Putin. “The war is the problem. Promises of peace on the conditions dictated by Putin sound promising to many in Hungary. People say, ‘We don’t want to die.’ Hungarians have forgotten what happened under Stalinism.”
As the old saying goes: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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