Like his counterparts across the continent, Orban had received a passionate appeal from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In Orbán’s case, Zelensky referred to the Hungarian uprising against communism in 1956, which was ruthlessly suppressed by Moscow. “There is no time for hesitation. “It’s time to decide,” Zelensky told Orban. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks from Kyiv via video to European Council leaders on March 24. (Press Office of the Ukrainian Presidential Press via AP) The man sometimes referred to as “Viktator” – who deliberately identifies with the “dictator” – remained unmoved. “Our moral responsibility is not for Ukraine: our moral responsibility is for our own people,” he said in a radio interview last Sunday, noting that Hungary was heavily dependent on Russian energy. He also discriminated against his liberal opponents, who said they were willing to “sacrifice our interests on the altar of Ukrainian interests and do what the Ukrainian president says we must do.” These liberal opponents hope to win a landslide victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, which will serve as a referendum not only on Orban’s self-proclaimed “liberal democracy” – a cousin of “managed democracy” implemented by his friend P and the threatened future of democracy in Eastern Europe. “In many ways, Hungary is a warning story,” David Koranyi, a fellow of the Atlantic Council and a critic of the Orbán regime, told Yahoo News. He laments how, under Orban, the “promising, fledgling democracy of the 1990s” has grown into a repressive regime where, as in Russia, the independent media has been suppressed and democratic institutions intimidated into subjugation. The story goes on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday at the last rally before Sunday’s election. (Petr David Josek / AP) Hungary under Orban has also become something of an obsession with American conservatives. In January, he received approval from ally Donald Trump, who praised him as a “strong leader.” Many on the right seem to admire Orbán for claiming victories in the same cultural wars they have been waging for decades. Ever since he returned to power in 2010 (having previously served only one term as prime minister between 1998 and 2002), Orban has promoted what he calls the “family agenda” that is similar to that advocated by the American evangelicals. He was also a staunch opponent of allowing migrants from Syria and North Africa to enter Hungary, and he built a border fence similar to the one Trump promised as a means of keeping Latin American immigrants out of the United States. This won Orban a visit from Tucker Carlson in the summer of 2021. The Fox News host hosted a week-long primetime of his program from the capital, Budapest, culminating in a one-on-one interview with Orban. Hungary, Carlson told his American audience, is a “small country with many lessons for the rest of us.” An Orbán fanatic on the American right “had to do with his moves to ban abortions or gay marriage or otherwise restrict LGBTQ rights in Hungary,” said Sarah Posner, a journalist who has covered Hungarian politics. , on the “On Point” radio program. last year. “It simply came to our notice then. “They also liked his calls not only to ethnic nationalism, but also to Christian nationalism, which is what they are promoting here in the United States.” Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson speaks during Mathias Corvinus Collegium Feszt in Hungary in 2021. (Janos Kummer / Getty Images) Hungary is a completely different cultural battlefield from the United States. About 62% of Hungarians are Catholic today. The nation’s once-large and prosperous Jewish population had been virtually wiped out in recent months when the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was in operation during World War II, and Muslims were never as welcome in Hungary. European countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom. Orban’s opponents hope that mutual admiration will be disrupted by Sunday’s election, which they hope will be the culmination of a year of political organization under extremely dire circumstances. Liberal and centrist opposition groups have united behind Peter Marki-Zay, a young mayor from a southern town near the Romanian border. Hungary borders seven countries in total, and has historically served at different times as an imperial power and as a vassal. Today, it is also a member of the European Union and an ally of Russia – NATO’s “weak link in the chain”, as Koranyi put it. Marki-Zay envisions a different future for Hungary, one more closely aligned with the West. “Putin and Orban belong to this authoritarian, oppressive, poor and corrupt world. “And we have to choose Europe, the West, NATO, democracy, the rule of law, freedom of the press, a very different world: the free world,” he told the New York Times recently. Hungary’s common opposition candidate for prime minister, Peter Marki-Zai, at a rally in Budapest on Tuesday. (Anna Szilagyi / AP) The sad irony of the growing unity of the Hungarian opposition is that it faces an authoritarian leader as determined as ever to stay in power. Now that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has resigned, Orban is the European Union’s longest-serving head of state. Never particularly ashamed of exercising state power to promote his own re-election opportunity, he has recently gone so far as to use a coronavirus alert service to take a step towards Sunday’s election. Given the intersection of fear and propaganda that signals Hungarian public discourse, Marki-Zay’s chances of winning are “less than they should be,” Koranyi said. Orban recently tried to oust Putin without alienating him, a tactic to save Hungary from the repercussions of a bitter Kremlin. The opposition is particularly strong in Poland, where a nationalist and conservative government has turned its back on Ukraine. Such a move is very unlikely to come from Budapest if Orbán remains in charge. “There are really troubling similarities” between Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary, media researcher Eva Bognar of the Central European University in Hungary told Yahoo News. The two countries are not identical, he warned, but the war in Ukraine could only alleviate the similarities. “Orban was very proud to be friendly with Putin,” Bognar said. The special relationship between the two strong men makes Sunday’s election a broader referendum on Hungary’s future. “Orban really subjugated the country to Putin,” Hungarian politician Katalin Cech recently told former Obama’s foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes on the Pod Save the World podcast. “If Orban stays in power, we will be the EU’s outsider for a long time to come.”
