Orban the Demagogue

Hungary’s right-wing populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has warned “countries that don’t stop immigration will be lost.” 

Addressing a huge crowd of supporters in Budapest he declared, “Africa wants to kick down our door, and Brussels is not defending us. Europe is under invasion already, and they are watching with their hands in the air.”

"They want us to voluntarily give [our country] to others, to foreigners from other continents who don't speak our language, don't respect our culture, laws or lifestyle," Orban told the crowd. "They want to exchange ours for their own. There is no exaggeration in this."

He announced, "The situation is that those who don't block migration at their borders will be lost. They will slowly but surely be digested," Orban told the crowd. "The youth of Western Europe will still live to see when they become a minority in their own country and lose the only place in the world to call home."

Orbán also said Hungary had kicked out the Ottomans, Habsburgs, and Soviets over the centuries and would kick out “Uncle George” too, referring to the American financier and philanthropist George Soros, who is of Hungarian Jewish origin and has supported civil society in the country through his Open Society foundations. Orbán attacked Soros using language that critics have said contains antisemitic undertones: “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.” Orbán’s government has painted Soros as a nefarious puppetmaster keen to destroy Europe by facilitating migration.

In February, Orban claimed the west had “opened the way for the decline of Christian culture and … Islamic expansion” while his administration had “prevented the Islamic world from flooding us from the south”. Deploying a host of questionable statistics and apocalyptic visions, Orbán said: “We are those who think that Europe’s last hope is Christianity … If hundreds of millions of young people are allowed to move north, there will be enormous pressure on Europe. If all this continues, in the big cities of Europe there will be a Muslim majority.” He accused Soros of having used his fortune not only to buy influence in Brussels and the west, but also at the UN. There was a conspiracy to create a “Homo sorosensus, the Soros type of man” that must be a rejected, he said. Orbán pledged his government’s solidarity with “those western European people and leaders who want to save their country and their Christian culture”.

Last month, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein described Orban as a racist, xenophobe, and bully whose "racial rhetoric is increasingly delusional."