There was a time when Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary used to fight Bolshevism. The West was his promised land. That was then. Now it has morphed into an enemy. The West is now the site of European cultural suicide, the place where family, church, nation and traditional notions of marriage and gender are sentenced to die.

Like President Trump, Orban used to tell the thousands of his followers: "Hungary First. The danger we are facing is threatening us from the West. This danger is coming to us from politicians in Brussels, Berlin and Paris.” Orban is poisoning Hungary day by day with these messages, but he is becoming a pharaoh who wants to adopt the Russian, Turkish or Chinese model.

Orban, who has been in power for eight years and was re-elected again this year, is now trying to neutralize an independent judiciary, subjugate much of the media, demonize migrants and create loyal new elites through crony capitalism. We still remember those thousands of migrants, fleeing the war in Syria, struggling through Hungary in the late summer of 2015 and left for weeks on end at Budapest’s main railway station until the Queen of Hearts Angela Merkel took that bold decision to admit hundreds of them into Germany.

The other face of fear in Hungary is venom. Since taking office in 2010, Orban's relentless anti-immigrant campaign has produced a startling level of fear. He used to tell Hungarians that migrants and refugees would one day force Hungarians to eat insects. It has proved easy for him to fuel anger against immigrants and refugees.

Unfortunately, Hungary under Orban and even Poland under Kaczynski's Law and Justice Party, are turning the clock back to Europe's darkest hours. Today they are all about erecting borders – real and imagined – against Islam, migrants and refugees, Jews, the European Union, the United Nations and what these two countries portray as a pluralistic international conspiracy.

 

Jos Edmond Zarb

Birkirkara