Hungary's Viktor Orban has attempted to dissolve Europe's values — but Brussels is fighting back
Updated
![Hungarian MEP candidates light flares prior ahead of EU elections Three men hold flares spouting green and red smoke rising against a blue sky.](http://web.archive.org./web/20190602054936im_/https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/11151446-3x2-700x467.jpg)
"The new state we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state."
It was Viktor Orban's most famous speech.
In July 2014, the Hungarian Prime Minister made plain the scope of his ambition.
"We must break with liberal social-organisation principles," he said.
The Central European nation has since been transformed. Critics say Hungary is now a democracy in name only.
Now it appears Mr Orban's anti-immigration rally cry has been heard loudly in the country, with his right-wing Fidesz party gaining a seat in the European parliamentary elections, meaning it now holds 13 of Hungary's 21 seats in the EU Parliament.
Across Europe, the centrist coalition has collapsed and fringe parties on both the left and right have made gains for the first time in decades.
Orban rides on fears over increased globalisation
![Prime Minister Viktor Orban A man in a suit stands on stage at a podium](http://web.archive.org./web/20190602054936im_/https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/10800706-3x2-700x467.jpg)
More than 400 million Europeans across 28 countries were entitled to vote in the elections — the world's second largest democratic exercise after the federal poll in India.
Turnout had been slowly declining since 1979, but this year it increased to 51 per cent — the highest in 20 years.
The big story in European politics has been the same story as in the United States and in the United Kingdom: voter disenfranchisement, economic dislocation and the rise of populist, anti-establishment parties and leaders.
In Italy, France, Austria, the Netherlands, Hungary and elsewhere on the continent, political firebrands have cast migrants as bogeymen to be feared, as well as so-called "globalists" they claim have conspired to bring mass migration to Europe.
Mr Orban, in particular, has capitalised on these fears to consolidate his power.
![A campaign billboard for Hungary's ruling Fidesz party A political campaign billboard in blue and orange is graffitied over with the name of its competitor.](http://web.archive.org./web/20190602054936im_/https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/11151586-3x2-700x467.jpg)
"Europe's borders must be protected against the invasion of migrants," Mr Orban said on the campaign trail.
Loyal media outlets parrot his obsession with George Soros, a Jewish Hungarian businessman and philanthropist who has funded pro-democracy groups around the world with billions of dollars.
"What we suffer from," Mr Orban said this week, "is Soros's influence."
"The interference of that global, liberal mafia ... players outside Hungary, manipulating huge funds, seeking to wage a campaign and interfere with the Hungarian elections."
![Marta Pardavi, co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee A woman in a black and white striped dress looks out of a large arched window in a house with high ceilings.](http://web.archive.org./web/20190602054936im_/https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/11151572-3x2-700x467.jpg)
On World Refugee Day last year, Mr Orban's administration passed through the Hungarian Parliament a suite of legislation dubbed the "Stop Soros" laws.
The laws "make it a criminal act to assist people who would want to seek asylum or apply for residents permit here in Hungary", said Marta Pardavi, co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.
"And the criminal punishment is quite severe; it can go up to a year of prison."
Ms Pardavi said the laws had created a chilling effect, not just on the work of civil society organisations.
"Individuals who have until then been collecting clothes have turned to us asking whether there's any risk of criminal prosecution, if they would be going to prison if they started collecting donations for asylum seekers."
Mr Orban and his Fidesz party say this is just rational policy that reflects the anti-immigration platform on which they won their third straight election last year.
Critics accuse Orban of attacking Hungarian democracy
![Michael Ignatieff, rector of Central European University, Hungary Michael Ignatieff, rector of Central European University, Hungary](http://web.archive.org./web/20190602054936im_/https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/11151568-3x2-700x467.jpg)
But others say it's a deliberate attack on non-government organisations, and the latest crackdown on dissent and democratic values in Budapest.
The latest victim is the Central European University, which claims it is being forced out of Hungary by a new law which outlaws the enrolment of its graduate students into US-accredited degrees on the Budapest campus.
Michael Ignatieff, the former Canadian politician who is now Rector of Central European University, said Mr Orban was using a "legal fig leaf" to force the university out of the country because it was founded by Mr Soros.
"They're going after Mr Soros as part of their belief that Mr Soros is organising a global campaign to damage the sovereignty of Hungary," he said.
"We think this story is a fabulous invention of Mr Orban's ... it's realpolitik, and we think it's an outrageous attack on academic freedom.
"Mr Orban has been in power since 2010. He's changed the constitution, he's suppressed the independence of the constitutional court.
"Eighty per cent of the media in this country is owned by Orban supporters."
As Hungarian newspapers and television stations battled like all media with the commercial headwinds created by the internet, the Mr Orban administration has also starved independent operations of state advertising.
The result has seen legacy media barons sell their titles to oligarchs and businessmen with ties to Mr Orban.
The Nepszabadsag newspaper was among them.
A former writer there, Anita Komuves, said it was "suddenly shut for political reasons".
Last year, more than 400 of these outlets were consolidated in the Central European Press and Media Foundation, whose chairman, Istvan Varga, is a former Fidesz legislator.
![Anita Komuves, former writer at the Nepszabadsag newspaper A woman looks concerned on a table with Hungarian printed media laid out in front of her.](http://web.archive.org./web/20190602054936im_/https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/11151564-3x2-700x467.jpg)
"These are newspapers, radio stations, TV channels, websites, it's a whole empire," Ms Komuves said.
"I would call it propaganda."
The state broadcaster is blindly loyal to Mr Orban's agenda.
"Fake news and misinformation is coming from the state-sponsored media itself," she said.
"You get the conspiracy theories and the anti-migration propaganda that you would otherwise get in a fringe fake news site."
Ms Komuves now works for a not-for-profit investigative reporting group, Atlatszo, and reports also for The Wall Street Journal.
"The most important role that this channel and other channels supporting the Government have is the fear-mongering," she said.
"For the past four years, it's been constant anti-migration propaganda.
Every single time you switch on this channel, you see something about migrants ruining Europe."
'Good decisions are now the exception'
![Former Hungarian judge Peter Szepeshazi A man in blue collared shirt and tie leans against modern balcony railings and looks out across a dark city.](http://web.archive.org./web/20190602054936im_/https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/11151576-3x2-700x467.jpg)
The European Union has instigated Article 7 proceedings against Hungary over concerns its repeated adjustments to the constitution and its attacks on the press and civil society constitute a breach of European Treaty values.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto condemned the move as "petty revenge" by a pro-immigration EU, but the formal proceedings open the door to potential sanctions against Budapest.
A Council of Europe report last week also raised the alarm over the degradation of the institutions of the rule of law in Hungary — including pressure being applied to the judiciary.
The council's Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovi, drew attention to "anomalies" in the manner in which judges have been appointed by the regime.
"She also expresses concern about the risk of politicisation of the judiciary," the COE report found.
Peter Szepeshazi, who resigned as a judge last year, told the ABC that in big cases that carry economic and social importance to the country "good decisions are now the exception", and that judges are afraid of the executive.
"It was only a matter of time in an authoritarian regime," he said.
"Judges are already afraid, without any phone calls, afraid to make a decision that would benefit a refugee, even if that's what the law required."
Fidesz spokesman Balazs Hidveghi rejected the COE report, and the wider criticism of Hungary's Government, as "nonsense".
"Hungarian is a vibrant democracy," he told the ABC.
"We stand up for what we believe is the will of the majority of Hungarians, which is to protect Hungarian culture, to protect Christian European traditions and say no to forced immigration."
Mr Hidveghi insisted that the EU was using the Article 7 process as a "political weapon".
"They're absolutely wrong if they say that Hungary is not democratic ... I think there is a much more honest debate in Hungary than in other parts of the European Union."
Topics: states-and-territories, refugees, censorship, print-media, media, information-and-communication, world-politics, globalisation---economy, globalisation---society, immigration-policy, immigration, european-union, hungary
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