The Hungarian revolt
by Frank Furedi, spiked:
The re-election of Viktor Orbán is a stunning rebuke to the meddling of the EU.
No one expected that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán would be re-elected with a substantially increased mandate at this weekend’s General Election. The results surprised all the parties in Hungary, including Orbán’s own Fidesz. And it certainly shocked the international supporters of the coalition standing in opposition to Orbán.
This weekend’s vote was arguably the most important in Europe since the referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU in 2016. Like the Brexit vote, the Hungarian General Election touched on foundational issues – the most important of which was national sovereignty. This was an election about the right of a nation to determine its own future. Hungarians were voting on who gets to decide the values and ideals they will live by – their own elected representatives or the unelected elites of the EU and other globalist institutions.
The election took place against the backdrop of a fierce battle between Budapest and Brussels over a new Hungarian law restricting the ‘promotion’ of LGBT identities to children. Since last year, the EU has been threatening to withhold billions of euros in structural funds from Hungary, due to its alleged failure to uphold the EU’s ‘core values’.
You could tell the stakes in this election were high because the Western media ceaselessly sought to undermine and delegitimise Orbán’s government. Orbán himself was constantly characterised as far-right, an authoritarian, a ‘strong man’ – someone who represented a threat to democracy both inside and outside Hungary. Time and again the Western media depicted him as a would-be dictator who relied on force and de facto electoral fraud to gain power.
Over the past few decades, no other government in Europe has been subjected to such a barrage of spiteful criticism as Hungary’s. And all because it is a government that takes the principle of sovereignty seriously. Unlike many small nations, which can be easily forced into line, Hungary has self-consciously upheld values that go against the technocracy and identity politics propagated by the Western political and cultural establishment.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
