Hungarian election result serves notice on Brussels

It is Brussels’ worst nightmare. On a large turnout of around 70 per cent, Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party won a crushing victory in Hungary’s general election yesterday. With 95 per cent of the votes counted Orbán appeared to have recovered the two-thirds super-majority he lost in 2015.

The background to yesterday’s election was not the quarterly GDP figures nor the latest employment statistics: it was a cumulative narrative that began exactly a century ago with the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Prior to that collapse and when the First World War still offered the prospect of a favourable outcome to the Central Powers, Hungary’s ruler King Charles IV, alias Emperor Karl of Austria, a lone voice of sanity, proposed ending the carnage with a mutually honourable settlement by retiring to the frontiers of 1914. That humane initiative was quashed by the brutal Clemenceau at the cost of a further million lives.

Following the Allied victory, at the Treaty of Versailles, President Woodrow Wilson enforced a settlement on Germany that provided the blueprint for the Third Reich. Less famously, at the parallel Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungary was stripped of two-thirds of its territory, all of its seaports, almost 90 per cent of its natural resources and one-third of all the ethnic Hungarians in its population. No equivalent despoliation of a European nation comes to mind.

In 1945 another inadequate incumbent of the Oval Office, Franklin D Roosevelt, having fawned over Stalin and baited Churchill to amuse him at Tehran, compounded this betrayal at Yalta where he handed over Hungary with the rest of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, at a time when the Western Allies had atomic weapons and Stalin did not. Behind the stylish boat cloak, the cigarette holder and the patrician pose, F.D.R. possessed as much geopolitical nous as the mayor of Peoria.

When the Hungarians bravely rose against Communist tyranny in 1956 the West looked away. Britain was embroiled in an unnecessary conflict in the Middle East (where else?). Hungary has only been even nominally free for less than thirty years. Until recently, it had not fully succeeded in liberating itself from some of the shackles of its Marxist past. Its efforts to complete its national emancipation have drawn upon it the displeasure of the culturally Marxist European Union.

With the history recorded above, it is understandable that Hungarians are sceptical about accepting the prescriptions of Brussels regarding the demography and institutions of their country. In 2010 they turned to Fidesz and its charismatic leader Viktor Orbán, elected to office with a two-thirds super-majority.

This enabled the Fidesz government to produce a new constitution to replace the amended Communist constitution of 1949 which still governed Hungarian public life. The new constitution was Burkean in defining the Hungarian nation as a union of the dead, the living and future citizens. It acknowledged the key role of Christianity in forming the Hungarian identity and enshrined such socially conservative principles as the sanctity of life from conception and marriage defined as between a man and a woman.

Predictably, the usual suspects – the United Nations, the New York Times, Hillary Clinton – denounced it; such opponents furnished reassurance that Orbán was on the right track. Even he could not have foreseen the crisis that assailed his country and the rest of Europe, aggravated by Angela Merkel’s spectacularly irresponsible invitation to migrants to enter Europe, with “no limit”. They duly obliged. Hungary found itself under siege and Orbán’s response was to build a razor-wire fence.

Walls don’t work, so Donald Trump’s opponents keep insisting. In that case, was it pure coincidence that illegal immigration into Hungary stood at 391,000 in 2015, fell to 18,236 in 2016 and to just 1,184 in 2017? Why is the rest of Europe supine in the face of massive, unending immigration while Hungary regained its territorial integrity virtually overnight?

Why, more importantly, is the surrender of any nation’s demography and culture regarded by liberal elites and complicit commentators as some kind of moral imperative? If a nation wishes to preserve its identity, what is reprehensible about that? Why, in particular, do the world and his dog imagine they have a right to order Hungarians’ lives? First Trianon, then Yalta – now Brussels.

Hungary is being demonised for failing, like Poland, to embrace the liberal, secularist, multicultural agenda. Groupthink has overtaken Western journalists singing from the Brussels/Soros hymn sheet. It is now an axiom that media freedom in Hungary has been abolished. Since 2010 the organization Reporters Without Borders has demoted Hungary from 23rd to 71st place on its media freedom index. Coincidentally, Reporters Without Borders has been the recipient of funding from Open Society, the George Soros foundation.

The long overdue public denunciation of Soros (where were the investigative media?) by the Hungarian government is supported by so much evidence of his interventions not only against Hungary but across the world (he is currently using his wealth to influence the abortion referendum in Ireland) that it should be a matter of global concern. If a billionaire were funding conservative causes on such a scale he would be hounded mercilessly by the liberal media. Why should NGOs be allowed to influence the fate of entire societies?

Orbán has been rewarded by the Hungarian electorate for saving it from the fate of other European countries visibly imploding under mass immigration. The politically correct (i.e. Marxist) criticism of Hungary is hypocritical. Where would you rather be as a traveller on New Year’s Eve: the railway station in Cologne or Budapest?

Orbán was also able to point at the end of last year to a satisfactory record of 700,000 new jobs created and an increase since 2010 in the minimum wage from 73,500 HUF to 127,500 HUF (forints) today, besides a fiscally innovative flat rate of income tax at 15 per cent. Fidesz listens to the population and takes its instructions, unlike the elites elsewhere in Europe (including Britain, as the establishment resistance to Brexit demonstrates) that seek only to ignore and overrule the public.

So, this result is Brussels’ worst nightmare. As Nigel Farage forecast, it signals the dislocation of the European Union. With a likely parliamentary two-thirds super-majority Viktor Orbán has unique legitimacy among EU leaders. There is now not a snowflake’s chance in Hell of his surrendering to Brussels on immigration – indeed he dare not.

This is worse than Brexit for Brussels. The Visegrad states are in a position to enforce massive internal reform and reorientation on the European Union. They cannot be expelled post-Brexit as the Empire is terrified of losing any more colonies. Orbán and Co. can redesign the European project to their taste.

Viktor Orbán is right to proclaim Hungary an “illiberal democracy” because, outside the bubbles where the elites live an ever more illusory existence, “liberal” has become a dirty word. It is associated with the reverse of its formal meaning, with totalitarian aspirations and disastrous social engineering experiments. The message from Hungary, which will be repeated from other sources soon, is: it’s over. The dictatorship of the liberal elite is finished. Hungary is not an aberration, as other European electorates have already shown. It is the future.