Posted on February 20, 2018

Orbán Calls for Global Anti-Migrant Alliance with Eye on April Elections

EURACTIV.com with Reuters, February 19, 2018

Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán called yesterday (18 February) for a global alliance against migration as his right-wing populist Fidesz party began campaigning for an 8 April election in which it is expected to win a third consecutive landslide victory.

Popular at home but increasingly at odds politically and economically with mainstream European Union peers, Orbán has thrived on external controversy, including repeated clashes with Brussels and lately the United Nations.

Those conflicts, mostly centred on migration since people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa flooded into Europe in 2015, have intensified as the elections approach and Orbán poses as a saviour of Europe’s Christian nations.

“Christianity is Europe’s last hope,” Orbán told an audience of party faithful at the foot of the Royal Castle in Budapest. With mass immigration, especially from Africa, “our worst nightmares can come true. The West falls as it fails to see Europe being overrun.”

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To achieve that and hold onto power the prime minister, 54, has used methods that critics have called authoritarian, and picked fights with EU partners, especially in the West. Eastern leaders, most notably in Poland, have followed his lead.

But migration dominates his agenda now.

Orbán said on Sunday that Europe faces a critical fissure between nation states of the East and the West, which he called an “immigrant zone, a mixed population world that heads in a direction different from ours”.

As the West wants eastern Europe to follow its lead, an increasingly vicious struggle was likely, he said, alluding to a plan to redraw the European alliance advocated by the leaders of France and Germany.

“Absurd as it may sound the danger we face comes from the West, from politicians in Brussels, Berlin and Paris,” Orbán said to loud applause. “Of course we will fight, and use ever stronger legal tools. The first is our ‘Stop Soros’ law.”

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A defining moment of his premiership came in 2015, as the migrant crisis peaked: he built a double razor wire fence that became the symbol of anti-migrant sentiment in Europe.

Orbán also said the Hungarian opposition had failed to heed the call of history when it opposed his toughness on migrants.

Voters have responded favourably and Orbán is a clear leader of all polls.

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Orbán has tightened the screws on non-government organisations, particularly ones funded by Soros, and attempted to close a prominent Soros-founded university.

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In Europe, he cited as allies Hungary’s fellow Visegrad countries Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland, whose ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party is also often at loggerheads with the EU. He said a victory for Silvio Berlusconi’s party in Italy’s 4 March election would strengthen the nationalist fold.

“We don’t think the fight is hopeless, on the contrary, we are winning,” Orbán said. “The V4 is firm, Croatia has come around, Austria has turned in the patriotic direction, and in Bavaria the CSU has created a resistance.