Polling booths in Hungary were kept open as voters still queued at 7pm when they were due to closePETER KOHALMI/AFP/GETTY
The hardline populist prime minister of Hungary celebrated a landslide third consecutive term last night, sounding alarm bells in Brussels.
Preliminary results suggested that Viktor Orban was on course to regain the two-thirds parliamentary “supermajority” he won in 2010 and 2014 after he campaigned against the European Union’s ambition to settle migrants and increase the pace of integration of member states.
The majority gives the prime minister, 54, carte blanche to alter Hungary’s constitution, making it almost impossible for the fragmented opposition to topple him. “We have won,” Mr Orban told supporters as results were published. “Hungary has won a great victory.”
The 70 per cent turnout, higher than the two previous elections, “has cast aside all doubts,” he added.
The Hungarian result will be welcomed by populists from Italy to Poland, whose government is also at loggerheads with Brussels over its refusal to host migrants. Winning two thirds of Hungary’s 199 seats in parliament is key to Mr Orban since it will allow him to strengthen his grip on Hungary’s courts, media and economy, for which he has been criticised by the EU. By-elections meant he lost his super-majority after less than a year in 2015.
“This overwhelming success will give Orban confidence to increase his illiberal democracy,” Tamas Boros, of the Policy Solutions think-tank, said. “No one’s going to jail, and we will not be Russia or Turkey yet, but it’s the end of democracy for NGOs and media freedom.”
Preliminary results showed Mr Orban’s Fidesz party taking about 50 per cent of the vote, with the nationalist Jobbik party on 20 per cent and the Socialists on about 12 per cent.
Jobbik, once to the right of Fidesz, hoped to make inroads into Mr Orban’s popularity. Gabor Vona, its leader, said he would be stepping down. During his campaign Mr Orban focused exclusively on the perils of migration, accusing the EU and the UN of plotting to flood Hungary with Muslims.
“Left-wing parties did well in Budapest, but the countryside was for Fidesz, which shows, as in other countries, that the old right-left divide has been replaced by a divide between cities and a countryside that wants a closed society,” Mr Boros said.
During the campaign Mr Orban turned on George Soros, the financier and philanthropist, accusing him of using his charities in Hungary to help asylum seekers to overthrow Hungary’s white Christian culture.
He first spoke of migration as a culture war after thousands of Syrians crossed into Hungary in 2015, a flow halted when he built a 109-mile razorwire fence on the border with Serbia.
During the campaign posters showed photo-shopped images of Mr Soros surrounded by opposition leaders using wire cutters to get through the fence. Last year his posters of a laughing Mr Soros — who is Jewish — were criticised for their antisemitic overtones.
If final results give him back the supermajority, Mr Orban is expected to pass a law that would allow him to shut down Mr Soros’s charities. The election showed that his campaign against migrants resonated with Hungarians, helped by TV shows and newspapers controlled by the government that gave obsessive coverage to violence committed by migrants in Europe.
“After Turkish, Hapsburg and Russian invaders, it’s time we were nationalist,” Dolzy Pal, a Budapest architect who voted for Mr Orban, said. “I have been to Paris and seen the migration there. We don’t want Hungary to be like that — it’s gone too far.”
Hungary’s opposition was weakened by splits and hamstrung by fines imposed by the government’s State Audit Office for irregular fundraising.
“For every penny they were fined, they lost the same amount in state subsidies for a total of about €2.3 million,” Attila Mraz, of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, said. “By chance the audit office did not have time to check the books of Fidesz before the election.”
Istvan Janos Toth, director of the Corruption Research Centre Budapest, said: “The system Orban has built, his control of courts and media and politics, is becoming self-perpetuating and accelerating. The next step could be moves against organisations such as ours. I would not rule out emigrating.”
The prime minister’s weak spot has been allegations of widespread corruption, as his family and friends reportedly grew rich from lucrative contracts thanks to the roughly €4 billion in annual EU funding. Mr Orban has focused on the country’s surging GDP.
Mr Toth said he suspected Russia had lent Mr Orban a hand. A report last month by the Corruption Centre found pro-Orban media were picking up a suspiciously large number of news items from Russian media that harped on migrant-linked violence in the West.
A big applause for the overwhelming victory for sound politics. Under the stewardship of Fidesz, Hungary in coordination with neighboring Visegrád countries secured its borders and thereby stemmed the route of Islamic invaders through the Eastern Europe route.
Mr. Orban accomplished the unthinkable. He has restored common sense and exposed an establishment elite, media dictatorships, the Brussels body politic and surreptitiously government-funded NGOs to what they really are, a naked emperor selling fabricated lies.
All while the Fidesz government also kept the budget deficit under control, reduced unemployment and some of Hungary’s debt, and put its economy on a growth track.
The people of Hungary have shown they have the sense to withstand the political dictates of a bloated corrupt EU bureaucracy that failed its citizens. And there is still more wisdom left in the countryside electorate than in the leftist denominated city center of Budapest with its dissenting minority vote estranged from reality.
One need not be an anti-Semite or a victim of Russian propaganda as the Times suggests, to disagree with Soros’ meddling of internal affairs of an autonomous electorate and to oppose Soros backed foundations that have orchestrated a well-managed migration of foreign infiltrators into Europe, the like of which last seen during the invasion of the Barbarians who ruined the Roman empire.
The linked Times article is a mean piece of propaganda. Hungary’s verdict at the poll is no fascist extreme rightist populism. They are trying to save Europe before it is too late.
Rather than ostracizing, Israel would do better to positively engage the ruling party in Hungary and not push it into a right wing angle where it does not belong.