Two years ago, the European Parliament’s largest center-right bloc, the European People’s Party, suspended membership of Hungary’s ruling party, Fidesz. Last week, the tug of war ended when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced that his party would leave the PPE forever. The Washington foreign policy establishment naturally applauded the result: its members equated any expression of national populism or conservatism with “extremism”.
And in fact, Fidesz’s departure from the EPP had something to do with extremism: the extremism of a Eurocratic elite that has long since abandoned its own Christian democratic ideals in favor of a hard-line globalist ideology that does not tolerate disagreements – and it does not. it has room for the concerns of ordinary voters in Central and Eastern Europe: faith, family and national dignity.
For the peoples of the post-Soviet bloc, such as the Hungarians and the Poles, the return to the European political family after more than four decades of communist occupation was an excellent opportunity. We look for allies who share the fundamental values that we believe to support the prosperity and decency of Western civilization.
So, we had a rude awakening. It turned out that the so-called traditional center-right and center-left parties paid little more than lip service – if that – sovereignty and self-determination, the diversity of nations, the traditional family and the Judeo-Christian foundations of Europe. As long as we followed the globalist and liberal line of Brussels and Washington, we were accepted. But as soon as we democratically chose a different path, we were called “undemocratic”.
Orbán – the most democratically popular leader in Europe – was considered worse. However, all of his decisions that drew the ire of the euro’s mainstream, including the leadership of the EPP, were pragmatic solutions to real problems – solutions, moreover, that were more faithful to the legacy of the EU founders than anything. offered by Eurocrats.
Consider illegal migration, a continuous flashpoint since at least 2015. Orbán, almost alone among center-right leaders, called for action to do what our treaties compel us to do: protect our territorial sovereignty. Europe has asylum laws, which the liberal nations of northern and western Europe have circumvented to bring in over a million unimpeded newcomers from the Middle East and Africa. Chaos, terror and mass social incohesion followed.
Most ordinary Europeans now take it for granted that it would be crazy to open the continent’s gates wide open, and Western politicians with a minimum of courage and common sense are prepared to admit this publicly. Still, Eurocrats and their mainstream media spokesmen labeled Hungarians fascists and xenophobes for simply insisting on borders and the principles of sovereignty enshrined in EU legislation.
Or see family policy. The Hungarian government offers generous subsidies to promote marriage, family formation and procreation – to prevent demographic collapse and to ensure that there are future workers and taxpayers to support the aging population. In 10 years, the number of marriages has doubled and the demographic decline has started to reverse. (Compare that to France, whose birthrate is at its lowest point since 1945.)
Thanks to a recent amendment, the constitution also defines marriage, like most civilizations throughout most of human history, as the union of men and women, aimed at raising children. The governments of Germany and France may disagree with this. But is it not the right of the Hungarian people to make that decision, as the overwhelming majority of their duly elected representatives did when voting to change the constitution?
These positions also opened Hungary to accusations of “fascism” in the liberal salons of Europe, where “family politics” is equivalent to everything that the most radical non-governmental organizations and gender ideologists dictate. But I wonder which policies would be most familiar and ingenious for the devout Catholic founders of Europe (men like Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman): the one in Budapest or the mandarins in Brussels?
So will Fidesz’s departure from the EPP isolate Hungarians, as liberals dream? It is unlikely.
The future is uncertain, but Fidesz is now free to form a regional dream team with the Polish ruling party, Law and Justice, and perhaps the Italian populist movement. The resulting bloc could easily end up as a bastion of ideological sanity at the eastern and southern ends of the union.
One thing is certain, however: Orbán would not attract the often silent admiration of millions across Europe, and the ardent enmity of the Brussels elite, if he did not address real problems that “conventional” parties ignore or exacerbate. He realized the power to tell the true story of his small country and Europe, a story in which people can recognize themselves. The same cannot be said of your enemies in the EU councils.
Péter Heltai is a podcast editor and presenter at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, based in Budapest.
Twitter: @PeterHeltai