Two years ago, the European Parliament’s largest center-right bloc, the European People’s Party, suspended Fidesz’s membership in Hungary’s ruling party. Last week, the tugboat ended when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced that his party would leave the EPP for good. The establishment of Washington’s foreign policy naturally cheered the result: its members equate any expression of populism or national conservatism with “extremism.”
And, indeed, Fidesz’s departure from the EPP had something to do with extremism: the extremism of a Eurocratic elite that long ago gave up its own democratic-Christian ideals in favor of a harsh, non-discarding globalist ideology. no dissent – and no room for concern. ordinary voters in Central and Eastern Europe: faith, family and national dignity.
For peoples in the post-Soviet bloc, such as the Hungarians and Poles, re-enlistment in the European political family after more than four decades of communist occupation was a remarkable opportunity. We sought allies who shared the core values that we believe underlie the prosperity and decency of Western civilization.
Then I had a rough awakening. It turned out that the so-called center-right and center-left mass parties paid a little more than lip service – if it – towards sovereignty and self-determination, the diversity of nations, the traditional family and the Judeo-Christian foundations of Europe. As long as we left Brussels and Washington, we were accepted. But as soon as we democratically chose another path, we were called “undemocratic.”
Orbán – Europe’s most popular democratic leader – has been named worse. However, all his decisions that angered the euro “mainstream”, including the EPP leadership, were pragmatic solutions to real problems – solutions, moreover, that were more faithful to the legacy of the EU’s founding fathers than anything the Eurocrats offered them.
Consider illegal migration, an ongoing hotbed of at least 2015. Orbán, almost alone among center-right leaders, has called for action to do what our treaties oblige us to do: protect our sovereignty territorial. Europe has asylum laws, which liberal nations in Northern and Western Europe have bypassed to bring in more than a million newcomers from the Middle East and Africa. Chaos, terror and mass social incoherence followed.
Most ordinary Europeans now consider it crazy to open the gates of the continent, and Western politicians with a minimum of courage and common sense are ready to publicly acknowledge. However, Eurocrats and their voices in the media labeled fascist and xenophobic Hungarians simply because they insisted on the boundaries and principles of sovereignty enshrined in EU law.
Or take family policy. The Hungarian government provides generous subsidies to promote marriage, family formation and fertility – 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 begun to reverse. (Compare it to France, whose birth rate is at its lowest point since 1945.)
Due to a recent amendment, the constitution also defines marriage, as most civilizations throughout human history, as a union of man and woman, have ordered the upbringing of children. The governments of Germany and France may disagree with this. But is it not the right of the Hungarian people to make this decision, as did an overwhelming majority of their duly elected representatives in the vote to amend the constitution?
And these positions have opened Hungary to accusations of “fascism” at European liberal salons, where “family politics” amounts to everything dictated by the most extreme non-governmental organizations and gender ideologies. But I wonder, what policies would be more familiar and brilliant to the Catholic founding fathers of Europe (men like Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman): those in Budapest or the mandarins in Brussels?
So will Fidesz’s departure from the EPP isolate the Hungarians, as the Liberals dream? Probably not.
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 Italy’s populist movement. The resulting bloc could easily reach the eastern and southern ends of the union as a bastion of ideological health.
One thing is certain, however: Orbán would not attract the silent admiration of millions of people across Europe and the fierce enmity of the Brussels elite if he did not address the real issues that mainstream parties ignore or exacerbate. He realized the power of telling the true story of his small country and Europe, a story in which people can recognize themselves. The same cannot be said of his enemies on EU councils.
Péter Heltai is the editor and host of podcasts at the Mathias Corvinus College in Budapest.
Twitter: @PeterHeltai