Not too many tears were shed when the public learned that Zoltán Balog, Viktor Orbán’s spiritual mentor, had thrown in the towel and had chosen no longer to lead the gargantuan, unmanageable ministry of human resources. The Hungarian Reformed minister, unlike his boss, realized that the ministry in its present configuration was close to non-functional. When Orbán refused to take at least healthcare out of the ministry’s portfolio, Balog resigned.
His decision to retire from government service was soon followed by his announcement that he was planning to return to his original vocation and would again be the minister of a church serving the tiny German community in Budapest. Soon enough, however, plans changed. As the president of the Fidesz foundation Polgári Magyarországért Alapítvány (PMA), he was given a new role: to preach Viktor Orbán’s gospel to the people of the European Union.
First, a few words about this Fidesz foundation, which upon closer inspection turns out to have been pretty well dormant for years. Its activities, which are described at some length on the website, are in fact nonexistent. The only things it does are (1) to organize Viktor Orbán’s yearly appearance before his fans every February when he delivers a speech on the state of his domain and (2) to organize and, I guess, pay for the yearly Fidesz picnic in Kötcse in September.
But now it seems that Viktor Orbán has given it a new task designed to advance his grandiose plans to take center stage in European politics. The scheme came to light during an interview with Zoltán Balog on ATV’s early morning program Start. The Hungarian government is planning to establish offices in the more important capitals of the European Union in addition to Brussels. They will spread the gospel of Orbán’s views and his designs for a reformed European Union. Balog and his associates will inform Europeans about the Fidesz regime’s stance on globalism, migration, and Christian values. The idea is to have a broad-based propaganda campaign prior to the European parliamentary election, aimed at changing the composition of the body in favor of the extreme right. The reporter bluntly asked Balog whether these plans include “the spread of hate,” which the Orbán government has perfected in the past three years in its fight against the migrants. Of course, according to Balog, what the government has been doing is just simple self-defense. Its propaganda is not propaganda, only a necessary information campaign.
The opposition parties, with the exception of the tiny Hungarian Liberal Party, didn’t react to the announcement, which is par for the course because they are normally slow on the uptake. The liberals perhaps reacted faster than others because the Orbán government has recently been preoccupied with the vilification of the leader of the liberals in the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt. The communiqué said that the liberals want to know more about the task of these propaganda offices and the nature of the campaign. Is the Orbán government planning to export the hate campaign that it inundated the Hungarians with and to do it on Hungarian taxpayer money? The party wanted “to warn Brussels and the people of Europe against Fidesz’s manipulative and hateful propaganda” that is awaiting them.
In addition to the warning of the liberals I found only one editorial responding to Balog’s announcement. Péter Németh of Népszava wrote an article yesterday titled “The soul of Zoltán Balog.” As you can imagine, the portrait is not favorable. It turned out that the interview on ATV’s Start took place on October 17, which is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. In Németh’s opinion, the good pastor could perhaps have talked about poverty or the plight of the homeless, but instead he is planning to head a hate campaign against those who try to find shelter from war and a better life from poverty-stricken countries. He wants to convince Europeans of the irrevocable danger that the immigration of non-Christians poses. “He will be exporting Viktor Orbán’s politics of hate.” He will dump “the incredible tsunami of lies he unloaded on the Hungarian people on the citizens of other countries.”
Indeed, this is all very worrisome since the propaganda had already begun with a misleading and hateful video campaign that is being spread on the internet. This time, a short video shows George Soros accompanied by Guy Verhofstadt and Judith Sargentini. Of course, their words are twisted and falsified. Verhofstadt, however, is not the kind of man who leaves such charges unanswered. He made himself crystal clear on the subject in several tweets, and only a few days ago he gave an interview to Marianna Biró of 168 Óra.
Let me state at the very beginning that, within the European Union, perhaps no one knows better what’s going on in Hungary than Guy Verhofstadt. As we found out from one of his many speeches dealing with Viktor Orbán’s regime, he came to know the young Orbán in 1989-1990 when he was still parading as a liberal. He has been watching Hungarian developments since 2010 with growing concern and finds the Hungarian government’s policies a disaster for the European Union, which must therefore be stopped. He is an activist in the sense that thinks that what’s going on in Hungary shouldn’t just be ignored but loudly protested and fought against. He is convinced, and he is correct, that Orbán is neither a Christian nor a democrat and that therefore “EPP should distance itself from him and send him and his new populist friends to where they belong: to the dung heap of politics.”
The Orbán government accuses Verhofstadt of being a promoter of unlimited immigration into the European Union, which is far from the case. As he said in the 168 Óra interview, “What I have always supported was supervised and legal opportunity for foreigners to come and live in Europe, adding to the economic achievement of the continent.” For him this means allowing the most talented to settle in an organized fashion. And that requires the creation of an immigration policy, which currently doesn’t exist in the EU.
Government attacks on Verhofstadt have been going on for some time, and they naturally intensified after his speech in support of the Sargentini report in the European Parliament. But the 168 Óra interview really added to the government media’s hatred of Verhofstadt. Magyar Idők published a short opinion piece titled “The case of Verhofstadt with the dung heap.” All of these editorials are similar in structure. First, the author misidentifies Verhofstadt’s stand on immigration and blames Hungarian liberals for providing him with false information. According to the young journalist, Verhofstadt, like a parrot, repeats what he hears from Hungarian liberals. The example he cites is Verhofstadt’s claim that “on the channels of MTVA Fidesz created a parallel reality” by falsifying news. In the limited horizon of the author, this information must be coming from liberal critics of the regime. It never occurs to him that a responsible politician who wants to know the state of the Hungarian media will simply ask native speakers to watch the state media’s practices and report back to him. Surely, hundreds of hours of such monitoring must have taken place in preparation of the Sargentini report.
But what really got the Orbán fans’ goat was that Verhofstadt “dared to insult the Hungarian prime minister” by saying that he should be sent to a dung heap. The Hungarian answer is: “Well, Mr. Verhofstadt, watching international tendencies, it is much more likely that there is a nice warm spot set aside for you already where you and your kind will end up in that dung heap.”
The plan to influence the political composition of the European Parliament in the hope of sending such liberal politicians to the dung heap is now being facilitated by Fidesz’s latest international campaign. Personally, I doubt that these offices in the capitals of member states will make an appreciable difference in the outcome because Hungarian propagandists will find themselves in less friendly surroundings. It is unlikely that they will be able to cover European cities with anti-migrant and anti-Soros posters, as they did in Hungary. And even if they could, there is simply not such fertile soil for this kind of propaganda in Western Europe as there was and is in Hungary. Yet I’m sure the European campaign will go ahead unabated because by now Orbán is absolutely certain of the success of his strategy.