INTERVIEW
‘All
the terrorists are migrants’
Viktor
Orbán on how to protect Europe from terror, save Schengen, and get
along with Putin’s Russia.
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
11/23/15, 5:30 AM CET
BUDAPEST — “Of
course it’s not accepted, but the factual point is that all the
terrorists are basically migrants,” says Viktor Orbán. “The
question is when they migrated to the European Union.”
In his office at the
Hungarian parliament, the prime minister points toward the flowing
Danube. In another era, an aide notes, the Turks followed this river
into the heart of Europe. Behind Orbán hang two maps: One shows a
short stretch of Hungary’s border with Croatia and another gives a
panoramic view of the Balkans toward Turkey, from where hundreds of
thousands of migrants have made their way north this year.
In a wide-ranging
90-minute interview a week after the Paris terrorist attacks, Orbán
lays out his prescriptions for Europe’s ailments: An impenetrable
external border to boost security and save the Schengen treaty on
passport-less travel within the EU; a new EU constitutional
convention that strengthens the power of nation states and weakens
Brussels; and normalized relations with Russia.
Thinking of Paris
and its aftermath, the Hungarian leader posits an “overwhelming
logical” connection between terrorism and the movement of Muslims
into Europe — in the last few months as well as over recent decades
— that to him and many Europeans is “an obvious fact,” whether
“you like it or not.”
“The majority of
our leaders in the West deny the fact,” he adds. That denial of the
“obvious” — which the Hungarian leader blames on political
correctness run amok — destabilizes European politics by increasing
“the gap between the leaders and the people.”
‘We want to save
Schengen’
Whether European
leaders like Orbán or not, the Hungarian’s critique of the EU’s
migration policy this year changed the terms of the debate. With
blaring alarms about terrorism across Europe, the leader of this
country of 10 million is again the uncensored Id of the European
right, offering ideas that the rest of the bloc can’t ignore (and
even, in some cases, pronounce aloud).
Linking terror to
migration, Orbán says the “number one job” after Paris is “to
defend the borders and to control who is coming in.” NATO and EU
countries are “at war” with Islamists in the Middle East and
Afghanistan, and, he says, “it’s quite logical” that “enemies”
would seek to send fighters with migrants coming into Europe.
We
criticize [the EU and NATO] because they are far from perfect, but
the starting attitude of the Hungarians to Western institutions is
always positive.
“All of them
present a security threat because we don’t know who they are. If
you allow thousands or millions of unidentified persons into your
house, the risk of … terrorism will significantly increase.”
Orbán says he
doesn’t presume to tell Western European countries such as Belgium
and France how to deal with the offspring of Muslim migrants who in
his words belong to “parallel societies,” holding EU passports
but rejecting Western values.
But, as calls grow
to rethink open borders — with five Western European countries
holding preliminary talks about a more limited “mini-Schengen”
zone (which wouldn’t include Hungary) — Orbán presents his hard
line on frontiers as the best way to silence calls to suspend or bury
Schengen.
“We would like to
save Schengen,” he says. “We would like to save the liberties …
including the free movement inside the European Union,” which, he
says, are imperilled by unregulated and porous external borders.
An EU rethink
Earlier this year,
Hungary was widely criticized for building a barbed wire fence along
its border with Serbia to stop the waves of new arrivals. For Orbán,
Hungary was merely upholding the law of the Union that Greece (“a
major problem for us”) failed to do by allowing the migrants to
continue north unimpeded.
Orbán’s
opposition helped torpedo a scheme championed by the European
Commission for a mandatory resettlement of migrants across the EU,
and flipped the discussion from how best to accommodate the refugees
to one of how to stop them from coming at all.
If
I disagree with them, they say, ‘You are not a democrat, you are
not a good man, you belong to the bad guys’.
For the Hungarian,
this year of troubles — from Greece to migration, from terrorism to
possible Brexit — calls for a wholesale rethink of the EU. The bloc
“is only reacting, reacting, crisis after crisis, instead of having
a concept.” Asked if the EU will be here in 10 years, he says,
“it’s an open question.”
Orbán says he wants
the EU to call a new convention on the future of Europe with a
mandate “to modify even the Basic Treaty,” the kind of exercise
that the bloc last carried out a decade ago. That convention,
overseen by former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing,
drafted a new constitution for the EU, which was killed in
referendums in France and elsewhere.
In Orbán’s
proposed reform of the EU, the balance of powers would tilt back
toward nation states and away from leaders in Brussels who have “very
much the pro-United States of Europe position,” he says.
The Hungarian has no
illusions about the ability of a leader of a small Central European
nation to force his views onto the EU agenda. Even David Cameron and
the British “are not strong enough to generate a European
discussion,” he says, and are limited to negotiating terms of a
deal for Britain alone.
“Innovation is
part of” politics, he says, “but basically it’s an art of
reality.”
Although he’s
widely seen in Western Europe as a leader who’s turned his back on
“liberal democracy” and embraced Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Orbán
insists he wants to save the EU and NATO. “Hungary’s place is [in
the] West,” he says. “We criticize them because they are far from
perfect, but the starting attitude of the Hungarians to Western
institutions is always positive.”
In his own telling,
he’s not the populist provocateur of EU media lore. “The basic
character of all politics is cooperation, not confrontation,” he
says. “We cooperate. We confront when it is necessary, not because
we enjoy it.”
Putin
is someone you can cooperate with. He’s not an easy man. He is not
a man who has a known personality, so don’t imagine him as you like
to imagine Western leaders.
Getting up from his
seat around a large conference table, Orbán walks over to the books
stacked on his desk and shelf. He picks up a tract on Europe he’s
reading by Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher and proponent of
a closer, federal EU. “The most dangerous book,” he calls it.
There are essay
collections by the founder of the ultra-conservative Catholic Opus
Dei movement (Orbán’s a Calvinist) and the Hungarian Nobel
laureate in literature, Imre Kertész. He’s reading about the
political theory of Islam and another book by a Hungarian writer on
the global sexual revolution — “an anti-gender study,” he says,
“about how we destroy freedom in the name of freedom.”
‘The very arrogant
mainstream’
At 52, Orbán
carries a healthy paunch and says his football-playing days are
mostly behind him. He puts on a tie and jacket for a photographer,
then quickly dispenses with both. In his part of the world, he says,
leaders are more laid-back.
He speaks fluidly in
English and cracks jokes, showing off a talent for retail politics
that won him three national elections (1998, 2010, 2014) and
altogether a decade as Hungary’s prime minister. While critics say
he caricatures Muslims, financiers and liberal elites, and uses his
majorities in parliament to whittle away at Hungary’s relatively
young democratic institutions, Orbán himself defies facile
caricature.
He isn’t a
“dictator” à la Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to use the gibe
thrown at him by Jean-Claude Juncker. In his half comic, half
mutually contemptuous routine with the European Commission chief,
Orbán returns serve by calling the Luxembourger “the Grand Duke.”
The Hungarian waves
aside comparisons of his ruling style with the autocrat in Moscow and
Turkey’s strong-handed leader as “ridiculous” and “a lazy way
of thinking” — an insult that Western European politicians use to
try to marginalize him.
“If I … disagree
with them, they say, ‘You are not a democrat, you are not a good
man, you belong to the bad guys’,” he says. Any time he breaks
with the “very arrogant and aggressive” Western European
“mainstream” on migration or another issue, he says, “we are
morally labeled as xenophobic, Putin-type, whatever.”
Liberalism
in Europe now concentrates not on freedom but on political
correctness. It became a sclerotic ideology. Dogmatic, may I say.
The censures come
not just from Brussels and Berlin but Hungary’s ally across the
Atlantic. In unusually blunt terms, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary
last month criticized the Orbán government’s crackdowns on NGOs,
limits on media freedoms, the packing of the courts with allies, the
redrawing of electoral districts in ways that favor the ruling
coalition and corruption.
Speaking at Corvinus
University, Ambassador Colleen Bell noted America’s “concerns
about the state of checks and balances and democratic institutions,”
the “centralization of power” and “opaque” decision-making.
The ‘illiberal
democrat’
There is an
oft-noted irony that this pro-democracy dissident of the late 1980s,
who co-founded the Fidesz student-led movement and helped bring down
communism, is seen in the second half of his nearly three-decade run
in Hungarian politics as a threat to its democracy.
Addressing doubts
about his democratic bona fides, Orbán says he has been in
parliamentary opposition longer — a dozen years — than in power,
and expects to “lose again” in future elections. “You can’t
avoid to lose because that’s part of the job,” he says.
Yet in this run as
prime minister, Orbán has made his name abroad as a prominent critic
of “liberal democracy,” someone who pushes an alternative
political model for Europe. In a widely circulated speech to ethnic
Hungarians in Romania last year, he announced his desire to build “an
illiberal new state based on national foundations,” and argued that
“liberal democracy can’t stay competitive.”
Viktor Orban
Orban at his office
in the Hungarian Parliament.
It was the moment
that Orbán most vocally broke with the liberalism that defined his
early years in politics with the Fidesz party and a leader role of
the Liberal International throughout the 1990s.
Orbán admits his
thinking and behavior have changed over 25 years — “it would be
irresponsible not to change” — but also says that liberalism
itself, both in Hungary and globally, isn’t what it once was.
“Liberalism in
Europe now concentrates not on freedom but on political correctness.
It became a sclerotic ideology. Dogmatic, may I say. The liberals are
enemies of freedom” who, he says, want to limit Hungary’s freedom
to make its choices as a nation-state.
“Liberalism became
a mainstream politics. They fight against everybody who does not
belong to the mainstream. But not to belong to the mainstream does
not mean that you are not in favor of freedom. Just the opposite
now.”
Me and Putin
Orbán’s political
journey took its first sharp turn after Fidesz lost seats in a 1994
elections. When another party picked up the urban, youth electorate
that Fidesz had courted, he went to find votes on the traditional
right and outside Budapest, in religious, rural areas. His former
liberal friends call the shifting shapes of Orbán opportunistic and
cynical. He says he’s right where he belongs, with the
“national-Christian-civic political family.”
“You know, I’m a
village boy,” says Orbán, who grew up in Székesfehérvár, a town
of 100,000 southwest of Budapest.
People call him a
populist.
“Because I am,”
he retorts. “The problem is nobody knows what [that] means. It does
not sound bad in Hungarian ears. Being a populist means that you try
to serve the people. It’s positive.”
Support for his
Fidesz party has grown from 40 percent last December to almost 50
percent today, according to polls.
The other notable
irony of the modern Orbán is his relationship with Putin. He fought
to bring down the Soviet empire and remove Russian troops from
Hungarian soil. Putin, a KGB officer who was a cog in the Soviet
system that Orbán battled, is now seeking to restore Russian power.
These days, Orbán
opposes EU sanctions on Russia over its incursions into Ukraine,
though Hungary has signed off on them since last year. He nurtures
close business ties with Moscow, particularly in energy. Despite the
Russian occupation of Crimea and military presence in eastern
Ukraine, Orbán is among the more vocal EU leaders calling for the
West to come to terms with the Kremlin.
Given his staunchly
anti-Soviet past, does his friendly relationship with Putin give him
any discomfort?
“It’s strange,
but politics is full of strange things, so it’s not uncomfortable,”
Orbán says. “That’s part of the job. And you know politics is
basically not a personal issue, and what I represent is not my
opinion but the interests of the Hungarian nation. And the point is
very clear, without the Russians it’s impossible to manage rightly
the future of the Hungarians. So we have to have a good balanced
relationship with the Russians.”
He says he has no
personal warm feelings for the Russian leader — adding that he
would not deny it if he did like Putin, just to please Western
opinion, which “you know, does not matter for us.”
“Putin is someone
you can cooperate with. He’s not an easy man. He has no personal
feelings [for] you…. He is not a man who has a known personality,
so don’t imagine him as you like to imagine Western leaders.”
With Russia, Orbán
continues, any country can have only a “power policy based on
reality,” adding that “if you would like to have a relationship
with the Russians based on principles, it will never work.”
European and Russian principles are “impossible to harmonize. So
put aside principles, ideologies and look at the interest, and find
the common sense realpolitik agreements. That’s the Hungarian
approach.”
When the EU soon
considers whether to extend sanctions on Russia, at least until June,
Orbán says he will voice his opposition but won’t use his veto
power to stop the extension — “a veto is a nuclear bomb, it’s
good to have but don’t use it.”
He says the final
decision on sanctions ultimately rests with the Germans.
While Orbán notes
that Hungary’s closest ally in Europe, Poland, backs sanctions, he
says he finds more than a little hypocrisy coming from Berlin.
Germans “like to appear as opposing” him on sanctions on Russia,
he says, “but in fact they are doing even more than we are” to
work with Russia. Orbán points to Berlin’s support for a second
gas pipeline from Russia to Germany under the Baltic, which will
deprive Ukraine of billions in yearly transit fees.
Balancing the
Germans
“Hungarians are
easygoing guys in the European Union,” Orbán says, laughing. “What
we are doing, we are saying — and what we are doing is exactly what
we are thinking. So it’s not complicated.”
Orbán says the
Russia relationship helps him balance a testy one with Berlin: “We
would not like to depend on the Germans.”
Angela Merkel is no
fan of his, and the feeling seems mutual. Still, Orbán says it’s
easier to work with the German chancellor than with Putin: “With
Merkel we have a principle-based policy. So if you agree on certain
principles, it’s easy to manage the reality. Just the opposite with
Putin: We can manage some reality, but never agree on principle. As
we Hungarians like to say, it’s a different coffee house.”
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