Hungary’s Freudian political fight:
Orbán vs Soros
The two men once walked a common path
but now are sworn enemies.
By DAVID M.
HERSZENHORN 4/27/17, 4:30 PM
CET Updated 4/27/17, 10:57 PM CET
Viktor Orbán has spoken openly about how his father beat him
as a child and his struggle with self-esteem.
These days, a different emotional drama is playing out
between Hungary’s prime minister and the billionaire financier and
philanthropist George Soros. The elder Soros, who in many ways is Orbán’s
political godfather, is now a sworn enemy — and their running political dispute
mirrors and to a degree defines the ideological divide between liberalism and
nationalism that’s shaping Europe’s present and future.
Unusually, the duo almost crossed paths this week for the
first time in years, appearing in Brussels within 24 hours of each other. They
were in town to fight their corners with the grandees of the EU. This time, the
dispute involves the Soros-backed Central European University in Budapest,
which the Hungarian government is moving to push out of the country.
It is an encounter that Orbán seemed to seek out. He invited
himself to the European Parliament this week to face down his critics, knowing
that a day later the Hungarian-American billionaire was due to visit Brussels.
Speaking before the chamber on Wednesday, the Hungarian prime minister bluntly
warned, “We Hungarians never give up the fight.” A day later, Commission
President Jean-Claude Juncker welcomed Soros with a greeting fitting of a
head-of-state.
The fight against authority is a recurring theme in Orbán’s
life. He led the anti-Soviet student movement Fidesz in the late 1980s and
after communism collapsed fought on behalf of liberalism.
Interviewed for a documentary filmed in the late 1980s, the
activist and budding politician talked frankly about his upbringing. “I
remember when he used to beat me, he would yell that I should keep my hands
down and things like that, I remember I had some pretty bad experiences,” Orbán
told an interviewer about his father. Later in the interview, he said: “I was
never delighted with myself, I always had a bit of a schizophrenic inclination;
I was able to view myself from the outside.”
But there was also a hint of defiance against parental rule:
“There came about a new rule that I can’t go out of the house after 9,” Orbán
said. “That was the order … and I said ‘I’m going.’ They said, ‘There’s no
way.’ And I said, ‘I’m going,’ they said, ‘No.’ I got dressed and got going.
And my father went to the door and beat me up insanely, I remember.”
In his youth too, Soros was a political father of sorts. As
a liberal democratic crusader against Communism and the Soviet Union, the
future prime minister attended Oxford on a Soros-financed scholarship. Soros
was a major financial backer of Fidesz (the name stands for the Alliance for
Young Democrats), which Orbán founded with other pro-democracy student leaders
in 1988. Soros even provided financing for a group called Black Box that made
the documentary about Orbán, which was part of a series on current affairs.
“Obviously, you don’t have to be Freudian to conclude that
[Orbán] has had a problem with authority ever since and the authority of the
European Union as much as the authority of George Soros is a factor here” —
Charles Gati
Their once common path split sharply when Orbán transformed
Fidesz into a center-right conservative party in the mid-1990s, a move that
helped catapult him into the prime minister’s office for the first time in
1998. He was forced out by subsequent electoral defeats only to win back the
job in 2010. Since then, he has maintained a tight grip on power by shifting
even harder to the right, in part to prevent being outflanked by the radical
nationalist Jobbik party.
Soros and other supporters of liberal democratic political
causes have watched with dismay as Orbán has adopted increasingly nationalist
policies, particularly by putting up fences to keep out unwanted refugees and
bitterly opposing the EU’s efforts to resettle migrants across the Continent.
Disdain for authority
Charles Gati, a senior professor of European and Eurasian
studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who has
known both men for years, said Orbán’s vilification of Soros fits a lifelong
pattern of rebelling against authority figures: his own father and the Soviets,
while growing up in the town of Felcsút in the Communist era, and later against
Washington and Brussels.
“Obviously, you don’t have to be Freudian to conclude that
he has had a problem with authority ever since and the authority of the
European Union as much as the authority of George Soros is a factor here,”
Gati, who is Hungarian-American, said in a telephone interview from Stockholm.
“The European Union lectures him all the time like his
father,” Gati said. “And of course Americans, all of us, have a tendency to
lecture abroad and he resents that because he sees a father figure in America
as well and in George Soros.”
Gati said he believed that Orbán was driven away from Soros
and the liberal path by advice from another fatherly figure, former German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who once warned Orbán that the biggest and most
persistent political threat he would face would come from the right not from
the left.
Soros declined requests for an interview.
‘This election is about survival’
Orbán, in testimony before the Parliament, unleashed
scathing criticism of Soros, describing him as a malevolent force, an “American
financial speculator” and an enemy of Hungary and of Europe’s common currency,
the euro.
“I know that the power, size and weight of Hungary is much
smaller than that of the financial speculator, George Soros, who is now
attacking Hungary and who — despite ruining the lives of millions of European
people with his financial speculations, and being penalized in Hungary for
speculations, and who is an openly admitted enemy of the euro — is so highly
praised that he is received by the EU’s top leaders,” Orbán said, according to
the Hungarian government’s English transcript of his remarks.
At a press conference later, Orbán said he had not seen
Soros since a meeting in 2010, and he insisted that the real problem was not
the new education law, which is viewed in Brussels as targeting Central
European University for closure, but rather the opposition of Soros and the EU
to Hungary’s immigration policies.
“The real issue here is the refugee issue and that’s the
reason we are in strong confrontation with the Commission, I suppose the
majority of the Parliament, and Mr. Soros, and his whole NGO empire,” Orbán
said. The prime minister also repeated his earlier line of attack, noting how
Soros had gained fame and wealth by breaking the Bank of England in a
successful currency bet.
“We as Hungarians, as talented Hungarians, have to face a
financial speculator, a person who has ruined the lives of tens of millions of
people when he attacked the British pound and other currencies,” Orbán said.
“The real issue here is the refugee issue and that’s the
reason we are in strong confrontation with the Commission, I suppose the
majority of the Parliament, and Mr. Soros, and his whole NGO empire” —
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
Balazs Jarabik, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, said that the real issue was Hungarian national politics.
He said Orbán’s stepped-up attack on Central European University began just
days after the far-right Jobbik Party put up campaign billboards across
Budapest criticizing Fidesz with the slogan: “You work. They steal.”
“This is the kick-off of the election campaign,” Jarabik
said, and that the thinking within Fidesz was: “We need to have a conflict and
mobilize our voters. This is a fight that we can win at home.”
“I think Orbán is using Soros’ overall image,” he added.
“This election is about survival.”
Jarabik and Gati said the attacks on Soros, who is Jewish,
could also tap into an undercurrent of anti-Semitism that runs through
Hungarian society.
“There is hidden anti-Semitism about this,” Gati said. “It’s
so obvious to any Hungarian reader that underneath it all, though Orbán would
never concede it, it’s there.”
Authors:
David M. Herszenhorn
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário