George Soros: Orbán turns to familiar scapegoat
as Hungary rows with EU
Rightwing prime minister Viktor Orbán reignites
anti-Soros rhetoric with EU dispute
Shaun
Walker
Shaun
Walker in Budapest
Sat 5 Dec
2020 05.00 GMT
Hungary’s
rightwing prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is threatening to veto the new EU
budget over a provision that would link some funding to rule-of-law concerns.
As the standoff intensifies, he has found a familiar enemy to blame: the
90-year-old financier and philanthropist George Soros.
Orbán has
reinvigorated his government’s anti-Soros campaign, which has often been marked
by conspiratorial and antisemitic rhetoric, as Hungary and Poland have tussled
with other European leaders over the so-called “rule-of-law” mechanism. The
dispute is holding up final agreement on the EU’s €1.7tn (£1.5tn) seven-year
budget and recovery package.
On Friday,
amid reports that the Polish government may be moving closer to accepting a
compromise solution on the budget, Orbán stood firm with his veto threat,
claiming in a radio interview that the EU wants to accept “35 million migrants”
and the rule-of-law mechanism would be a way of punishing him for disagreeing.
Orbán has
consistently claimed that European critics are punishing Hungary because of its
anti-migrant stance, rather than for well-documented concerns over corruption
and rule-of-law.
The guilty
party behind this supposed plan: Soros, of course. “Europe must not succumb to
the Soros network,” wrote Orbán recently.
Soros was
born to a Jewish family in Hungary in 1930, and survived the Holocaust by going
into hiding. He later moved to Britain and then the US, where he became one of
the world’s richest men through trading and currency speculation. Starting in
the late 1980s, he has given away huge portions of his fortune to liberal
causes, and even funded Orbán and a number of other current Hungarian officials
in the late 80s and early 1990s.
“I
supported Orbán because at the time he was a very active supporter of open
society. But he became an exploiter and the creator of a mafia state,” Soros
told the Guardian in an interview last year.
Soros has
been the target of conspiracy theories in many countries for years, but Orbán’s
government took it to a new level in 2017, with a media campaign that told
Hungarians they should not let Soros “have the last laugh”. The government
funded billboards in Budapest and other cities featuring Soros as a puppet
master.
In 2018, in
the run-up to parliamentary elections, Orbán criticised Soros using language
that contained textbook antisemitic tropes: “We are fighting an enemy that is
different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not
honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working
but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the
whole world.”
After those
elections, which Orbán’s Fidesz party won, the billboard campaigns ceased and
mentions of Soros somewhat quietened, but in recent weeks his name has been
cropping up ever more frequently.
Soros has
certainly been part of the debate. He wrote an opinion piece last month in
which he accused Orbán of setting up “an elaborate kleptocratic system to rob
the country blind”, and called on the EU to ensure it stands up to Hungarian
and Polish threats to veto the budget.
In
response, Orbán upped the stakes in his rhetorical attacks on Soros, calling
him “the most corrupt man in the world” and claiming Hungary is the victim of
shadowy Soros networks.
The latest
bout of Soros-mania has even touched the actor George Clooney, who irritated
the Hungarian government when he conflated “hate and anger” with Orbán’s
government. In response, pro-government media dug up a photo of Clooney with
Soros’s son, and suggested the actor was parroting the billionaire’s talking
points. It prompted the actor to release a statement saying he had only met
Soros and his son once. “Orbán’s propaganda machine is lying,” he said, though
he went on to praise the work done by Soros foundations across the world.
The most
disturbing episode of the recent anti-Soros campaign was an article written for
a pro-government website by Szilárd Demeter, a ministerial commissioner and
Orbán-appointed museum director. He called Soros a “liberal Führer” who wanted
to persecute Hungarians and Poles. “Toxic gas flows from the capsule of a
multicultural open society,” he wrote.
Even by the
standards of official Hungarian discourse on Soros, the outburst was shocking,
prompting critical responses from the US and Israeli embassies as well as
Jewish organisations, particularly given its target was a Holocaust survivor.
In the end, Demeter withdrew the article, though he did not apologise.
Critics
suggest the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric could be a device to deflect
attention from the worsening coronavirus situation in Hungary, as well as from
the tricky corner Orbán is now in with the negotiations in Brussels.
Attention
was briefly distracted from the budget negotiations this week when Fidesz MEP
and leading Orbán confidant József Szájer resigned after he was detained by
police leaving a gay orgy via a drainpipe with drugs in his backpack. It was an
awkward scrape for someone who personally rewrote the Hungarian constitution to
define marriage as a heterosexual institution.
Szájer is
another Fidesz official who was once a recipient of a Soros scholarship but has
now turned anti-Soros fighter. Perhaps surprisingly, Soros has not yet been
blamed for Szájer’s decision to take part in the orgy, though some
pro-government media commentators have suggested the incident was a set-up by foreign
secret services.
Negotiations
on the EU budget are about to enter a crunch phase. Earlier this week, the
European commission warned it could create a new coronavirus recovery fund
without the help of Hungary and Budapest, prompting Polish deputy prime
minister Jarosław Gowin to say on Thursday that a compromise proposal could be
possible.
Orbán,
however, said on Friday that this would not work.
“The Poles
cannot back out of the veto; our countries have signed a declaration stating
that Hungary and Poland will support each other and will not accept a solution
that’s unacceptable to the other,” he said.
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