In his second spell as prime minister, Viktor Orban has battered Hungary's young democracy
1989 Hungarians gathered to rebury Imre Nagy. The liberalising prime minister’s overthrow had prompted the uprising against Soviet rule 33 years before. In Heroes’ Square in Budapest they placed flowers and wreaths around his coffin as Viktor Orban, a 26-year-old leader of the Young Democrats , proclaimed that the Soviet Union had forced Hungary into a “dead-end Asian street” and that communism and democracy were incompatible.
That feels like a long time ago. In his second spell as prime minister, since 2010, Mr Orban has battered Hungary’s young democracy: changing the constitution to cow judges, taking over the press, clamping down on civil society, manipulating elections and propagating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros, a Hungarian-born billionaire whom he accuses of plotting to flood the country with migrants.
Now, however, Mr Orban may finally have gone too far. Last month he launched a publicly funded poster campaign showing a cackling Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission president and anveteran, next to George Soros, with the slogan “You have a right to know what Brussels is planning to do” . The vitriol and scale of the campaign shocked the.
’s assembly will settle the matter on March 20th. It will probably be decided by German parties, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, its Bavarian sister party and Mr Weber’s political home.’s new general secretary, old Fidesz excuses did not fly.
That would be grossly inadequate. The case for expelling Fidesz is overwhelming. Far from restraining him, cosseting Mr Orban in thehas legitimised his illiberal abuses. Andras Lederer of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human-rights campaign in Budapest, is withering about the’s “utter failure”. Letting Mr Orban go unscathed, he says, “encouraged him to continue dismantling the rule of law and checks and balances.
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