As I’ve noted before, Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a complicated figure, no devil and no saint, but it’s difficult not to have some sympathy for the position in which his country finds itself now.
Hungary has defended its opposition to Brussels’ plans for compulsory migrant quotas, saying it did not wish to repeat the West’s “failed experiments” in multiculturalism. In a defiant rejection of diktats from Europe’s high command, the country’s right-wing government said it was not interested in “lectures” from the European Union about taking in Middle Eastern refugees.
The comments were a direct challenge to remarks last week by one of the EU’s most senior figures, who criticised Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, for opposing the quotas plan and for fencing off its borders to migrants trying to reach Europe.
Frans Timmermans, the Dutch vice-president of the European Commission, said that “diversity was the future of the world,” and that Eastern European nations would just have to “get used to that.”
And if you cannot hear the echo of the commissar in that “get used to that”, or, for that matter, the echo of that old idea of a ‘new man’, an EU variant of Homo Sovieticus, divorced from past and culture, but this time wrapped in blue and gold rather than red, then you are not paying attention.
The Daily Telegraph’s Janet Daley is someone who certainly is paying attention:
In the midst of the general vilification of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian leader who has inspired moral outrage for his hard-line stand on the migrant crisis, you might have missed the vaguely sardonic mention in the news coverage of the leap in his popularity at home.
The voters who put him in office, it seems, hugely approve of the Orban policy. Imagine that: a European leader who actually chooses to represent the views of his own electorate rather than please the unelected commissioners of the EU. The obvious implication on the broadcast news was that this rise in approval within his own country was somehow indecent: a crass populist stance targeted deliberately at a benighted population. Either Mr Orban was a nasty piece of work who was opportunistically appealing to his countrymen’s worst instincts, or the desires of the Hungarian people were beneath consideration – or both.
Let’s just hang on a minute. Before we are pulled into self-righteous judgments about other peoples and their leaders, we might consider what is at stake. Maybe we need to ask precisely what elected governments are for in modern Europe, and whether a population has to sign up to certain assumptions and attitudes before it is entitled to democratic government. There is an unspoken argument here that goes beyond the immediate refugee problem or that other threat to EU unity, the future of the eurozone. If democratically mandated national leaders can be condemned for being genuinely in tune with their own electorates, what does this amount to?
Years ago, long before these latest crises developed, I suggested something that must have seemed at the time like doom-laden hyperbole. This was that the structure of the EU, with the unelected Commission at its head, might represent an effective end to the two-centuries-old experiment in European popular democracy. After the Second World War, there had been a conscious decision by the then-wisest minds on the Continent that mass democracy – which had reached a grotesque apotheosis in the elections of Hitler and Mussolini – had been a terrible mistake. It was time for a return to benign oligarchy. Europe must be ruled in future by an enlightened class of professional administrators who would ensure that the Mob, with its ancient hatreds and bloodthirsty prejudices, would never again run amok. The countries most responsible for the design of these structures that would consign popular democracy to obsolescence were Germany and France, which shared a historical sense of responsibility for the nationalist debacles of the first half of the last century.
They also shared, as it happened, fear and resentment of the global power of America – a fear enunciated very clearly by German Europhiles who were adamant that a European currency must be created to counteract the world dominance of the dollar. And so was born the new Europe with its megalithic institutions and a philosophy that was (who could doubt it now?) explicitly devised to prevent the impulses of the masses from seizing control over economic, social or military decisions.
We find ourselves joining in without a second thought when an elected head of government is pilloried for reflecting the views of those who elected him as if he were a reincarnation of Hitler or Mussolini when, in fact, he is upholding the EU’s own asylum regulations, which Germany chose unilaterally to suspend…..
The bitterness of the division between the western European member states and the newer eastern ones over whether there should be a forced redistribution of migrants is not just a split between generous, liberal (and rich) countries, opposed to mean, resentful (and poor) ones. It arises from their very different historical experiences. Germany, the guilt-ridden rehabilitated criminal of the past, wishes to make amends to the world. The former Warsaw Pact countries, having only just discovered the joys of self-determination and democratic accountability, are adamant that they will not be dictated to by yet another autocratic supra-national body that treats them with contempt.
Quite.
And if you don’t think that Vladimir Putin sees an opportunity in all this….
Meanwhile in Austria, Euronews reports:
Refugees and asylum were key factors in a regional election in Austria which saw support for a far-right party more than double, say analysts. Public Opinion Strategies made the claim after the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) made strong gains in the northern Upper Austria region, according to preliminary results. It netted 31.4 percent of the vote, after 16 percent of ballots had been counted on Sunday (September 27), more than double its result of 15.3 percent in 2009.
“We were optimistic from the beginning,” said Heinz-Christian Strache, FPO leader, adding the result had “overtaken our expectations”.
Despite FPO’s strong showing, the Christian Democrats held onto first place, with 35.9 percent of the vote. Austria has also been hit by the EU’s refugee and migrants crisis. In one day alone, Sunday, September 20, around 10,700 migrants walked into Austria from Hungary. Austria had 17,395 asylum applications between April and June this year, a leap of 305 percent compared with the same period last year. Sunday’s vote comes ahead of elections in Vienna. The capital has been a social-democrat stronghold for decades but could also see a rise in support for the far-right, report AFP.
Austria is, of course, a country distinguished by a chancellor who recently compared Hungary’s handling of the refugee/migrant crisis with Nazi deportations during the Holocaust. Playing politics with the memory of the Holocaust is the last thing an Austrian chancellor should be doing, but it seems that there is no depth too low to which the EU’s governing class will not go in defense of its attack on national democracy.