Budapest — A “post-reality campaign” seeking to “corrupt” Hungary’s “searing national memory” by “build[ing] terror of an enemy that doesn’t exist at all.” That’s how Anne Applebaum, the liberal historian and writer at The Atlantic, described Viktor Orbán’s closing message in Hungary’s fraught general election campaign, which will come to a head when voters go to the polls this Sunday. By inventing “existential threats — from migrants, from so-called decadence, from the European Union,” Orbán is, in Applebaum’s estimation, engaging in a sinister campaign of distraction from his purported efforts to impose “authoritarian populism and one-party rule” while downplaying what she regards as the real threats facing the post-communist Central European state.
“Brussels doesn’t pose an actual threat to Hungarian health and happiness,” she declares. “Ukraine is not going to invade, but Russia might.”
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