Orban Derangement Syndrome

On March 8, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will visit former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Largo, and the crossover already has the media and political establishment in a tizzy. MSNBC says the meeting is a cause for alarm, Rawstory calls it worrying, while The New Republic explained why it should “terrify us all.”

Unsurprisingly, all of these media “explanations” for why Orban is such a singularly terrible figure are a collection of rhetorical charges that fall apart upon first contact with reality.

Viktor Orban is an authoritarian dictator who retains power through systemic gerrymandering, we are told. Yet somehow he won 54.12 percent of the total popular vote in his last reelection in 2022, more than enough to retain power under any reasonable political system.

But Hungary under Orban is a close ally of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the media tells us. Yet under Orban’s leadership, Hungary dropped its objections to a $64 billion European Union aid package to Kyiv last month and approved Sweden’s accession to NATO.

According to the media and Western liberals, Hungary, which has recognized same-sex domestic partnerships since 2009, is also somehow a homophobic theocracy where minorities are persecuted because the government has restricted sexual propaganda in classrooms and prohibits minors from undergoing dangerous experimental sex change operations.

The obsession of the global liberal elite and their pet media institutions with Viktor Orban’s Hungary predated the appearance of Donald Trump on the American political stage. But their disdain for Orban reflects the same horrified reaction they had to Trump – specifically to the idea that someone dares to challenge their status and power.

In the eyes of a global elite stretching across academia, corporations, NGOs, and other institutions, history ended in 1991 with the triumph not just of liberal democracy, but of a specific class of liberals. The entire history of mankind had conspired to create a world where Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Boris Yeltsin tore down trade barriers, obliterated borders, and allowed for a new global order in which nations would be replaced with a transnational elite of like-minded figures.

In this new order, Davos and the World Economic Forum were to be the new United Nations. The prospect of World Trade Organization accession and economic integration for a supposedly liberalizing China did not mean empowering the Chinese people, but rather bringing the leaders of the CCP into this elite circle.

Viktor Orban was present at the creation of this new class of global elites. The Hungarian leaders’ critics are careful to highlight his close working relationship with George Soros’s Open Society Foundations as a student leader in the struggle against communism, as if that discredits, rather than lends credence, to Orban’s criticisms of Soros.

Orban saw the operations of the Soros network from the inside, both in its relentless struggle to overthrow illiberal regimes, in which it shared interests with democrats, but also in how its agenda diverged afterward. Hungarians like Orban wished to throw off the yoke of communism so they could seek their own destiny; George Soros wished to overthrow Hungarian communism as a prerequisite for the destiny he had set for his native Hungary – namely, economic, social, and political integration into the European Union.

Soros had not trained young men and women like Orban merely to overthrow communism, but to govern states like Hungary afterward with a commitment to a specific set of values. Even European integration worked both ways. It was designed both to place Hungarian politicians under the authority of Brussels and also to flood Brussels with Open Society-trained cadres from newly admitted Eastern European states, thereby diminishing the remaining influence of existing member states.

Toward this end, the Soros network built universities, sponsored media outlets, and trained bureaucrats, but they made no effort to build political parties.

Instead, they pushed electoral systems, including proportional representation and public funding for dozens of parties that seemed designed to ensure the fragmentation of politics into unstable parties. This ensured governments would be weak, divided coalitions, incapable of effective government, resulting in immense power and influence for the institutions trained by Soros.

Rather than promoting an “Open Society,” this fragmentation encouraged a culture of corruption and public cynicism in which Soros-funded media outlets and NGOs could accuse any politician they wished of corruption while causing the public to lose faith in the electoral process. Rather than promoting good government, these institutions cultivated an environment of chaotic misgovernment which allowed Soros’s acolytes to pose as saviors.

As Orban learned in the joint struggle against communism, often the Soros network fights against leaders who are genuinely corrupt and authoritarian, as is the case in Russia.

To that extent, it is important to resist the urge to mistake the enemy of my enemy for my friend. What Orban figured out is not that the Soros network is wrong about corruption or authoritarianism, but rather that it has no desire to fix those problems, only change who benefits from the corruption.

Orban therefore desired to “drain the swamp,” which was the only habitat in which the Soros network could prosper. It was a habitat of constant unfixable crises – whether it be loss of manufacturing jobs, immigration, or an external enemy. Orban’s wall blocking the influx of migrants into Hungary was just as much of an existential threat to the NGO-Industrial Complex as was Donald Trump’s wall on the southern border, because if it were possible to do something to stop migration, there would be no need for grand bargains on legalization as proposed in the U.S. or forced refugee resettlement as in Europe.

Even the supposedly authoritarian tactics Orban is accused of undertaking, such as creating single-member districts and forcing multiple parties to field single candidates, are aiding democracy by forcing the opposition to unite and present a unified platform. The 2014 Hungarian elections produced an even split between the left and right factions in opposition. In 2022, the opposition was forced to unite to try to hold Orban to account on his record.

American society has been subject to a takeover by the same NGO industry that Soros promoted in Eastern Europe.

In universities, administrators and faculty have found themselves sidelined in favor of a DEI bureaucracy whose HR counterparts torment corporate America. The innovation of the Biden administration has been to introduce a DEI bureaucracy into government itself to sideline the remaining authority of elected officials. When Democrats and the media warn that Trump poses a threat to the “independence of the federal bureaucracy” they mean he intends to smash the power of these DEI institutions within the government.

This is not just about democracy; it is about peace. The global elite needs an enemy, one with whom they can associate all their opponents, and they found one in Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin is a nasty individual with blood on his hands, but the danger he poses pales in comparison to the Chinese Communist Party.

But the global elites have investments in China, and still wish to woo the CCP politburo to Davos. They have long since lost interest in Russia, which means it is a safe target for demonization.

The result is that Putin has been built into an existential threat, and anyone who questions the policies needed to stop him can be accused of disloyalty. Viktor Orban, as noted, allowed Sweden into NATO and for aid to flow to Ukraine. His crime was in questioning the lack of a clear mission for NATO, an endgame for expansion, or a goal in Ukraine.

Far from a defensive alliance based on mutual defense, NATO has transformed into an offensive alliance aimed at carrying out by force the agenda of the Open Society Foundations. That includes adding members that appear to be of no strategic benefit to the existing members, but rather are added as part of an effort to strengthen the “pro-Western” elements in states such as Ukraine and Georgia, a recipe for proxy conflict with Russia.

In the Middle East, NATO pursued an offensive ideological agenda that triggered civil wars in Libya and Syria, ones which flooded Europe with millions of refugees. Donald Trump, meanwhile, who we are told undermined the alliance, did more to prepare Ukraine for a Russian attack than Obama, and challenged European countries to pay their NATO dues.

Trump questioned the purpose of a policy that was likely to lead to a Russian attack on Ukraine, and in doing so threatened something even more dangerous to his institutional critics. They could survive the destruction of Ukraine in a war, but they would lose their enemy if the Russian threat could be removed without the need for conflict.

Neither Orban nor Trump is against NATO. They believe that there is a place for a defensive alliance that serves the interests of its members. The objection they have is that NATO is currently undermining the security of its member states. Their most grievous sin was to point this out.

Orban has ventured to point out that even a Ukrainian victory would leave a hostile Russia seeking revenge and a ruined Ukraine whose economy would need to be rebuilt and whose borders would need to be defended, not to mention tens of millions of refugees across Europe. He dared to ask what people were fighting for. The answer, of course, was “liberal democracy,” and by asking the question Orban marked himself as an enemy.

That is why the left set out to destroy both Orban and Trump. When they complain about “failures of the system” they mean not “failures of democracy,” but their lack of success in using their control of institutions such as courts, prosecutors’ offices, and the European Union to remove Orban and Trump from office.

A healthy democracy would not need the “system,” a truth that Donald Trump and Viktor Orban have both grasped. Their meeting will throw the system’s failure in its face, and that is what truly terrifies their critics.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.