Opinion: PM Viktor Orbán’s European career is over since the German big businesses will no longer protect him

Remarks from Jobbik MEP Márton Gyöngyösi:

It was just five or six years ago that Viktor Orbán’s name was seriously considered in the list of politicians who could have a significant impact on Europe’s future. In all likelihood however, Fidesz’ “debarment” from the EPP Group this week will mean the end of the Hungarian premier’s European dreams, too.

Of course, they will keep Orbán in their memories for a long time, just not the way he thought.

Around 2015, the European Union was undergoing a serious crisis: while the community was more and more heavily criticized for being unable to define its own identity and values, the migration crisis also revealed grave security deficiencies. In the meantime, there were growing concerns that the United Kingdom might actually leave the European Union. Amongst all these uncertainties and the often contradictory voices, more and more

people started to talk about Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán in Europe, too.

Orbán, who had already attained the two-thirds majority in two consecutive elections in Hungary and begun to establish a completely unlimited power for himself, apparently welcomed this situation. While the Hungarian PM demonstrated a clear assertiveness in pointing out the fallacy of any political attempt to sweep the migration issue under the rug or to accept and integrate anybody without exception, he had a strong opinion on the question of European values, too.

Orbán became the talk of the town in Budapest as someone who was no longer tested by the challenges of Hungarian politics and who wanted to become a formative politician at the European level.

In the short run, it seemed that Orbán’s tactics might be successful: the Hungarian PM did actually win the European debate on migration since more and more European countries, albeit less loudly and spectacularly, began to realize that they would be unable to accommodate and integrate millions of people overnight. In the meantime, Orbán was able to ride the rising “populist wave” while he, unlike any of his counterparts, had substantial pillars to rely on in mainstream politics, too. He had something that no other boisterous European politician could show for around 2015 and 2016: Orbán’s Fidesz party was a member of the European People’s Party, with excellent ties to Berlin and the German union parties.

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This has proven to be such a protective umbrella that allowed Fidesz to go quite far: going into the 2018 Hungarian national elections, he launched a hatemongering campaign with the

occasional anti-Semitic streaks,

something that has not been seen anywhere in the western world in the past decades, while the Hungarian state bodies that had been filled up with Orbán’s people were constantly trying to block the opposition’s campaign. By 2018, Hungary turned from a democracy into a hybrid regime but Orbán, thanks to his connections, was always able to survive the truly dangerous attacks from abroad. The Prime Minister apparently dared to dream big.

Hoping to attain a key role in Europe by leveraging his connections to both the European People’s Party and the then increasingly successful populist right in 2019, he more and more openly talked about how he wanted to reshape the right side of the political spectrum by taking the EPP to a more radical direction. However, Fidesz had made Hungary’s public discourse so extremely heated and he had focused on his hatemongering and smear campaigns so much that it was no longer possible to conceal the Hungarian reality from Western Europe. The turning point came when Fidesz launched a fiercely anti-European outdoor media campaign, putting up the photo of his fellow EPP member and EC President Jean-Claude Juncker in a markedly negative context on billboards all over Hungary.