The Times: No surrender in Hungary’s ‘war on woke’
The country is feeling the pinch, but challenging EU orthodoxy is still more important than unlocking frozen funds, according to Viktor Orban’s chief political adviser
Hungary is fighting a “war on woke” against the European Union that is more important than funding, Viktor Orban’s political adviser has warned Brussels.
Hungary’s culture war with the bloc will continue even if Brussels unlocks billions of euros in funding at a time when the central European country faces a grim economic winter.
Tomorrow the European Commission is expected to renew a block on EU funding worth over €13 billion, more than 8 per cent of Hungary’s annual GDP.
To unfreeze the money, as inflation and energy prices rocket and Hungary’s economy contracts sharply, Budapest must meet a series of “milestones” to show that the country is fit to administer the cash, passing 17 pieces of legislation to meet EU anti-corruption criteria.
Orban, 59, Hungary’s populist socially conservative and nationalist leader, is at odds with the EU over almost every burning political question of the day, ranging from sanctions against Russia to refusing migrant quotas and Brussels’s demands for full LGBT rights.
Balazs Orban, 36, no relation, is the chief political adviser to Hungary’s prime minister. He sees the funding question, important as it is, as secondary to the need for a “culture war” against “woke” institutions captured by “political jihadists” imposing a “progressivist” agenda on traditional and socially conservative countries such as Hungary.
“Unfortunately, there is a European culture war,” he said, drinking a coffee in the café at the top of the Atomium, a tourist attraction in Brussels.
“The equilibrium inside the EU and especially inside the politicised institutions has disappeared,” he said. “Now it has become most important for them to preserve and ensure their woke political ideology flourishes.”
“If anybody thinks that we Hungarians have only one issue with Brussels and this one issue is money, then it’s a misunderstanding.”
Orban argues that, especially following Britain’s exit from the bloc and as politically fragile national governments become the new normal across Europe, the EU’s traditional balance has gone.
“The European Commission, which used to be neutral, bureaucratic in a positive way, is not any more. It has a political agenda,” he said. “The equilibrium has gone and the institutions have been taken over by political jihadists — that probably is too harsh an expression but it’s closer to it than anything else.”
“If the EU is technocratic, it’s less problematic than if it’s all politicised. Currently, the problem is that the technocrats are saying that there is only one way to proceed. There is only one way forward. There is only one type of integration which is beneficial. There’s only one solution for global challenges and they think that they should just silence everything else.”
Many in Brussels, at the heart of the EU and in other capitals across Europe would like to see the back of Orban’s government after repeated Hungarian challenges to the supremacy of European law, especially on “liberal values” such as judicial independence, refugee protection or gay rights.
During an EU summit in the summer of last year, Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, told the Hungarian leader that “Hungary has no business being in the EU any more”.
“The long-term aim is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue,” he said, comments that Budapest has taken as a declaration of a culture war.
Speaking in America this summer — shortly before meeting Donald Trump rather than President Biden — the Hungarian leader, who has won four consecutive electoral landslides, insisted that he would never back down on accepting EU refugee quotas or demands that he repel legislation banning the promotion of “transgender” identity. “It is on these issues that the future will be decided,” he said.
For Orban, the political director for Europe’s most controversial prime minister, the accusations are the EU’s form of “cancel culture”. “If you argue you are out of the game, you are autocrats, populists or something bad”. He accuses most MEPs, and many in the commission, of political grandstanding “to kick Hungary out of the EU”.
“If you are a responsible politician, you understand that blackmailing and really going after Hungary with a political witch-hunt is not a good way to keep the EU together in such fragile times,” he said.
“Nobody wants a compromise and no one is willing to understand the other point of others’ point of view. The old methodology of compromise, there since the founding moment of the EU, is not as strong as it was. And that’s why we are in a culture war on a constant basis.”
This month Orban launched a counter-cultural think tank, MCC Brussels, which is linked to Budapest’s Mathias Corvinus college, to bring the fight into the enemy’s camp in the EU’s capital.
Hungary, which is highly dependent on Russian oil and gas, has been a critic of EU sanctions on Russia’s energy supplies to Europe, which it fears damages Europeans, especially Hungarians, more than President Putin. But Hungary, one of the EU’s poorest countries, needs Europe’s single market and has a European “destiny” dictated by geography, as well as a history of innovation and being dominated by empires.
Despite the culture war, Hungary must stay in the EU and change it. Unlike Britain, argues Orban, Hungary has no choice. “Our destiny is different. You’re an island,” he said. “You can say you’re fed up with that, get up and leave. You have the right to do so. And you have that destiny after Brexit. But the Hungarians are in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the continent, surrounded by EU member states, and so our destiny is different. We have no option to leave.”
Amid all the anger, the commission moved in September to use new powers to suspend funding to Hungary on the formal basis that more is needed to be done to tackle corruption in order for the cash to be properly spent.
To unlock the funds, Hungary has passed a range of legislation — 17 acts of parliament — but for key political players in Brussels, that is not enough.
“Orban’s last-minute legislation to get access to EU funds does not make anything better,” said Daniel Freund, a German MEP, who has led calls by the European parliament for funding until the Hungarian government renounces its illiberal politics. “He is not serious about rule-of-law reform and de-autocratisation.”
Freund dismisses Hungarian claims of a woke crusade against conservative values. “Orban might always claim that there’s some culture war going on between Brussels and Budapest. It’s a red herring. The conflict with Hungary is about rampant corruption and the systematic demolition of democratic institutions.”
