A clip of PM Orbán of Hungary citing George Soros’ European migration plan published in 2015 in Project Syndicate was recently shared on the social media site X in reference to the election results in the United Kingdom and France, and garnered over 25,000 likes within 12 hours.
On the afternoon of 8 July, Patriots for Europe, the sovereigntist alliance recently founded by Viktor Orbán, Herbert Kickl, and Andrej Babiš, is to officially become a political group in the European Parliament. Over the weekend, several right-wing parties across Europe announced their accession. With the arrival of Marine Le Pen’s RN and, most likely, with Salvini’s League, Patriots for Europe are set to overtake Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) as third largest group in the EP.
The integration of the countries of the region into the EU is a decades-long process, the positive outcome of which is still to be seen. Thus, the number of Eurosceptics in the region has multiplied in recent years. As a consequence of the protracted accession negotiations, which have not even started for several Western Balkan states, some countries in the region have forged closer economic, political, and cultural ties with non-EU actors.
‘The fate of American democracy—and democracy more broadly throughout the West—depends on social, cultural, demographic, and technological trends and changes that have been ongoing for quite some time now. It may perhaps be too late to reverse these trends, and the fixation on individual figures fails to address the real issues at hand. As history has shown, the unraveling of social cohesion, coupled with technological disruptions, erodes the very foundations of democratic systems.’
‘It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that same forces that saw the young turn out en masse for the far left Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 have begun to circle around Farage. Like Corbyn, he is an anti-politics figure for an anti-politics age. Like Corbyn, he scandalises the Westminster establishment.’
‘If the Hungarian government’s foreign policy in recent months had truly been to serve Russian interests, then, for example, the NATO secretary general would not have left Budapest with a free hand from Hungary to negotiate and conduct NATO training and support for Ukraine, as well as to undertake a long-term financial commitment required for military support, even if Hungary will not itself participate in these NATO efforts.’
According to former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán aims to create ‘maximum discomfort’ for the new European Parliament with his newly established right-wing alliance, Patriots for Europe. Juncker harshly criticized the Hungarian PM as well as former US President Donald Trump in an interview with POLITICO.
Dick Schoof, the 67-year-old independent former Director-General of the General Intelligence and Security Service, arose as a compromise candidate for prime minister after seven months of negotiations between the winning PVV party and its coalition partners. The new cabinet has vowed to implement the strictest migration and asylum policy in the history of the country.
The KINCS survey conducted in May clearly shows that Hungarians understand and take seriously the demographic challenges of our time. 78 per cent of respondents believe that the EU faces serious demographic problems that 73 per cent think threaten Europe’s future.
‘The Hungarian presidency has just begun, but every opportunity is being seized to obstruct it, as it offers the Hungarian government the chance to present its vision of an alternative Europe to the entire continent,’ the Center for Fundamental Rights stress in their analysis. They also note that the Hungarian PM’s visit to Kyiv took the international press by surprise, as the liberal media has consistently and falsely portrayed Hungary’s stance as pro-Russian from the start, a claim that Viktor Orbán has now clearly disproved.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.