ABOVE: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Screenshot via BBC.
Declaring himself the winner with 91% of the votes counted in the national parliamentary elections April 3, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán addressed supporters and members of his Fidesz Party telling the enthusiastic crowd it was a “huge victory.”
“We won a victory so big that you can see it from the moon, and you can certainly see it from Brussels,” Orbán said referring to his ongoing battles with the European Union.
“The whole world has seen tonight in Budapest that Christian democratic politics, conservative civic politics and patriotic politics have won. We are telling Europe that this is not the past, this is the future,” he added.
Once the results are confirmed and Orbán settles in for his fourth consecutive term as prime minster, it is almost certain that recent tensions between him and the leadership of the European Union, especially over the question of LGBTQ civil rights, will continue to escalate.
Further adding tension has been Orbán’s longtime close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The prime minister has insisted that Hungary remain neutral in the Russian leader’s war on neighboring Ukraine, although Hungary has maintained close economic ties with Moscow, including continuing to import Russian gas and oil on favorable terms.
Orbán, although he had previously condemned the Russian invasion, has refused to participate in assisting Ukraine or allowing EU and NATO members to ship much needed supplies, including weapons, across Hungarian borders to Ukraine.
At his final campaign rally, the Associated Press reported that Orbán claimed that supplying Ukraine with weapons — something that Hungary, alone among Ukraine’s EU neighbors, has refused to do — would make the country a military target, and that sanctioning Russian energy imports would cripple Hungary’s own economy.
“This isn’t our war, we have to stay out of it,” Orbán said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told western media representatives that Orbán is out of touch with the rest of Europe, which has united to support sanctions against Russia and sent aid including weapons assisting Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression.
“He is virtually the only one in Europe to openly support Mr. Putin,” Zelenskyy said.
Peter Marki-Zay, the man who challenged Orbán in national elections on April 3 on behalf of a united opposition, warned of worsening isolation under Orban’s “illiberal” model and likened him to a “traitor” putting Hungarians at risk. Marki-Zay in an interview with RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service said; “Let’s for once be on the right side of history, for once on the winning side.”
Critics have charged that there will be further erosion of civil rights and democratic norms, especially for Hungary’s LGBTQ community which has been under relentless attack from the Orbán government and the Fidesz Party over the past nearly three years.
“We have heard a lot of nonsense recently about whether there is democracy in Hungary,” Orbán’s State Secretary Zoltán Kovács told reporters in recent interviews. “Hungarian democracy in the last 12 years has not weakened, but been strengthened.”
Lawmakers in December 2020 approved proposals that would effectively ban same-sex couples from adopting children and define marriage as between a man and a woman. That same year parliamentarians from the the Fidesz Party approved a bill that would prevent transgender and intersex people in the country from legally changing their gender.
A law that bans the promotion of homosexuality and sex-reassignment surgery to minors in Hungary took effect in 2021.
“The homophobic and transphobic amendments to the law, which came into force on July 8, 2021, stigmatize LGBTQI people, deprive LGBTQI youth of information that is vital to them, and illegally restrict freedom of speech and the right to education,” said the Háttér Society, a Hungarian LGBTQ rights group.
On Aug. 6, Orban’s government issued a decree that restricts the sale of children’s books with LGBTQ-specific themes.
Orban has garnered the admiration of right-wing nationalists across Europe and North America including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson who traveled to Budapest. Carlson at the opening of his show described Orbán as “an elected leader who publicly identifies as a Western-style conservative.”
Carlson referred to transgender athletes and critics of President Biden’s policies as he introduced his interview with Orbán. The Hungarian prime minister, for his part, defended his record.
“The Western liberals cannot accept that inside the Western civilization there’s a conservative national alternative, which is more successful at everyday life and the level of it than the liberal ones,” he added. “That’s the reason why they criticize us. They are fighting for themselves, not against us. But we are an example that somebody, or a country which is based on traditional values, on national identity, based on a tradition of Christianity, could be successful or sometimes even more successful than a leftist liberal government.”
The European Commission last year announced it would take legal action against Hungary after a law that bans the promotion of homosexuality and sex-reassignment surgery to minors took effect.
“I’m treated like the black sheep of the European Union,” Orbán told Carlson.
Along with the election to parliament, a referendum on LGBTQ issues was being held Sunday. The questions pertained to sex education programs in schools and the availability to children of information about sex reassignment.
“Orbán’s policy in the last 12 years has always been to pick a target and then start to shoot,” Anna Szlavi, co-founder of the Qlit network, an organization and website for gay women in Hungary, told The Daily Beast in a March 29, 2022 interview.
“In 2021 the so-called ‘pedophile law’ was introduced, which basically kind of conflated the LGBT+ [community] with pedophiles,” Szlavi says. “Orbán repeatedly upholds this idea that [being] LGBT is an abnormal thing and it’s OK to equate them with pedophiles.”
