(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Enough Interference in Hungary!)
If Viktor Orbán wins the elections of April 12, there are already not a few who foresee an operation by Brussels to refuse to recognize the result and to seek ways of carrying out in Budapest, too, a soft coup like the one staged in Romania. If Viktor Orbán wins the elections, all the alarms will go off in Brussels, because its gross and massive interference against the Hungarian conservative government will have failed. And it will step up still further its attacks against the conservative, patriotic, and reformist forces that have the European Commission—and its mastodon-like bureaucratic apparatus and network of institutions in the service of the social-democratic ideology of populars, socialists, and greens across all of Europe—terrified.
If Viktor Orbán loses, Brussels, the governments in Berlin and Paris and their various appendages, all the media of the two-party establishment, the thousands of NGOs financed by the EU and by those governments, will declare that the elections were perfect and that their brutal, massive interference never existed.
Brussels has already grown accustomed to interfering successfully in various countries, but never in Hungary. Now it will try. For that purpose, its NGOs and assorted media have been publishing delirious polls in favor of the opposition, polls with no semblance of reality. They will always serve to claim that there was Russian interference or that the results were manipulated by the demonized Viktor Orbán, who refuses to submit to Brussels’s policies.
Brussels, the apparatus of the European Union—that machinery of soft totalitarianism created by the powerful of Berlin, Paris, Davos, and Frankfurt—has waged a hostile campaign against Hungary for many years. And it has reached levels of permanent hysterical aggression ever since, four years ago, ignoring all the EU’s threats, interference, manipulations, and blackmail, the Hungarians chose to hand Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party a massive victory, the third consecutive one.
Ahead of the April 12 elections, Brussels and Berlin, and their most obedient governments—such as that of Donald Tusk in Poland, which exists thanks to interference similar to what we are now witnessing again in Hungary—were counting on a very happy outcome. They believed that this time it would be easy. They thought that the logical erosion after three terms in office, together with the immense resources that Brussels and its outlets channel directly and indirectly to the left and to the People’s Party—which fields the artificial rival created for this election—would put an end to the Orbán era.
A few months ago, Brussels was convinced that, before the summer, it would have a docile government led by Péter Magyar, a resentful man to whom the EU has guaranteed the support of its entire apparatus, in addition to the whole of the left. Thus, Hungary would begin to accept the distribution of mass Muslim immigration, would allow LGBT groups to indoctrinate children from kindergarten onward, would be forced to open mosques, and would let the judiciary and the executive impose gender laws and all the wokeism and the general ills of the shattered societies of Western Europe. Hungary would then be as “normal” as Germany or France, where women travel terrified on public transport. Or as “normal” as Spain, where rapes have tripled in little more than five years and where the very scarce housing and public services give permanent priority to immigrants, with the resulting collapse.
To achieve all this, they have launched a brutal and permanent campaign across all their European media, from the capitals of the two-party establishment, with extraordinary financing for all the NGOs that work against the Hungarian government, and with political, financial, and informational-manipulation harassment reaching unprecedented levels. Like the “everyone against VOX” campaign launched in Spain by every force, from Sánchez to the bishops, from the PP to ETA, but on a scale that is no longer European but global.
All the progressives of the world want to destroy the conservative Hungary of Viktor Orbán and Fidesz because it is an example that an ever-greater number of Europeans wish to follow. And this is being seen in the continuous growth of the Patriots for Europe forces, the national and sovereigntist group in which Orbán and VOX are allied. There is panic that Orbán may win, because soon his allies on the European Council may be many.
The so longed-for defeat of Orbán would be presented as a triumph of all the social-democratic forces of the two-party establishment, which are in permanent retreat and bunkered down in the European institutions they have hijacked. Since they have lost the political debate, they intend to save themselves through administrative measures, through censorship, and, of course, through massive interference in the national elections of the various countries.
The United States Congress has already presented a report with evidence of Brussels’s interference in numerous elections. The Hungarian government, too, has demonstrated the immense irregularities of the European Commission in its open war against a democratic government that is, moreover, one of the few that keeps its electoral promises.
Orbán does what he promised and what he was voted in to do. And he is demonized for it. The government of Pedro Sánchez, which violates not only all its promises but also the Constitution and the laws, and which is mired in the most repugnant general corruption, has received nothing but money in abundance from Brussels, instead of the complaints, notices, and warnings about its criminal policies and its thieving politicians that it should have received.
Brussels has been interfering throughout the entire Hungarian campaign, using even Ukraine and its president to intensify the aggression and to interfere in the Hungarian electoral campaign. And it has sent there NGOs and observers who are declared enemies of the government. It is a brazen, gross, and anti-democratic intervention against a legitimate government elected by its people.
And the fact is that the target to be defeated is the supreme one: Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz are not mere candidates; they are the voice of a free Hungary that refuses to kneel before the stateless bureaucrats of Brussels, the unscrupulous globalists, and the progressives who hate freedom, truth, borders, the family, and the nation.
The European Union, which proclaims itself the guardian of democracy, has deployed its usual arsenal: threats to cut funding, media campaigns orchestrated from Brussels and Strasbourg, and brazen support for the Hungarian opposition financed from abroad.
But it is not only Brussels. The entire international campaign against Orbán is a coordinated operation of the global left, which has the European People’s Party at its service—the party that provides the faces of supposedly center-right politicians in order to then carry out totalitarian leftist policy.
There they are, buying loyalties and spreading lies: from Soros and his NGOs, the progressive press of half the world, Hollywood, the Davos elites, and the entire North American apparatus of Joe Biden until little more than a year ago.
The problem they have is that they have been publishing false polls giving an overwhelming victory to Péter Magyar, the protégé of Von der Leyen and of Berlin. But as the date draws near, they themselves verify in the real polls that Hungary does not seem convinced to let itself be subjugated. Hungary remembers that Europe was built on free nations, not on a bureaucratic empire that imposes from above what the peoples reject from below. That is why they are preparing a scenario in which, should Orbán win, they will seek the annulment of the elections, as they did in Romania—where it is now proven that they brazenly stole the presidency of the republic from Călin Georgescu.
They hate conservative Hungary and they are going to try to bring down Orbán, legally or illegally. If they cannot buy off or confuse a majority of Hungarians, they will try to invalidate the results or boycott them.
But Hungary is not alone. Millions of Europeans fed up with this totalitarian drift of social democracy—that vegan socialism which, sooner or later, intends to impose the same dictates as its carnivorous or cannibal cousins, the communists—look to Budapest with hope. The true Europe is not in Brussels: it will be, on April 12, at the Hungarian ballot boxes. In those elections, we all have a great deal at stake. The Hungarians are gambling the freedom and security they have enjoyed until now. We European patriots are gambling that government, a friend to the conservative and patriotic forces of the continent that grow unceasingly and are the great hope of a Europe that may mend the terrible errors of this European Union that makes us ever poorer and less free—this failed EU.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.
