As I stood in a cold, disconsolate crowd in central Budapest late on Sunday night, listening to Hungarian opposition leader Péter Márki-Zay concede defeat in the country’s election, the Twitter feed on my phone filled with images of murdered Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha. Some of them had their hands tied behind their backs. Beside one murdered woman lay a keychain with a pendant showing the yellow stars on blue background of the European flag. The Ukrainian horrors are clearly far worse than the Hungarian miseries, but the two are fatefully connected.
It is a bitter irony that, just as we learn of some of the worst atrocities in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war of terror against Ukraine, Putin’s closest ally among EU leaders, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, is re-elected partly because he turned that very war to his own political benefit. As well as exploiting all the advantages he has already built in to a heavily rigged political system, such as gerrymandered constituencies and overwhelming media dominance, Orbán won by telling Hungarians that he would keep them out of this war – and that their heating bills would stay low due to his sweet gas deals with Putin.
In his victory speech, the Hungarian leader listed the “opponents” he had defeated. They included the international media, Brussels bureaucrats and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has criticised him fiercely for his opposition to the weapon supplies and further sanctions that Ukraine desperately needs. So he tells us exactly who his enemies are – and friend Putin has hastened to congratulate him on his famous victory.
If the Hungarian six-party opposition coalition led by Márki-Zay had won, Hungary would have become a staunch western ally in the face of Russian aggression, as other central European countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic are proving to be. “Russians go home!” some youngsters chanted at the very end of that disconsolate opposition wake in Budapest, recalling a slogan from the time of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Walking back at midnight across a deserted Heroes Square, I recalled how in that very place in June 1989 I had heard a young, seemingly idealistic Orbán himself call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. Yet now the ageing cynic is flatly refusing to let western arms supplies pass through Hungary in order to help the Ukrainian army send the Russians home. I wonder what he sees when he looks in the mirror. » | Timothy Garton Ash* | Monday, April 4, 2022
* Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
