Who is Viktor Orbán?

by Geoffrey Botkin

President Trump has invited Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to a working meeting in Washington on May 13^th.  The agenda is not unusually controversial, but the world’s self-righteous media will explode with outrage because the president is publicly welcoming the one world figure more hated by the media than President Trump. 

Why does the media focus so much time, invective and column space on the leader of a small European nation?  Because Viktor Orbán is a thoughtful, principled Christian statesman. He has successfully and skillfully led his nation out of hard-left socialistic demoralization, and continually shames the globalist elite with unassailable arguments for the rule of law and national sovereignty. Honest historians may regard Orbán as the most broadly influential political leader of the 21^st century. Freedom parties from Austria to Sweden imitate Orbán’s proven solutions and policies, and respect him as one of the West’s most inspirational and visionary statesmen. Orbán has shown the world how to dash the utopian hopes and schemes of the liberal elite, and they will never forgive him for it. 

Today Hungary may stand as the most confident, free, self-aware nation on the continent. Orbán, who has served as Hungary’s Prime Minister for nine consecutive years,[1] is regarded a national hero. His eurosceptic Fidesz government, which is unashamedly Christian, has more popular backing than all opposition parties combined.  

Unbreakable Hungary

As the West awakens to the reality that Western civilization may soon be exterminated, along with the last hope of liberty and justice, secular Europe is looking at revitalized Christianity with new-found deference. Orbán is calling Western Europe back to the historic foundations of Christendom, and now even skeptics and atheists are joining him in arguing for the sanctuary of Christian civilization.[2]

“The West,” explains atheist Enza Fereri, “would not have existed without Christianity and will not survive without it.”  Professional God-hater Richard Dawkins begrudgingly agrees, noting that, “Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.” Even historian Niall Ferguson, who calls himself “an incurable atheist” is a vocal champion for the restoration of Christendom. “A weekly dose of Christian doctrine,” says Ferguson, “will help to provide an ethical framework for your life. And I certainly do not know where else you are going to get one.[3] 

Today’s death-culture has forced these and other atheists back into reality. The very concept of freedom, including freedom of conscience and speech, derives from Christian culture. So do private property, economic competition, scientific innovation, modern medicine, the Protestant work ethic, and whatever it was that made our streets safe – once long ago. For the last century, Europe has been trying to run a 1,500-year-old culture without the ethical framework that supports a living civilization. For three self-serving and foolhardy generations, arrogant secularists have been burning the blueprints of Christendom. Reason and freedom have gone up in smoke. This was a suicidal experiment.  After scorning Christian virtue with condescending smiles and then selling-out Christian culture, where can postmodernists find a sincere, experienced guardian of Christendom who knows the deeper inner-workings of civil society?

Apparently the man with the legitimate resume is Viktor Orbán, the political leader who has reassembled this ethical framework on the battered cultural battlefield of Hungary. Since the 13^th century, Christian Hungary suffered greatly by absorbing assaults from genocidal Mongols, Muslims,[4] Nazis, Communists, and Socialists. But Hungary overcame enemy invaders every time, and returned to the continuity of what Orbán calls “Christian wisdom.” With this wisdom, Hungary rebuilt shattered foundations, and moved into the future a little wiser with every war. Hungary never burned the blueprints of civilization, and Orbán has been using them to chart a national course which could be duplicated in all other Western nations. “There is no free, prestigious and honorable Europe,” Orbán believes, “without the lifeblood of nations and the wisdom of two thousand years of Christianity.”

The Optimistic World of Viktor Orbán 

“Europe should recognize,” said Orbán in 2012, “that without nations it has no heart, and without Christianity it has no soul.”[5]  In 2015, Europe and the UK began recognizing this. Today nationalist Europe looks at Victor Orbán and sees the future of the West: in place of cowardice and surrender, they can now imagine widespread and deliberate renewal of spiritual, intellectual, and moral strength. These virtues Orbán deliberately built into a reworked Hungarian Constitution in 2011, whose unapologetic preamble states, “We recognise the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood.” Those who are watching Orbán’s consistent actions see that the more he applies Christianity, the more peace, stability, prosperity, security, and civility he gets. The streets in Hungary are safe again. 

In 2014, ISIS spokesman Sheikh Abu Muhammad Adnani ash-Shami threatened all Westerners with the taunt, “We will conquer your Rome (the West), break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted…and [we] will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”[6]  In 2015, ten thousand Sunni Muslims per day started pouring over Hungary’s borders. The first mobs of young Muslim men who made it through Hungarian railway stations outnumbered Hungarians 200 to 1, defying laws, threatening citizens, defacing Hungarian property, and shouting in unison, “Allahu Akbar! We want death!” Some of these were Islamic State jihadists who ended up in Paris to plot an attack that killed, wounded, tortured, and sexually mutilated 498 Parisians. An ISIS smuggler admitted there were 4,000 other ISIS gunmen among the Muslim migrants in Europe.[7] There might have been more terrorists moving North, but Orbán had by that time acted decisively, erecting a razor-wire fence on his southern border — with gates, guards, vetting, and warnings to criminal migrants. “We chose border defense,” Orbán said, “instead of raising surrendering hands.”

This is why Viktor Orbán has Europe’s full attention today. He may be the free world’s only political leader who can expect 98 percent voter support when the nation votes in a national referendum. In 2016, 98.3 percent of Hungarian voters answered Orbán’s invitation to vote with a resounding rejection[8] of EU control, domination, and social engineering.[9] In 2018, record numbers of voters in the national election returned Orbán to a fourth term with a supermajority parliament. 

“The task which awaits the Hungarian people,” says Orbán, “the nations of Central Europe and the other European nations which have not yet lost all common sense is to defeat, rewrite and transform the fate intended for us.” This vision is establishing Orbán as the lead author of the next chapter in European history. America has a direct interest in this story because Hungary has always played a pivotal role in world political affairs, primarily because of her geographic situation on historic trade routes, and resting like the small but central jewel in an ornate setting of world powers. The greatest thieves of history have always wanted to steal that jewel. Today everyone seems to want Hungary as an ally in order to preserve that ornate setting of world powers. Including the United States. Can this possibly work in such a belligerent world?   

Hungary lies directly on the land route used by agitators and human smugglers to flood Europe with Muslim colonists. China has a direct interest in a modernized silk superhighway through Budapest, both in information and trade goods. Hungary is a direct pressure point between rising tensions between Russia and NATO, Russia and Ukraine, Russia and her energy customers. If, for purposes of enlightened self-interest, Hungary masterfully succeeds in maintaining simultaneous peaceful relations with NATO, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel and China, how will this square with all the advanced intrigues of American balance-of-tension politics between all those same entities? It could square very well, and America will be the richer and wiser in learning how peaceful Hungary has overcome her past and taken confident control of her future. It’s time to pay attention to Viktor Orbán.

[1] During the previous socialist regime, he served as parliamentary leader of the opposition.  Orbán  learned to refute leftism with moral authority and conviction.  

[2] The late Oriana Fallaci, the Italian writer who perhaps more than most promoted the notion of ‘Eurabia’, described herself as a ‘Christian atheist’, insisting that only Christianity provided Europe with a cultural and intellectual bulwark against Islam.  Melanie Phillips, a non-believing Jew, argues in her book The World Turned Upside Down that ‘Christianity is under direct and unremitting cultural assault from those who want to destroy the bedrock values of Western civilization.’ https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/christian-europe/

[3] http://www.niallferguson.com/journalism/miscellany/heaven-knows-how-well-rekindle-our-religion-but-i-believe-we-must

[4] The 150-year Muslim occupation of Hungary began with the Siege of Buda in 1541, and ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, when the Ottomans ceded Hungary to the Habsburg Monarchy.  Ottoman forces occupying Hungary plundered and pillaged the land and took more than a million Hungarians as slaves.  

[5] http://washington.kormany.hu/Orbán -speech-october-23

[6] “In the Name of Allah the Beneficent the Merciful, Indeed Your Lord Is Ever Watchful,” ISIS message, Sept. 26, 2014, accessed June 1, 2015.

[7] http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/555434/Islamic-State-ISIS-Smuggler-THOUSANDS-Extremists-into-Europe-Refugees

[8] More than 98% of those who voted in the October referendum answered ‘no’ to the question: “Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of the National Assembly?” http://valasztas.hu/en/ref2016/481/481_0_index.html

[9] “We do not want to distribute the migration burdens falling on Europe, but we want to eliminate them: to put an end to them.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, July 11, 2016.