Hungary: Scapegoat for Western European Failure

The willful blindness of intelligent Western people about Central Europe is a stunning thing to behold. 

On a recent trip to London, I had several conversations with smart liberals¯even right-liberals, like Tories¯about Hungary, where I live. They all went something like this:

“You live in Budapest? That must be hard under Viktor Orbán.”

“No, actually, it’s wonderful. It’s very safe.”

“Because there is so much policing?”

“No, because the Orbán government polices the borders.”

Silence.

“It’s about the migration problem, you know.”

Oh no, not that! My liberal interlocutors would change the subject. Every time. The awfulness of Hungary and its prime minister is such an idée fixe for Western Europeans that very little, aside from perhaps a visit to actual, existing Hungary, would change their minds. To the Western European liberal, Hungary must be a villain, a pariah, so they can avoid dealing seriously with their own failures to govern. 

It’s not only Hungary. Last weekend, on his CNN foreign policy show, Fareed Zakaria interviewed Central European expert Ivan Krastev on the subject of why Central European countries are turning away from what Zakaria called “liberal democracy.” Zakaria, one of the U.S. foreign policy elites, seemed genuinely puzzled, even hurt, that the EU countries liberated from communism would have chosen their current path.

Krastev, an intelligent scholar, gave a few plausible answers but ignored the two elephantine ones: mass migration and Islam. 

Put simply, Central Europeans see what mass migration and Islamization have done to Great Britain and the countries of Western Europe and do not want to suffer the same fate. Western Europeans who visit Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, and Bratislava do not have to fear for their safety as many Westerners do in their own cities. 

Strolling through peaceful Budapest one night after dinner, a Parisian visitor to Budapest told me, “This city feels like Europe did thirty years ago.”

“That’s because of Viktor Orbán,” I told him. He understood. 

Then I told him about a fellow Parisian, a good friend of mine who migrated to Budapest several years ago. She told me that she could no longer bear being sexually harassed by migrant men every time she went out on the streets of Paris. Nor could she endure any longer Muslim women in hijabs stopping her on the street to berate her for what the Muslims considered to be immodest dress.

“Sometimes these women would tell me and my friends, ‘It’s not your country anymore,’” my French émigré friend told me. She despaired that French authorities would ever do anything to restore order, to restore Frenchness, to her hometown and native land. So she moved to Budapest.

I have told that story many times to Western Europeans on my travels when they want to chastise me for living in ‘illiberal’ Hungary. They simply cannot believe me. I tell them that when ‘liberal democracy’ becomes a suicide pact for one’s nation, you should not be surprised when people living in that nation prefer something different. 

In Germany, authorities profess to be mystified as to why young people are becoming more politically extremist. It might be anxiety over climate change, they speculate. Robin Brooks, an analyst at the prestigious liberal Washington think tank The Brookings Institution, notes the rising popularity of the populist right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and puzzles over “what policies will stop the inexorable rise” of the party. 

Some things are so simple that only intellectuals fail to see them. The AfD is rising because Germans are fed up with mass migration and loss of confidence in the established parties. Germans correctly feel that they are losing their country. According to data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, Germany is one of the top sources of internal EU migration to Hungary.

From 2019 to 2023, the rate of German immigration steadily rose. On conservative estimates, Hungary receives between 1,400 and 2,000 net new German residents annually. Without giving his name, one of these German internal migrants attending a lecture at Matthias Corvinus Collegium this past summer told the audience that the migration and Islamification situation in his homeland is out of control, and he had had enough of it. He said he wanted to live in Europe again.

One can understand, perhaps, why liberal Western Europeans and Britons don’t want to face these realities. On my recent London visit, the sense of despair and unease among the British is visceral, as is the rising contempt among Britons for the establishment. 

It’s not simply about migration—the UK economy is in rough shape—but the loss of control of the country’s borders, the increasing aggression of Britain’s Muslim community, and the growing conviction that the ruling class is willing to sacrifice the interests of native Britons for the sake of globalist liberal ideals, increase the anger and distrust of a growing number of Brits.

David Betz, a prominent analyst in the war studies department of King’s College London, has been warning all year that these conditions are pushing Britain, France, and nearly every other Western European country to the brink of civil war. Yet few, if any, people inside the establishment, public or private, are willing to see it. From the conversations I had with them, the real problem is “ethnonationalists” or “right-wing extremists” who notice the problems and complain.

To be fair, if one is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, either of the left-wing or right-wing variety, of course one will disapprove of the Hungarian government. What is hard to take, though, is the utterly closed minds of these liberals, who are convinced of the obvious correctness of their globalist views. They cannot fathom good-faith disagreement. Like Fareed Zakaria on his CNN program, they genuinely cannot grasp why Hungarians and other Central Europeans won’t accept what is—in the minds of liberals—good for them. 

For example, Hungary’s minority position on the Russia-Ukraine war cannot, in their minds, have anything to do with the Orbán government’s stated reasons, including rational arguments it has made about the impossibility of a NATO-Ukraine victory. It can only be (they say) because Orbán is a “Putin stooge.” End of discussion.

Another example: London is filled with signs and banners proclaiming LGBT Pride. When I would tell British liberals that Central Europeans are generally more culturally conservative and resent Western European cultural values being forced on them by Brussels—many Central Europeans take it as a form of cultural colonialism—they would respond as if I were a Boer stalwart defending apartheid.

At some point, this irrational hatred of Hungary is less explainable by politics and more by psychology. Hungary exists in the Western European mentality as a classic scapegoat. Unable to deal with their own overwhelming problems caused by mass migration and Islamification, they offload their fear and anxiety over them onto Hungary. In reality, Viktor Orbán and his policies are the solution they all need. But they are too afraid to accept this, so Orbán and the nation he leads must be monsters. 

If Western European citizens would come spend as little as one weekend in Budapest, it would become crystal clear what has been taken from them over the past three decades by liberal, globalist governments. An English expatriate friend who has lived for seven years in Budapest told me he still receives texts from friends back home who worry about his safety in “fascist” Hungary. He tells them that he is far safer in the Hungarian capital than they are in England, and that there aren’t police everywhere because there don’t need to be. This is the benefit of living under a government that takes nationhood and borders seriously.

They don’t believe him. But it’s true.

Likewise, if Hungarians dissatisfied with their current government would spend time in Western Europe, outside the tourist-heavy city centers, and talk to ordinary Europeans about their experiences with migration and Islam, they would better understand what the Orbán government has protected them from. This past spring, at a book signing in France, a young couple told me that I am lucky to live in Hungary.

“But you have such a beautiful country here,” I replied. “One day, I would love to try living in France for a time.”

“No!” they said in unison. Stay where you are, the husband added. It’s much safer: you don’t have to worry about migrant crime today or civil war tomorrow. 

That said, Western European voters are finally coming around to the wisdom of their Eastern fellow Europeans. 

In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform party, which takes a stronger anti-migration line than the other parties, is favored to go into government at the next election. The AfD is now the most popular party in Germany. And new French polls show that not only is the Rassemblement National (National Rally) by far the most popular party in France, but that in a second-round presidential election, its leader Jordan Bardella would easily defeat any rival. 

The shrewd Ivan Krastev hinted at this emerging reality in his final comment to the perplexed Fareed Zakaria.

“Thirty years ago, the idea was that there was [in the future] not going to be a difference between East and West,” Krastev said. “We have arrived at it—but very much on the terms of Eastern Europe rather than Western Europe.”