WASHINGTON, D.C. — It has been just over four months since conservative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban left office after 16 years of running the country, and what replaced him was not the “new conservatism” promised to the Hungarian people by Western elites, but rather a “liberal authoritarian rule,” according to a conservative Hungarian politician.
Viktor Orban had been persistently demonized by Western leftists and their friends in the corporate media as the bogey man for right-wing authoritarianism, using him as the example for what President Donald Trump might do in America, and while neither Trump nor Orban were anything they were accused of, the true authoritarians have quickly made their presence known.
The Federalist sat down with Balazs Orban, a member of the Hungarian National Assembly who is of no familial relation to the former prime minister but served as his political director for five years. Orban, a member of the Fidesz party, came to the United States this week with a warning for the country ahead of the midterms: Western liberals are on the warpath, and conservatives losing elections has much greater consequences than just being in the minority for a couple years.
“The strategy of the new government is a political and economical purge of the conservatives in the in the country,” he said of the regime under Hungary’s new Prime Minister, Peter Magyar. “They want to make sure that conservatives are never coming back.”
Magyar’s election was sold as a conservative alternative to Viktor Orban, but the moment the election results came in, he was showered with support by socialist politicians from across the world, including Americans Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and many more. European socialists like Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, then-United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and many more did the same.
Orban said Magyar’s regime is a “Brussels operation,” meaning he is doing the bidding of the globalist powers that be in the European Union, and that it has some juggernaut governing dynamics Americans have become familiar with in the last ten years, like the left using government power to destroy their political opponents and fundamentally undermining cultural cohesion.
“I see the signs everywhere in in Europe. I see the signs here in the United States as well before midterm,” Orban said. Conservatives “have to protect their their power to to govern because otherwise, [Democrats] are going to come back and destroy everything which was done. And this conservative movement in the United States of America achieved wonderful things on migration issue, on gender issue, on family support issues, and on on many things.”
‘These Are The New Communists’
However, other aspects of the left-wing authoritarianism under Magyar has been systematic and harsh, and Orban says that could be what the future holds in America, if conservatives do not maintain governing power.
“They were accusing us of being autocrats for 16 years, just like American Democrats, and we were backed by the people,” Orban said. “After 16 years, we lost the election, we immediately transferred the power and said, ‘Okay, it’s now your turn.’ But it turned out that our opponents are real authoritarians.”
According to Orban, the first thing Magyar’s government did when taking office was ban Viktor Orban from being able to be re-elected if the Hungarian people chose to do so, and then quickly banned nearly 50 percent of the politicians in his Fidesz party from being re-elected as well.
Magyar’s and his party then altered the Hungarian constitution to “terminate the political mandate” of some constitutional officers, including President Tamas Sulyok, who was effectively removed from office by coup.
“They said that the president is not in line with the new policies, so he has to go,” Orban said.
The new government is set to re-install adoption for gay couples, and reverse laws that restricted the promotion of homosexual activity and gender transitions for children. The new regime has nominated five new judges to the country’s high court, ostensibly with the intention to uphold the laws the Magyar government passes. Their nominations have been seen as a further dismantling of the Viktor Orban government, and Balazs Orban maintains that many of them are “gender activists.”
Their upholding of the gender ideology laws will be necessary for the Magyar regime because the laws protecting children from such propaganda were the subject of a European Union Court of Justice ruling against them.
The new judges and laws promoting homosexuality are part of the new government’s attempt to “please their liberal masters in Brussels,” Orban told The Federalist.
Far from limiting their purview to governmental institutions, the Magyar government started nationalizing longtime conservative institutions like the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), the Danube Institute, and conservative news outlet Mandiner.
Orban compared these organizations to the Hungarian versions of the Spectator or the Heritage Foundation, and after nationalization, they were shut down.
“The right-wing intellectual media platform, they nationalized it and they closed it, and they ordered the police to go to Fidesz party HQ, and they collected all the data of the supporters of the party members,” he said.
The Magyar government also shut down the House of Terror Museum in Budapest, an institution opened in 2002 which Orban said on social media is “one of the country’s most important memorials to the victims of communism,” and is in a building in which he says his grandmother was imprisoned.
Magyar’s regime fired the museum’s founding director as well.
“These are the new communists,” Orban added on social media. “From the moment it opened, the museum came under fierce political attack from post-Communist and progressive circles. They particularly objected to its ‘Wall of Perpetrators’ and to its insistence on judging Nazi and Communist terror by the same moral standard.”
“The director now suspects that the same ideological hostility may be behind the museum’s closure,” he continued. “She argues that the post-Communist liberal intellectual milieu that attacked the museum from the beginning is now influential around the new government.”
‘Asset Confiscation Super Authority‘
Constitutional overhauls and institutional capture are more structural ways to seize and exercise raw power, but for normal Hungarian citizens and business owners who are conservative, Orban said the Magyar government is conducting a retribution campaign intent on destroying their lives.
Step one is to “trick the voters” to obtain a governing mandate. Step two is to “purge the opposition when the voters are realizing that they were tricked.” And step three is “everybody is punished who was part of this conservative movement,” Orban told The Federalist.
“People are really afraid,” he said, “like ordinary people.”
They target conservative supporters and treat them as criminals who should be in jail, Orban said, noting that their political preferences are viewed as tantamount to treason.
The new regime will say “you were backing this government for 16 years, and they destroyed the country, so therefore you destroyed the country. They are criminals, so you are part of the mafia. We should take away your savings, and we should put you into jail, or put you under investigation, or it’s better for you to leave the country, or to hang yourself.”
“Hang yourself” was not hyperbole. According to Orban, “many people” have committed suicide.
Fidesz members, donors, and others associated with the party have been debanked or otherwise financially targeted by the Magyar government, and some have left the country.
The Magyar regime also attacks conservative political donors and their businesses. “They created an asset confiscation super authority, which was previously only in place under the communist regime, where they, without any judicial review, can overtake the management of a company.”
‘If You Give It Up, It’s Like Nothing’s Left’
The authoritarian left is tightening its stranglehold across Europe, largely dominated by Brussels, but Orban says similar powers could catch American conservatives off guard in the next election cycle if they do not pay attention.
In the West, “right now, many conservative movements are backed by a general dissatisfaction of the people,” and that dissatisfaction is both “complicated” to govern under, and easy for political opponents to exploit.
Some of that has manifested as infighting on the right, to which Orban said “it’s not about like high-level metaphysical intellectual fights, but it’s about really trying to make their life more easy.”
He pointed to examples like the Trump administration’s plan to pay stay-at-home parents for raising their children.
But a conservative loss in the Unites States will mean a sweeping retribution campaign, set on annihilating political opposition and American society and culture.
Because of their institutional control, “liberals, if they lose election, they just lose [a] term, but if conservatives lose the election, their entire everything falls,” he said, adding, under the liberal regime, “you have to give up who you are … if you give it up, it’s like nothing’s left.”
The playbook in America has already had a trial run in places like Virginia, which elected a former CIA agent as a governor because she claimed to be a “moderate,” but turned out to be the most radical leader in that commonwealth’s history.
It’s the same playbook that was run on Hungarians to elect Magyar, and it will be much more widespread in the midterms and beyond.
“The liberals learned very fast and they realize that they losing the battle of arguments,” Orban said. “To influence the conservative voters, they have to steal the language of the conservatives and use the same language during the election campaign.”
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