The Hungarian ruling party Fidesz has experienced two strange scandals in recent days. On Tuesday, her most influential MEP, József Szájer, admitted what was the real reason for his unexpected resignation on Sunday – Brussels police caught him on the eaves while fleeing an unauthorized party, plus with a backpack of drugs. The party banned due to the pandemic is described by police sources as exclusively male “sexual orgies” – and the men of the law were called by neighbors because it was very noisy. The police were not far away, the apartment in question was one corner from the station.
Szájer was Fidesz’s voice in the European Parliament and heavy in the party: a co-founder and an experienced lawyer. Legend has it that the new constitution of 2011 – one of the important steps on Fidesz’s path to controlling the country and being a state party – was written on a tablet in a high-speed train. He also participated in recent constitutional amendments and other new laws that declare a “traditional family” as the basis of the state and, among other things, prohibit homosexuals from adopting their partners’ children. According to observers, the Fidesz party thus wanted – in addition to further intervention in the so-called cultural war – to divert attention from pandemic numbers and a change in the electoral law, which is to help it win in the next elections.
The visitor of the Szájer party thus quite predictably earned ridicule for hypocrisy. The whole thing, especially running away from the gutter, also has a comic level. And it is not helping the Hungarian government at the moment. Together with their Polish colleagues, they resist the rest of the Union in the dispute over the next budget. Both countries are being officially investigated for breaches of the rule of law – and it is with these adherence that the rest of the Member States want to link the payment of common money.
Theoretically, Poland and Hungary would be in danger of paying off at one point. Both governments are therefore vetoing the budget, so the whole Union can enter next year without a financial plan. Hungary and Poland, as well as other recipients of funds, including the Czech Republic, would lose a lot.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán insists that the conditions proposed in the budget are illegal and his fight thus fights for the Union and for European values. In the midst of a relatively dramatic clash, Fideszu’s most prominent MEP has now been ridiculed for violating anti-epidemic measures, among other things. He is also facing punishment for drugs – however, Szájer says that the narcotics in the backpack are not his and has nothing to do with them.
However, Szájer’s colorful adventures were at least overshadowed by a few days older scandal, when one of the party men of culture overdid it with war comparisons and caused a worldwide upheaval. There is one important rule in the rhetoric of the Hungarian ruling party Fidesz: not to say anything in your mouth. The long-running government campaign against George Soros is anti-Semitic: it uses all available anti-Jewish stereotypes against a wealthy financier of Jewish descent. But Orbán and his party deny it for the same length of time. It’s not about Soros’s Judaism, say high-ranking party members, it’s about his world-famous plans and his hatred for everything Hungarian. Whoever sees anti-Semitism in our campaign is anti-Semite himself. It didn’t even occur to us.
Everything can be indicated. That someone is a murderer, pedophile or idiot – if the hint is smart enough and can be denied. This governs the public statements of all ideologues and commentators of the Fidesz party. One of them is Szilárd Demeter, director of the prominent Sándor Petöfi Literary Museum in Budapest. And a writer who cultivates the image of a tough man. He fought as a child and as a young man – and when it comes down to it, he likes to fight as a mature man in his forties. However, one of the most important cultural figures of the ruling party made a big mistake – in the text for the government boulevard Origo did not stick to it and wrote sentences that cannot be ground.
The article concerned the aforementioned negotiations on the European budget. Readers have learned from Demeter in this context that George Soros is literally Adolf Hitler, the Western Liberals are literally Nazis, the people of Central Europe are literally Jews, the European Union is literally a gas chamber and multiculturalism is literally a murderous gas.
At first it seemed that Demeter would be able to repel the usual wave of outrage. Criticism of the opposition is irrelevant to Fidesz, but the condemnation of Jewish organizations and the state of Israel that Demeter despised the Holocaust seems to have been too great. Although Demeter did not apologize at first, he only explained why he had written what he had written – adding that he did not want to denigrate the Holocaust in any way. In the end, however, he was forced to come up with a pardon, and his text disappeared from Orig’s pages; Unfortunately, the director also hung it on social networks, where he lives his own life.
According to observers and independent media, the apology means only one thing: Orbán acknowledged that Szilárd Demeter’s article does more harm than good to the state party. As in the time of the quarantined MEP, the head of the most important literary institution, who informs the neighbors that they are Nazis, does not help Orbán’s argument that by blocking the budget, it protects European values and the Union as such.
But it is likely that the article will not cost Demeter director. In a recent interview with one of the government media, Prime Minister Orbán himself said that there was not much to do with criticism from German politicians, because “the level of anti-Semitism in Germany is unthinkable in Hungary.” And as for Szájer’s scandal, for example, the pro-government tabloid Bors does not pay attention to it, although it also reports to its readers how the Belgians are not complying with anti-epidemic measures.
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