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Donald Trump\u2019s election was part of a worldwide nationalist and autocratic lurch. A vigorous counterrevolution against the liberal-democratic orthodoxy of diversity and multiculturalism is underway. The fact that Trump reflects, and reinforces, this broad movement, exactly a half-century after the heady flowering of every liberty in 1968, suggests he will be much harder to dislodge than many liberals imagine. Orban was the first European leader to back Trump during his campaign and celebrated his victory as the end of \u201cliberal non-democracy.\u201d Trump called Orban \u201cstrong and brave\u201d in a meeting with the Hungarian ambassador, according to the Hungarian magazine Figyelo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The European nations most enamored of freedom \u2014 those released three decades ago from the withering grip of the Soviet empire \u2014 have transformed into those most skeptical that liberal democracy provides it. It\u2019s an extraordinary turn. The Brussels-based European Union (of which Hungary has been a member and financial beneficiary since 2004) and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany are viewed in Hungary with greater suspicion than Vladimir Putin. Poland, the most populous Central European state, has so embraced the Hungarian model that Kaczynski calls it the \u201cexample.\u201d The Czech Republic may not be far behind.<\/p>\n
Orban, who attended Oxford as a young man on a Soros-funded scholarship, has hailed \u201ca new era\u201d reflecting a popular desire for democracies that are not open. Adam Bodnar, Poland\u2019s embattled ombudsman in Warsaw, suggested to me that \u201cHungary has shown there\u2019s no need to introduce a typical authoritarian system. You can control what happens without it.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the politicians embraced by Soros in the election posters around Budapest is Bernadett Szel, a co-leader of the Green Party. She told me she has never met Soros. The image is a fake. According to Laura Silber, the spokeswoman for Soros\u2019s Open Society Foundations, it has been \u201cdoctored to make Soros\u2019s nose longer \u2014 right out of the Goebbels playbook.\u201d<\/p>\n
Szel, who is trying to unite Hungary\u2019s chronically splintered opposition against Fidesz, said Orban \u201cis poisoning Hungary day by day.\u201d A member of the Parliament\u2019s National Security Committee, she faces a smear campaign from Fidesz politicians determined to oust her. She fears for her country. \u201cOrban,\u201d she told me, \u201cis becoming a pharaoh who wants to adopt the Russian, Turkish or Chinese model.\u201d<\/p>\n
For such a project, Orban needs enemies. Thousands of migrants, many fleeing the war in Syria, straggling through Hungary in the late summer of 2015, encamped for weeks at Budapest\u2019s main railway station, provided them. Merkel\u2019s decision to admit so many, made of German \u201cWillkommenskultur,\u201d or welcoming culture, the \u201csurrender\u201d Orban would define himself against. It was a pivotal European moment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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No universal human right to dignity, invoked by kale-eating Western liberals racked by colonial or war guilt, would be used to destroy Hungarian or Polish culture!<\/p>\n
\u201cHungary First\u201d is Orban\u2019s election slogan. His relentless anti-immigrant campaign, including claims from a cabinet minister that migrants and refugees would force Hungarians to eat insects, has produced a startling level of fear. Csaba Toth, a political scientist, told me that \u201cchildren in kindergarten have drawn Soros as the devil and migrants as evil figures who will take you away if you are not good.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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One gray afternoon, I went out to Orban\u2019s home village of Felcsut, population 1,800, about an hour\u2019s drive west of Budapest. His simple white house has a cross on its gabled roof. Opposite the house, a spaceship has landed. It takes the form of a giant soccer stadium, complete with turrets and vaulted wooden beams that can accommodate more than twice the population of the village.<\/p>\n
Orban is passionate about soccer \u2014 and rewarding his cronies. Lorinc Meszaros, the mayor of the village and a former pipe fitter, has virtually overnight become one of Hungary\u2019s richest men, the owner of several regional newspapers. In and around the stadium, where a couple of hundred people, including the prime minister, were watching a desultory match, I heard how Orban brings jobs, how Hungary does not need immigrants who \u201crob and murder,\u201d how \u201c1,000 percent he will win the election.\u201d Later, at the Mediterranean Cafe, I met Andras Vigh, a childhood friend of Orban, who confessed to me that \u201cwe\u2019ve never seen a migrant in our lives.\u201d No matter: \u201cI watch TV and I know. I don\u2019t want any immigrants. Only an idiot would allow them in.\u201d<\/p>\n
The other face of fear is venom. In homogeneous societies like Hungary and Poland, it has proved easy to stoke fury against the unknown \u201cother.\u201d In October 2015, the month after the train station ordeal, Kaczynski\u2019s Law and Justice Party swept to victory in Poland with an absolute majority. His blueprint would be the one Orban has developed since taking office in 2010.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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I visited Poland and Hungary regularly in the early 1990s to chronicle their extraordinary post-Communist transformation. Nowhere was the passion for the liberty and security the West seemed to offer stronger than in Poland, heroic vanguard of the liberation of Europe in 1989 through the Solidarity movement of workers and intellectuals. Nowhere today is the turn against Western liberal democracy more startling or seemingly perverse.<\/p>\n
European Union funds \u2014 some $90 billion between 2012 and 2016 alone \u2014 have fast-forwarded Polish modernization. (Hungary, with about a quarter of Poland\u2019s population of 38 million, received close to $33 billion in the same period.) After traveling from Hungary to Poland, I boarded the high-speed train from the capital, Warsaw, to Krakow. Gazing out, I was confronted with a tableau of rapid change: orange-vested laborers, boxcars painted a reassuring blue, new suburbs, a church spire above drab five-story Communist-era apartment blocks, poplars and willows, storks\u2019 nests suspended in wintry branches, crumbling farm buildings.<\/p>\n
Poland: obliterated from the map for more than a century; restored and transformed; killing field par excellence of the Nazis; home to a burning Catholic faith, the \u201cChrist of nations\u201d in a collective subconscious brimming with persecution mania.<\/p>\n
Membership of NATO and the European Union, attained like Hungary in 1999 and 2004, was supposed to confer normality and security. A market economy and the rule of law were intended to cement them. These objectives, through painful transformation, were reached.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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So why, with the prize in hand, this nationalist, xenophobic stiffening, across Central Europe? The Polish economy, like the Hungarian, has been expanding briskly, attaining 4.6 percent growth last year, a rate Western Europe can only dream of.<\/p>\n
Of course, growing inequality, perceptions of impunity, the arrogance of liberal elites and the disruptions of globalization have played a role, just as they have in the United States and Britain. But something more is at work. Perhaps, I thought, the tumultuous kaleidoscope seen through the train window provided a clue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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For three decades, Poland, like Hungary, has been going somewhere: The destinations were NATO, the European Union and a free market. Now that they are attained, a question arises: Was all the sacrifice, in this nation whose self-image is of heroes and martyrs, just for shopping malls and German cars? A burned-out generation has transformation fatigue. The point of comparison used to be Communist gray. Now it\u2019s prosperous London and Berlin.<\/p>\n
Kaczynski declares that immigrants carry \u201cparasites and protozoa.\u201d He turns the 2010 death in a plane crash in Smolensk, Russia, of his twin brother, the former president Lech Kaczynski, into a Russian plot, condoned by the centrist, pro-European Civic Platform party that was then in power. He promises a \u201cFourth Republic,\u201d with a new Constitution, rid of Brussels and the lingering hand of Communists co-opted by Civic Platform. It\u2019s not always clear what he means, but his conspiracy theories get the blood up. He has a project!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cIn 1989, we all emigrated to the West,\u201d Karolina Wigura, a sociologist based in Warsaw, told me. \u201cWe were all going somewhere in our souls, and, as you know, emigration is not an easy process. And then, when we finally thought we\u2019d done it, we saw all these new people coming into Europe, and we couldn\u2019t take the idea of immigrants, because that\u2019s what we felt we\u2019d been.\u201d<\/p>\n
Capitalism, in other words, was another country. The rallying cry throughout Central Europe in the early 1990s was \u201cfree-market democracy.\u201d Get the all-controlling state out; let the market in. Nobody stopped to ask whether the market and liberal democracy were necessarily eternal twins. Turns out they\u2019re not.<\/p>\n
The \u201cmarket\u201d equaled globalization, good for the hyperconnected metropolis, less so for the hinterland. Poland and Hungary, too, have their Wisconsin and Ohio. Adam Bielan, a senator who is close to Kaczynski, told me that the difference in wages between his constituency in the provincial town of Radom and in Warsaw had doubled over the past dozen years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The policy of Civic Platform, in power from 2007 to 2015, was \u201cto concentrate European Union funds in the big cities,\u201d Bielan argued. The result: \u201cA huge part of Poland was forgotten.\u201d These forgotten Poles voted overwhelmingly for Kaczynski, who has since rewarded them with a $150 monthly handout to all families with two or more children. If you don\u2019t want immigrants, the only way you can offset an aging population in Poland or Hungary is with babies.<\/p>\n
Kaczynski has set about undermining democracy guaranteed by constitutional checks and balances, the very thing Poland craved after 1989 as insurance against tyranny. In the name of the people\u2019s will, using a false democratic mantle, he has taken relentless aim at what he once called \u201clegal impossibilism\u201d \u2014 the counterbalancing power vested in an independent constitutional judiciary. His ruling party has in effect commandeered the Constitutional Tribunal and the Supreme Court in a way that has led the Venice Commission, a panel of constitutional law experts, to declare that Polish judicial independence is \u201cat serious risk.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Marcin Matczak, a prominent Warsaw law professor, asked me: \u201cWhat does this say about political transitions? It\u2019s the Supreme Court that rules if an election is valid or not. This feels like some kind of preparatory stage for worse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bolshevism, the cradle in which Orban and Kaczynski were rocked, was an ideology bent on force-marching society toward some higher ideal. In fact, the reality, as the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert put it, was that it \u201cpoisons wells, destroys the structures of the mind, covers bread with mold.\u201d Something of this urge, it seems, remained in the two men. It was not enough for them to succumb to the permissiveness of the West. They needed a mission. They have decided to save Christendom, no less \u2014 and to heck with open societies.<\/p>\n
Witold Waszczykowski, the former Polish foreign minister, has said Poland must be cured of the onslaught of those who believe history is headed inevitably toward \u201ca new mixture of cultures and races, a world made up of cyclists and vegetarians, who only use renewable energy and who battle all signs of religion.\u201d He\u2019s Trump\u2019s kind of guy.<\/p>\n
Of course, in this worldview, Muslims in Europe are a problem. Bielan, the senator close to Kaczynski, told me: \u201cIntegration has failed. I worked in Brussels and there were no-go zones. Poles don\u2019t want the social problems of France or Belgium. Why would we be more successful than France in this?\u201d<\/p>\n
On that basis, Poland has refused to take the 7,000 asylum seekers it agreed to absorb under a decision taken by European Union member states during the refugee crisis of 2015. Hungary and the Czech Republic have also refused. They have shown contempt for European solidarity in the name of racial and religious purity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A mood of high nationalist righteousness has taken hold. Poland recently passed an absurd \u201cDeath Camp\u201d law that makes it a crime to accuse \u201cthe Polish nation\u201d of complicity in any \u201cNazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.\u201d Poles saved Jews; they also denounced and, in villages like Jedwabne, killed them. This by now is well known. It has become a crime in Poland to speak the truth.<\/p>\n
Hungary and Poland are turning the clock back to Europe\u2019s darkest hours. Today they are all about erecting borders \u2014 real and imagined \u2014 against Islam, migrants and refugees, Jews, the European Union, the United Nations, Soros and what they portray as a pluralistic international conspiracy. Hungary erected an actual barrier on its southern border following the refugee crisis of 2015, the fence Orban portrays the opposition as wanting to cut.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It was precisely the measures taken to construct and preserve a homogeneous society that lay at the core of the most heinous crimes of the last century. The illiberal trend represents a rejection of the core postwar insight that borders should be dismantled to save Europe from its repetitive suicides. Ever-closer union meant ever-expanding peace.<\/p>\n
Taken to its end point, the new Hungarian and Polish authoritarianism means danger. It is more dangerous because Trump\u2019s despot-coddling America has disappeared as a countervailing force. The president has ceased upholding the values that advance liberty.<\/p>\n
In Warsaw last summer, Trump declared, \u201cThe fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.\u201d He continued, \u201cDo we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?\u201d<\/p>\n
There was no criticism of Kaczynski or his illiberal steps. I was told the Polish government feels empowered by Trump.<\/p>\n
Nor have Poland or Hungary felt remotely threatened by the European Union, whose censure of the countries\u2019 turn against liberal democracy has been prudent to the point of feebleness. The billions of dollars still going to Warsaw and Budapest from Brussels should be diverted elsewhere for now. The union rests, by treaty, on the principles of \u201cdemocracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The democratic West needs to awaken from its slumber. The forgotten people of the post-1989 decades have spoken. They have embraced disruption at any cost, declaring \u201cEnough!\u201d to the economic prescriptions (mainly austerity) and the smug impunity of globalizing elites. Europe cannot open its doors to everyone. It needs a shared immigration policy that works, economic policies that offset rather than accentuate inequality and a Brussels bureaucracy that delivers tangible results to a half-billion Europeans.<\/p>\n
The worst is not inevitable. Orban could yet lose (Fidesz suffered a surprising local election defeat recently), but that is a long shot. Poland lags behind Hungary in the descent into authoritarianism. It is bigger, more diverse and more hostile to Putin\u2019s Russia for historical reasons. It has a stronger civil society and retains a more vigorous independent media. These are important distinctions. They provide some hope.<\/p>\n
But Europe\u2019s drift is ominous. \u201cI have the weird sense this is the future \u2014 it feels like the transition to something new,\u201d Michael Ignatieff, the president of the Budapest-based and Soros-funded Central European University, told me of Orban\u2019s ascendant illiberalism. The university, a symbol of academic freedom conceived to anchor Central Europe in the West by providing a liberal education, is under threat of closing by Orban.<\/p>\n
When I asked Zoltan Kovacs, Orban\u2019s spokesman, why the government uses anti-Semitic riffs against Soros, he said: \u201cWe\u2019re not riffing on his Jewishness. We\u2019re riffing on what he does as a speculator, spending dubious money for his cosmopolitan conception of the globe.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the new-old language of Europe today. Marcin Matczak, the law professor I met in Poland, told me: \u201cThe young take liberty for granted. They never had to fight for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Roger Cohen, Op-Ed Columnist, Opinon, April 7, 2018 Mr. Cohen is an opinion columnist.\u00a0He wrote this\u00a0article after a recent visit to Poland and Hungary. In Hungary and Poland, the liberal West used to be the promised land. Not anymore. Hungary had a horrendous 20th century of lost territory and freedom, but Budapest, a handsome city […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2915,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914\/revisions\/2915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}