Vox: Hungary just passed a “Stop Soros” law that makes it illegal to help undocumented migrants

This week, Hungary passed what the government dubbed the “Stop Soros” law, named after Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. The new law, drafted by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, creates a new category of crime, called “promoting and supporting illegal migration” — essentially, banning individuals and organizations from providing any kind of assistance to undocumented immigrants. This is so broadly worded that, in theory, the government could arrest someone who provides food to an undocumented migrant on the street or attends a political rally in favor of their rights. [...]

“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world,” Orban said in a characteristic anti-Soros tirade in March.  [...]

There’s still a lot of opposition to Orbán’s policies in Hungary, particularly in the capital city of Budapest. But Orbán is popular with a pretty significant chunk of Hungarian society. In the April 2018 parliamentary elections, the Fidesz party won a little under 50 percent of the vote. The next-closest party, the even-more right-wing Jobbik, won 19 percent. [...]

Soros’s aim, according to Orbán, is to undermine the soul of European Christian society — to hollow out the West from the inside out. Soros’s humanitarian activity is supposedly secretly indoctrinating Hungarians in a bid to let them acquiesce to mass migration. Once Soros and his allies succeed in opening the borders, Orbán warns, Muslim refugees will flood into Hungary and the rest of Europe — and soon the continent will become unrecognizable.

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Quartz: George Soros’ radical plan to save the EU from its next financial crisis

Soros thinks everything came to a head with the refugee crisis. Austerity had already set the stage for Germans and other rich countries to think of Greeks as foreign, or other. Then in 2015 came a whole new wave of outsiders from countries like Syria, Somalia, Bhutan, Iran, and Afghanistan. “At first, most people sympathized with the plight of refugees,” Soros said in his speech. “But they didn’t want their everyday lives disrupted by a breakdown in social services. And soon they became disillusioned with the failure of the authorities to cope.” The refugee crisis fueled populist ire even in countries with few migrants. Hungary’s current prime minister, Viktor Orbán, ran on an anti-refugee reelection campaign even though Hungary was hardly touched by the crisis. [...]

In the long run, migration has major benefits for host countries, bringing in diverse populations who can help the economy grow. That said, any country, for a time being, might struggle to handle a high flow of economic migrants. Soros worries that Europe, in its current state of disintegration, political populism, and austerity, could collapse under the pressure to provide social services and jobs to incoming refugees. As migrants join the labor force, it could,in the short term, lead to growing competition for jobs and a fall in wages, only stoking populist anger. If the crisis continues at its current pace, the European Union is at stake. [...]

Soros’ plan to rescue Europe is both simple and incredibly difficult: Solve the refugee problem. Soros wants the EU to commit to giving €30 billion ($35.4 billion in US dollars) annually to Africa for a number of years; he left the exact timeline vague. This “Marshall Plan for Africa” would go toward building and fortifying democratic nations in Africa. Support and improve African economies, the thinking goes, and fewer refugees will leave the region. [...]

“I don’t think George is suggesting that someone next week is about to draft a bill and pass it, but he’s creating a conversation,” says Johnson. “He is painting a vision to start a conversation to move the conventional wisdom away from its unsustainable structure.” That vision involves bringing about popular recognition that there is a positive, collective interest in everyone pitching in and doing something for Africa. 

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Social Europe: Hungary’s Lost Democracy

Despite the evident strength and sincerity of my companion’s convictions there is ample evidence to suggest that the truth is a great deal more complex. While Fidesz may have gained an impressive number of seats in Hungary’s Parliament, the election results show conclusively that the Party does not enjoy overwhelming support amongst the electorate. Without taking account of possible electoral irregularities – now the subject of mounting speculation – Fidesz-KDNP received one hundred thousand fewer votes than the opposition parties combined. Fidesz’s striking success, in terms of winning parliamentary seats, is far from an accurate barometer of its real approval ratings. Rather, the party’s two-thirds majority in the new Parliament is the product of Hungary’s spectacularly skewed election laws, which were designed by Fidesz and passed by a Fidesz-dominated legislature. As underlined by the historian and blogger, Eva Balogh, “many people underestimated…the devilish nature of the electoral system Viktor Orbán created.” [...]

Aside from alleged material inducements, occasional reports of pressure from employers on their workforce and, most worryingly, suggestions of serious election irregularities, including the contention that as many as 125,000 votes may have simply “vanished”, the governing party’s campaign was greatly helped by a range of dubious practices. In its preliminary report on the Hungarian elections, an OSCE Election Observation Mission noted: “the ability of contestants to compete on an equal basis was significantly compromised by the government’s excessive spending on public information advertisements that amplified the ruling coalition’s campaign message.” The Observation Mission also emphasised that, while the public broadcaster had “fulfilled its mandate to provide free airtime to contestants”, its “newscasts and editorial outputs clearly favoured the ruling coalition”. At the same time, most commercial broadcasters – the bulk of which support Fidesz – had been “partisan in their coverage”. These factors go some way towards explaining why Fidesz was able to attract significantly more votes than any other single party in the elections. Persistent and grossly biased media coverage – in combination with omnipresent state-funded “public information advertisements” that, in reality, simply reinforce the anti-migrant, anti-EU and anti-(George) Soros rhetoric of Fidesz – have helped to create and sustain a fearful social climate in which poorly educated, low-income citizens, in particular, especially in deprived rural areas, have grown to accept Fidesz’s fictive political narrative. As Balogh noted recently in Hungarian Spectrum, although opposition parties took most of the seats in Budapest, „[t]he inhabitants of villages, in fact, the poorest villages, voted in droves for Fidesz. They are under-educated, ill-informed, and brainwashed.” [...]

Strikingly, many educated younger Hungarians I encounter – most of whom have had little or no direct involvement in politics – no longer see a meaningful future for themselves in a Fidesz-dominated Hungary, where corruption and nepotism – as well as the continuing assault on civil liberties – are becoming the norm. Since 8 April, the talk amongst customers in the café where I often take breakfast has been almost entirely of emigration. Fidesz may have won the recent parliamentary elections but it’s Hungary, not only the country’s hopelessly divided and ineffectual opposition parties, that has lost.

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Jacobin Magazine: Fidesz’s Two-Thirds

The plan had been brewing for some time. Various political and civil organizations, united under the umbrella of “Country for All Movement,” ran a series of surveys to determine the strongest anti-Fidesz candidate in the most competitive districts; the weaker candidates were then supposed to step aside. This call for tactical voting sparked much discussion both inside and outside the country, with liberal editorialists like Cas Mudde even suggesting that in order to overcome the Orbán regime, the liberal opposition should join forces with the Jobbik party, an extreme-right formation that has tried, like Marine Le Pen in France, to clean up its image and present itself as more moderate. [...]

Aside from anti-corruption rhetoric, opposition parties offered nothing new to voters. The election program of the ostensibly socialist party — as well as that of its liberal spin-off, Democratic Coalition — contained little progressive content. Discredited due to past betrayals, lacking a strategy to expand beyond partisan die hards, these parties failed to offer voters a credible left-wing alternative. Their opposition was stylistic, rather than substantive. [...]

Orbán is a liberal at his core, topped off with some colorful nationalism and racism. The same could be said of Italy’s Berlusconi or France’s Sarkozy or, more recently, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz. Has Western Europe already forgotten Italy’s anti-immigrant Bossi Fini law, or France’s ban on face-covering (which Kurz is now considering implementing)? Do we really have to remind aghast liberals that Switzerland voted for a constitutional amendment, proposed by the far-right Swiss People’s Party, to ban the building of minarets?  

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Bloomberg: Hungary's Orban Isn't Another Putin

As a result, I think that Orban's style of running his country resembles Putin's in a number of important ways. But the differences, at least so far, outweigh the similarities -- they're on key issues that determine whether a country is a democracy or a dictatorship. It's important to make a clear distinction between a government that legitimately pursues illiberal and often noxious policies and one that is fundamentally illegitimate, repressive and a danger to its citizens, whether they realize it or not.

Orban and Putin share an obsession with sovereignty -- the kind that critics would call unlimited personal power. Their goal is not to allow any external force to undermine their power to make decisions on their nations' behalf, be that wealthier Western countries, multinational corporations or non-governmental organizations. Orban, however, has been far more sophisticated than Putin in reaching for that goal. That sophistication isn't "softness" -- rather, it's a sharper sense of what's sufficient. [...]

Though there have been some calls for a recount in Hungary because of possible voting irregularities, no one has suggested the massive falsification detected by independent observers of the Russian election -- up to 10 million fake votes for Putin, almost 18 percent of his total. And the high turnout in Hungary wasn't caused, as in Russia, by local officials' pressure on public employees. There is one similarity: The opposition parties in both countries have failed to present a united front, which makes them easier to defeat. [...]

Even on this, though, there are important differences between Russia and Hungary. Toth estimates that 15 to 24 percent of government procurement is corrupt. In Russia in the first half of 2017, the Finance Ministry found that 42.5 percent of the total amount of government-owned companies' procurement contracts was distributed without a competitive procedure at all -- a clear indication that these are corrupt deals. According to Martin, the overall share of corrupt and cronyist business in the Hungarian economy is between 5 and 10 percent; in Russia, according to a 2015 estimate by Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov, corruption causes an annual loss of 10 to 20 percent of official economic output.

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Spiegel: What Orbán's Third Win Could Mean for Europe

Overall, the election results show the extent to which the election conditions were tailored to Orbán's Fidesz, Hungary's only large political party. Of the party's 199 members of parliament, 106 were elected in single-member constituencies based on the first-past-the-post system. In many constituencies, Fidesz candidates only won with a relative majority, with the combined outcomes for the opposition candidates significantly higher in come cases. But the parties would have had to join forces and put up a single joint candidate in order to beat Fidesz -- and they were unable to reach such an agreement in many electoral constituencies.

Overall, the election results show the extent to which the election conditions were tailored to Orbán's Fidesz, Hungary's only large political party. Of the party's 199 members of parliament, 106 were elected in single-member constituencies based on the first-past-the-post system. In many constituencies, Fidesz candidates only won with a relative majority, with the combined outcomes for the opposition candidates significantly higher in come cases. But the parties would have had to join forces and put up a single joint candidate in order to beat Fidesz -- and they were unable to reach such an agreement in many electoral constituencies.  For some observers, including G.M. Tam, a leftist philosopher in Budapest and former anti-communist civil rights activist, Orbán's landslide victory didn't come as a surprise. "In recent years, elections all over Europe have been decided based on the so-called immigration question," Tamás told DER SPIEGEL. He says that consensus over a common well-being and common interest is disappearing all over Europe and that an increasing number of groups in society are placing their own interest over those of minorities like foreign citizens or refugees. "Orbán is a strong and talented representative of this trend," Tamás says. "That's why he wins elections. Everyone in Hungary knows that he's corrupt and that he governs poorly, and yet many people still vote for him because they consider it important that he protects them from immigrants and minorities like the Roma." [...]

All of which makes his reserved appearance on election night seem disingenuous at best. Particularly since Orbán explicitly said a few weeks ago that he planned to deal rigorously with his opponents and critics -- including nongovernmental organizations. In his speech on the Hungarian national holiday on March 15, Orbán said: "After the election, we will of course seek amends -- moral, political and legal amends."

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The Atlantic: 'The Most Dangerous Man in the European Union'

Fidesz has gradually become the main political force in Hungary by exploiting the highly explosive “national question,” which concerns the trauma caused by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, through which Hungary lost two-thirds of its historic territory and over 3 million Hungarians found themselves living in foreign states. The national humiliation, and the fate of ethnic Hungarians now living in bordering states, have filled generations with bitterness. Since his lurch to the right, Orbán’s rhetoric has been characterized by professions of faith in the nation, in the homeland, and in Christian values. [...]

But by early 2015, the Orbán government had lost its supermajority, and the prime minister was using immigration as a wedge issue to regain support. The migrant and refugee crisis, which hit its zenith that year, proved a godsend for that project. Hungary received 174,000 asylum applications in 2015 alone—or 1,770 applicants per 100,000 residents, the highest rate of any European country. Voicing sharp opposition to the influx of migrants, Orbán built a 110-mile-long fence along the border with Serbia to keep them out, and later one along the border with Croatia. He was able to dictate the narrative about migrants—initially in Hungary and subsequently across the post­-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe—by exploiting two predominant elements of Hungarians’ self-image both byproducts of the Treaty of Trianon: the victim myth and the will to survive. [...]

Opinion polls leave little doubt that Orbán successfully won back support by weaponizing the immigration issue. In a September 2015 poll, two-thirds of respondents in Hungary supported the building of the fence along the Serbian border. A 2016 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in 10 European countries ascertained that Hungarians were the most likely to believe that refugees would increase the chances of terrorism in their country: 76 percent of Hungarians questioned said they believed this, compared with a median of 59 percent for the 10 polled countries. Even stronger was the belief that refugees are a burden because they take a country’s jobs and social benefits: 82 percent of Hungarians polled identified with this belief, as against a median of 50 percent. [...]

It would be a mistake to compare the Hungarian regime to, say, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Opposition politicians are not jailed, and antigovernment demonstrations are not subject to police brutality. But over the past eight years, Orbán has pioneered a new model of what some Hungarian scholars describe as a “half democracy in decline” or a “soft autocracy,” merging crony capitalism with right-wing rhetoric. He has flatly rejected accusations about the alleged impropriety of the sources of his allies’ enrichment, but opposition speakers in parliament repeatedly complain that he has become not only the most powerful but also the richest man in Hungary. On the Corruption Perception Index compiled by Transparency International and released this February, Hungary is ranked as the second most corrupt EU country after Bulgaria. By gerrymandering the electoral system, subjugating the free press, and curbing the judiciary, Hungary has also achieved the dubious distinction of being named by Freedom House the “least democratic country” among the EU’s 28 members.

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The New York Times: How Viktor Orban Bends Hungarian Society to His Will

His party’s appointees or supporters dominate many artistic institutions and universities. A growing number of plays and exhibitions have had nationalist or anti-Western undertones. Religious groups and nongovernment organizations critical of Fidesz have seen funding dry up. He has especially vilified pro-democracy organizations funded by the Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros.

National opinion surveys are used to steer public opinion as much as collect it, while history is also up for grabs. The government has jousted with educators over textbooks while promoting a narrative of Hungarian victimhood and ethnocentrism. [...]

“The government is using its democratic legitimacy not only to reform the state but to reform the society,” said Professor Andras Patyi, the head of a new university formed by Fidesz to train the public officials of the future. He said the current president of France, Emmanuel Macron, was doing the same thing. “This is common in democratic societies,” he said. [...]

This kind of revisionism has also entered the national curriculum. High school graduates can now be tested on the new preamble to the Hungarian Constitution — a text which implies that Hungarian nationality is exclusively Christian, even though Hungary has a substantial Jewish minority. Its wording also reduces the agency of Hungarian officials in the final year of World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were murdered.

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The Guardian: Here lies danger. Hungary is on the verge of full-blown autocracy

“Their task, should they get to power,” says Orbán of those who oppose him, “is to execute ‘the grand plan’.” Europe, he claims, is about to be invaded by tens of millions of people from Africa and the Middle East and “if Europe does nothing, they will kick down our doors. The history of the conquered nations will be rewritten by others, and those who are still young will see how they become minorities in their own country.”  

Forget the fact that Hungary has practically zero immigration from those regions, and that the EU request that they should take in 1,300 was fiercely resisted, resulting in the erection of two rows of barbed-wire fence at the border with Serbia and Croatia, and the deployment of a civil militia – which could always be used for other purposes – to patrol it. More importantly for now, he tells his hard-core supporters that all who oppose him under the “independent” banner are in fact undeclared Soros candidates ready and willing to carry out the wicked financier’s orders. “Our strength lies in unity: one camp, one flag. We need everyone working together,” he declares, adding that he understands that people may be frightened by the prospect.

If they are frightened, of course, it will have been because of Orbán’s own version of “project fear”, the only thing that could shield him from the mounting charges of financial and social corruption. It is because he has instilled fear into those who oppose him, chiefly through loss of employment. He has control of all civil institutions and has already succeeded in having the main paper of opposition, Népszabadság, closed down.  

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Jacobin Magazine: What Orbán Knows and His Enemies Don’t

But Hungary’s case seems even more extreme, showing signs of slipping toward an autocratic system like Turkey’s. Its conservative-nationalistic turn has been around longer, preceding rather than following Western trends, and it may have begun a dangerous cycle: the Western media and public opinion initially ignored or ridiculed Orbán’s nationalistic, xenophobic, and autocratic measures, but now they greet similar moves elsewhere as legitimate thanks to being “mainstreamed” by Hungary’s ruling class. [...]

Importantly, however, decommodification isn’t always progressive. Polanyi argued that the rise of Italian fascism represented society’s attempt to protect itself from the excesses of the market, writing, “the victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control.” It is this regressive decommodification that we see in Hungary today. [...]

To boost competitiveness and reduce the country’s crushing debt, the nation hurried to privatize state-owned companies, which also seemed like a way to “adopt” capitalism and attract foreign investment. In time, Hungary not only became liberalized — it became more liberalized than most “old capitalist” countries. [...]

Much like Polanyi described, Orbán has won the support of disgruntled and alienated citizens. Meanwhile the opposition has nothing to offer than more liberalism. Opposition parties (apart from Jobbik, of course) promise to make Hungary “more European,” but, for most Fidesz voters, the past decade’s efforts to advance toward Europe have been disastrous — slashing the welfare state, endangering their jobs, and making their lives more uncertain. For these Hungarians, voting for Fidesz makes perfect sense. [...]

Much like the Italian left under Berlusconi, the Hungarian opposition is obsessed with Orbán but not really interested in why he’s so popular. They love to hate his flamboyant rhetoric, his obvious lies, and the absurdities of the government-managed mass media. Many people recognize all this as a dangerous swing toward authoritarian rhetoric, but no one seems to wonder why it was so successful.

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Bloomberg: Europe’s Bad Boy Has a Fight on His Hands

So when voters in a small agricultural city overwhelmingly voted for an opponent for mayor for the first time in 20 years on Feb. 25, it sent shockwaves through the political establishment. No poll had predicted such a rebellion by voters complaining of rampant cronyism, much less in a stronghold of Orban’s party. [...]

The opposition parties smell an upset if they can manage to work together, and politicians who have formerly ruled out cooperation are now huddling to bridge their differences. They held a meeting in parliament to discuss alleged government corruption on Wednesday. Orban is on the offensive, with his Fidesz party doubling down on anti-immigrant rhetoric that's previously given it a lift in polls. [...]

Orban knows better than anyone that polls showing his party with a hefty lead -- some put Fidesz’s support equal to the six biggest opposition parties combined -- may mean little if those opposed to him back a single candidate in the country’s 106 electoral districts.  

That’s where the majority of seats in the 199-seat parliament will be decided, with the rest based on national party lists. Orban, a former student activist taking on the communist regime, became premier for the first time in 1998 after he convinced parties opposed to the former communists to withdraw their candidates, most of them in his favor.

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Social Europe: Hungary’s Enfeebled Democracy

However, this ‘explanation’ begs as many questions as it appears to answer. For example, it ignores the extent to which public sentiment has been cynically manipulated in Hungary since 2015, with a succession of massive, mostly government-funded propaganda campaigns calculated to create and sustain a full-blown moral panic about the existential ‘threat’ to Hungary posed by migrants and by the EU’s alleged efforts to prevent Hungary from controlling its own borders. In recent weeks, the Fidesz-KDNP government has placed whole page advertisements in ‘sympathetic’ newspapers and paid for thousands of billboards falsely accusing the Hungarian-born financier and philanthropist, George Soros, of wanting to “settle millions of migrants from Africa and the Middle East”. If ordinary Hungarians fear large-scale immigration from outside Europe and believe that only Fidesz will protect them from the supposed machinations of Soros that is because government propaganda has succeeded in convincing them that such fears are reasonable and well-founded.  

The weakness of Hungary’s opposition parties is only partly due to their political ineptitude, their inability or unwillingness to form effective, long-term alliances or their alleged failure to promote policies that are genuinely popular with the electorate. Quite simply, Hungary’s opposition parties lack the resources or the means to counter the insidious anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-globalist and anti-opposition propaganda, which projects Fidesz-KDNP as the ‘saviour’ of the Hungarian nation at a time, so Hungarians are constantly warned, of unparalleled crisis. One of the latest advertisements placed by Fidesz, now appearing in newspapers and on billboards, shows a grinning Soros in front of a partially destroyed fence. Several of Hungary’s leading opposition politicians – Bernadett Szél of LMP, Ferencz Gyurcsány of DK, Gábor Vona of Jobbik and Gergély Karácsony of Párbeszéd – are pictured standing on either side of the financier. In this carefully crafted advertisement, each of the politicians is brandishing giant wirecutters. The message to Hungary’s electorate could not be clearer or more deceitful – a vote for some of Hungary’s most popular opposition figures would lead to the rapid dismantling of Hungary’s border defences, resulting in a potential onslaught by ’alien hordes’.

The robust performance of Fidesz-KDNP in opinion polls – together with the continuing weakness of the opposition parties – also stems from the growing control exerted by Orbán and his allies over Hungary’s print and electronic media. Marius Dragomir, Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society at the beleaguered Central European University, estimates that ’some 90% of all media in Hungary is now directly or indirectly controlled by Fidesz. That will indisputably give them a major lead in the elections’. In addition to public sector radio and television, which have been transformed into a platform for government propaganda, the bulk of supposedly ‘independent’ print and electronic media outlets in Hungary are now owned by business interests aligned with Fidesz. As emphasised by Dragomir, ‘Hungary is a classic case of media capture where the government’s head honchos, hand in glove with the country’s oligarchs, have used policy and public funding to turn independent media into a mere government establishment.’

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Politico: Hungarian left’s far-right dilemma

“Of course it’s sad that the second-largest opposition party is also a far-right party,” he said. But he argued that Jobbik was now “a moderate far-right party” — an assessment that chimes with Jobbik’s own efforts to recast itself as a milder alternative to Orbán. [...]

A survey last month by pollster Median found 39 percent of all adults — and 56 percent of those who know who they will vote for in the election — support Fidesz. Jobbik lies second, with the support of 11 percent of all adults and 15 percent of those who know how they’ll vote in the election, to be held in April or May. [...]

“Although we reject the redistribution of migrants in Europe on the basis of quotas determined by Brussels, we also warned the government of making statements that basically spark Islamophobia,” said Gyöngyösi. “We cannot go against a world religion … Moderate Islam is our ally in fighting extremism.”

Jobbik’s leaders also point to their recent support for embattled NGOs and the Central European University and their opposition to a government campaign against financier and philanthropist George Soros. They have also teamed up with trade unions to fight wage inequality between Western and Eastern Europe.

The party has even begun to distance itself from Western European right-wing Euroskeptic parties. Gyöngyösi says France’s National Front and the Alternative for Germany now have more in common with Fidesz than Jobbik.

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Al Jazeera: How is Hungary's far right changing?

"Since the refugee crisis, [Fidesz] has become much more radical and even more prejudiced than it was before," Peter Kreko, a political scientist at Political Capital Policy Research and Consulting Institute, told Al Jazeera. [...]

An opinion poll published in early November concluded that Fidesz maintains a support rating of 61 percent, as reported by Hungarian Free Press. [...]

Recent years have seen the party shift from open anti-Semitism to a more brazen form of pro-Russian, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee politics that lines up with other European far-right parties. [...]

Cas Mudde, an expert on far-right politics and associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, said Jobbik "has partly been forced to remake itself into a mainstream right-wing party" because Fidesz has been "effectively dominating 'their' themes of authoritarianism, nativism and populism".

"[Jobbik is] now mainly a radical right anti-Fidesz party though, whose electorate is their core base and radical right people who are upset about the corruption of the governing party," he told Al Jazeera.

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Foreign Policy: Who’s Afraid of George Soros?

Romania TV was fined for its false claims about Soros. But the idea — that roughly half a million Romanians, and their dogs, came to the streets because Soros made them do it — struck a responsive chord. It’s similar to the idea that Soros is personally responsible for teaching students about LGBTQ rights in Romanian high schools; that Soros manipulated the teenagers who led this year’s anti-corruption protests in Slovakia; and that civil organizations and what’s left of the independent media in Hungary wouldn’t exist without Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

The idea that the 87-year-old Soros is single-handedly stirring up discontent isn’t confined to the European side of the Atlantic; Soros conspiracies are a global phenomenon. In March, six U.S. senators signed a letter asking Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s staff to look into U.S. government funding going to Soros-backed organizations. [...]

In Romania, where the head of the ruling party said Soros wants to do evil, the billionaire is not to be trusted because he’s Hungarian. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has reportedly declared that Soros will be a main campaign theme in next year’s general election, he’s a traitor. And everywhere, he is Jewish, his very name a nod to the anti-Semitism that runs deep throughout the region. [...]

In fact, one of Saakashvili’s cabinet members, Alexander Lomaia, had previously been the executive director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation, an indication of the close links supporters of the Rose Revolution had with the Hungarian billionaire’s philanthropic works. Soros was good at fostering that sort of popular movement, according to Saakashvili. But the former Georgian president seems wary of Soros getting more involved than that. “When he starts to play politics, he’s not that good,” he added.  [...]

Yet Hungary has gone well beyond attacking Soros-supported organizations, focusing its energy on Soros the man. The Hungarian government’s national consultation is polling adult citizens on whether they agree or disagree with statements including: “Another goal of George Soros is to make sure that migrants receive milder criminal sentences for the crimes they commit” and “It is also part of the Soros Plan to initiate political attacks against those countries which oppose immigration, and to severely punish them.”

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Politico: Viktor Orbán courts voters beyond ‘fortress Hungary’

Hungary’s parliament is selected using a mixed system, whereby some MPs are elected through single-member districts and others through party lists. Citizens in surrounding countries don’t have districts — but they may cast a vote for a party list. [...]

With Romania preparing to celebrate the centenary of its creation in its modern-day form, heightened tensions over minority language and cultural rights are dominating many conversations.

And with Romania’s presidential election and the European Parliament election coming up in 2019 — plus a lack of progress on raising living standards — there are fears that local politicians may resort to nationalist rhetoric as a political tactic. [...]

Fidesz works closely with some local Hungarian groups, and the government in Budapest funds a wide range of projects in the region, from language education and the arts to voter registration drives. Thus far, its efforts have paid off: In Hungary’s 2014 election, over 95 percent of votes cast by non-domestic citizens went to Fidesz. [...]

Each year, Orbán’s most important policy speech takes place not in Hungary, but across the border in Tusnádfürdő (Băile Tuşnad in Romanian) where Fidesz has been organizing a summer camp for the past 28 years. And when his party came to power in 2010, one of the first major policy changes Orbán implemented was extending citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in surrounding countries — a policy move that left-wing parties campaigned against during a 2004 referendum.

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