Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s visit to the White House caused a meltdown by media outlets across the country. President Trump was supposedly assaulting the liberal democratic order by even speaking the to the democratically elected Orbán.
What is it in Orbán that makes him such a threat to the Western liberal order? He’s not violently putting down a workers movement as French President Emmanuel Macron has done to the yellow vest movement, been incapable of delivering a democratically approved Brexit like British Prime Minister Theresa May, or created failed states in the Middle East and North Africa like former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
To the ruling class, none of these events are as much as an existential threat as Orbán’s nationalist policy to defend Hungary’s culture, heritage, and Christian roots.
[Read: Trump praises autocratic Hungarian PM Orbán for having done ‘right thing’ on immigration]
The Hungarian prime minister has been a thorn in the side of the European ruling class since his Fidesz Party took over the country in 2010; he previously governed from 1998 to 2002. He has regularly pushed back against globalism, secularism, and the eradication of his nation’s sovereignty.
When German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Europe up to millions of mostly economic migrants, Orbán refused to allow them to flood into his country. “Hungary must protect its ethnic and cultural composition. I am convinced that Hungary has the right and every nation has the right to say that it does not want its country to change,” Orban said at the time.
Unlike other post-national leaders, Orbán does not believe that people and borders are interchangeable. To him and his ilk, Hungary is more than just a geographical location on a map — it is a people, a history, a Christian heritage.
Orbán promised in his campaign protection, prosperity, and the preservation of Hungary, which has had a declining population for decades. For the most part, he’s delivered.
From 2014 to 2017, the GDP of Hungary grew by annual rates of 4.2%, 3.4%, 2.2%, and 4%. That’s on par with most of the other Eastern European countries and greater than all the Western European countries. Unemployment fell from nearly 9% in 2014 to 3.6% in 2019, and GDP per capita rose from $13,196 in 2012 to $15,647 in 2017.
He has used the powers of the administrative state to make Hungary one of the most pro-family countries in Europe, offering huge tax incentives to couples who have children and a lifetime free of income tax if they have four or more babies.
Orbán outlawed the teaching of gender studies and worked to reduce the number of abortions occurring in Hungary.
While Europe has been rocked with dozens of terrorist attacks and thousands of sexual assaults since Merkel’s Germany absorbed more than a million refugees, Hungary has seen its crime levels drop from 2016 to 2017. The U.S. State Department assessed that their terror threat remained low because of Orbán’s actions to secure their southern border. He would not allow Hungary to enter the same kind of cultural decline and ethnic conflict that Germany and France inflicted on themselves.
The perceived threat from Orbán is not because he’s a brutal dictator, a genocidal maniac, a warmonger, or attempting to build a nuclear arsenal. He is supposedly a threat because he’s beloved by the Hungarian people — his Fidesz Party is more popular than Merkel, May, or Macron.
American and Western Europe’s ruling elite see the decline of liberalism all around them, with populist-nationalists winning elections around the world. The answer to preventing the rise of a post-liberal order isn’t by treating Orbán and anyone who dissents as a villain — it’s by addressing the shortfalls of liberalism.
Ryan Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a writer based in New York.
