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| What, no Michael Portillo? |
Here's a transcript of Stephen Sackur's From Our Own Correspondent report this morning:
Viktor Orbán doesn't do subtlety.
I know this because I've been to his home village, a short drive from Budapest. Felcsút, population 1,800, has become a potent symbol of the Hungarian Prime Minister's vanity and the shameless merger of his own interests with those of the state.
Exhibit A is the now notorious 'railway to nowhere' built as a pet project on the Prime Minister's orders in 2016. It connects Felcsút with an arboretum, reportedly owned by Mr. Orbán's dad, some three miles to the south. The railway was built with the help of two million euros of EU funds and has, on the busiest of days just a handful of passengers in its faux-antique carriages. Trains don't run at all from October to March. due to an overwhelming lack of public demand.
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| Puskás Akadémia football stadium |
The railway is by no means the most incongruous piece of expensive infrastructure in this rural backwater. 20 yards across the road from Mr Orbán's weekend cottage is an extraordinary timber, steel and copper clad football stadium, home to Puskás Academy - a Hungarian Premier League team founded by Orbán and his close friend Lőrinc Mészáros. Mr Mészáros was a plumber and pipe fitter when he first met the future PM; now he's Hungary's most powerful oligarch.
There is, not surprisingly, an intense loyalty to their home-grown Prime Minister amongst Felcsút's residents. Journalists from far away are viewed with deep suspicion. I was ejected from the village cafe when I tried to ask a pointed question about Mr. Orban's largesse, and a handful of locals refused to emerge from the nearby general store when they saw me loitering outside. Finally an old lady shuffled out, clutching a tray of eggs, to declare that Mr. Orbán was the saviour of the village and the country.
30 years ago Mr. Orbán was a fiery opponent of the dying Soviet empire, a champion of freedom from authoritarian rule who welcomed Hungary's embrace of the European Union. Now he's the continent's leading exponent of what he calls 'illiberal democracy'. Brussels is the enemy, run by a liberal elite intent on diluting the Christian identity of Europe with waves of immigration.
The crisis of 2015, which saw hundreds of thousands of migrants cross into Hungary from Serbia in the hope of making it to Germany, was a political gift for the Orbán government.
In response he built a fortified electrified fence along 125 miles of the country's southern border. He rejected EU efforts to get all member states to take in a share of the refugee influx. He built detention camps on the border which human rights groups say flout international rules on the treatment of migrants. He now blocks UN efforts - and, indeed, mine - to gain access.
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| Migrants detained in Ásotthalom |
In response he built a fortified electrified fence along 125 miles of the country's southern border. He rejected EU efforts to get all member states to take in a share of the refugee influx. He built detention camps on the border which human rights groups say flout international rules on the treatment of migrants. He now blocks UN efforts - and, indeed, mine - to gain access.
All of this has proved tremendously popular with many Hungarians. I walked a stretch of the fortified fence with László Toroczkai, the far-right mayor of the border village of Ásotthalom. "Finally we have security. Now I sleep at night", he said, nodding to his own home 30 yards from the barbed wire.
Mr. Orbán and his Fidesz party machine have done away with many of the institutional checks and balances associated with Europe's more liberal democracies. 500 of the country's media titles are now controlled by a conglomerate run by cronies of the Prime Minister. The Hungarian parliament has made it a crime for NGOs to offer assistance to migrants.
And the Government continues to wage a vitriolic campaign against the Hungarian-born American billionaire financier George Soros, who has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into civil society organisations in his native land. Ironically a youthful Viktor Orbán studied at Oxford thanks to a scholarship funded by Mr. Soros. Now the Prime Minister rails against the Jewish billionaire as a crafty international speculator intent on filling Hungary with immigrants.
It is cynical dog-whistle politics and, to the consternation of many, it works.
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| 'Screaming' poster |
In the last few days thousands of posters have gone up across Hungary depicting Mr. Soros and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker side by side. "You have a right to know what they're doing" screams the poster's headline. "Undermining Hungary's security".
With European parliamentary elections looming Mr. Orbán is now coordinating with anti-immigrant political leaders in Italy, Poland and other member states to seize the political momentum and deal a devastating blow to the Brussels status quo.
He may despise the EU in its current form but he has no intention of leaving. His ambition is much bolder. He wants to remake it in his own image.
