Orban – increasingly isolated in Europe, as demonstrated by the conflicts with Brussels over recovery funds, migrants, aid to Ukraine – is preparing to receive a visit from Xi Jinping and hopes for the return of Donald Trump to have support at the White House: two days ago he flew to Florida and the Donald he welcomed him as “a great leader with whom we can do great things”, unlike Joe Biden who instead considers him “an aspiring dictator”.
But at home he has to deal with the Magyar phenomenon, who, due to his personal history and political career, seems to have the qualifications to challenge the current regime: for a long time from the smaller group of Orban’s advisors, until last year, the minister’s husband of Defense (now former) Judit Varga, Magyar left Fidesz in February accusing the government of corruption and revealing, from the inside, the mechanisms of Orban’s propaganda machine. At the end of March, she published a recording of a conversation with Varga from the time of their marriage, in which she detailed an attempt by Orban’s aides to interfere in a corruption case, which the judiciary is now investigating. .
Although Orban and his followers are trying in every way to discredit him, the latest polls attribute 13% of voting intentions to Magyar: Fidesz is far away, still above 40%, but some cracks are appearing in the majority in power. Even more so after the sexual abuse scandal that convinced Orban to sacrifice, at the beginning of the year, two important figures of the regime: even the President of the Republic, Katalin Novak, and Judit Varga herself, the leader of the list designated for the European elections , forced to resign for having granted pardon to a man guilty of having covered up acts of pedophilia in an orphanage.
«These turbulences do not represent an immediate threat to Orban, but they have exposed the hypocrisy of government officials on family values and make attacks on the LGBT+ community less credible», says Zsuzsanna Szelenyi, one of the founders of Fidesz during the democratic transition, left the party already in 1994, in total disagreement with the nationalist turn introduced by Orban, then an independent parliamentarian several times. «People – he continues – are showing great interest in the affairs of the government, even in politics, there is a desire to participate, to inform themselves that we haven’t seen for a long time in Hungary. There have been demonstrations, strikes and protests in recent years, but now they occur more frequently and involve more and more people.”
Szelenyi is also director of the Democracy Institute Leadership Academy at the Central European University, and welcomes us into the emptied classrooms of the university banned by the Fidesz government because it was supported by the financier and philanthropist George Soros, one of Orban’s declared enemies. «In Hungary Orban controls everything, from the media to the judiciary and he can no longer blame anyone, but – explains Szelenyi – he needs enemies to maintain consensus, like all autocrats. And therefore the enemy becomes Europe, or rather, more correctly, the enemies become the EU leaders who sit in Brussels, the so-called technocrats who want to impose their rules, on migrants, on the war in Russia, on the rule of law”.
