At a fiery election rally in Budapest last month, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — who seems set to extend his rule after Hungarians go to the polls on Sunday — launched into the latest in a long line of attacks on what has become his favorite foe: the Hungarian-American businessman George Soros.
"We are fighting an enemy that is different from us," Orban was reported to have said. "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's rhetoric — anti-immigrant and, as many critics have argued, anti-Semitic — would have been consigned to the fringes of Europe's far-right just a few years ago.
Yet in a sign of how mainstream these once-taboo views have again become in parts of the continent, such language is now commonplace for the leader, whose country is a U.S. ally and a member of the European Union and NATO.
0 comments: