[Grem] Interview with and article on OV

[Emoke Greschik]

Interview
‘All the terrorists are migrants’

http://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-interview-terrorists-migrants-eu-russia-putin-borders-schengen/

Viktor OrbĂĄn on how to protect Europe from terror, save Schengen, and get
along with Putin’s Russia.
By

Matthew Kaminski <http://www.politico.eu/author/matthew-kaminski/>

11/23/15, 5:30 AM CET

Prime Minister Viktor OrbĂĄn on the balcony of his office at the Hungarian
Parliament, November 19. Photo by Árpåd Kurucz

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BUDAPEST — “Of course it’s not accepted, but the factual point is that all
the terrorists are basically migrants,” says Viktor Orbán. “The question is
*when* they migrated to the European Union.”

In his office at the Hungarian parliament, the prime minister points toward
the flowing Danube. In another era, an aide notes, the Turks followed this
river into the heart of Europe. Behind OrbĂĄn hang two maps: One shows a
short stretch of Hungary’s border with Croatia and another gives a
panoramic view of the Balkans toward Turkey, from where hundreds of
thousands of migrants have made their way north this year.

In a wide-ranging 90-minute interview a week after the Paris terrorist
attacks, Orbán lays out his prescriptions for Europe’s ailments: An
impenetrable external border to boost security and save the Schengen treaty
on passport-less travel within the EU; a new EU constitutional convention
that strengthens the power of nation states and weakens Brussels; and
normalized relations with Russia.

Thinking of Paris and its aftermath, the Hungarian leader posits an
“overwhelming logical” connection between terrorism and the movement of
Muslims into Europe — in the last few months as well as over recent decades
— that to him and many Europeans is “an obvious fact,” whether “you like it
or not.”

“The majority of our leaders in the West deny the fact,” he adds. That
denial of the “obvious” — which the Hungarian leader blames on political
correctness run amok — destabilizes European politics by increasing “the
gap between the leaders and the people.”
‘We want to save Schengen’

Whether European leaders like Orbán or not, the Hungarian’s critique of the
EU’s migration policy this year changed the terms of the debate. With
blaring alarms about terrorism across Europe, the leader of this country of
10 million is again the uncensored Id of the European right, offering ideas
that the rest of the bloc can’t ignore (and even, in some cases, pronounce
aloud).

Linking terror to migration, Orbán says the “number one job” after Paris is
“to defend the borders and to control who is coming in.” NATO and EU
countries are “at war” with Islamists in the Middle East and Afghanistan,
and, he says, “it’s quite logical” that “enemies” would seek to send
fighters with migrants coming into Europe.

We criticize [the EU and NATO] because they are far from perfect, but the
starting attitude of the Hungarians to Western institutions is always
positive.

“All of them present a security threat because we don’t know who they are.
If you allow thousands or millions of unidentified persons into your house,
the risk of … terrorism will significantly increase.”

Orbán says he doesn’t presume to tell Western European countries such as
Belgium and France how to deal with the offspring of Muslim migrants who in
his words belong to “parallel societies,” holding EU passports but
rejecting Western values.

But, as calls grow to rethink open borders — with five Western European
countries holding preliminary talks
<http://www.politico.eu/article/nations-mini-schengen-borders-passports-travel-freedom-migration-refugees/>
about a more limited “mini-Schengen” zone (which wouldn’t include Hungary)
— Orbán presents his hard line on frontiers as the best way to silence
calls to suspend or bury Schengen.

“We would like to save Schengen,” he says. “We would like to save the
liberties … including the free movement inside the European Union,” which,
he says, are imperilled by unregulated and porous external borders.
An EU rethink

Earlier this year, Hungary was widely criticized for building a barbed wire
fence along its border with Serbia to stop the waves of new arrivals. For
Orbán, Hungary was merely upholding the law of the Union that Greece (“a
major problem for us”) failed to do by allowing the migrants to continue
north unimpeded.

Orbán’s opposition helped torpedo a scheme championed by the European
Commission for a mandatory resettlement of migrants across the EU, and
flipped the discussion from how best to accommodate the refugees to one of
how to stop them from coming at all.

If I disagree with them, they say, ‘You are not a democrat, you are not a
good man, you belong to the bad guys’.

For the Hungarian, this year of troubles — from Greece to migration, from
terrorism to possible Brexit — calls for a wholesale rethink of the EU. The
bloc “is only reacting, reacting, crisis after crisis, instead of having a
concept.” Asked if the EU will be here in 10 years, he says, “it’s an open
question.”

OrbĂĄn says he wants the EU to call a new convention on the future of Europe
with a mandate “to modify even the Basic Treaty,” the kind of exercise that
the bloc last carried out a decade ago. That convention, overseen by former
French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, drafted a new constitution for
the EU, which was killed in referendums in France and elsewhere.

In Orbán’s proposed reform of the EU, the balance of powers would tilt back
toward nation states and away from leaders in Brussels who have “very much
the pro-United States of Europe position,” he says.

The Hungarian has no illusions about the ability of a leader of
a small Central European nation to force his views onto the EU agenda. Even
David Cameron and the British “are not strong enough to generate a European
discussion,” he says, and are limited to negotiating terms of a deal for
Britain alone.

“Innovation is part of” politics, he says, “but basically it’s an art of
reality.”

Although he’s widely seen in Western Europe as a leader who’s turned his
back on “liberal democracy” and embraced Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Orbán
insists he wants to save the EU and NATO. “Hungary’s place is [in the]
West,” he says. “We criticize them because they are far from perfect, but
the starting attitude of the Hungarians to Western institutions is always
positive.”
[image: Viktor Orban]

Prime Minister Orban, with the Danube in the background. Photo by Árpåd
Kurucz



In his own telling, he’s not the populist provocateur of EU media lore.
“The basic character of all politics is cooperation, not confrontation,” he
says. “We cooperate. We confront when it is necessary, not because we enjoy
it.”

Putin is someone you can cooperate with. He’s not an easy man. He is not a
man who has a known personality, so don’t imagine him as you like to
imagine Western leaders.

Getting up from his seat around a large conference table, OrbĂĄn walks over
to the books stacked on his desk and shelf. He picks up a tract on Europe
he’s reading by Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher and proponent of a
closer, federal EU. “The most dangerous book,” he calls it.

There are essay collections by the founder of the ultra-conservative
Catholic Opus Dei movement (Orbán’s a Calvinist) and the Hungarian Nobel
laureate in literature, Imre Kertész. He’s reading about the political
theory of Islam and another book on the global sexual revolution — “an
anti-gender study,” he says, “about how we destroy freedom in the name of
freedom.”
‘The very arrogant mainstream’

At 52, OrbĂĄn carries a healthy paunch and says his football-playing days
are mostly behind him. He puts on a tie and jacket for a photographer, then
quickly dispenses with both. In his part of the world, he says, leaders are
more laid-back.

He speaks fluidly in English and cracks jokes, showing off a talent for
retail politics that won him three national elections (1998, 2010, 2014)
and altogether a decade as Hungary’s prime minister. While critics say he
caricatures Muslims, financiers and liberal elites, and uses his majorities
in parliament to whittle away at Hungary’s relatively young democratic
institutions, OrbĂĄn himself defies facile caricature.

He isn’t a “dictator” à la Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to use the gibe
thrown at him by Jean-Claude Juncker. In his half comic, half mutually
contemptuous routine with the European Commission chief, OrbĂĄn returns
serve by calling the Luxembourger “the Grand Duke.”

The Hungarian waves aside comparisons of his ruling style with the autocrat
in Moscow and Turkey’s strong-handed leader as “ridiculous” and “a lazy way
of thinking” — an insult that Western European politicians use to try to
marginalize him.

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“If I … disagree with them, they say, ‘You are not a democrat, you are not
a good man, you belong to the bad guys’,” he says. Any time he breaks with
the “very arrogant and aggressive” Western European “mainstream” on
migration or another issue, he says, “we are morally labeled as xenophobic,
Putin-type, whatever.”

Liberalism in Europe now concentrates not on freedom but on political
correctness. It became a sclerotic ideology. Dogmatic, may I say.

The censures come not just from Brussels and Berlin but Hungary’s ally
across the Atlantic. In unusually blunt terms, the U.S. ambassador to
Hungary last month criticized the Orbán government’s crackdowns on NGOs,
limits on media freedoms, the packing of the courts with allies, the
redrawing of electoral districts in ways that favor the ruling coalition
and corruption.

Speaking at Corvinus University, Ambassador Colleen Bell noted America’s
“concerns about the state of checks and balances and democratic
institutions,” the “centralization of power” and “opaque” decision-making.
The ‘illiberal democrat’

There is an oft-noted irony that this pro-democracy dissident of the late
1980s, who co-founded the Fidesz student-led movement and helped bring down
communism, is seen in the second half of his nearly three-decade run in
Hungarian politics as a threat to its democracy.

Addressing doubts about his democratic bona fides, OrbĂĄn says he has been
in parliamentary opposition longer — a dozen years — than in power, and
expects to “lose again” in future elections. “You can’t avoid to lose
because that’s part of the job,” he says.

Yet in this run as prime minister, OrbĂĄn has made his name abroad as a
prominent critic of “liberal democracy,” someone who pushes an alternative
political model for Europe. In a widely circulated speech to ethnic
Hungarians in Romania last year, he announced his desire to build “an
illiberal new state based on national foundations,” and argued that
“liberal democracy can’t stay competitive.”
[image: Viktor Orban]

Orban at his office in the Hungarian Parliament. Photo by Árpåd Kurucz

It was the moment that OrbĂĄn most vocally broke with the liberalism that
defined his early years in politics with Fidesz and a leadership role
in the Liberal International throughout the 1990s.

Orbán admits his thinking and behavior have changed over 25 years — “it
would be irresponsible not to change” — but also says that liberalism
itself, both in Hungary and globally, isn’t what it once was.

“Liberalism in Europe now concentrates not on freedom but on political
correctness. It became a sclerotic ideology. Dogmatic, may I say. The
liberals are enemies of freedom” who, he says, want to limit Hungary’s
freedom to make its choices as a nation-state.

“Liberalism became a mainstream politics. They fight against everybody who
does not belong to the mainstream. But not to belong to the mainstream does
not mean that you are not in favor of freedom. Just the opposite now.”
Me and Putin

Orbán’s political journey took its first sharp turn after Fidesz lost seats
in a 1994 elections. When another party picked up the urban, youth
electorate that Fidesz had courted, he went to find votes on the
traditional right and outside Budapest, in religious, rural areas. His
former liberal friends call the shifting shapes of OrbĂĄn opportunistic and
cynical. He says he’s right where he belongs, with the
“national-Christian-civic political family.”

“You know, I’m a village boy,” says Orbán, who grew up in Székesfehérvár, a
town of 100,000 southwest of Budapest.

People call him a populist.

“Because I am,” he retorts. “The problem is nobody knows what [that] means.
It does not sound bad in Hungarian ears. Being a populist means that you
try to serve the people. It’s positive.”

Support for his Fidesz party has grown from 40 percent last December to
almost 50 percent today, according to polls.

The other notable irony of the modern OrbĂĄn is his relationship with Putin.
He fought to bring down the Soviet empire and remove Russian troops from
Hungarian soil. Putin, a KGB officer who was a cog in the Soviet system
that OrbĂĄn battled, is now seeking to restore Russian power.

These days, OrbĂĄn opposes EU sanctions on Russia over its incursions into
Ukraine, though Hungary has signed off on them since last year. He nurtures
close business ties with Moscow, particularly in energy. Despite the
Russian occupation of Crimea and military presence in eastern Ukraine,
OrbĂĄn is among the more vocal EU leaders calling for the West to come to
terms with the Kremlin.

Given his staunchly anti-Soviet past, does his friendly relationship with
Putin give him any discomfort?

“It’s strange, but politics is full of strange things, so it’s not
uncomfortable,” Orbán says. “That’s part of the job. And you know politics
is basically not a personal issue, and what I represent is not my opinion
but the interests of the Hungarian nation. And the point is very clear,
without the Russians it’s impossible to manage rightly the future of the
Hungarians. So we have to have a good balanced relationship with the
Russians.”

He says he has no personal warm feelings for the Russian leader — adding
that he would not deny it if he did like Putin, just to please Western
opinion, which “you know, does not matter for us.”

“Putin is someone you can cooperate with. He’s not an easy man. He has no
personal feelings [for] you…. He is not a man who has a known personality,
so don’t imagine him as you like to imagine Western leaders.”

With Russia, Orbán continues, any country can have only a “power policy
based on reality,” adding that “if you would like to have a relationship
with the Russians based on principles, it will never work.” European and
Russian principles are “impossible to harmonize. So put aside principles,
ideologies and look at the interest, and find the common sense realpolitik
agreements. That’s the Hungarian approach.”

When the EU soon considers whether to extend sanctions on Russia, at least
until June, Orbán says he will voice his opposition but won’t use his veto
power to stop the extension — “a veto is a nuclear bomb, it’s good to have
but don’t use it.”

He says the final decision on sanctions ultimately rests with the Germans.

While Orbán notes that Hungary’s closest ally in Europe, Poland, backs
sanctions, he says he finds more than a little hypocrisy coming from
Berlin. Germans “like to appear as opposing” him on sanctions on Russia, he
says, “but in fact they are doing even more than we are” to work with
Russia. Orbán points to Berlin’s support for a second gas pipeline from
Russia to Germany under the Baltic, which will deprive Ukraine of billions
in yearly transit fees.
Balancing the Germans

“Hungarians are easygoing guys in the European Union,” Orbán says,
laughing. “What we are doing, we are saying — and what we are doing is
exactly what we are thinking. So it’s not complicated.”

OrbĂĄn says the Russia relationship helps him balance a testy one with
Berlin: “We would not like to depend on the Germans.”

Angela Merkel is no fan of his, and the feeling seems mutual. Still, OrbĂĄn
says it’s easier to work with the German chancellor than with Putin: “With
Merkel we have a principle-based policy. So if you agree on certain
principles, it’s easy to manage the reality. Just the opposite with Putin:
We can manage some reality, but never agree on principle. As we Hungarians
like to say, it’s a different coffee house.”
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