In a little over 50 days, Hungarians will vote in a pivotal election that could remove Trump ally Viktor Orbán after 16 years as prime minister and replace him with Péter Magyar, a defector from Orbán’s Fidesz movement. If you want a respite from US politics but crave the battle between the open society and its enemies, subscribe to this weekly podcast covering a campaign that is rapidly turning into the dirtiest in the post-communist era - culminating in the threatened release of a illicitly filmed Magyar sex tape.
The tricks could get a lot dirtier, warns this week’s guest Géza Jeszenszky, Hungary’s first post-communist foreign minister. Together with prime minister József Antall, he began the process of Hungary’s accession to the EU and NATO and sought to repair the now century-long damage caused by the Trianon treaty that ceded more than 2 million ethnic Hungarians to modern-day Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine.
At every election since 2010, Orbán has created bogeymen like George Soros to motivate his base. In 2022, he stoked fears that Hungarians would be sucked into a western war against Russia. In the four years since, his peacenikery has since evolved into a full-on anti-Ukrainianism that is growing as election day approaches. In the past week alone, Orbán has described Ukraine as Hungary’s “enemy” and the EU’s plans to fast-track Kyiv’s accession as an “open declaration of war” against Budapest.
Jeszenszky fears this hysterical rhetoric is less about mobilising support and more about laying the groundwork for a constitutional coup - a fear that only grew after reports in the Fidesz-allied media of threats by a ‘Ukrainian soldier’ to bomb schools in Hajdú–Bihar county. “My fear is that the very opposite is in his mind or in the mind of people around him: to postpone the election, not to hold the election,” he says, pointing out that the Fidesz-dominated parliament recently extended Hungary’s Covid-era emergency laws until mid-May. “Many of us, many Hungarians who are not really too friendly to Orbán can imagine that a kind of false flag operation may be committed - obviously directly by Russians or with the help of Russia - and something may happen, which can be presented as an act of aggression against Hungary”.
Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - newsletter focused on the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.
