Whitewashing Orbán’s Image and Ideas in Brussels

Acting as the President of Europe

“Make Europe Great Again” – the slogan chosen by the Hungarian Council presidency did not come as a surprise to anyone. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is often compared to the former US president and was already labelled the “Trump before Trump” several years ago (for example, by convicted former Trump advisor Steve Bannon). Even if this characterisation is both cheap and somewhat misleading, both are driven by contempt towards the rule of law and the determination to have an effect that goes well beyond their country: to destroy the multilateral institutions that could be the only options in tackling global challenges. Since 1 July, Orbán’s government has presided over the work of the Council of the European Union, overseeing, among other things, sound lawmaking and the coordination between EU institutions. 

As early as last year, a European Parliament resolution voiced concerns about Hungary’s ability to “credibly fulfil” the tasks related to the rotating presidency. While there might be clear risks related to EU policy, with Hungary acting as a “dishonest interlocutor” rather than an honest broker in Council negotiations, the focus of this article is on Hungary’s governmental PR machinery, which aims to position Hungary’s far-right governing party as a constructive political force in Europe and Orbán as a political visionary whose good intentions have been misunderstood by many across Europe. The prime minister’s stunt to travel as a self-proclaimed peacemaker to both Kyiv and Moscow is one of these PR efforts: the country holding the Council presidency has no right to make peace deals in the name of the EU, but for observers, it might look like it is doing something no one else dared to do in the more than two years that have passed since the invasion of Ukraine. This could be a plausible strategy due to Orbán’s roots in the mainstream: many of his supporters still consider him a moderate, and a rotating presidency full of well-crafted stunts could make it look conceivable to many that a dog that barks is unlikely to bite.

European image-building

Orbán is seen to have a more or less coherent worldview, which he communicates in speeches held in front of his followers; components include the shift of the global centre of power from West to East, the failure of liberal democracy, and the role of The Great Replacement in the demise of the West. According to his messages, the major threats to society stem from Liberal and Leftist hegemony in political institutions, in public discourse, and even in science (for allowing gender studies to become a discipline). In the last couple of years, the Hungarian prime minister decided to promote this worldview internationally, by hosting international events (such as the Conservative Political Action Conference – CPAC), creating fellowship programmes, providing grants to international experts and journalists – as long as they agree with Orbán’s worldview – and setting up pseudo-independent research institutes and think tanks.

One of the main institutions working on behalf of the Hungarian government is the state-funded Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC). After years of failed attempts to set up a media presence abroad, the new international flagship of Hungary has become the “talent-promotion institution” headed by Orbán adviser Balázs Orbán (not a relative of the prime minister). Its office in Brussels, led by Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, actively organises policy discussions in the European capital in order to present its positions on issues that divide the left and the right with the aim of getting its message out. Ahead of the EU elections, it assembled a team of experts to share its alternative views on issues like farming, energy security, border control and the regulation of disinformation. Such action can also be expected during the Hungarian presidency; Germany’s Berliner Zeitung already enabled an MCC expert to explain why Orbán’s actions during the Council presidency should be considered an attempt at building bridges in an extremely polarised environment. Even if its narrative may not be able to convince the masses in the EU, it can bring together a wide range of sceptics and create the impression that there are legitimate counterarguments to the European consensus.

In April of this year, the MCC was also a sponsor of the controversial National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, an event that was supposed to feature former British home secretary Suella Braverman, the Brexiteer Nigel Farage and French far-right leader Eric Zemmour, alongside Viktor Orbán, but it was temporarily shut down by Belgian police due to outrage over the event. Following the scandal, Furedi was given the opportunity to publish a piece, titled “Cancel culture comes to Brussels”, in the leading publication covering EU politics – thus making use of the legitimacy of a publication that is otherwise extremely critical of the MCC.

Constructing a moderate politician

On another front, the institution is also actively building an image of a moderate Orbán. The MCC Brussels’ Research Director, Werner J. Patzelt, used to be a professor at the Technical University of Dresden (and a member of the German Christian Democratic Union). His research on Pegida was widely considered an endorsement of the far-right movement. Last summer, he published the book “Ungarn verstehen” (Understanding Hungary), which was hailed in mainstream German-language outlets, such as the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), for encouraging readers to use the “toolkit of criminologists”, study the facts, and make up their minds about Hungary (at the same time, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was critical, calling it a PR publication).

As good as this sounds, the key Patzelt provides for readers to interpret the “facts” is inherently biased. Exceptions are presented as the rule, or the other way around. When it comes to discussing the massive corruption in the country, Patzelt, for example, describes the extreme cronyism as an effort to keep EU funds in the country through supporting local entrepreneurs (which is neither good nor bad in his view per se). He acknowledges that corruption may happen in this process but plays it down by mentioning that even the government and its prime minister can be, and often are, criticised for these acts in public. What he forgets to mention is that local entrepreneurs are connected to the governing party, and corruption is not investigated by the public prosecutor’s office, while criticism can only come from the sidelined opposition and cannot be heard in the government-controlled forums that are consumed by most parts of society.

Patzelt also mentions that the Hungarian electoral system can be rightfully criticised for not being proportional, as Orbán’s party has in the past managed to gain more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, while gaining somewhat less than half of the votes. But he plays this down by highlighting that elections in the United Kingdom are even less proportional. What he fails to mention is that Orbán’s government changed election laws to its advantage, gerrymandered the electoral districts, and handed out citizenship to ethnic Hungarians abroad to make sure that Orbán’s party received a disproportionate share of seats in Parliament. In the end, the reader should have the feeling that Orbán, although far from perfect, is a well-intentioned servant of his nation, who is badly misunderstood due to Western Europe’s lack of interest in Hungary’s language and culture. At the same time, Orbán’s xenophobic rhetoric, support for bloody dictatorships and attempts to undermine the European Union are not even mentioned.

The narrative laundromat

On its mission, the MCC relies on an opaque network of institutions and actors to increase its impact and create a pretence of legitimacy. The MCC has by now acquired booksellers and publishers and has created a network of satellite organisations. One of them is the Climate Policy Institute (CPI) in Budapest. At the MCC Brussels’ climate conference, the director of CPI, Calum Nicholson, sat on a panel bashing climate “scientism”, which in his view is a left-wing strategy to push for unpopular policies and to delegitimise criticism by referring to the scientific consensus on climate change that Nicholson tends to disagree with. It was not made clear, however, that he was not an independent civil society representative, but rather part of the same network as the organiser of the conference, another panellist and the moderator. The fourth person on stage was a retired professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for his turn to climate denialism, whose research and one of his testimonies were found to be funded by the fossil fuel industry.

The aforementioned book review of Patzelt’s Ungarn Verstehen in the NZZ (as mentioned in the disclaimer at the end of the article) was written by the German philosopher Alexander Grau, who is a fellow of the German-Hungarian Institute for International Cooperation (Deutsch-Ungarischen Institut für Europäische Zusammenarbeit) – another institute operated by the MCC. Its members usually publish in radical fringe outlets of the populist extreme right, such as Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung, Tichys Einblick and Die Weltwoche (the editor-in-chief of the last outlet got the exclusive opportunity to interview Viktor Orbán on the way back from his self-proclaimed peace mission in Moscow), but the example of the Patzelt book shows that accessing mainstream channels gets easier with time. This way, they can aim at convincing new audiences who might be sceptical of opinions voiced by far-right fringe media, but who could be open to the same argument if it can be read on the pages of a respected outlet.

This kind of normalisation of the far right is a major risk in Europe, and one that is not without precedent. Most recently, Ursula von der Leyen made a gesture to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni by postponing the rule of law report’s publication, hoping that in exchange she could hope for support from the post-fascist party running Italy. The rationale behind such a gesture is clear: it seems to speed up the formation of a governance structure that stands for responsible politics by preventing interference from anti-system forces. But it has obvious side effects as well: namely, the erosion of democratic values. Meloni is often mentioned as a politician who became more centrist once she got into power, but MEP Daniel Freund’s assessment of the voting behaviour of Fratelli d’Italia members in the European Parliament shows that this opinion is not backed by facts – at least not when looking at EU integration or the rule of law. It is instead rather likely that the more far-right ideas and personalities make it into the mainstream, the harder it will become for us to remember what we used to stand for.