After winning a supermajority in the Hungarian general election, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that he had won a victory over the left, the media, EU bureaucrats, George Soros, and Ukrainian President Zelensky.
Orban, whose populist right Fidesz party won 135 of 199 seats in the Hungarian Parliament, his fourth election victory in a row, said during his acceptance speech that the win was “so big” that it could be seen from the moon, “and definitely from Brussels,” referring to the home city of the EU administration.
The Hungarian PM declared that he had had to fight an “overwhelming” force of various enemies: “the left at home, the international left, the Brussels bureaucrats, the Soros empire with all its money, the international mainstream media, and in the end even the Ukrainian president.”
“The whole world has seen tonight in Budapest that Christian democratic politics, conservative civic politics, and patriotic politics have won,” Orban continued. “We are telling Europe that this is not the past, this is the future. This will be our common European future.”
Opposition leader Peter Marki-Zay, whose group “United for Hungary” that consisted of various parties of all political stripes, said that their campaign did “everything right,” but that because the country had been subject to “12 years of brainwashing,” they had no chance of winning.
Marki-Zay further complained that the United for Hungary group faced an “unequal fight” against biased Hungarian media, and that Orban had run a campaign of “hate and lies.” The opposition had painted itself as the pro-EU group, and would have changed the country’s foreign policy dramatically.
Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Orban on his victory in a statement posted to Telegram. “Despite the difficult international situation, the further development of bilateral ties of partnership fully accords with the interests of the peoples of Russia and Hungary,” Putin said.
International media commentators were rather upset at Orban’s win. Writing in The Guardian, Timothy Ash was quick to compare alleged war crimes committed by the Russian military to Orban’s election. “The Ukrainian horrors are clearly far worse than the Hungarian miseries, but the two are fatefully connected,” Ash wrote.
“Europe should now get tough on both the Russian enemy without and the Hungarian enemy within,” The Guardian writer demanded, describing the result of the election as “another dilemma this dark, depressing weekend has presented to a deeply shaken Europe.”
