To characterize the Hungarian Prime Minister’s ”Annual Evaluation Speech” (in Hungarian: Evertekelo Beszed) delivered on February 18, 2023, is very easy: it was one of the most pathetic malarkey in Hungary’s political history. In fact, the most catastrophic problem in today’s Hungary is that the majority of his compatriots lack the courage to tell Viktor Orban that he is not as great as he thinks he is. In reality, he is an uncultured and uncivilized doofus with significantly below average intelligence.
Concerning his mental state, Viktor Orban has always been a born rebel, incapable of adapting himself to the realities of his surroundings. Having been an incompetent amateur throughout his life, he has totally ruined his reputation across the globe. As a result, he has become a laughingstock even in Moscow, Ankara and Beijing, devoid of respect and personal affection. Moreover, while oscillating among multiple unreasonable extremes without any rational explanations, he has been written off by everybody as an unreliable partner. Finally, because of his reputation as a ridiculous tyrant and a shameless kleptocrat, the ubiquitous verdict of the international community is that Viktor Orban is a contemptible and slightly deranged ersatz politician.
What the domestic parts of Viktor Orban’s speech unambiguously demonstrate are that he does not comprehend the fatal dangers of mindless populism and hate-filled culture wars on the entire system of Hungarian society, its political institutions as well as its economy. Moreover, he is completely unaware of the fact that inflation, which he designates in his speech as the twin “enemy” with “the war” and which is by far the highest within the European Union, cannot be brought down by the conventional authoritarian means of a tyrant. Finally, he is absolutely oblivious to the devastating effects of the persistently high rates of the Hungarian National Bank on domestic as well as foreign bond investors, the labor markets and the aforementioned central bank’s limited authority to set realistic targets to facilitate meaningful corrections in the face of the discombobulated political goals set by him and his destructive kleptocracy. Clearly, his party’s unchecked absolute majority since 2010, has already made Hungary much poorer, polarized to the extremes at home and a pariah abroad. Robbed by a grotesquely politicized constitution, called Basic Law and amended at the whims of the ruling party ten times within a decade, of all checks and balances, nothing can block the political and economic idiocies of the limitlessly greedy and immoral Gangsterrocracy. Consequently, in addition to being a tyrannical regime, Viktor Orban’s Hungary has been turned with the selfishly disinterested assistance of Brussels into a lawless state, in which the hollowed principles of the rule of law are almost nonexistent.
Yet, by far the greatest danger for the whole Free World, mainly NATO as well as the European Union, have been Viktor Orban and his tyrannical regime’s ruinous foreign policy. At the root of Viktor Orban’s twisted historical understanding of European and world politics is the Hungarian people’s negative fascination with the Trianon Treaty of 1920, in Hungarian vocabulary “Peace Dictum”, that cut down the former Hungarian Kingdom’s territory by 71.4% and its population by 63.5%. The illusion of Hungary's betrayal by the United States and all the states of Western Europe, the creation of Czechoslovakia as well as Yugoslavia, and the loss of Transylvania to Romania, have cemented an enduring national trauma for victimhood. The slogan coined by the Horthy regime in the 1920s “Truncated Hungary is not a country but Great Hungary is Heaven” became the rallying cry for a disastrous alliance with Hitler’s Germany and the subsequent occupation of Hungary by the Soviet Red Army.
Indeed, these combined national tragedies have led to a deep moral crisis in the souls of most Hungarians. In turn, this moral crisis has resulted domestically in a convoluted ethical schizophrenia between good and evil and also manifested itself internationally by a significant deviation from Western European moral fundamentals. Thus for mainly existential reasons, the most rabid National Socialists became the most ruthless Stalinists after 1945, while the most dedicated Communists turned into the most committed Democrats after 1990. As a consequence, Viktor Orban’s FIDESZ Party as well as most of the opposition parties are stocked with the former communists and their fellow travelers.
Unfortunately, this Hungarian immoral ambivalence has been reinforced by the United States of America’s and the leading Western European states’ unreasonable obsession with the new Soviet cum Russian leaders’ “enlightened” overtures to the Free World. From Margaret Thatcher's “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together” through the ubiquitous political mythology of the West that “Russia wants to open up to Europe and eventually become an integral part of it” to the naive attempts at peacemaking before and after the illegal invasion of Ukraine by President Putin, the leading states of the European Union continue to live in the Lalaland of strategic fantasy.
However, Viktor Orban’s Russia and China derangement syndromes are more critical for the future cohesion of NATO and the European Union and the emerging confrontation with Russia and China. His indirect support of President Putin, combined with his aggressively pro-Chinese campaign in opposition to the stated policies of both alliances, signal a critical moment for Viktor Orban. His public crusade against Ukraine and Hungary’s fellow alliance members is for domestic consumption. According to this legend, Viktor Orban is the champion of peace and enduring security for Europe, while his opposition are bloodthirsty warmongers. Internationally, however, he does not dare to vote against any decision voted on by the other member states of NATO and the European Union.
As every schizophrenic politician he wants to have it both ways. Since he is his own counselor, he will try to float in the air between his visceral hatred for the United States of America as well as Europe and his tyrannical enchantment for the despotism of Presidents Putin and Xi.