Can naivety be the font of truth, no matter how unpalatable that truth may be? Let’s be bold and put it to the test: would Hungary now be allowed to join the European Union? In truth, everything suggests that it would be unlikely, even though the realism of Europe’s political groupings has more to do with cynicism than ethics (and this barb is directed as much at the European People’s Party as the Party of European Socialists, given that the democratic credentials of Robert Fico’s Slovakia are no better than those of Orban’s Hungary). Some are unhappy with Jean Asselborn for saying, in less than diplomatic terms, that those countries whose leaders “build fences to keep out refugees fleeing war, … violate the freedom of the press and the independence of the judiciary” are violating “the values of the European Union”, and thus deserve to be excluded “temporarily or even, indeed, permanently”. Ultimately, the Luxembourg foreign minister was perfectly right to sound the alarm.
This Sunday 2 October, the citizens of Hungary will vote in a referendum called by Viktor Orban for the purpose of slapping down the Commission of Jean-Claude Juncker whose crime was to suggest that asylum seekers be shared among the member states. Voters will be asked to answer yes or no – and the no vote will, of course, win the overwhelming majority – to a noisome, loaded question: “Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarians citizens in Hungary without the consent of parliament”. But what else could realistically be expected of a man who would also like to bring back the death penalty, responding haughtily to those who dare point out to him that Europe had banned capital punishment before Hungary’s accession: “The European treaties are not holy writ”? Are the treaties no more than scraps of paper for the Hungarian prime minister?
In fact, Viktor Orban no longer makes any secret of it: what he is trying to do is to change the very nature of the Union. With his Polish sidekick Jaroslaw Kaczynski, he is issuing an invitation to join a crusade to make Europe the repository of “illiberal democracies”, that is to say, to see authoritarian, xenophobic democracies appearing here, there and everywhere, borne on the surge of populism, seeking also to present themselves as defenders of a reactionary and imaginary “European civilisation”. Can you hear them? By coincidence, Austrians, too, had been called to the polls on that same Sunday 2 October to elect their new president, the choice being between a septuagenarian ecologist and a far-right candidate. As a result of a technical hitch, the vote has now been postponed until 4 December. One can imagine how this rescheduling will be viewed by the Visegrad Post journalist who saw the annulment of the second round result as “yet another milestone reached in the crisis in the European institutions, demonstrating yet again the systemic problems of false democracies, out-dated and contaminated by lobbying, corruption and noxious ideologies than run counter to the direct interests of states and their peoples”.
The least that one can say is that the former Hapsburg Empire – and more widely, Central Europe – is allowing itself to be tainted by repellent, and therefore disquieting, ideological aspirations. Jean Asselborn is correct, this wayward drift is a major problem for the European Union to which it can no longer, at any price, shut its eyes and hold its nose. This is a disease that does not respect borders any more than jihadists, organised crime or capital looking for a safe haven do. To paraphrase Jean de la Fontaine in his fable “Animals Struck by the Plague”, not all countries may succumb but all have been infected. Now more than ever we must bear in mind, as the writer Marek Halter (whom Viktor Orban has probably never read) invites us, that “the greatest danger is not so much forgetting what happened in the past as forgetting the essential: how the past happened”. Urgent soul-searching is required, required in all the democracies of the Union as each and every one has been infected by a disease leading to insidious and growing dissatisfaction among citizens. It is required in the Union more than anywhere else because, in the name – it is claimed – of national democracies, democracy is being held hostage by the states. At this moment, the extreme right remains “an electoral minority” everywhere but, as Professor Sylvain Kahn (Slate of 13 September) has just argued, “as a result of the blindness, the lack of backbone or the cowardice of so-called parties of government, their leaders and the media which support them, this multi-form, multi-message, inconsistent, minority right-wing is becoming culturally and politically dominant!” Urgent steps must be taken to put an end to the “cultural colonisation of the traditional democratic parties”. Orban’s Hungary, Kaczynski’s Poland as well as the Czech Republic, Finland, Denmark and many others have at least reminded us how the past happened. Michel Theys