During 2013 Orbán’s government continued to implement a moderate austerity program, reducing welfare spending and introducing a new set of crisis taxes on banking and selected industries. It also used its parliamentary supermajority to intervene in the energy market by ordering utility companies to significantly reduce charges for all households. The popularity of that initiative contributed to Fidesz’s victory in the national parliamentary elections in April 2014, in which the party and its junior partner, the Christian Democratic People’s Party, captured more than 44 percent of the total vote, securing more than 130 seats in the 199-seat Parliament. Running on a unity slate, five left and centre-left parties—including the Hungarian Socialist Party and splinter parties led by former prime ministers Gyurcsány and Bajnai—took 26 percent of the vote, and Jobbik won more than 20 percent of the vote. Beginning his third term as prime minster, Orbán staked out a nationalist stance but yielded the full embrace of Euroskepticism to Jobbik as both parties repeated their success in the elections to the European Parliament in May 2014 (won by Fidesz, which garnered some 52 percent of the vote, with Jobbik finishing second, having taken 15 percent of the vote). Orbán’s nationalist stance became even more pronounced in 2015 in his response to Europe’s migrant crisis. Not only did he outrage many European observers when he called the crisis a “German problem” (because of the desire of many of the migrants from turmoil-ridden countries in the Middle East and Africa to settle in prosperous Germany), but he also joined several other eastern European leaders in refusing to go along with mandatory quotas for sharing the resettlement of the migrants and refugees throughout the EU. His government’s hard-line policies regarding the plight of the migrants included construction of a barbed-wire fence the length of Hungary’s border with Serbia, to which the migrants had come on the path that led from Turkey to Greece by boat and then on through the Balkan countries toward northern Europe. Orbán’s government put the question of EU migration policy to the Hungarian electorate in a referendum on October 2, 2016, that asked, “Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of parliament?” While Orbán’s adamant opposition to the proposition was never in doubt, the Socialists asked Hungarians to abstain from voting in an attempt to invalidate the vote and undermine Fidesz’s credibility. For some Hungarians the rejection of the EU policy was seen as the first step toward Hungary’s departure from the EU, dubbed “Huxit” in imitation of “Brexit,” the British decision to leave the EU in response to a vote to do so in a referendum in June 2016. In the Hungarian vote some 98 percent of those who went to the polls rejected the EU’s migrant-settlement policy, but, because fewer than 50 percent of eligible voters participated (about 40 percent voted), the results were invalid. Orbán still claimed victory and promised a constitutional amendment to block the imposition of the EU policy; on the other hand, there were calls for his resignation in the wake of the referendum’s failure. Nationalism and virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric remained at the centre of Fidesz’s campaign for the 2018 legislative election, as Orbán sought a fourth term as prime minister. Fidesz exploited its dominance of the media to spread anti-Islamic fearmongering, and Orbán accused the opposition, the liberal Hungarian-born American financier and activist George Soros, the EU, and the UN of conspiring to make Hungary an “immigrant country.” All of this came despite the fact that construction of the wall on the border with Serbia had chocked the flow of immigrants to negligibility. Meanwhile, the opposition’s failure to arrive at a consistent message and a thriving economy worked in Orbán’s favour.
Nincsenek megjegyzések:
Megjegyzés küldése