Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he wants to abandon liberal democracy in favor of an “illiberal state,” citing Russia and Turkey as examples.
The global financial crisis in 2008 showed that “liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” Orban said on July 26 at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Baile Tusnad, Romania.
“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”
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The Hungarian prime minister is distancing himself from values shared by most EU nations even as his government relies on funds from the bloc for almost all infrastructure-development financing in the country.
Orban said civil society organizations receiving funding from abroad need to be monitored as he considers those to be agents of foreign powers.
“We’re not dealing with civil society members but paid political activists who are trying to help foreign interests here,” Orban said. “It’s good that a parliamentary committee has been set up to monitor the influence of foreign monitors.”
Orban’s steps mirror those of Russia under Putin, where non-governmental organizations that accept foreign money must register as “foreign agents.” Putin orchestrated a crackdown on NGOs in 2012 after he faced the biggest street protests in more than a decade after elections.
“Orban’s comments are very controversial and closer to what we’re used to hearing from President Putin of Russia than from a leader of a European democracy,” Paul Ivan, an analyst at the Brussels-based European Policy Centre, said by phone today. “It’s also an extremely bad moment to cite Russia and Turkey as examples, with Russia becoming much more imperialistic and nationalistic and with serious attacks on the freedom of speech in Turkey.”
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Orban, who has fueled employment with public works projects, said this weekend that he wants to replace welfare societies with a “workfare” state. He has earlier said more centralized control was needed to confront multinational companies such as banks and energy firms, to escape from “debt slavery,” and to protect Hungarians from becoming a “colony” of the EU.
Orban said his “illiberal democracy” won’t deny the “fundamental values” of liberalism, such as “freedom.”
“The point of the future is that anything can happen,” Orban said. “That means it could easily be that our time will come.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-2 ... ngary.html
According to other sources, he also said that he doesn't want "more foreigners" in his country.
Vladimir Putin does not seem to be so isolated within Europe after all, it seems. All in all, some quite worrying news coming from a head of government in the heart of Europe. I suspect this is the kind of model that Marine Le Pen and others have in mind for their respective countries as well. Especially his direct praisal of an "illiberal" state seems baffling, but than again, maybe the semantics have a different connotation in Hungarian than in other languages.