Last March, in a formal speech commemorating the 170th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, President Viktor Orban said the following:
They do not fight directly, but by stealth; they are not honourable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs. They are not generous, but vengeful, and always attack the heart especially if it is red, white and green [the colours of the Hungarian flag].
With these words, Mr. Orban pursued his marginalization of Hungarys Jews. He didnt name them. He didnt have to. His familiar anti-Semitic tropes, which might have been lifted from any number of German sources between the late 18th-century and the defeat of Adolf Hitler in 1945, would have resonated clearly in the minds of his audience.
And that was the point. Elections were just weeks away and Mr. Orban had adopted ethnic nationalism as a tactic. Back in 2014, his governing party, Fidesz, was low in the polls. Then came the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015 a godsend issue. That year, Hungary received the second-most asylum applications of any European Union country; and when the EU assigned refugee quotas to each of its member countries, Hungary mounted a legal challenge at the European Court of Justice (it failed). Mr. Orban built more than 500 kilometres of border fences to keep the migrants out, and enlisted border hunters. He called this law and order.
By telling Hungarians they were victims of foreigners and foreign ideas, Mr. Orban built a winning formula. He promoted illiberal democracy as opposed to the chaos of Western societies. This chaos was nothing less than multireligious, multicultural society open society, in other words.
Enter George Soros, or a caricature thereof. For decades, no one has personified open society more closely than the Hungarian-born philanthropist whose organization, Open Society Foundations, has consistently promoted ideas of democracy, human rights, participatory capitalism and political liberalism. Mr. Soross goals opening closed societies, making open societies more viable, and promoting a critical mode of thinking are those of his mentor, the philosopher Karl Popper, whose book, The Open Society and its Enemies, was avidly studied by millions in the immediate post-Soviet era. They are, however, anathema to the illiberal designs of Mr. Orban, which are to strengthen hard-right nationalism by evoking manufactured security threats from the outside and promoting an exclusive Christian culture within.
That Mr. Soros is both Hungarian and a Jew made him an ideal target during the recent election campaign, which resulted in Mr. Orban being re-elected with a two-thirds majority. Vilified, accused of wanting to take over Hungary (another anti-Semitic trope), Mr. Soross grinning face was plastered on posters omnipresent throughout the country. The ambiguous caption read: Dont let George Soros have the last laugh.
So focused was the attack that one Fidesz campaign ad urged voters to stop Soross people from forming the government, thus conflating the opposition parties with the designated enemy.
But Mr. Orbans campaign against Mr. Soros, whom he has depicted as preparing to strike a final blow to Christian culture by sponsoring the reception of thousands of refugees into Europe, neither began, nor ended, with electoral exhortations. For in his effort to reshape the status quo, the President has openly borrowed strategies from the Nazis and from Stalin. To the distress of many educators, he has revised school texts. In one eighth-grade book, students are informed that Mr. Orban thinks refugees are a threat to Hungary.
