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Video Rattling Austria Can’t Touch Orban: Postcard From Budapest

Video Rattling Austria Can’t Touch Orban: Postcard From Budapest

(Bloomberg) -- Vienna and Budapest are connected by imperial history, the river Danube and in the latest twist on the eve of European Parliament elections, a Russian-tinged scandal.

Both eastern capitals are home to governments that have embraced nationalist sentiment and made the political mainstream uncomfortable. Hungary has gone the farthest in dismantling democracy’s guardrails in the EU, making four-term Prime Minister Viktor Orban a standard bearer of the far-right.

Video Rattling Austria Can’t Touch Orban: Postcard From Budapest

Among a stream of like-minded visitors to his office this month was Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache. In an alcohol-fueled video (to a woman claiming to be related to a Russian oligarch), Strache dangled contracts for cash and also recommended a convicted Austrian investor build an Orban-like media empire.

In Austria, the leaked footage led to the sudden fall of Strache and triggered early elections. In Hungary, calls by the opposition for a probe into Orban largely bounced off of Europe’s biggest propaganda machine.

“Our Austrian friends can’t be with us because they’ve decided to have an extra hunting season,” Orban quipped Monday.

Video Rattling Austria Can’t Touch Orban: Postcard From Budapest

The whole episode, so close to EU elections this week, is yet another example of the power Orban has amassed via a network of media outlets. But it also highlights what’s at stake: nationalists from Italy to Poland have learned from Orban and a strong showing by them threatens the EU’s founding principles.

In Hungary, Orban has neutered dissent. Thousands protested to no avail against longer working hours in freezing weather last December on the outskirts of Budapest. Some marched miles to have their demands read out on public television, a medium Orban controls.

The consolidation of the media is part of Orban’s “illiberal democracy,” bending the constitution to his will and allowing trusted allies running formerly independent institutions.

That helps to partly explain why Hungary’s vote Sunday for the EU legislature is a forgone conclusion, with the only question being the extent of Orban’s victory.

Europe’s center-right political group has suspended his Fidesz Party, citing the erosion of the rule-of-law. And while Orban is untouchable in Hungary, the failure of Austria’s coalition of conservatives and the far-right -- a model he recently lauded as a model for Brussels -- risks stunting his ambitions.

Orban doesn’t sound worried.

He’s in the process of carving up the supreme court and across from his office, a former Carmelite Monastery in the Buda Castle, members of the Academy of Sciences are fretting over his plan to influence what they research.

--With assistance from Boris Groendahl and Zoe Schneeweiss.

To contact the reporter on this story: Zoltan Simon in Budapest at zsimon@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net, Flavia Krause-Jackson, Robert Jameson

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.