Orbán vs. Soros: the four-decade duel between Viktor Orbán & George Soros, by Gabor G Fodor; Angelico Press, £16
THIS is an absorbing book, worth reading and reflecting upon, not for any detailed argument and analysis of events and facts but for the author’s dramatic, even theological interpretation of this extraordinary ‘duel’.
Viktor Orbán is a well-known figure in Western politics: five times prime minister of Hungary, elected in 1998, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 with comfortable majorities, a democrat but not a liberal, a man who believes that ‘a nation is a sacred thing’, that ‘it is a moral duty to preserve [Hungary’s] 1,000-year-old civilisation – and if you are a Christian, to build up the Kingdom of God within your country’. As Fodor comments, ‘sovereignty mattered to him more than anything else’.
George Soros, born in 1930, 33 years older than his enemy, is an atheist of Jewish origin who left Hungary in 1947, aged 17, and who made billions of dollars through insider trading, hedge funds and offshore activities, though much of his immense wealth seems mysteriously acquired. Indeed, Fodor asks, ‘How did he get his money?’
He is less well-known than Orbán in the West at large, because his modus operandi is to work secretly through other organisations and people, and behind the foundations he has established in 150 countries.
In 1984 Soros returned to Hungary from the US where he had settled and established the Soros Foundation to promote the concept of the ‘open society’, to which he has remained committed ever since: that is, a society hostile to borders, nationhood or a national culture, in favour of globalism and unlimited migration.
In 1985 he visited the College of Advanced Studies in Law and the Social Sciences, where Orbán was a young student, but missed meeting the man who became his eventual nemesis because Orbán was playing football. Orbán later went to Oxford, along with other youthful members of Fidesz, the political party they had founded, on a scholarship programme funded by Soros, but returned to Hungary after a few months to engage in politics full-time.
The author describes Orbán as a large personality even as a student: ‘Intelligent, courageous, combative.’ His political party, Fidesz, was characterised by the slogan: ‘We’ll do it our way!’ Orbán saw that its strength was its independence ‘from everyone’.
Even earlier, in June 1989, the then Hungarian government of Joszef Antall was already acting independently, ordering the Russians out of Hungary, opening the border with Austria, so allowing East Germans to cross into the West, thus effectively toppling the whole edifice of Communism.
In 1992 Orbán spent six weeks in the US and finally met Soros for the first time when the latter invited the Fidesz party members to meet him on the top floor of his office – the 60th floor. He offered to cover their costs to ensure victory when the next elections were held in Hungary. Orbán declined this offer, convinced that Fidesz had to be autonomous. Soros, who loathed not winning – even playing tennis he admitted hating to lose – never forgave this rebuff. The two were now enemies. Orbán, the Christian, later saw this moment as akin to Satan’s temptation of Christ, when Satan offered Christ all the kingdoms of the world on one condition: that he gave his allegiance to the devil instead of God.
From then on, indirectly but deliberately, Soros began funding causes and people who opposed Orbán and Fidesz. He had no moral scruples about this; the author describes him as ‘a disruptor’, someone who thrives on causing political chaos to make a personal profit. He set up the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest; its students were told ‘that human rights exist and that they must take precedence over national sovereignty’.
Orbán was accused of being anti-Semitic, anti-Roma (Hungary’s gypsies), anti-democracy. Undeterred, he continued to fight for Hungary’s identity as a Christian and European nation. In 2015, the advent of mass immigration into Europe, he saw clearly that ‘mass migration and illegal immigration went hand in hand with terrorism’. His government put up posters everywhere declaring: ‘If you come to Hungary, you must respect our laws!’
Fodor sees this struggle as a modern-day ‘David and Goliath’ battle. For Orbán the question is how to survive as a small sovereign nation in the middle of a Europe dominated by the diktats of the undemocratic EU.
For Soros, working behind EU policies, migration is a ‘human rights issue’, a ‘question of labour shortages’ and a matter of ‘social inclusion’. As for the CEU, Orbán insisted that it had to be ‘integrated into the Hungarian legal system like all other Hungarian universities’. It was forced to relocate to Austria – and Soros has not been to Hungary since.
Although short on a close account of the last 30 years of Hungarian history the author, clearly an advocate of Orbán’s political vision, has made a powerful case for traditional conservative politics everywhere, against the globalist, open-borders agenda of the left.
Orbán attended the funeral at Malmesbury Abbey of the late Sir Roger Scruton, eloquent defender of conservatism in this country.
What of Soros? He remains unfathomable.
‘Profit is the ultimate meaning of things . . .’
‘The greater the chaos, the bigger the profit . . .’
‘Morality is not part of the game . . .’
Where Orbán ‘swears by the traditional concept of the family . . . Soros opposes it by propagating the notion of “gender”.’
Their duel really seems, at an existential level, a battle between good and evil. Perhaps we conservatives in the UK should take note and learn from this small European country and from Orbán’s determined, unyielding example.
