Trump’s election win pleases Orban and Europe’s far right

These are not just kind words, but the result of deep connections that have developed between the European far right and Trump’s Republican Party.

Chief among them is Orban, 61, who has become an unlikely favorite of Trump and other Republicans who have hosted him and sought his political advice.

“Orban is the poster child” for Team Trump, said Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University and author of the new book “Erasing History: How Fascists Are Rewriting the Past to Control the Future.” “They bring him, they meet him,” Stanley said, arguing that Orban’s most attractive quality is the 14 years “he has managed to stay in power,” making him the longest-serving leader of the European Union.

Orban did it according to researcherspassing laws limiting the independence of the judiciary; filling government offices and institutions with party supporters; and creating a pro-government media landscape by threatening fines or suspensions for “unbalanced” or “immoral” news reporting.

His power has become such that the European Parliament calls his rule an “elective autocracy.” And from that platform, he portrayed refugees as a threat to Christian culture, calling migrants “poison” and Muslims “invaders” – and passed supposedly anti-pedophile laws that effectively conflated the crime with LGBTQI+ issues.

It’s a platform he’s increasingly exporting to Republicans, he says.

“We have entered into the programming system of President Donald Trump’s team and are actively participating in it,” he said at a July lecture. Meanwhile, in January, Trump described Orbán as a “very great leader” and “a very strong man.”

I’ll send a message. In the meantime this could be done

When a Hungarian visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in March, President Joe Biden accused his Hungarian counterpart of “seeking dictatorship.”

NBC News asked Trump’s team to comment on this criticism, as well as its ties to far-right parties in Europe.

The far-right label is rejected by Orban’s Hungarian Fidesz party.

“If the left wants to portray us as being on the far right on illegal immigration, the only thing I can say is that we are on the far right on illegal immigration, in the sense that the left is sadly mistaken because they promote lawlessness.” borders, said Fidesz MP Laszlo.

This is not just about platitudes between leaders.

An Orbán-linked think tank called the Danube Institute developed connections with the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation leading the Blueprint 2025 policy roadmap. Trump has disavowed a 900-page plan to reshape politics and society along far-right lines, despite the involvement of some of his former aides in writing it.

Yet publicly, Trump has supported mass deportations, said he would use the legal system to punish political opponents, and threatened to deploy the military and National Guard against the left, whom he calls the “enemy within.”

Trump and his team deny he is a fascist, and last month he called himself “the opposite of a Nazi.”

The prospect of a new alliance between these transatlantic political colleagues is deeply troubling to independent experts, activists and political opponents.

In Trump’s first term, heavy hitters such as German leader Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron presented themselves as rational, mainstream counterweights to the president’s most norm-breaking outbursts. Now Merkel is long gone and Macron is greatly weakened.

The new political topography of Europe has shifted to the right: Wilders calls for the “de-Islamization” of the Netherlands, the Austrian Freedom Party wants to achieve the “remigration” of Austrian citizens with a migrant background, and the Brothers of Italy party uses the Fascist motto of the Benito Mussolini era: “God, family, fatherland.”

While party leader Meloni has softened her image internationally by forging ties with Biden and the EU, at home she has overseen Albania’s controversial migrant processing program, stated her personal opposition to abortion and supported anti-surrogacy laws that critics say are discriminatory. same-sex couples.

Now Trump’s election means Orbán will be much less isolated and may even become a conduit for the political bloc to Trump.

“The Trump movement is going through a learning process with these people,” said Stanley, the Yale professor. “Their use of Orbán is very, very effective and very smart.”

Alexander Smith reported from London and Carlo Angerer reported from Munich, Germany.