PM Orbán praised with the benefit of hindsight
March 10th, 2020A pro-government historian welcomes two Austrian newspaper articles whose authors admit that PM Orbán was right five years ago, with his lonely stand among European leaders against mass immigration.
In Magyar Hírlap Irén Rab, the author of a book on the migration crisis published last year, quotes Saturday’s editorial in the Vienna Kleine Zeitung which suggests that “Europe owes an apology to Viktor Orbán” for haughtily dismissing his opposition to the mass influx of asylum-seekers in 2015 and 2016. The author, Boris Kálnoky, is the Budapest correspondent of the German conservative daily Die Welt, and Rab suspects that he couldn’t place his comment in his own newspaper. A similar OpEd column was published one day earlier in the more authoritative Die Presse in Vienna, where neo-liberal activist Christian Ortner also wrote that “Viktor Orbán was right” and deserves an apology. Irén Rab admits however that such opinions are far from being mainstream. West European leaders, she writes, will never apologise to Mr Orbán, on the contrary, they will never forgive him for the very reason that he was right and they were wrong.