Michael Brown devoted his April 6 WorldNetDaily column to gushing over the re-election of Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orban:
Judging by reports from the left-leaning media, the people of Hungary showed their true colors by electing Prime Minister Viktor Orban to an unprecedented fourth consecutive term. If these reports are to be trusted, Orban is a dangerously nationalistic, far right-wing, anti-gay, anti-Muslim bigot, a friend of Russia’s Putin and an adversary of Ukraine’s Zelensky.
If this description is accurate, what does this say about the people of Hungary?
Orban was expected to have an especially tough challenge this time because all six opposition parties united against him. Instead, he won by his largest margin to date, with his party now looking to take 135 seats and the six-party opposition alliance taking only 56 seats.
As we pointed out when Newsmax’s John Gizzi similarly gushed over Orban’s win, Orban used his years in power to rig the country’s election process to undercut any opposition; voting districts have been gerrymandered to the point that while Orban won only 53 percent of the vote, he won 83 percent of the districts.
So committed to this narrative was Brown actually quoted from Gizzi’s whitewashing of Orban’s win:
But Orban’s relationship with Putin is not the primary reason for his great popularity. Instead, as explained by John Gizzi on Newsmax, “With the economic growth rate at 7.1% in 2021 and unemployment at roughly 3%, the economy was clearly on the side of Orban.”
Gizzi also notes that “Orban also got high marks from voters for his policy of ‘support for responsible child bearing’ – notably that mothers who have four children are exempt from federal income taxes for life.
“The fruits of this pro-family policy (in which the government invests 5% of Hungary’s Gross Domestic Product for family support) includes an increase in the fertility rate of 24% in the last decade – ‘the largest in Europe,’ Minister of Families Katalin Novak told Newsmax last October.
Brown then did some whitewashing of his own, trying to justify Orban’s anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT agendas:
As for Orban being anti-Muslim, the truth is that Hungary largely closed its doors to Muslim refugees when the government found that, by and large, they were not trying to integrate into society but were instead living off government support, often while remaining hostile to Hungary itself. (Orban actually styled them “Muslim invaders.”)
And the people of Hungary have not forgotten that they were under Ottoman (Muslim) rule for 145 years, from 1541-1699. This, too, affects their views on having open borders to large numbers of Muslim immigrants.
As for Orban being anti-LGBTQ, the reality is that Orban upholds Christian moral values when it comes to marriage, family and the sexualizing of children.
Accordingly, in 2020, the government altered “the constitutional definition of families to exclude transgender adults and same-sex couples, asserting that the ‘foundation of the family is marriage and the parent-child relationship.'”
Then, in 2021, “Hungary’s parliament … passed a law banning gay people from featuring in school educational materials or TV shows for under-18s.”
And the majority of the Hungarian people supported these changes, which is another reason they voted again for Orban. Can you imagine?
After writing all that, Brown laughably denied he was defending Orban’s hate:
Yet in saying all this, my intent is not to be an apologist for Orban, to minimize the suffering of the Ukrainians, or, in particular, to defend his relationship with Putin.
It is simply to say that, to the best of my knowledge, being informed by well-connected, mature Christian sources within Hungary, Prime Minister Orban is not the man the left-leaning West is making him out to be. He has done much good and stood for many noble causes, and in turn, his nation has shown its support.
If those “well-connected, mature Christian sources within Hungary” are willing to be apologists for Orban’s hate and authoritarianism, how Christian are they really?