Hungary

In 1989, the year Soviet communism collapsed, John O’Sullivan, Margaret Thatcher’s former speechwriter, gave the world O’Sullivan’s First Law of Politics. ‘All organisations that are not actually right wing,’ he pronounced, ‘will over time become left wing.’ No one who watched Amnesty International’s descent from austere principle to cultural relativism can deny he spoke with a little truth. Yet if you listened carefully, you also caught notes of self-satisfaction and self-regard. Subversives corrupt impartial organisations, O’Sullivan continued. They rig the system and impose their prejudices against ‘private profit, business, making money, the current organisation of society and, by extension, the Western world’. Who fought them? Who reinvigorated the West and

The good people of Hungary went to the polls on Sunday and voted by more than 98 per cent against accepting even a few hundred migrants, as per the European Union’s insistence. That poll result must have been gravid with nostalgia for Magyars over the age of about 35. They will remember that sort of election result being de rigueur, rather than astonishing. Indeed, in 1985 the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party succeeded in capturing 98.8 per cent of the popular vote — and even this was a bit of a disappointment, because in 1980 it had pulled in 99.3 per cent. On both occasions the ruling party was aided, of

A country votes against the EU in a referendum in which rabidly anti-immigrant sentiments are aired by senior politicians. That is Hungary, of course, where voters have just rejected — with a majority of 98 per cent, albeit it on a turnout of 44 per cent, too low to make it binding  — an EU plan for the country to house 1200 refugees. Now, perhaps, the Remain camp in Britain will stop trying to portray Britain as a nasty, xenophobic country out of step with European values and admit that actually we are really rather liberal in our attitudes towards migration. The only difference is that we had an in-out

When an EU country elects a government with nationalist or Eurosceptic policies, the European Parliament calls an urgent investigation into ‘the situation’ in that country. When Victor Orban became Prime Minister of Hungary in 2010 for example, the European Parliament called a debate entitled ‘the situation in Hungary’. Orban’s Fidesz party is known for its conservatism and its regard for national sovereignty. When Orban was democratically elected with a two thirds majority in the Hungarian Parliament, he was elected with a mandate to reform the state institutions, which had become corrupt under communist rule and had been stagnating ever since. When he set about enacting the above, the European Parliament

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/merkelstragicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Holly Baxter debate Merkel’s offer to Syrian refugees” startat=38] Listen [/audioplayer]Of all the irresponsible decisions taken in recent years by European politicians, few will cause as much human misery as Angela Merkel’s plan to welcome Syrian refugees to Germany. Hailed as enlightened moral leadership, it is in fact the result of panic and muddled thinking. Her pronouncements will lure thousands more into the hands of unscrupulous people-traffickers. Her insistence that the rest of the continent should share the burden will add political instability to the mix. Merkel has made a dire situation worse. On Tuesday last week, Germany declared that any Syrian who reaches the