Having long since undermined any claims he might have had to rudimentary decency, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has now begun to undermine his own dangerously authoritarian regime.
The most overtly anti-Semitic leader of a European nation since Adolf Hitler, Orbán is now the target of daily demonstrations from an increasingly unified group of Hungary's previously squabbling and fissiparous opposition. His take-over of the nation's independent media, his closing of Budapest's Central European University, his supplanting the nation's independent judiciary, his anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish demagogy had already infuriated Hungarians of various political stripes—all but the rural, more elderly ultra-nationalists who constitute his party's base of support.
In recent days, however, he may well have upset them, too, by pushing through a new law enabling employers to require their workers to put in up to 400 hours of overtime a year. The problem, apparently, is that Hungary is a small, relatively low-wage country—with 9.7 million residents, it accounts for just 2 percent of Europe's population—to which manufacturers from Germany and elsewhere flock for cheap labor. And the nation is no longer able to do the work that has come, or would come, its way due to its small labor force.
And who's responsible for that small labor force? By vetoing Angela Merkel's proposal to distribute the immigrants to the EU among its member nations, by building a wall on Hungary's borders to keep out virtually all immigrants, by compelling a number of the best educated and most productive Hungarians to move to other lands, Orbán has effectively ensured that the nation's labor force will be too small to create a more vibrant economy. That's why he came up with the forced overtime.
Confronted with the most fascistic regime in Europe since you-know-when, the Trump administration has stayed resolutely mute. Besides our president's own tin-pot proclivities, it's also the case the foremost target of Orbán's anti-Semitic broadsides is George Soros, the Hungarian-born American financier who supports a range of liberal causes here and abroad—for which he's repeatedly been the subject of Trump's attacks as well. One of those causes Soros supported was the now-shuttered Central European University, which he founded.
The U.S. ambassador to Hungary—make that Trump's man in Hungary—is David Cornstein, an octogenarian New Yorker and lifelong Republican. Representing the United States in the midst of the most anti-Semitic, anti-democratic Western regime we've seen since the 1940s, Trumpier-Than-Thou Cornstein—who is Jewish—has yet to find anything worthy of his condemnation or even concern. He's called Orbán a “friend,” found nothing upsetting in Orban's ordering the Central European University to close its doors, and said he's seen no evidence of the nation's movement towards authoritarianism. He's made no comment on Orban's appointment of the owner of a notoriously anti-Semitic magazine, who has condemned as too harsh the sentences handed out at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, to head the nation's new Holocaust museum.
Debate continues as to whether Cornstein is the World's Dumbest, or just the World's Blindest, Jew.
