Hungarian-Romanian commonality of interests

We are the only bastion of normality, but truth is not a matter of referendums.

Orbán Viktor a román miniszterelnökkel tárgyalt Fotó: Miniszterelnöki Sajtóiroda/Benko Vivien Cher

In the introduction to his address at the Tusvanyos Festival in Baile Tusnad, Romania, Viktor Orban presented the Romanian Foreign Ministry's demarche prepared for him in an attempt to dictate what he could speak about and how in this year's annual speech. The relevant footage has since been circulated on social media from Facebook to TikTok, garnering a flood of likes.

The Hungarian prime minister reacted with self-confident authority and subtle irony to the impertinence of the Romanians, who not only sought to restrict his right to speak on issues of what they consider their own business (national symbols, collective rights, the naming of territories acquired in the Treaty of Trianon) by invoking "Romanian sensitivities", but also, oddly enough, demanded that he "not present Western values in a bad light". PM Orban handled this in a most elegant manner. I quote:

Today 'Western values' mean three things: migration, LGBTQ, and war. My Dear Romanian Friends, these do not need to be presented in a bad light, as they already present themselves in a bad light.

It is typical of Romania's particular brand of opportunism, which could also be called pragmatism, that it does not side with Hungary on these issues. If there is a common interest between the two countries, it is certainly on these issues.

Romania also has an interest in peace as soon as possible, just look at the map. The Romanian leadership also feels the danger. Although their Ministry of Defense has denied that the updating of their reservists database is related to the Russian-Ukrainian war, the causal connection is quite obvious.

It cannot be mere coincidence that in June of this year, the reservist soldiers of Harghita and Covasna counties were called up for a mobilization exercise (God forbid, but this also is an indication of who would be flung into the front lines if the country were to go to war. We got a taste of this during the Yugoslav wars, when on more than one occasion ethnic Hungarians were firing at each other on the Serb-Croat front.)

The situation is similar regarding the matter of migration, but Romania, which has joined the Atlanticist mainstream, does not go against the global superpower on this issue either. For the time being, the threat level is low, although increasing numbers of migrants can be seen in the cities of the Banat and Crisana regions.

Finally, the bulldozer of the LGBTQ lobby threatens Romania as much as it does Hungary. Pride is just the tip of the iceberg, as everyone can see. But even these icebergs are growing and multiplying. In Bucharest, Pride actions have been organised since 2004, in Cluj Napoca since 2017, in Timisoara since 2019, and supposedly the event in Sibiu, which has no Wikipedia page, is now three years old. The support for these initiatives is growing, from hundreds to tens of thousands, with more than 25,000 people reportedly taking part in Bucharest's Pride parade this year.

Like Hungary, Romania, too, is unable to defend itself against the less spectacular, but more methodical, manipulative and effective activities of this lobby. The Pride parades of the deviants typically provoke from the majority representing normality different forms of aversion, from contempt to disgust to pity.

However, the tsunami of sensitization that is coming to Central and Eastern Europe through social media, Netflix, and the thousands of products of the entire Hollywood film industry, is having an impact. In particular, screenwriters and directors are appealing to people's noble sentiments, such as compassion, humanity and solidarity.

The majority of the generation now growing up is already repeating the panels they have invented on this issue (too). Adolescents have always been characterized by their desire to be different. Those who are unable to excel based on their actual achievements in sports, academic studies, or in the arts, seek to be different in their appearance or even in their sexual habits. Homosexuality, bisexuality and ideologies such as non-binary gender identity are slowly becoming fashionable. This phenomenon is borne out by countless Western statistics, and in a few decades' time, we will see similar statistics for our region.

So far, this issue has not caused any major rifts between or within the organisations representing the interests of Hungarians in Transylvania, but there are cracks here and there. In 2017, the fact that Peter Eckstein-Kovacs, former senator of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ/UDMR), also spoke at the first Pride in Cluj did not cause a stir and the news slipped by shows this. A year later, the referendum on family affairs created unprecedented political unity, with all three ethnic Hungarian parties in Transylvania at the time, the RMDSZ, the EMNP and the MPP, calling on voters to participate in the plebiscite and vote in defense of traditional values. (It is another matter that former RMDSZ head and Senator Bela Marko broke with the consensus, just as he did in the case of the great Szekler march, when he was the only political leader besides Hungary's Ferenc Gyurcsany to speak out against this large-scale pro-autonomy action.)

For the time being, the whole LGBTQ issue is of little importance in the broader Transylvanian context, for several reasons. For a community whose very existence is in danger, with a population decline of 200,000 every ten years, this threat is not a primary one, although its spill-over effects should be discussed.
Besides, for the electorate the issue itself is (for the moment) essentially irrelevant. Those who formulate their world view along national lines see the problem rather in the lack of perspective of current policy and in the fact that even at the level of a target program there is no vision within the RMDSZ, which won roughly 80-90% of the vote, that promises long-term survival and prosperity if it is implemented. And those who are primarily concerned about their own individual worries and who vote for a particular political force because of a paved road or the piping of gas into their village, see the whole LGBTQ issue as a distant problem that has no impact on their daily lives.

What is perhaps the most important: the whole of society, including the political elite, relegates this whole issue to the sphere of private life. Even in the Ceausescu era, famous intellectuals were known to be attracted to their own gender, and this did not in any way affect their esteem.

(The way to checkmate the paraders in two steps is to first ask them whether they consider sexuality to belong to private or public life. It is almost certain that the respondent will select the private sphere as the correct answer. But then, when asked what they are doing marching on the street, they will look stunned and gasp.)

If the leadership of the RMDSZ follows the guidance of its perhaps most prepared and strategically minded member and executive VP, Istvan Szekely, who says that the five percent threshold for representation in Romania's parliamentary should not be reached through national minority parties striving for autonomy, but instead by reaching out to Roma and homosexual voters, this issue could soon be on the political agenda. (See Istvan Szekely, 'Fidesz, RMDSZ - values, interests and political practice,' in Maszol, 3 February 2023).

Fortunately, this scenario does not have much of a chance of materializing, because RMDSZ president Kelemen Hunor is a pragmatic politician who approaches political issues with good sense and due caution, and he himself probably perceives that with this 'opening' he would, on balance, lose more than he would gain.

But to return to the basic question, every single dimension of the centuries-long war by the globalist powers against the self-identity of the European people affects all countries of the region nearly equally. The left has been waging a regular war against Christian Churches and Christian thought since the intellectual and spiritual eclipse known as the Enlightenment, national thinking has been in the crosshairs since the Second World War, and the increasingly intense woke attack on gender identity has been a totally insane phenomenon of the last decade.

The only difference is where the mercenaries of the globalist networks have managed to gain a government role. In Slovakia and in the Czech Republic the standing of those supporting normality is not good; in Romania there is no serious opposition, and oddly enough, it is only the ex-communist PSD that has some anti-globalist potential.

Hungary and Poland are bastions of normality, but if we take into account the issue of the Russia-Ukraine war, we have to state that Hungary stands  alone within the Union.

Classical Greek philosophy teaches us that truth is not a matter of referendums. And those who say that it is impossible for everyone in a political community to be wrong and that we alone are right, are lost in a world of illusions. It would be enough if they thought about the context of our times in a sober, rational and unemotional way, because those who do will identify with the Hungarian position, as Donald Trump did a few years ago, when he pointed out very eloquently that Europe has problems because it does not do what Viktor Orban does.

Cover photo: Hungary's PM Viktor Orban and Romania's PM Marcel Ciolacu meet in Bucharest on 19 July, ahead of the former's speech at the Tusvanyos Festival (Balvanyos Free Summer University and Student Camp) in Baile Tusnad, Romania (Photo: Hungarian PM's Press Office/Vivien Cher Benko)