Why is Hungary turning to nationalism?

VIKTOR ORBAN looks set to win another four years as prime minister of Hungary when his country goes to the polls on Sunday (see article). A recent speech outside Parliament epitomised his approach. On March 15th—a national holiday commemorating the failed 1848 uprising against the Habsburgs who ruled Hungary for centuries—Mr Orban (pictured) issued a rousing battle-cry to defend the Magyar homeland from waves of migrants; militant Islam; plans in Brussels for enforced migrant quotas; and a United States of Europe. In today’s Europe, thundered Mr Orban, “it is forbidden to speak the truth”: that immigration brings crime and terrorism and “endangers our way of life, our culture, our customs and our Christian traditions”. During the campaign there has been little mention of health care, education and the economy. Why have Mr Orban and his ruling Fidesz party been so successful at rallying Hungarians to the nationalist message?

Ever since the conquest of the Carpathian basin by the Magyar tribes around 1,100 years ago, Hungary’s history has been that of a small, embattled nation, fighting continually for its survival. It has been conquered and occupied by Tatars, Ottoman Turks, Nazis and Russians. The failed uprisings of 1703 and 1848 against the Habsburgs and the 1956 revolution against the Soviets are burned into the national psyche. (The Nazi invasion of 1944, when the Hungarian state mobilised to send hundreds of thousands of Jews and thousands of Roma to their deaths receives less attention.) That embattled theme resonates in the debate about refugees today. Hungarians also like to describe themselves as a Magyar island in a Slav sea. Other countries in the region share a similar history of occupation but speak Slavic tongues that are, to some extent, mutually comprehensible, giving them a sense of having cultural, linguistic allies in their suffering. The Magyars feel like a race apart: their language is unrelated to the Indo-European tongues that surround them, and works as a powerful national glue.