In a quick speech during his impromptu trip to Hungary, President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) displayed all the credentials that place him as a member of the league of populist leaders on the spectrum of the global nationalist right.
During a statement to the press, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the country’s strongman since 2010, called “my brother given the affinities”, and celebrated “values that we represent, which can be summarized in four words: God, Fatherland, Family and Freedom “.
It’s not the first time he’s used the motto, which has its origins in Italian fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, without the addition of “freedom”. It was adopted by Brazilian fascists of the Integralist Action and by the longest-running European dictatorship of the 20th century, the one commanded from 1933 to 1974 by António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal.
Bolsonaro has not very diplomatically called the country of nearly 10 million people Brazil’s “little big brother”.
The Brazilian once again insisted on a lie suggested by him and successfully replicated on Bolsonarista networks, with a fake video, that he would have influenced Vladimir Putin, the Russian president he had visited the day before in Moscow, to decide to take out parts of the troops surrounding Ukraine. .
Initially, he said: “We discussed the possibility or not of a war between Russia and Ukraine. Coincidentally, when we were in [rumo a Moscou]there was the announcement”.
Until then, correct. But he added: “Coincidence or not, the war is in nobody’s interest.” There is no causal relationship between the Russian decision, which has been denounced as a farce by the West in the dispute over Ukraine, and the Brazilian’s arrival hours later in Moscow.
In the end, they embraced, Orbán wearing an orange tie, as part of his party.
The Hungarian prime minister will face tough elections in April, and his team has been trying to attract like-minded leaders to try to magnetize his grassroots electorate — not unlike Bolsonaro’s actions when he adopts radical speeches.
The class’s dream of consumption is Donald Trump at a conservative event in March, but the former American president has not yet accepted. Orbán is a leader noted for a metamorphosis in power, leaving his more liberal and anti-Russian origins progressively towards what he himself called “illiberal democracy”.
He is chastised in European forums for his policies against immigrants and the LGBTQ+ population. But Hungary still has the vitality to present a challenge to its power with opposition unity, and even the feared use Orbán might have made of the superpowers he granted himself at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic has not materialised.
He is a constant character in the most ideological group of Bolsonarism, like the presidential son Eduardo, federal deputy for the São Paulo PL. He had already visited him in 2019, and maintains dialogue through the radical network organized by former White House aide Steve Bannon.
On a practical level, Bolsonaro’s trip to Hungary only saw the signing of three memoranda, including in the area of defense cooperation. Budapest has become a customer of Embraer, which is selling it to two KC-390 military freighters for US$ 300 million. In Russia, it had only been one, although this is not a yardstick for measuring the success of international travel.
The parade was improvised just over a month ago, being restricted to a meeting between Bolsonaro with President János Áder, a figurehead, Orbán, and then a visit to the country’s National Assembly.
According to Bolsonaro, the president asked him about environmental policy, and the Brazilian once again said that the data abroad is distorted and that, despite all the indications of objective monitors pointing to the advance of deforestation, the country protects the Amazon.
Business between Brazil and Hungary is small, with US$ 457 million imported by Brazil and US$ 62 million sold.
Earlier, Bolsonaro had made a reference to his visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, a Russian protocol for visits by the head of state, but which generated noise on social media because, after all, the military in question was from the Soviet Union — and the president insists. to call himself anti-communist.
“Soldier is simply soldier,” he wrote.
Hungarian premier had liberal and anti-Russian origins
Despite his stature as an illiberal icon, alongside Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister’s convictions are more flexible.
He burst onto the Hungarian scene as a student leader in the throes of the Cold War in 1989. Like every young man, a harsh critic of the Soviet Union’s dominance over Hungary and other satellites.
His country suffered the first major Moscow-mandated armed intervention against its post-war European vassals in 1956 to quell a student revolt that spiraled out of control against the Communist regime. There is a disturbing museum in Budapest about this trauma, the House of Terror, which also takes aim at the fascists who came before the communists in World War II.
Orbán founded a liberal party, Fidesz (Hungarian acronym for Union of Young Democrats) – Hungarian Civic Union. He came to power in 1998 and stayed until 2002, defeated by socialists.
Since the 1990s, it has tipped towards the extreme right, with the usual package of the European model: nationalist discourse, against immigrants, against internationalism.
Interestingly, Orbán had a stint at Oxford University supported by billionaire George Soros, today the beast of the so-called anti-globalist circles — Trumpists and Bolsonarians who followed the late writer Olavo de Carvalho, such as the former Brazilian chancellor Ernesto Araújo and the President’s children.
But the prime minister has always been critical of Russia, even for a certain Hungarian Cold War atavism. That changed after the 2008 global crisis, and in 2014 Orbán cast Putin as the star of the model he called illiberal democracy.
Here and there, there were squabbles, but in the end the two leaders are perceived by the European Union elite in Brussels as political beings of the same extraction. Orbán’s attacks on the independence of the Judiciary, with the occupation of positions, and on LGBTQIA+ rights have already earned him several censures.
In addition, since the middle of the last decade, he and Putin have been negotiating a 12 billion euro nuclear energy mega-project funded by Russian state-owned Rosatom, seen by critics as a way to buy support for the Kremlin.
At the same time, he is a member of NATO in sensitive Eastern Europe, shaken by the crisis in which Putin’s troops surround neighboring Ukraine. He has already told Putin, whom he has visited recently, that he is worried about the risk of a new European refugee crisis should there be the conflict the Russian denies wanting.
The crisis was on the menu of Bolsonaro’s visit, who had been pressured by the US not to appear at Putin’s side at this tense moment, so as not to assume support. The president said he is “in solidarity with Russia” and that the Russian seems to “want peace”.
