It seems that our favorite “NGO,” Open Society Foundations, is back to its more than a decade-long mission of trying to topple Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. Now they’ve partnered up with the German think tank Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP) for a Soros-funded report to convince the German Federal Government that it is in their best interest to blackmail the Hungarian government into following Open Society’s liberal agenda.
Why? Because “rule of law,” because Viktor Orbán, because of “democratic backsliding.” You got to be kidding me.
But they are not. They are so serious that the report puts forward not one, not two, but six concrete steps that the German government should take to force PM Orbán’s government to fall in line.
I won’t bore you with too much detail, as I’ve already covered most of these a couple of times on this blog over the last decade, but these recommendations include denouncing Hungary as a “systemic rival,” financing “democracy promotion projects” in Hungary (this one’s particularly interesting), calling for an EU-wide coalition against Hungary, deploying more sophisticated “rule of law” tools, and supporting liberal NGOs and media in Hungary.
There isn’t anything remotely surprising here; the report simply took a page out of the classic Soros playbook. We’ve seen this two-step recipe before: Build up an international anti-Hungary coalition, and interfere with domestic affairs through liberal NGOs and media.
The worst part is that, according to the IEP report, it’s in Germany’s best interest to protect the single market and big German companies with investments in Hungary from the Hungarian government. This is just insane.
Please, experts behind this paper, answer one question: If Hungary is indeed such a dangerous place for German firms, and the Hungarian government poses such great risk, then how is it that such stable and profitable companies like Mercedes, Audi and BMW continue to invest billions of euros in their Hungarian subsidiaries year after year?
It’s obvious that the goal here is to undermine mutual respect between Hungary and Germany and dismantle our strong strategic cooperation, exclusively on ideological grounds. Beware the tactics of the Soros Network!