Hungary's Orban calls for global anti-migrant alliance with eye on 2018 elections
Marton Dunai
February 18, 2018 / 12:31 PM / Updated 8 hours ago

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian leader Viktor Orban called on Sunday for a global alliance against migration as his right-wing populist Fidesz party began campaigning for an April 8 election in which it is expected to win a third consecutive landslide victory.

Popular at home but increasingly at odds politically and economically with mainstream European Union peers, Orban has thrived on external controversy, including repeated clashes with Brussels and lately the United Nations.

Those conflicts, mostly centered on migration since people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa flooded into Europe in 2015, have intensified as the elections approach and Orban poses as a savior of Europe’s Christian nations.

“Christianity is Europe’s last hope,” Orban told an audience of party faithful at the foot of the Royal Castle in Budapest. With mass immigration, especially from Africa, “our worst nightmares can come true. The West falls as it fails to see Europe being overrun.”

Orban is widely credited for reversing an economic slump in Hungary and controlling its public finances, culminating in a return to investment-grade for its debt, which was cut to ‘junk’ during the 2008 global economic crisis.

To achieve that and hold onto power the prime minister, 54, has used methods that critics have called authoritarian, and picked fights with EU partners, especially in the West. Eastern leaders, most notably in Poland, have followed his lead.

But migration dominates his agenda now.

Orban said on Sunday that Europe faces a critical fissure between nation states of the East and the West, which he called an “immigrant zone, a mixed population world that heads in a direction different from ours”.

As the West wants eastern Europe to follow its lead, an increasingly vicious struggle was likely, he said, alluding to a plan to redraw the European alliance advocated by the leaders of France and Germany.

“Absurd as it may sound the danger we face comes from the West, from politicians in Brussels, Berlin and Paris,” Orban said to loud applause. “Of course we will fight, and use ever stronger legal tools. The first is our ‘Stop Soros’ law.”

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hunga...s-idUSKCN1G20PV