Pannonia’s Poster-PM, Viktor Orban, has found yet another scapegoat to blame for Hungary’s economic and social problems.
No, it still can’t be the fault of his own inspired policies of appropriating people’s private pensions, imposing a flat income tax on the populace, inflating taxes on foreign companies and banks, dismantling the independence of the banks and the judiciary, punitive press control laws, government-side FUD campaigns against philosophers critical of Mr. O, crony political and commercial appointments, property appropriation, self-enrichment and corruption, self-perpetuating rigging of electoral boundaries, covert and overt support to irredentist and fascistic groups and sentiments and using his unearned but technical super-majority to ram through an undemocratic and self-serving new constitution designed to keep his party, appointees and sentiments in power for decades to come.
None of these are to blame.
Now that it’s not the Russians with their uniforms who are responsible for Hungary’s malaise, but the Europeans with their suits (joining a long line of prior oppressors — Turks, Austrians, Reds, Whites, other political parties, foreigners, gypsies, and, of course, the Jews) — Mr. Orban now ascribes magyar malheurs to Europe’s preoccupation with protecting geese and pigs from maltreatment. The lament will sell well with the ladies who spend their time with geese heads firmly wedged between their thighs, forcing food down their throats till their livers get sufficiently diseased to cater for the French appetite for paté de foie gras. Hungary is one of the last European paté suppliers — but the supply of putative perpetrators of Pannonia’s problems (always excepting, of course, themselves) is inexhaustible.