It’s election season in Europe, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has decided that George Soros can again win him votes. “The Soros network is embedded in the European institutions. They are so embedded that the European institutions give them money to operate,” Orban said in late March on his near-weekly interview with public broadcaster Kossuth Radio. “They’re in the Commission, in the Parliament, and quite a few prime ministers are clearly Soros holdouts.”
It’s election season in Europe, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has decided that George Soros can again win him votes. “The Soros network is embedded in the European institutions. They are so embedded that the European institutions give them money to operate,” Orban said in late March on his near-weekly interview with public broadcaster Kossuth Radio. “They’re in the Commission, in the Parliament, and quite a few prime ministers are clearly Soros holdouts.”
Between June 6 and 9, citizens in all 27 European Union member states will choose a new Parliament, and Orban kicked off his campaign in Hungary with a fresh dose of attack politics. Brussels, he said in his March interview, was “increasingly becoming a prisoner of the international network of activists that George Soros has built up over the last 30 years with great effort.”
This isn’t the first time Orban has used Soros, the Hungarian Jewish financier and philanthropist, as a punching bag in an election campaign. He has done so before to win elections in Hungary. What is new this time, however, is that Orban’s spokesperson immediately translated his boss’s stinging attack onSoros from Hungarian into English and posted the translation on X (formerly Twitter). Clearly, the attack is being taken to a new, European level.
How attack politics works, and why the Hungarian prime minister has used it often during the last 10 years, is described in a 2019 BuzzFeed News article, “The Unbelievable Story of the Plot Against George Soros.” (An earlier version appeared in the Swiss magazine Das Magazin.) It tells the story of two American spin doctors who designed Orban’s first hate campaign against Soros back in 2013, managing to turn Soros—who got rich in the United States and poured billions of dollars of his fortune into organizations supporting democratic governance and freedom of speech all over the world—into Hungary’s most hated man within weeks. In fact, their anti-Soros smear campaign was such a success that Orban, who himself worked at the Soros-funded Central European Research Group and studied briefly on a Soros scholarship at the University of Oxford, won the election.
These two spin doctors, Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum—Jewish themselves—worked with a simple idea: If you want to win elections, make sure you go on the attack. The underlying assumption is that many voters know whom they will vote for. Consequently, it is difficult to motivate them to vote for another candidate. Demoralizing them, however, is easier. You discredit your political opponent with a volley of accusations, mostly false, so your opponent’s supporters will start having doubts. As a result, some will not vote. Others will defect to you. Finkelstein and Birnbaum called this “rejectionist voting.”
The duo used this technique first in Israel in 1995, just after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. New elections were scheduled, with the social democrat Shimon Peres as the designated winner. Very few observers gave the young conservative Likud candidate Benjamin Netanyahu, who was polling 20 percentage points behind, any chance. Netanyahu contracted Finkelstein and Birnbaum to help him get out of the underdog position. They told him the only way he would have a chance of winning would be if his campaign focused on spreading the rumor that Peres intended to give half of Jerusalem to the Palestinians. Peres did not want to do that;it was a complete fabrication. But the more the line spread, the more journalists asked him about it. Instead of pushing and discussing his own political agenda, Peres was forced to defend himself against Netanyahu’s lie. Netanyahu completely trapped Peres and, to the surprise of many, won the 1996 election, with more than 50 percent of the vote. This is how Netanyahu’s spectacular rise in politics began.
In the early 2000s, Finkelstein and Birnbaum helped Bulgarian and Romanian politicians gain power with similar campaigns. Then Netanyahu introduced them to another ambitious politician in Europe: Viktor Orban. He had been prime minister between 1998 and 2002 before losing power. Orban felt so humiliated that he swore he would never lose again. In 2010, the spin doctors advised him to conduct a tough, polarizing campaign against bureaucrats and foreign investors. It worked: Orban’s alliance won a comfortable two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, and the social democrats suffered a stinging defeat that they still have not recovered from today.
During the next election, in 2014, the opposition hardly managed to get a word in. Still, Orban took no chances and again consulted the advisors who had helped him win earlier. They told him he needed a scapegoat with a familiar face. They suggested he use Soros and depict him as a Jewish financier with a secret political agenda: to weaken Hungary and then dominate it. According to some reports, this campaign fueled antisemitism in the country; however, since Hungary keeps no official data on antisemitism, the EU’s rights watchdog, the Vienna-based Agency for Fundamental Rights, found it hard to substantiate this claim.
During this campaign, Orban blamed all his problems on Soros and his “tentacles”—from the financial and economic crises that had hit the country to the arrival of refugees from war-torn Syria and other countries. In 2014 and again in 2018, Orban won elections, consolidating his grip on power in Hungary. In the run-up to the 2018 vote, posters appeared all over Hungary depicting Soros with the text: “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh.” That year, the Hungarian government also forced Central European University (CEU), founded and partially funded by Soros, out of the country.CEU eventually found refuge in Vienna, from where it still operates.
As Birnbaum once said, “It’s good to have an enemy,” calling Soros a “good target.” Soros was defenseless. If he fought back, he would only crank up the rumor machine. If he entered the Hungarian political fray, Orban could accuse him of being power-hungry. So he did not say anything, and the rumor spread anyway.
Birnbaum’s father survived Auschwitz. (Finkelstein, who was much older, died in 2017.) That their campaigns featured racist tropes and fueled antisemitism does not seem to bother Birnbaum in the least. Once he asked an interviewer: “Can I not attack someone because he is a Jew?”
While Orban successfully won two Hungarian elections deploying the “Soros monster,” the first time he used this strategy to win a European election was in 2019. Posters went up picturing then-Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Soros, with the words: “You have the right to know what Brussels is cooking up!” Orban’s campaign then focused on migration: Brussels’s “secret” plan to use migrant visas to flood Europe with immigrants and Europe’s so-called attempts to prevent Hungary from guarding its external borders.
Soros largely kept quiet, but Juncker—who had once called the Hungarian prime minister a “dictator”—immediately began to refute the charges. He strongly denied Brussels was working on secret migrant visas or was hindering border guards. In short, Orban’s strategy went according to plan. His alliance won 53 percent of the vote.
That the Hungarian prime minister is having his attacks on Soros translated into English this time is telling. A Hungarian diplomat once told me, “Viktor Orban thinks Europe will either be his Europe or Emmanuel Macron’s Europe.” In countries such as France, where far-right politician Jordan Bardella from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is clearly the front-runner, the election campaign is dominated by a similar binary choice: Europe will be shaped by the likes of Macron or the National Rally.
Now that several far-right parties in different countries do not want to leave the EU anymore because of what Swedish politician Carl Bildt has called the “BTP effect”—meaning, Brexit, Trump, Putin—they seem to want to instead enter European politics for the first time and attempt to change it from the inside. Consequently, they are trying to form coalitions to maximize their influence. Orban told a party congress last year that Europe needs to be changed, not ditched.
Herbert Kickl of the Freedom Party of Austria, Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom, and several other far-right politicians are starting to talk more and more about what they want with Europe: ditching climate legislation, changing the existing migration policy, and blocking aid for Ukraine. In the run-up to this year’s elections, the European center-right is already moving somewhat in this direction, just as it does in member states when it tries to prevent voters from fleeing to the far right. Several polls, while showing that the center will hold after the elections in June, have predicted substantial gains for the far right in several member states.
According to Paul Lendvai, a Hungarian journalist in Vienna who has written a critical biography of the Hungarian prime minister, Orban has Hungary “in his pocket, and Europe will be his next step.” He seems intent on using—or rather abusing—Soros to this end once more. Europe had better be prepared.
