As I'm sure many of you heard, today's popular referendum of Mr. Orbán upon which he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars failed, less than 50% turned up. Those who did voted against the question which was a tricky lie (that was why the entire left democratic segment decided either to stay home or to throw in invalid ballots.
The misleading question stated "Do you want the European Union to settle foreigners in Hungary against the Hungarian Parliament's resolution?"
Now the thing is that that is not what the EU wants (or rather orders us to do): it is merely to examine whether 1,294 refugee claimants are worth the refugee status. Hungary is known lately to refuse refugee applications at a rate of 92% so many of these people would not be granted asylum (let's say, if they are from Mali or Kosovo and not Syria or Afghanistan, or cannot prove anything because they threw away their papers for fear). The third point is that almost 100% of recent refugee status people headed straight to another richer EU country. So at three levels, the question is a presupposition which is a lie.
A further problem is that we are EU members formally (not for long, I'm afraid), so even if eighty percent of voters had voted no, the question would have no legal consequences either here or in the Council of Europe, since one member state is not allowed to bring legislation which is in direct contradiction of EU Directives, and in this case, even its founding principles or a bunch of international accords like the Geneva convention and so on. But on top of that, the referendum turned out to be invalid, since the law says they need 50% of the people with voting rights to validate it. Basically, 3.2 million people seemed to agree with the government out of a 10 million country with several hundred thousands - parhaps another million - voting from abroad. (Mind you, there is another cheat trick: Transylvanian Hungarians could vote by mail - and even if they died it went unchecked - while the quarter of a million people working in the UK alone would all have had to travel to the Hungarian Embassy building by appointment DURING A SINGLE DAY. From all over the UK. ... Sure, so foreign citizens who never paid taxes in this country but got citizenship from this nationalistic government could vote by mail, whereas those who belong here but left Hungary and are abroad could practically not.
This in my mind amounts to a direct election cheat operation.
Despite the cheats and the millions in campaign posters and letters, the referendum failed - though the overwhelming majority of those who did go said "no" as the government wanted. But almost all opposition parties campaigned with slogans like "stay home, stay in Europe!"
Despite that, Orbán declared it a victory, and he is committed to change the constitution (which he cannot do now in the lack of a two-thirds majority in Parliament), bring and enforce legal rules against Brussels and even dreams of reforming the EU charter.
He is quickly turning from a Richard the Third type of dictator into another Shakespearean role: that of King Lear. He will face rebuffs at every level - the legislators are openly against doing anything, Brussels will sweeep it off the table, his party bloc in the EU will laugh at him - and they will all ask: how the Prime Minister dares to act on the basis of an invalid referendum with a deliberately mistranslated question and an absolute minority vote of all voting age citizens, and how dare he try to attempt to change the EU charter when clearly, he does not even have the support of the majority of his own people. (The irony is that an overwhelming amount of small towns and villages nominally led by Fide$$-appointed mayors lost or could not churn up enough support.
I think by now many people in international politics will realize and state openly that he is not only an unpleasant dictator catering to obscure Russian demands, but moreover, he is simply psychotic, mentally unstable, and he has deep delusions about how the EU and the whole world is working, from the simplest rules up - I hope some EU politician will question if he is really qualified to lead a country when obviously he has lost touch with reality. King Lear, singing his praises about his own good governance... Fantastic. But we aren't North Korea. German papers are already dissecting his victory speech when he clearly lost a lying, hatred-filled and anti-EU campaign.
For if he dared to ask "Do you want Hungary to step out of the EU?" he would have gotten a participation over eighty percent and I'm sure a clear margin over 50% would hav sent him a resounding message: NO! So he was testing us.
All the time, squabbles about 1,294 refugee applications were conducted with Orwellian distortion of language - such as terming political refugee applicants as "migrants" while "processing refugee applications" got somehow translated as the eq"forced resettlement of Muslims," and tens of thousands of settlement bonds were issued to people who lend money to the government for a few years - Chinese, Russians, Arabs, Ukrainians etc. Mind you, the budget does not get a cent from that, Orbán's friends offshore companies do. All the time, Hungarian citizenship was extended to probably over one hundred thousand people (or twice as much) who had absolutely no Hungarian roots, spoke no Hungarian but they paid for the forged documents here and in Ukraine and in Russia... But we refuse to examine the political refugee applications of some 1,294 people assigned as our quota by the Council of Europe.
Does this guy think he is like the U.S. Grant of the South attacking our form of Federalism? (He has not even had any live military experience as far as I know).
A combination of Don Quixote and King Lear indeed, fighting the heroic battle against wind turbines...