Time for Europe’s centre-right group to kick out Viktor Orban

ON JUNE 16TH 1989 Hungarians gathered to rebury Imre Nagy. The liberalising prime minister’s overthrow had prompted the uprising against Soviet rule 33 years before. In Heroes’ Square in Budapest they placed flowers and wreaths around his coffin as Viktor Orban, a 26-year-old leader of the Young Democrats (known as Fidesz), proclaimed that the Soviet Union had forced Hungary into a “dead-end Asian street” and that communism and democracy were incompatible. Fidesz would later become a political party and help lead Hungary’s post-communist modernisation. So impressed was the European People’s Party (EPP), the grouping of European centre-right parties, that it wooed Mr Orban away from the liberal bloc—sending representatives to Budapest to persuade him to switch, which he did in 2000.

That feels like a long time ago. In his second spell as prime minister, since 2010, Mr Orban has battered Hungary’s young democracy: changing the constitution to cow judges, taking over the press, clamping down on civil society, manipulating elections and propagating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros, a Hungarian-born billionaire whom he accuses of plotting to flood the country with migrants. He has routinely trampled over red lines laid down by the EPP, yet still the group has coddled him, cheering his election victories and dismissing calls to expel Fidesz. The EPP warned Mr Orban not to pass a law curbing NGOs’ independence and not to force the Budapest-based Central European University (CEU), founded by Mr Soros, out of the country. He did both last year. No sanction followed.