Orbán: ‘Soros network’ has ‘signed up’ for Hungary election campaign

The network of US financier George Soros has “signed up” for Hungary’s election campaign, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in a radio interview on Friday.

“The Soros network works like a party: it wants to remove and weaken governments that push back against the resettlement of Muslims,” Orbán told Kossuth Radio.

The prime minister said he expects the “Soros network” to pursue propaganda, strengthen civil groups, “pay hundreds or thousands of people” and set up so-called civil centres throughout the country that would function exactly like political parties do during a campaign.

Orbán said Soros had already succeeded in pushing his agenda through the European Parliament.

Now that body is putting pressure on the European Council in an effort to persuade the bloc’s prime ministers to approve its decision so that the settlement of migrants can get under way, he insisted.

Orbán said the Hungarian government had to start dealing with Soros once “his enormous machine … suddenly inserted itself into the migration issue, and the financial speculator put forward his plan for whose implementation he mobilised his network”. “Since then, this has become somewhat of a life-and-death matter for Hungary,” the prime minister added.

“With Soros, you always have to watch his hands instead of his mouth because a speculator is the kind of person who has a talent for talking one’s head off,” he said.

The “Soros network” wants to dismantle the fence on Hungary’s southern border because it does not want nations to be separated by borders, Orbán insisted. It wants Hungarians to be happy to receive people from cultures that are different from theirs and give them money, he said. “But we want a different kind of future.” Therefore the state has had to employ every means at its disposal, including a fresh report by the domestic intelligence services concerning the make-up, operations and influence of the “Soros machine”, he added.

Asked how much of the report would released to the public, Orbán said the government had to be cautious because no country wants to expose its intelligence capabilities regarding “hard-to-obtain information”.

Citing a sentence from the report, Orbán said the Open Society Foundation’s report from last August indicated that it had supported “influential players” around the migration issue, including think-tanks, political analysis centres and civil group networks in an effort to shape migration policy and influence the processes that determine the regulation of migration.