Photo Source Epistola8 | CC BY 2.0
Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are very possibly advising President Trump to follow the Hungarian Model in confronting refugees at the southern border, in order to win wider support for his far-right authoritarian policies. Trump is now exactly following the playbook of far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who in 2015-16 deployed national police and army troops to the southern contiguous boundary of the EU, on the Serbian border. They interned Syrian and other Muslim refugees in cages, police beat refugees, troops built a barbed-wire fence, and fascist vigilantes threatened other migrants. A media photographer who tripped a Syrian father at the border was arrested, but last week had her conviction overturned. To respond to police violence and harassment as they tried to board trains at the Eastern Train Station in Budapest, and to find greater safety in numbers, the Muslim refugees held a dramatic march to a refuge across the Austrian border, in a scene that closely resembles the Central American refugee caravan.
Before 2015, the far-right in Hungary only had their old stand-by enemies, the Roma (Gypsies) and Jewish liberals, to blame for the country’s problems. But now they had Muslim immigrants to scare the voters, just like the far-right movements in Western Europe. Orbán’s standing in polls and elections increased, so much so that his Fidesz party eclipsed the even-farther-right Jobbik because it had stolen its…