Hungary to become the exemplar of the American right-wing “Trumpism”?
Tucker Carlson, an American TV host and political commentator on Fox News, visited Hungary and its border with Serbia. One of the most influential voices of American right-wing politics came to Hungary for a week to report live for the news channel every day during his stay.
The popular right-wing TV presenter is visiting Hungary to be a special guest of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium’s festival on Saturday in Esztergom – on top of working on a documentary, supposedly about Viktor Orbán and his government’s politics.
He already interviewed the Hungarian Prime Minister, who says that President Biden personally insulted the Hungarian people.
His visit has quite the importance, and not only because our beautiful Budapest provides the backdrop to his reports and interviews for a whole week.
Tucker Carlson is a dominant figure in extreme right-wing politics in the United States, an exemplar for those against migration, vaccination, free trade, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and liberalism, among other things.
He is frequently accused of spreading fake news about the effectiveness of the vaccine, for instance. Conspiracy theories are not alien to him, either. He uses his ideas to grow his audience, writes 24.hu.
His ideas and opinions in numerous cases coincide with the policy of the Orbán cabinet. For this reason,
in Carlson’s eyes, Viktor Orbán is a hero and idol who fights for the protection of the West from Muslims, migration, and the technocracy of Brussels.
On Tuesday, he started his programme “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with these words: “If you care about Western civilisations, democracy, and families and the ferocious assault of all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions, you should know what is happening here right now.”
He also visited the Serbian border and complemented the work there, saying that the Hungarian government did not need huge amounts of money or high-tech technology to stop migration completely. As hvg.hu quotes his words, Hungary was the only country in Europe that decided not to follow the EU’s rules and stood up against illegal migration. He was surprised to see two Syrians being accompanied back to Serbia through a small gate, instead of getting them a lawyer or the help of a “civil organisation with ties to George Soros”. According to him, there was no chaos or rubbish anywhere on the Hungarian side, as opposed to the Serbian part of the border.
To complement his reports, it is important to mention that the Hungarian police spent over 1 billion euros on defending the borders of the country between 2015 and 2019. When it comes to “putting an end to illegal migration”, this year, the Hungarian Police and Army stopped three times more illegal migrants than the past year.
His visit to Hungary made ripples in international media as neither the majority of the American press, nor most international news sites are particularly happy about it and what he talks about in his programme. The Washington Post dedicated two articles to the issue, which was the main topic of world politics on Tuesday.
These respected papers and news sites are worried that Carlson presents Hungary and its policies as an example to follow.