Failed US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should look in the mirror before accusing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban of stifling democracy, one of Orban’s senior advisers has argued.
Clinton took to X on Wednesday to harangue former President Donald Trump for praising Orban during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris the previous night. Clinton described Orban as a “democracy-killing Hungarian dictator,” sharing a 2018 article claiming that his strict immigration policies, controversial judicial reforms, and expulsion of liberal financier George Soros’ Open Society Foundations NGO amount to “soft fascism.”
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Balazs Orban, the political director of Viktor Orban’s office and no relation to the prime minister, responded shortly afterwards.
“Dear Mrs. Clinton,” he wrote on X. “May I share with you what I think the death of democracy is: the desire to imprison your political opponents, the failure to organize elections transparently, and the attempt to replace dissatisfied voters with migrant voters. Which country do you think this applies to?”
“Every reasonable person thinks of this when reading your remarks: ‘first take the log out of your own eye’,” he concluded.
Viktor Orban has been open about his support for Trump, endorsing the former president’s election campaign and meeting with him in Florida earlier this year. The Hungarian leader has described Trump as the only American politician capable of ending the Ukraine conflict, claiming on several occasions that the conflict never would have started had Trump been in the White House in 2022.
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Balazs Orban’s criticisms of Clinton echo Trump’s own disputes with the Democratic Party. The former president has described the multiple criminal cases against him as Democrat-led attempts to “weaponize” the justice system and prevent him from being elected this November. He has also accused Democrats and sympathetic local officials of “rigging” the 2020 election for Biden, and of allowing millions of illegal immigrants to enter the country “because they want to sign these people up to vote.”
Clinton was far less critical of Orban during her time as secretary of state under President Barack Obama. During a visit to Budapest in 2011, Clinton said that the US was “strongly supportive of the prime minister’s commitment to rebuild and strengthen Hungary’s economy,” and applauded his efforts to “eliminate corruption that discourages foreign investors and entrepreneurs.”