Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) denounced conservatives who advocated for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán before his party lost parliamentary elections on Sunday.
In a Fox News opinion piece published on Monday, McConnell wrote that U.S. politicians “have traditionally abided by the idea that politics stopped at the water’s edge” and “sought to avoid even the appearance of telling other sovereign democracies how to run their internal affairs and resisted the urge to treat foreign policy as an extension of our domestic politics.”
However, he noted that “for the better part of a decade,” Hungarian politics “has persisted as an object of intense fascination” for conservatives stateside.
“This phenomenon is endlessly puzzling,” the former Senate GOP leader continued. “America’s self-proclaimed national conservatives spoke of Orban’s Hungary as an oasis of traditionalism amid the wasteland of an ailing, liberal and decadent postmodern Europe. And some American politicians appear to have bought into the myth.
“To be clear, it is a myth. Orban’s champions on this side of the Atlantic may well consider his illiberal court-packing, crony capitalism or restriction of free speech an acceptable price for their desired social utopia. Yet for all the talk of reviving faith and family through statist intervention, Hungary’s religious participation and birth rates under his rule have declined right alongside the rest of the West.”
