Hungary’s prime minister becomes Europe’s Donald Trump

“Call him Europe’s Donald Trump.

Hungary’s maverick Prime Minister Viktor Orban is emerging as the straight-talking voice of right-wing Europe, vowing to block a wave of desperate refugees from seeking sanctuary in the region. Continuing a string of blunt statements of a sort rarely heard from heads of state on this side of the Atlantic, he warned Friday that Europeans now stand to become »a minority in our own continent« if the floodgates are not immediately closed.

Trump dreams of building a wall to keep migrants out. But Orban, 52, has actually done it — erecting 109 miles of razor wire to stop them. Authorities in Hungary, a key transit nation for ­asylum-seekers aiming for generous European nations offering shelter, including Germany and Sweden, have been preventing them from moving on and shuttling them to camps, in part to dissuade more from coming. Under international pressure Friday, Hungary agreed to bus some of the blockaded asylum-seekers to Austria. But it remained unclear whether the Austrians would accept them and what would happen to the thousands of refugees stuck in Hungarian camps.

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Calling the mostly Muslim refugees a threat to Europe’s »Christian roots,« Orban has given voice to the fears of other European conservatives too shy to say such things aloud themselves.

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In Hungary, Orban’s bigger political threat is not from his center-left opposition but from the Jobbik party, which won 20 percent of the vote in national elections last year and has staked out a position even more extreme than Orban’s. In the radically anti-gay and anti-Semitic party, one top Jobbik member of parliament openly called in 2012 for a registry of Jews living in Hungary because they posed a »national security risk.«”