Die große Nachahmung – Orbán folgt Trump ins Reich der Schattengegner

A phantom as a state enemy: Viktor Orbán is copying Trump’s plan to designate Antifa a terrorist organization. In Hungary, where antifascist groups are hardly present, a sideshow thus becomes a political spectacle - and a scapegoat that distracts from the real dangers. Surprise? Hardly. Viktor Orbán has announced that he will follow Donald Trump’s example and designate Antifa a terrorist organization in Hungary. On Friday morning, the Hungarian Prime Minister declared in an interview with state radio that the time had come “for organizations like Antifa to be classified as terrorist organizations according to the American model.” A sentence that sounds like an echo from Washington - and that reveals more about the political strategies of two close allies than about the actual reality in Budapest.

For what Orbán is enacting here is less a security measure than a political performance. Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” is not a clearly defined entity but a catch-all term for loosely connected groups and activists who oppose fascism, neo-Nazis and far-right structures. It is more of an attitude, an ideology, than an organized movement with structures such as those common to terrorist organizations. In Hungary, where Orbán and his Fidesz party have held almost unchallenged power for a decade and a half, antifascist groups hardly play any role in political life. But it is precisely this fact that makes the decision so transparent. Orbán points to a single incident in 2023: At that time, antifascist activists attacked several suspected participants in a far-right event in Budapest. Among the accused was the Italian activist Ilaria Salis, who spent over a year in Hungarian pretrial detention. Her case caused diplomatic tensions between Rome and Budapest, mainly because of the detention conditions. In May 2024, Salis was released to house arrest - shortly thereafter she won a seat in the European Parliament. With the immunity of an EU legislator, she was able to evade Hungarian prosecution. Orbán has since railed against the “Antifa parliamentarian,” who in his view left people half dead and now from Strasbourg lectures Hungary on the rule of law.

Thus a singular incident becomes a state construct. Trump has announced in the United States that he will designate Antifa a “major terrorist organization” - and Orbán promptly delivers the Hungarian copy. That both know how thin the factual basis is does not matter. What matters is the effect: an enemy image that can be exploited in the media, a slogan that produces fear and at the same time distracts from their own abuse of power. While far-right groups and violence have long been identified in statistics as the main threat, attention is now focused on a phantom that lends itself more easily as a projection surface than their own entanglements. In the end, Orbán’s step appears less like a legal decision than like a performance for the international stage: the authoritarian pupil following his American role model down to the last detail. The fact that antifascist activists are hardly present in Hungary does not make the decision weaker but exposes it - as a symbolic show of power that in its absurdity borders on caricature.