Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Hungary Is Winning Its War on Muslim Immigrants

International pressure won't soften Hungarian hearts. The only thing that can is evidence that aging countries need foreigners.

April 13, 2018 at 1:47 PM UTC

By Leonid Bershidsky

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

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Photographer: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images

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To win parliamentary elections last weekend, Hungary's ruling party, Fidesz, ran a single-issue campaign against immigrants. That may seem strange in a country with one of the lowest shares of foreign-born population in the developed world and a fertility rate below even the abysmal European average. But it wasn't a response to demographic facts; it was a cultural crusade that has made Hungary the least refugee-friendly country in Europe.

Hungary isn't really an anti-immigrant country. In 2016, the latest year for which official data are available, 23,803 foreigners moved there, and the numbers have been stable since before Prime Minister Viktor Orban came to power in 2010. Fewer than half of the migrants were European Union citizens.