Hungary set for fresh blitz against 'public enemy' Soros

Ruling party official announces campaign to probe Jewish-American billionaire’s support for immigration reform

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Hungary is set to launch another state “national consultation” about Jewish-American financier and philanthropist George Soros, the government said Tuesday, six months before expected general elections.

The campaign would be to investigate public views on the “Soros plan,” and would likely be launched next month, government spokesman Bence Tuzson told public radio, without giving further details.

Last week, a top official in the ruling Fidesz party, Lajos Kosa, said that this “Soros plan” includes Europe accepting a million migrants per year and the demolition of Hungary’s anti-migrant border fences.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has regularly attacked the Hungarian-born Soros in the last year, calling him a “public enemy” for his alleged backing of uncontrolled mass immigration.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrives at a press conference after attending a European Parliament plenum session on the situation in Hungary, on April 26, 2017 in Brussels. (AFP Photo/Emmanuel Dunand)

A national consultation earlier this year also focused on Soros, seen by Budapest as a liberal bogeyman who funds a raft of civil society groups in central and eastern Europe.

An image of the 87-year-old laughing adorned billboard posters alongside a message urging Hungarians “not to let Soros have the last laugh.”

An anti-Soros billboard with a swastika and Soros’s name replaced by Viktor Orban’s, seen in Budapest on July 17, 2017. (Raphael Ahren/Times of Israel)

The posters, some of which were daubed with anti-Semitic graffiti, were widely condemned including by Soros himself and Hungary’s main Jewish organization, which called them “poisonous.”

The drive is the latest of a series of taxpayer-funded “national consultations” by Orban’s government made up of questionnaires sent to households and accompanying mass media “public information” campaigns.

The first one, in 2015, included a questionnaire asking households about “immigration and terrorism.”

That survey was sharply criticized, notably by the UN refugee agency UNHCR which expressed “shock” at its questions and said it could boost xenophobia in the EU country.

Another campaign titled “Let’s Stop Brussels” asked citizens for advice on how to deal with European Union policies that the government said threatened Hungarians’ independence.

Hungarian media reported Tuesday that Orban told a recent closed party meeting immigration would be the main theme of the run-up to the next election, likely to be held in April.