By István Rév, Sept. 25, 2015
While journalists flocked to cover the chaos at
Budapest's Keleti Station and thousands of
refugees marched on foot along the M1 motorway
toward the Austrian border, Viktor Orban, the
prime minister of Hungary, was watching the
Hungary-Romania soccer match from his V.I.P. box
in the Budapest football stadium.
Before the kickoff, Hungarian and Romanian
"ultras" shouted Nazi slogans and fought one
another at the stadium, after having warmed up by
harassing, insulting and beating up hundreds of
hopelessly exhausted refugees, who, in their
panic, had mistaken the noise of fireworks for
gunshots.
Mr. Orban, who recently built a $20 million
dollar soccer stadium next door to his summer
cottage - with seats for 4,000 people in a
village with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants - had
cut short a meeting with foreign leaders in
Prague in order to get back to Budapest in time
for the match. His behavior recalled the habit of
Nicolae Ceausescu, the one-time Romanian
Communist dictator, who never allowed social
unrest to disturb his favorite pastime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/opinion/hungarys-politics-of-hate.html
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