anti-Ukraine rhetoric/ The main differences of vision between Romanians and Hungarians regarding the current international situation (think tank study)

The Hungarian think tank Bálványos Intézet presented in a press conference on Tuesday, in Cluj, a study about the desire to participate and the political preferences of Hungarians in Transylvania in the 2024 elections, kronikaonline reports. The researchers also looked at how the attitude of Transylvanian Hungarians towards the geopolitical situation, namely the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has evolved, and compared the latest figures with the data from their 2022 survey.

• Bálványos Intézet is a social science and public policy think tank that “seeks scientific and policy-based answers to important questions for the future of the Hungarian community in Transylvania,” according to the organization’s official website.

The Bálványos Institute believes that the opinions of Transylvanian Hungarians in relation to the war in Ukraine are the closest to the geopolitical views and attitudes of the extremist AUR party: the main objective is sovereignty, with anti-Western and anti-Ukraine rhetoric. It should be noted that the extremist parties AUR and SOS have a strong anti-UDMR speech.

If two years ago, the vast majority of Hungarians in Transylvania (74%) considered Russia responsible for the outbreak of the war, today many are unsure or perhaps do not want to answer the question of who is behind the conflict.

A kind of anti-Westernism can be perceived at this moment, but according to sociologist Tamás Kiss, this should not be interpreted as pro-Russian.

He emphasized that, from this point of view, Romania occupies a “special” place between the Russophile Eastern European states and the Russophobic states suffering from the pressure of the former Soviet Union: it oscillates somewhere between the two, and the Transylvanian Hungarians are somewhere between the pro-Russian views of Hungary and those of the UDMR.

Support for Ukraine’s accession to the European Union and NATO has also changed at the Romanian level, which experts explain by the fact that it is a kind of “normalization” of the war.

In other words, those who two years ago rejected this because they were afraid that it would drag Romania into war, now – after they “got used” to the situation – see it as a natural process for Ukraine to slowly follow slowly this way.

Among Transylvanian Hungarians, the proportion of those who support accession has not changed significantly, they are still more disdainful, and the proportion of those who support the integration of Ukrainians into the EU and NATO is negligible.

The staff of the institute also carried out a survey regarding immigration and refugees, which also revealed that there are significant differences between the attitudes of Romanians and Hungarians in Transylvania towards this phenomenon.

While, for example, Romanians do not differentiate between refugees from different countries, they treat Europeans (whites) and non-Europeans in the same way, while Transylvanian Hungarians have a more refractory attitude towards refugees from outside the continent, for example from Somalia or Syria. Among Romanians, there are no significant differences regarding the question depending on the party for which the respondents are voters.

The specialists also emphasized that, according to the survey, AUR voters would accept a Hungarian neighbor in the same proportion as anyone else, i.e. the voters and sympathizers of any other Romanian party. It was also mentioned that Transylvanian Hungarians fear refugees and immigrants for subsistence (jobs) and cultural reasons.

When asked by a journalist, sociologists explained that immigrants who can settle in Transylvania will increase the Romanian-speaking community in the long term. Since the language of the state and the administration is Romanian, immigrants will learn Romanian, not Hungarian, so the number of Romanian speakers increases, not Hungarian speakers.

Regarding the population’s trust in the institutions, it was highlighted that the trust of Transylvanian Hungarians in the European Union has been continuously decreasing for years, repeatedly breaking negative records, and is currently 26%, well below the percentage of 49% from Romania.

Last but not least, the willingness of Transylvanian Hungarians to vote is significantly higher than that of the majority population, which experts attribute to the early campaign of the UDMR. According to their surveys, 44% of the Hungarian population in Transylvania can be considered active, that is, sure voters of the UDMR.

According to the opinion poll, if the elections (any of the competitions in this super-electoral year) were to take place next Sunday, about forty percent of Romanians would definitely go to the polls, while for Hungarians the ratio is about sixty percent .

The results of the research were presented by Tibor Toró, professor of Sapientia EMTE, research director of the Bálványos Institute, and Tamás Kiss, researcher of the National Minorities Research Institute, co-owner of the Transylvania Inquiry.