Is Hungary's governing Fidesz party replacing indigenous Hungarians with Ukrainian Jews and other foreigners? No, that's not true: The claim focuses on a refugee center in Hungary that hosts observant Jews fleeing the war in Ukraine, most of whom did not stay for long. And while the total number of foreigners residing in Hungary has increased since Fidesz came to power in 2010, it still amounts to only a tiny fraction of the population.
The claim appeared in a Hungarian-language video (archived here) on TikTok on September 19, 2023. The text read:
They're moving everyone onto us!
Filthy G Fidesz
A population replacement is happening!
Hungarians don't get anything but the foreigners get everything!
What will happen here???
Traitor Fidesz!
(All translations by Lead Stories.)
The "G" in the second line is an abbreviation for the Hungarian word for "sperm," a well-known insult.
The video showed Hungarian Rabbi Slomo Köves giving an interview at the refugee center that his organization, the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation (EMIH), established in the city of Balatonőszöd for Jews fleeing the war in Ukraine in 2022. Köves said:
I believe this is the biggest Jewish refugee camp [in Europe], maybe we can say the only one now, because most of these kinds of camps that were set up just after the war got shut down in one or two months... At the moment, about 600 people are here, I reckon.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Sep 20 07:38:18 2023 UTC)
The full version of Köves' interview appeared on Hungarian blogger A.J. Megyeri's Facebook page on August 18, 2022. The clip that appears in the TikTok omits the part where Köves says about 3,000 people had stayed at the facility during the first six months of the Ukraine war, some for only a few days.
In other words, about 80 percent of the refugees who arrived at the center in Balatonőszöd had moved on, according to Köves' estimates.
Köves added that some of the Jewish families who passed through the refugee center want to remain in Hungary. However, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian refugees who cross into Hungary are just passing through. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Hungary has recorded some 3.4 million border crossings from Ukraine, but only 53,375 Ukrainian refugees have stayed, according to the latest data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The number of foreign citizens residing in Hungary has risen in recent years, but it remains too small to support the TikTok's claim that Fidesz is orchestrating a "population replacement." As of January 1, 2023, some 226,267 foreigners had settled in the country, a 14 percent increase over 2010, the year Fidesz came to power, according to data from the Central Statistical Office (KSH). That number represents just 2.3 percent of Hungary's total population of 9.6 million.
This TikTok is an iteration of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, some of whose adherents argue that Jews are plotting to replace people of European ethnicity with immigrants, according to the National Immigration Forum (NIF), a U.S immigrant-advocacy group. White supremacists have used this trope to justify violence against Jews and other minorities, the NIF says.
