Did Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sign a "secret pact" with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he promised to push Hungarians out of their homeland to make way for Jewish immigrants? No, that's not true: The claim was promulgated in 2017 by an ultranationalist politician who offered no proof to back it up. There is no evidence of any mass influx of Jews to Hungary: Israeli immigration has plummeted since 2017, only a small number of Hungarians have Jewish ancestry, and even fewer describe themselves as practicing Jews.
The claim appeared in a Hungarian-language video (archived here) on TikTok on December 14, 2023, under the caption (translated from Hungarian to English by Lead Stories staff) "The secret pact." A computer-generated voice reads out an article by the late Tibor Nagy, former president of the nonparliamentary Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP), published on the Magyar Megmaradásért (For Hungarian Survival) website on December 11, 2017. Nagy claimed to have discovered a covert agreement that Orbán and Netanyahu hammered out during their July 2017 summit, saying (as translated):
The essence of the pact: Israel will allow a new Orbán administration in 2018, if the emptying out of the country continues at a faster tempo. The elimination of living standards, the material and psychological impact of the series of foreign-currency loan scams, the disappearance of health care, the liberalization of education and, above all, the widespread misery demonstrated by the catastrophic decline of population numbers, has made Hungary a suitable place for the immigration of half a million Jews, and in the next [parliamentary] cycle the rate of [Hungarian] emigration and [Jewish] settlement must be increased.
Fidesz [Orbán's party] can form a government from 2018 if it surpasses the one million Hungarians who have been pushed out so far ... The goal is, Jewish immigration, return, repatriation and a new occupation, which will redress Jewry's thousand-year-old grievance.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Dec 15 15:13:49 2023 UTC)
If Orbán cut a deal with Netanyahu to boost Jewish immigration, evidence shows he has not kept up his end of the bargain. The number of Israeli immigrants to Hungary dropped from 255 in 2017 to 134 in 2022, a decline of 47 percent, according to data from Hungary's Central Statistical Office (KSH).
Naturally, an immigrant from any country may be Jewish. But even if every one of the 226,267 foreigners living in Hungary in 2023 -- plus the 154,966 people who obtained Hungarian citizenship since 2000 -- was a Jew, the total number would be 381,233, or 4 percent of Hungary's total population, according to KSH statistics. That would be far less than the "half million" Jews that had supposedly settled in Hungary before 2017, by Nagy's lights.
Research shows that the percentage of Hungarians who have more than 50 percent Jewish ancestry is tiny. In a study of DNA samples that was completed in 2019, statistician Daniel Staetsky of the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research estimated the number of Hungarians who were at least half Ashkenazi Jewish at about 130,000, or 1.4 percent of the total population. This projection is in line with an earlier estimate by sociologist András Kovács.
If "Jewish" is understood to mean "people who practice Judaism," then statistics cast even greater doubt on Nagy's theory of a surreptitious Semitic takeover. Only 7,635 Hungarians described themselves as observant Jews in the 2022 census.
Furthermore, there is no evidence supporting Nagy's claim that the poor quality of life in Hungary is causing native-born citizens to leave. The number of Hungarians who returned home after spending time abroad, which includes the number of Hungarian citizens born abroad who declare residence in Hungary, has outpaced the number of people leaving Hungary every year since 2016, KSH statistics show.
There is also no evidence that Orbán made any kind of "pact" with Netanyahu in 2017. A Google search conducted on December 18, 2023 (archived here), using the keywords "Orbán," "Netanjahu" ("Netanyahu"), and "paktum" ("pact") turned up only sites that are known to promote conspiracy theories and reader comments.
This video on TikTok is an iteration of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which argues that global elites, including Jews, are replacing ethnic Europeans with outsiders, according to the National Immigration Forum (NIF), a U.S. advocacy group. White supremacists have cited this theory as justification for violent attacks on Jews, the NIF says.
