4. Everyone against everyone Anti-immigrant propaganda illustrates the way illiberal world views have made their way into the political, social and public debate by repeating the same themes over and over again. In 2025, a decade on from what is now known in Europe as‘the refugee crisis’ and nine years on from Orbán’s anti-immigrant referendum in Hungary, the asylum and rights themes – the“Wir schaffen das” or“we can do it” view uttered by the then Chancellor Angela Merkel – has been completely turned on its head. In Germany, in the wake of a surge in the popularity of AfD, the German Christian Democrats have gone to the extent of voting for an anti-immigra­tion motion together with the far right. In France, the Emmanuel Macron moderates espoused the 2024 loi pour contrôler l’immigration which Marine Le Pen astutely presented as an“ideological victory”. And beyond the nation state level, the‘melonisation’ of the European Commission has meant that President Ursula von der Leyen frequently takes part in the pre-Council of Europe discussions promoted by Meloni, together with the Danish prime minister, to push Brussels into agreeing‘innovative solutions’ which translate into out­sourcing operations such as the Albania model which violate human rights. The EU budget proposal put for­ward by the Commission in July 2025 for the 2028–2034 seven-year period set aside billions of euros for national border-consolidation plans to the joy of those – from Meloni to Polish prime minister Donald Tusk – who have made it a key consensus issue. The Schengen sys­tem is now so full of holes as to be virtually unusable and taking back border controls is a byword even in Berlin. And all this causes very little embarrassment. It is now the norm. It has been normalised. But it began years ago, when the words‘wall’ or‘pushback’ were the exclusive preserve of the sovereignist camp. In the EU the job finished by Meloni today – in her dia ­logues with von der Leyen – began with the incessant anti-immigrant rhetoric honed by Orbán. In October 2016, a referendum asked the people of Hungary: “Do you want to allow the European Union to mandate the resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens to Hungary without the approval of the National Assembly?” 8 Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V. In 2015 fear of mass immigration – the arrival of thou ­sands of refugees at the border – was used by Fidesz to pass a law which authorised the government to declare a state of emergency. And this despite the fact that these large numbers never arrived. As we will see, Hungary’s 2025 ban on pride marches and other such examples, often under the aegis of identity flags which apparently strike at the rights of a section of the population but actually trigger a more generalised attack on democracy. And a playbook is made to be reused and this is what has happened. Polish ultra-conservatives replicated Orbán’s strategy both in the harshness of its anti-immigrant rheto­ric –“Immigrants bring cholera and parasites” said PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński ten or so years ago – and in its use of identity-focused referendums as an electoral mobi­lisation tool. “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accord­ance with the forced relocation mech­anism imposed by the European bu­reaucracy?” This was the key question, out of four which PiS put to the vote in October 2023, replicating the Orbán model in its entirety. The anti-immigration referendum idea came from Hungary and it was once again in Orbán’s orbit that the use of the propaganda referendum was put to the test – one in which the referendum question is formulated in such a way as to embody the ideological assumptions of the party in power – holding it on the same day as the parliamentary elec ­tions. It is an idea which serves a multiplicity of purposes: polarising the electoral debate on identity themes, mobilis­ing one’s own electorate and that attempted by parties even further to the right(in the case of the Polish neofas­cists of Konfederacja), i.e. trying to breakup a united oppo­sition front(as happened in Poland in 2023 and Hungary the year before) by dividing it on the theme voted on. The Hungarian prime minister attempted precisely this in the 2022 elections by holding an anti-LGBT referendum