He helped Orban and Netanyahu rise to power

The godfather of modern populism, George Birnbaum, says that it's good to have an enemy.

As a political consultant for 30 years, he helped Benjamin Netanyahu come to power in a surprise victory in Israel in 1996, and Hungary's Viktor Orban in 2010. His clients are in many countries, and he flits between New York, Dubai, and Harare these days.

In 1972, George Birnbaum led many Republican leaders to power by re-inventing the art of political campaigning under mentor and late business partner Arthur Finkelstein, a brilliant mathematician who helped Richard Nixon win the election and many other Republican leaders as well.

"One should polarize the election around that issue that cuts best in your direction, e.g. drugs, crime, race in New York State," Finkelstein wrote in 1970. "When the opponent seizes the polarization initiative, you're in trouble."

With Benjamin Netanyahu's first election victory in Israel, which came just months after Yitzhak Rabin, the predecessor of incumbent PM Shimon Peres, was assassinated, the duo scored a dramatic upset.

"Peres will divide Jerusalem," was one of the slogans that electrified voters during peace talks with the Palestinians. "Whether or not it would have been a line down the middle of Jerusalem, I don't think that's true," he admits today. As part of a peace deal, certain areas of the municipality were to be given to the Palestinian Authority."

The pair began working for Viktor Orban in 2008, whose right-wing Fidesz party won a landslide election in 2010. A new enemy was needed by Viktor Orban three years later, as more elections loomed. After copious opinion surveys, the duo picked George Soros, the then 85-year-old Hungarian-born US billionaire and philanthropist, as a perfect target. He has been vilified ever since by Viktor Orban.

"George Soros was a good target," George Birnbaum tells me, "Because enough people in Hungary didn't like the idea of this billionaire behind the curtain, controlling politics and policy." But did he really?

In 2015, when George Birnbaum stepped away from Viktor Orban's side, the Hungarian prime minister had already uncovered a new enemy in Muslim migrants. When George Soros proposed in September that year that the EU should absorb large numbers of asylum seekers, Orban was prompt to label it as "the Soros plan". It is a theory largely held on the far-right corners of European politics, known as the "Great Replacement” theory, which blames immigrants for supposedly attempting to ruin Christian Europe. People of other faiths became perceived as a threatening outsiders by many Hungarians; superseding Jews and Gypsies. And soon this demonisation of Soros spread far and wide around the globe from Budapest.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas in 2022, Viktor Orban told Republicans, "Don't be afraid to call your enemies by their name. They will never show mercy. Consider George Soros for a moment." "I know George Soros very well. He is my opponent. He believes in none of the things that we do," the Hungarian leader told the American hosts.

Being closely connected to the Ukraine, George Birnbaum and his Ukrainian wife visit often. They are also familiar friends with Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko. It's a difficult time for many in the region, with Russian President Putin proclaiming liberal values of the West as "obsolete". This is something that Ukraine is striving for; a sentiment promote by George Soros. In reaction to this, Birnbaum comments on why freedom and democracy matters. He has disagreements with those of extreme progressivism and isolationist conservatism alike. Though it has been some time since he conversed with Viktor Orban, he remembers him fondly as an intelligent man who possessed knowledge on economic issues and beyond - something not always common.

He now believes that Viktor Orban has been in power too long. He told supporters in January 2015 that "every migrant is a potential terrorist." He said in July 2022, "We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become mixed-race people".

Birnbaum strongly disagrees with both statements. Critics argue that he provokes polarisation in politics - but what can be done to combat this? "The best leaders remind us of our shared goals, rather than our differences," he says. "It's not about ideology, it's about making sure people's dreams and hopes are realized," he says.