by Paul Lendvai
Six people, victims and opponents of the communist dictatorship, spoke at Heroes’ Square. The political sensation of the day, however, for the media and for me too, was the speech of a completely unknown young man with a beard. His name was Viktor Orbán and he was just twenty-six years old. On behalf of the younger generation he delivered the final speech, one that was both concise and clear; in view of the conditions still prevailing, it was also in its demands for democracy and independence an extraordinarily sharp oration:
If we trust our own strength, then we will be able to put an end to the communist dictatorship. If we are determined enough, then we can compel the ruling party to face free elections. If we have not lost sight of the ideas of 1956, we will vote for a government which will at once enter into negotiations on the immediate beginning of the withdrawal of Russian troops. If we are courageous enough, then, but only then, we can fulfil the will of our revolution.
Even in retrospect, and regardless of his subsequent political actions and more recent cosying up to the Russian head of state Vladimir Putin, the trailblazing character of Orbán’s courageous and politically rebellious words, which went beyond the limits of protocol, has to be recognised. After this appearance, which lasted a mere six-and-a-half minutes, the young man became, from one moment to the next, famous both in Hungary and abroad. In the words of József Debreczeni, his biographer and today his harshest critic, this was the ‘meeting of an extraordinary luck with an extraordinary talent’.
2
THE LONG CLIMB FROM BOTTOM TO TOP
In 1989, as Kádár’s Hungary was being laid to rest, who would have thought that just nine years later the bearded young revolutionary would (in the words of his biographer Debreczeni) shoot like a ‘meteor in the sky of the Hungarian people’? Minus the beard and now aged thirty-five, in 1998 Viktor Orbán was the youngest freely elected prime minister in the history of Hungary, following the sensational victory under his leadership of the erstwhile youth party Fidesz. Even fewer observers could have imagined that, after two consecutive electoral defeats in 2002 and 2006, the young politician, driven by an unbridled lust for power and blessed with exceptional personal talent and tactical skills, would go on to score two epochal electoral triumphs in 2010 and 2014, twice winning a two-third parliamentary majority. Orbán then proceeded to fill all positions of state power with his own supporters, without any regard for the principles of the rule of law or the EU’s set of values. Since his spring 2010 victory, he has aggressively assumed the leadership role, unwilling to delegate decision-making. In his profound analysis of the methods and practices of the Orbán regime, the distinguished independent legal expert, Tamás Sárközy, speaks of a ‘new land grab’ (a clear allusion to the Magyar conquest of territory in the Danube region in 896 AD) by a Freikorps of plebeians, who are enriching themselves in the interests of their mission and want to create a new order, with a new elite and the new middle class.1
Sárközy points out a phenomenon unique to Hungary, one that has been completely overlooked in the Western media: nowhere in the world (apart from the family clans or dictatorships in Africa and Latin America) is there a democratic country in which a small group of ten to twenty former students, who have known each other for about thirty years, occupies to such a degree so many key positions of power. The offices of the highest dignitaries (the state president, the prime minister and the speaker of the National Assembly) are held by three old friends, János Áder, Viktor Orbán and László Kövér. The core of power in the Hungarian state is formed by a band of friends, now in their mid-fifties, who have been together since university, college or their time in the military, or who have forged friendships through their wives. It is due to their unreserved personal loyalty to Viktor Orbán, and not because of any particular personal talents, that they have risen to key positions in government, the administration and the economy.
A good starting point for any description of the exercise of power and leadership within the authoritarian regime established by Viktor Orbán in 2010–16 is Max Weber’s well-known definition: ‘power is the opportunity, within a social relationship, to have your own will prevail even against resistance’; ‘ruling should mean the opportunity for an order of a particular content to be obeyed by the assigned person’.2 Orbán’s system of government does not depend on naked oppression as do the regimes of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus or Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan. Through the distribution of offices with sinecures the ruler of Hungary has assembled around himself a great army of devotees, one that extends far beyond the administration, police, secret services and military. Over the decades, long before winning his two-thirds majority, Viktor Orbán created for himself enormous personal room for manoeuvre. From the very beginning, his opponents in the party were incapable of resistance. They either lacked the will or acted too late and failed. Even when taking into account the particular context and historical circumstances of the last three decades, the personalised rule of Orbán can be explained primarily through his life history.
The fact is that most of the politically or financially powerful men around Orbán come from the poorest layers of society, from difficult backgrounds; overwhelmingly, they are not from Budapest, but from socially marginalised environments in the provinces. This has led some Hungarian authors to make bold comparisons between leading Fidesz politicians and the heroes of novels by Balzac (Lucien de Rubempré) and Stendhal (Julien Sorel). But these allusions, in spite of parallels in the behaviour and lifestyles of some of Orbán’s new friends (such as the flamboyant Árpád Habony),3 are false. The circumstances of the social rise of both Orbán himself and the most influential Fidesz members of his circle correspond in no way to the milieux described by these French masters.
In 2003 and in 2009, the Hungarian political scientist and journalist József Debreczeni published two separate biographies of Orbán. Together they total 1,020 pages and are very different in tone. It is not Balzac’s encyclopaedic moral portrayal of France but these books, written six years apart and before the decisive election victory in 2010, alongside interviews and TV recordings from the early days, that provide the key to understanding those particular circumstances in the long and contradictory Kádár era that shaped the lives of Orbán’s family and friends.4
Viktor Mihály Orbán was born on 31 May 1963. Most of what we know about his family life and childhood in the tiny, wretched village of Alcsútdoboz, about 50 kilometres west of Budapest, comes from Orbán himself. Initially, the whole family, including Viktor’s brother (two years his junior), lived squeezed together in the cramped house of his paternal grandparents. The central figure in the family was his legendary grandfather. A physically very strong man, a dock worker, he joined up in the Second World War, served on the Eastern Front and, after the collapse of the Second Hungarian Army, eventually returned home from captivity in Austria, unscathed but not without some adventures to tell. With his wife, a former cleaning woman, he settled in the tiny backwater of Alcsútdoboz. Orbán’s grandfather was, for a time, employed as a sort of surgeon (doctor’s assistant) alongside the local vet. The young Viktor admired this strong personality who took his school leaving certificate at the age of forty-eight, just to make his mark in life. And it was from this extraordinary man that the five- or six-year-old Viktor got his passion for football. Together, grandfather and grandson regularly listened to radio broadcasts of football matches and read the sports pages.
When Viktor was ten, as a consequence of arguments between his mother and grandmother, the family moved to the somewhat larger neighbouring village of Felcsút. In a dilapidated house at the end of the main street they had to begin all over again. The circumstances in which he grew up were certainly orderly, but without doubt very poor. It was only later, looking back on these years during interviews, that Orbán recalled how unbelievably hard he and his siblings had had to work in the fields as young children, at times having to help neighbours, and always in the school holidays:
pulling beets, sorting potatoes, collecting corncobs, feeding the pigs and chickens.
There was no running water. Hot water was a luxury that had to be heated in a tin pot on the gas stove before washing yourself in the sink. It is easy to imagine what all this must have meant for a bright boy growing up in such conditions. At the age of thirty, the successful young politician, by then the president of Fidesz, described what an ‘unforgettable experience’ it had been for him as a fifteen-year-old to use a bathroom for the first time, and to have warm water simply by turning on a tap. That there was another world, one of prosperity, was something he had yet to encounter personally at Felcsút.
Orbán has never made any secret of the fact that his parents’ social rise was closely associated with the political and economic consolidation of the Kádár regime. In the 1970s and 1980s, there emerged in Hungary a new figure, that of the successful petty bourgeois, whom the political scientist László Lengyel has characterised as ‘Homo Kádáricus’, as opposed to the ‘Homo Sovieticus’. In Lengyel’s analysis, the Homo Kádáricus in the towns and countryside made a living from various side jobs. In the heyday of ‘mature Kádárism’, public and private life was divided under the guiding principle of ‘We up here play politics—and you down there live.’ This tacit agreement, under which the ruling party and the people both knew the boundaries of what and what was not possible, permitted a Hungarian variety of communism.
Orbán’s father, Gyözö, born in 1940 and a party member from 1966, was without any question one such Homo Kádáricus. In the local farm collective in Felcsút, he belonged to the party leadership and was head of the machinery department. Hard work combined with ceaseless learning were the keys to the family escaping its poverty. Orbán’s father was thirty years old when he resumed his previously interrupted studies by means of a correspondence course, and he completed university as a mechanical engineer. His mother became a teacher for children with special needs after attending teacher training college as a mature student.
Viktor was good at school, but even at an early stage his tendency to indiscipline, which in later years would arise again and again, was recognisable. As the second smallest in the class, he was not going to be a leader, but in scraps he always fought fearlessly. He admits himself that he was an ‘unbelievably bad child. Badly misbehaved, cheeky, violent. Not at all likeable. Repeatedly I was thrown out of all schools … The adults couldn’t stand me and I couldn’t stand them … At home I had constant problems with discipline; my father beat me once or twice a year.’ From school to his military service and then studies at the law faculty, his maxim remained unaltered: ‘If I’m hit once, then I hit back twice.’ In an unguarded moment, the young politician let slip that even as a seventeen-year-old he had been thrashed by his father for his loutish behaviour.
The social rise of the family coincided with Viktor’s acceptance to one of the most distinguished grammar schools in Hungary and the household moving away from the tiny village of Felcsút to the town of Székesfehérvár, the country’s medieval capital. Here, in the two-room flat of 54 square metres, the fifteen-year-old not only experienced the small miracle of that first bathroom but also passed the social test of encountering urbane surroundings and his new classmates (thirty-one girls and only six boys), many of whose parents were better off than his own. In an interview, Orbán later mentioned that it took him half a year to successfully overcome his rural accent and behaviour. In this he was aided by his mother, but also by his own self-confidence. At the grammar school the young firebrand got into arguments and fights and was even thrown out of the boarding home. Luckily, by that time his father had already found a job and the family had moved to Székesfehérvár.
In his first two years at this school, the eager young schoolboy, as secretary of the Young Communist League (KISZ), helped organise various social and sporting events. Orbán has never attempted to retrospectively present himself as a young fighter against the regime. On the contrary, politics was a subject he never discussed either with his much-loved grandfather or his parents. It was simply not a topic within the family. Nobody read newspapers, nobody listened to political news. They accommodated themselves to the Kádár regime, which, in comparison to those elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc, was milder and more bearable. In Orbán’s own words:
It is remarkable but there is not a single factor or reason in the history of my family which would have explained why I became an anti-communist. My father was a party member. The family did not want to involve itself in politics. A typical reaction to the post-1956 mood. I was told to learn hard, work and to take care of your own business. Don’t think about social questions or the outside world. We can’t influence them anyway.
In this manner, the Orbáns, like most Hungarians, adjusted to the communist regime. His father was promoted to a higher position in a quarry and in 1982 got a job as an engineer in Libya. This was initially for a year but was prolonged; in the second year he was able to have his wife and youngest son (fourteen years Viktor’s junior) join him; Viktor also visited his father in Libya as a student.
Meanwhile, football had become the greatest passion in the schoolboy’s life. He played in the youth team of a top club in the Hungarian first league. He trained four times a week and spent 90 per cent of his free time on the football pitch. These were his best years yet, even if he had ‘no particular talent as a player’ and had to work extremely hard to get a place on the youth team.
Though he was fully aware of his ultimately limited skills on the pitch and did not overestimate his abilities as a centre forward, Orbán has always cultivated an intense, uninhibited and, it goes without saying, media-effective relationship with football. At the grammar school he grasped that in the world of football it is possible to reach the top even if you start at the bottom. Football also offered a chance to shift his social boundaries, an opportunity to be tested and to measure personal strengths as an equal among equals:
In the grammar school we led a far too dull a life. That was different in the football team; in it could be found all kinds of people: rich, poor, dull, clever. At the same time it formed a very good community of friends. The game brought together people from different backgrounds and classes. Every time I changed team, I also changed cultures.
By far the most important person amongst Viktor’s friends at school was Lajos Simicska, who was three years older. This was somebody who had started out right at the bottom. Hardly any other pupil had plunged the depths he had. According to Simicska, his family was so poor that he had to steal coal to keep them from freezing. His father, a metalworker, had been morally and physically destroyed by his role as the secretary of a workers’ council during the 1956 uprising. The openly anti-communist Simicska had been thrown out of one class and had to repeat the year because of his rebellious demeanour, so that he was now only two classes ahead of Viktor and his contemporaries. They all admired Simicska as a battering ram. According to Orbán, Simicska had a ‘fantastic brain. He was the cleverest of us all.’ He only joined the Communist Youth in order to be accepted to university. Simicska ended up starting and completing his studies at the law faculty at the same time as Orbán and his other friends.
They were all soldiers together. Young men accepted for university had first to complete their military service of almost one year. Military service was a particularly hard time for the future students because they were considered ‘privileged’ by the other recruits and, above all, by the officers and non-commissioned officers, who did not hesitate to bully them. For Viktor Orbán these months were a real trial. They coincided with the World Cup and, because of all the limitations placed upon his free time as a conscript, he ran the danger of missing important games. On several occasions he was sentenced to three days’ imprisonment for going AWOL or failing to appear for duty because he was watching football matches. Once, the headstrong Orbán had to spend ten days behind bars because he had struck a non-commissioned officer during a personal altercation.
&
nbsp; Although he was still politically unengaged, this period marked emotionally a turning point in Orbán’s life. In the army, for the first time and at first hand, he was confronted with both the brutality of the military machine and with the sheer crudity of the indoctrination justifying the system. These experiences prepared the ground for his subsequent political activity and for his turning into a conscious opponent of party dictatorship. It was also at this time that the omnipresent secret services, which were particularly active in the army, tried to win him over as an informant. He turned down the offer, but said nothing about it to his friends. Only after a press report referring to this emerged in June 2005 did Orbán publish a document from the archives of the state secret services, according to which the ‘attempt was unsuccessful’.
His friend Simicska was also considered something of a black sheep during his military service because of his critical attitude towards the Soviet attempts to suppress the trade union opposition in Poland. A whole array of future Fidesz politicians, including Orbán’s closest friends from his student days such as Gábor Fodor and László Kövér, had similar experiences in the army. Kövér, who comes from a Social Democratic workers’ family and is almost four years older than Orbán, often tends towards hyperbole: he once described his time as a soldier as a ‘mini-Auschwitz’.
This group of friends grew closer through their political activities in the law faculty students’ union. But it was above all their time at the Bibó István Special College for law students, founded in Budapest in 1983,5 that forged their close links and the network of personal and political friendships which, directly and indirectly, have shaped not only these individuals’ careers but also, through their subsequent rise, the whole political landscape of post-communist Hungary. The fact that Orbán shared a small college room at 12 Ménesi Street in Buda, first with Simicska and then for almost two years with Gábor Fodor, means that these key political figures have an intimate knowledge of one another, which has determined time and again their personal reactions in the interplay of cooperation, rivalry and animosities over the following decades. Even today sixty students, each paying about 12,000 forints (approximately €40) a month for the privilege, live in twos or threes in the only 12-square-metre rooms at the college.