Orbán
Page 4
Orbán and his closest friends were moulded by these deeply rooted differences in their childhoods, upbringing, lifestyles and standards. These roots marked, first subconsciously but later openly, their attitudes towards liberal politicians, who were often overweening, even arrogant in their behaviour. Their initial admiration for the brilliance of some liberal and left-wing intellectuals evolved over the years into an aversion fed by inferiority complexes, later into almost open feelings of hatred. A famous episode was immortalised in some verses by the poet István Kemény. At a reception for newly elected parliamentarians in 1994, the well-known Free Democrat MP, Miklós Haraszti,3 went up to Orbán, who like the other Fidesz representatives was appropriately attired, and adjusted his tie with an insolent gesture of the hand. Orbán blushed and was visibly incensed. Kemény celebrated this symbolic and never forgotten moment in a poem, as a key experience in the life of the ‘last prime minister of the drowning country of Hungary’. This personal background of perceived inferiority has to be understood, as it lies behind the outbursts of animosity against the renegade MPs around Gábor Fodor who ‘betrayed’ Fidesz in 1993 and ‘sold’ themselves to the post-communists; it is also reflected in the disdain for cosmopolitan Europhiles repeatedly and vociferously manifested by Orbán’s friends, especially by the speaker of parliament, László Kövér. The turning away from liberal positions and the espousal of grassroots nationalist values, in contrast to the ‘alien’ left-liberal governments, has run like a thread through subsequent debates, peaking with Orbán’s open avowal of ‘illiberal democracy’ in the summer of 2014.
Untroubled by any sense of scruple, Viktor Orbán, not yet thirty, single-mindedly and quite openly pursued his goal of seizing total control over Fidesz. With the help of his loyal comrade Kövér, he cannily outplayed his former friend and subsequent rival in every trial of strength—for the last time in 1992–3, when Fodor sought the post of chair of the enlarged executive. At that time, Fodor was by far the most popular Fidesz politician and the second most popular political figure in the country. Finally, in protest against the underhand pressure and intrigues, Fodor and two other MPs quit the party in November 1993 and resigned their parliamentary seats. Some months later, two further well-known MPs left Fidesz for political reasons. In all, according to Fodor, the party lost between 400 and 500 active members.
Even before the final break, the media were commenting upon Fidesz’s internal differences in general and Orbán’s absolutist claim to leadership in particular. In this period he gave a key interview to the critical journalist Zsófia Mihancsik.4 She pointed to charges that Fidesz was prepared at any moment to give up its principles in favour of seizing power and added that Orbán’s attitude as party leader was dedicated to engendering fears amongst ordinary people. For his part Orbán dismissed the allegations about settling personal scores by pointing to democratic, majority-based decisions, as well as the claims that people were supposed to be frightened of him. Amongst other things he was quoted as saying:
My personality has a number of defects (I’m not going to say what they are, that is for my opponents to find out) and offers a ready target for such personal attacks. I am considered to be a resolute person; I like rational arguments and also that style of politics in which resolve is an important element. My mentality also offers a target in the sense that by origin I am not a sensitive intellectual of the twentieth generation and this throws up some questions of style; there is in me perhaps a roughness brought up from below. That is no disadvantage as we know that the majority of people come from below. But this struggle also gives an opportunity for such attacks. In my opinion, in certain conflicts, confrontation and not compromise has to be pursued because only in this way can subsequent, even greater conflicts be avoided.
At the 1994 parlimentary elections, Fidesz paid a high price for the dispute with Fodor and his followers. When they left the party Fidesz stood at 20 per cent in the opinion polls and its Free Democrat rivals at 8 per cent. Yet when the elections were held a mere six months later, in May 1994, the Free Democrats won more than 19 per cent of the vote, and Fidesz only 7 per cent. Instead of the 100 (or at the very least sixty) seats anticipated by Orbán, Fidesz had only twenty representatives in parliament, two fewer than in 1990. The party dropped to last place, even behind the Christian Democrats, who now had twenty-two MPs.
This was a bitter disappointment for Fidesz, which had been so certain of victory. An additional, painful slap in the face was the entry into parliament of the three rebel MPs, on the Free Democrat ticket. After a brilliant rise and a completely unexpected fall, Viktor Orbán, and Fidesz with him, stood before the greatest test of his life.
4
THE ROAD TO THE FIRST VICTORY
The election of May 1994 marked the nadir of Viktor Orbán’s political career. The post-communist Socialists quintupled their vote and formed a coalition with the Free Democrats for political appearances’ sake even though they had a clear majority; together the two parties held over 72 per cent of the seats. In contrast Fidesz had become the weakest party in parliament. Yet, only four years later, in May 1998, it won the election and Orbán became prime minister, the youngest head of a government in the history of Hungary and, at that time, the youngest in Europe. How was this possible? What reasons lay behind this truly sensational change?
Before discussing the errors of the Socialist–Free Democrat government, we must first return to the role of the personality, to Orbán himself. I first met him on 22 September 1993, before his electoral defeat. The occasion was a speech he gave at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, in what was then a still far from polished English. Afterwards I spoke with him at an intimate dinner given by the Institute’s director, Krzysztof Michalski. Orbán struck me with his frankness when discussing, for example, his rivalry for the party leadership with Fodor, as he did with his solid liberal attitudes in opposition to the conservative policies of the then Antall government. At the time he impressed us all—his audience, his host and myself included—as a progressive politician of the young generation, a man with a promising future. This first encounter was followed by others; these, however, were in the period after Orbán had turned his back on liberalism in favour of nationalist, right-wing politics.
After the election defeat it soon turned out that the liberalism of Orbán and his closest friends had been little more than a thin veneer. They quickly grasped the necessity of making a smooth accommodation with the new circumstances. The Free Democrats, in the past radically opposed to the communist regime, were now prepared to form a coalition with Prime Minister Gyula Horn, a former communist, and his victorious Socialist Party. Gábor Fodor, once the symbol of Fidesz, even accepted the post of education and cultural minister in the coalition government. These dramatic and surprising developments seemed to justify in retrospect the hard and distrustful line taken by Orbán and Kövér towards their stronger, centre-left rivals. After the formal resignation of the entire party leadership and a clever mixing of self-criticism and condemnation of any cooperation with the Socialists, Orbán, Kövér and their friends were confirmed in their functions at an extraordinary party congress in July 1994. Though in his speech on that occasion Orbán excluded any shift to either right or left, this was just a ruse.
In the summer of 1994, after the Fidesz debacle, Orbán’s former adviser and subsequent biographer József Debreczeni taped a long interview with him while collecting material for a book on the recently deceased prime minister, József Antall. Only nine years later did Debreczeni make these off-the-record comments available to the public in his first book on Orbán. In the wake of Fidesz’s worst electoral defeat in its history, Orbán reproached Antall with extraordinary acerbity for his failure to create or leave a legacy of either a communications framework or an economic basis for any future conservative government:
Antall bears the personal responsibility. Not because we are in opposition but because we are standing buck naked with our bottoms bare
in opposition … There isn’t a single newspaper. Some of the newspapers were stolen, and he allowed the others to be robbed under his nose and the rest he left in state ownership … there is no radio, no TV channel. There’s nothing. And for this there is no excuse.
Orbán saw as the late prime minister’s other great mistake
his having neglected to cultivate personal contacts with the eight to ten big capitalists … What should have been done with them? Make it clear in front of the bankers that these eight to ten people are our people. And then let big business arrange everything else according to its own logic. These people could perhaps have been helped in the investment funds, in the calls for tenders … After an international negotiation he [Antall] was asked in a small group of people why he had not proposed some possible joint economic ventures. Antall replied that he had not gone to do business but to improve the position of his country. In his view, business had no part in politics although it is the very substance of politics … He had no feeling for anything like this. Absolutely no feeling.1
For many readers of Debreczeni’s book, these attacks were puzzling, because Fidesz propagandists were already busily spreading stories that shortly before his death in December 1993 Antall had personally bestowed his political testament on Orbán.
Nevertheless, these remarks reveal even at this relatively early stage the relationship of the young politician to the acquisition and exercise of power, as well as his understanding of political communication and media management. Drawing on the instructive experiences of his predecessor Fodor’s alleged shortcomings, Orbán, whilst still opposition leader, put Lajos Simicska, perhaps his oldest friend from his grammar school and army days and a ‘genius’ at financial transactions, in charge of fundraising for Fidesz.
At the seventh party congress in April 1995, only nine months after his categorical rejection of any swing to left or right, Orbán committed himself without reservation to a political shift to the right.
In my view, the formation of blocs, the emergence of a socialist centre-left and a moderate centre-right dominated by the middle classes is in the interest of the country … In the centre we have, if we stand alone, no chance against either left or right. To my mind there is no possibility of cooperating with the left. My answer is that Fidesz must seek cooperation with the forces politically right of the centre.
In keeping with the new line the party now called itself Fidesz—Hungarian Civic Party (Magyar Polgári Párt).
The volte-face, a great surprise for many, was soon reflected in the language and personal style of the Fidesz leadership. Increasingly the erstwhile rebels, who had once been bearded and casually clothed, were dressing ‘conservatively’ and had their hair neatly styled. In the speeches of Fidesz MPs, and particularly in Orbán’s own rhetoric, current political and economic questions were increasingly interwoven with professions of faith in the nation, in Magyar tradition, in the homeland, in national interests, in respectability, in middle-class values, in the family, in love of the mother country. It was a smooth transition, one gathering speed all the time, as the politicians who had previously scorned and caricatured conservative values now began to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Catholic and Protestant churches and, above all, to deliberately play the card of the Hungarian nation founding myths against their left-wing and liberal rivals.
Fierce critics from the left maintained that the Fidesz leaders were chameleons, without a shred of principle and always ready to bend with the wind. Such emotional accusations missed the point because they overlooked the deeper motivations of the all too conscious and superbly executed turn to the right. After splitting off the weak and, it must be said, skilfully isolated left wing, Orbán exploited his only realistic chance for future success against the left: the right-wing conservative, nationalist, populist option. In the first freely elected parliament, Fidesz had inevitably been the left-wing opposition to a right-wing government. Now that the government was overwhelmingly socialist and left-liberal, everything was naturally reversed. Thus in parliament on 27 September 1994 Orbán was able to taunt the Socialist–Free Democrat coalition (much to the delight of the Smallholders’ Party and the Christian Democrats) with Willy Brandt’s famous quip on German reunification: ‘What belongs together is growing together.’
In any explanation of why the Fidesz leadership lurched to the right, the long concealed but highly explosive force of the national question, above all the Trianon trauma, must never be forgotten. What Nietzsche called ‘cowardice in the face of reality’ applies equally well to the forty-year-long silence of the communist regime about the national tragedy and, after 1989, to the suppression of any discussion by the post-communist left of this subject, one exploited and exaggerated by right-wing nationalists. The treaty that was signed on 4 June 1920 in the summer palace of Trianon at Versailles distributed two thirds of the territory of historical Hungary and 40 per cent of its peoples among the three neighbouring successor states of Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. 3.2 million Hungarians now lived under foreign suzerainty. That Hungary won back 40 per cent of the lost territories in the Vienna Awards of 1938–40 as a consequence of its alliance with Hitler’s Germany was a taboo subject for the Kádár regime. (After 1945, the pre-war borders were reimposed.) Despite this, in the 1980s, 70 per cent of those polled stated that the Treaty of Trianon still filled them with feelings of deep bitterness.
These national misfortunes—the disaster of Trianon, defeat in war, the fate of Hungarians living abroad and the psychosis of a nation in peril—have for generations been part and parcel of the traditions of the Christian middle classes, the very people identified by the Fidesz leadership as the potential core of a future great, national people’s party. This doleful, historical factor has been especially strong in rural areas. When considering the deeds and choices made by the leading Fidesz politicians, the small group of its founding fathers, we should always remember that, with very few exceptions, they were first-generation intellectuals, coming from rural families, even if (and we have this on the best authority) they were atheist in inclination and the majority of them were not baptised.
During their flight from the provinces to the capital city, these young men forged their close ties and networks at the Bibó College rather than at university. It was not only their desire for independence that played an important role in their relationship with the Free Democrats. As already mentioned, in the personality-based interpretation of their political actions, the differences in social status and education among some of the important actors should not be overlooked. It was these differences, just as much as the superior behaviour of some Free Democrat notables, that must have given rise to the inferiority complexes of the young and then still inexperienced Fidesz politicians. The personal element was probably decisive in Orbán’s chronic inability to make compromises and his recurring reflex reaction to political defeats or unconscious humiliations: political annihilation of his opponents and rivals.
Those who know him best emphasise again and again the immense importance of football not only in the origins of the political team called Fidesz but also in its tactics and strategy in politics. As a bitter opponent once put it, Orbán always wanted to be the referee, the lineman, the centre forward and the goalkeeper, all at one and the same time. He has never denied that he always wanted to be prime minister, comparing political struggle with a game of attacking football. He can only tolerate losing when he knows that, next time, his success-oriented team can, with hard training, grim determination and clever tactics exploiting the weaknesses of their opponents, and turn yesterday’s defeat into a victory.
One of the most telling but barely known stories about the Hungarian prime minister concerns Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western starring Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson. This 1968 film did not reach cinemas in communist Hungary until the 1970s. Over two-and-a-half hours it tells the story of a dramatic struggle over a piece of land that a
railway company wants to buy, to build its line. As the family does not want to sell, it is slaughtered by a band of gangsters at the behest of the company. Only the wife survives. Then Charles Bronson appears on the scene as an avenging angel and shoots the leader of the gang, who had in the past murdered his older brother. Justice prevails.
According to his Polish biographer Igor Janke, Viktor Orbán has seen this film ‘at least 15 times’. What so enthralled him about this film? Orbán:
Everything! The heroic story. At the beginning everything seems hopeless. Night and day with little or no hope, nothing works. To persist and to emerge victorious, it is not enough that the hero can shoot and knows how to use his fists. He must also use his brain and show magnanimity. That is very important. You must know and understand your enemy, you must find out what in reality makes him tick and then, when things come to a head, you mustn’t shrink from the fight but attack and win!2
This credo has held true not only for Orbán’s four years at the head of the opposition but also, in a deeper sense, for the whole life of this power-seeking politician. Depending on the situation, politics is for Orbán a mixture of a Western and a football match. However, despite his professions to the contrary, after victory in his struggles with his political rivals he does not display magnanimity but ruthlessness. On every occasion, he demonstrated his assertiveness and resolve between 1994 and 1998 in the face of a seemingly all-powerful coalition government and a hopelessly divided opposition. With the election defeat, Fidesz was now freed of its liberal and doubting elements. From this time on, it formed under Orbán a tight-knit unit in the fight against the Socialist–Free Democrat government. The rise in its popularity and the applause it received in parliament from other parties on the opposition benches confirmed the impression that those groups that joined or cooperated with Orbán and his party could regain the initiative.