by Paul Lendvai
In retrospect this curious interview indicates that the thirty-nine-year-old Orbán was not disheartened in the slightest by the shock of the defeat; on the contrary, it filled him with new vigour. In this context an episode from the time of the 2002 election, which only became known a decade later, must be related. In the Orbán biography generously supported by the Fidesz leadership and edited by Mária Schmidt (a controversial historian and adviser to the prime minister), the Polish journalist Igor Janke recounted the following scene which took place in the VIP room of the Millenáris Park in Buda.2
In the late evening of 7 April 2002, after the announcement of the results of the first round of the elections and when the completely unexpected defeat of Fidesz was already evident, only some deeply shocked veteran party stalwarts remained with Orbán. Then the beaten prime minister said: ‘Let us pray.’ And the one-time anticlerical rebels, who in parliament had previously mocked the clergy and protested against the introduction of religious instruction in schools and the restitution of church property in 1992–3, now all prayed together.
The talk and stories about the public evolution of Orbán into a deeply religious man in the late 1990s were met with some derision by his political opponents. Both Orbán himself and the Calvinist pastor Zoltán Balog, the person who (apart from his wife, Anikó Lévai, a practising Catholic) most influenced him, have spoken several times in speeches and interviews about the prime minister’s long path to belief. ‘I didn’t have a religious upbringing … I grew up in a world of unbelievers,’ confessed Orbán; he had been baptised but there was never any question of confirmation, the very symbol of Christian maturity and the personal profession of belief. He hadn’t wanted a church wedding with Anikó; they had married in 1986, both still students, in a registry office.
Contacts and meetings with church dignitaries were intensified as liberalism was abandoned and growing attention paid to nationalist conservative ideas. Balog became Orbán’s most important contact with the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Bishops now sat in the front row at the political gatherings for the presidential elections and at the Declaration for a Civic Hungary (2002). Balog told Igor Janke that after a meeting with the archbishop of Eger and the chairs of the Catholic Bishops Conference in 1992 Orbán had told him: ‘I was not aware that the Church is so important, such an important part of Hungarian life. I cannot talk to the people about politics if I don’t understand that!’ Orbán’s conversion was crowned with a church wedding with Anikó Lévai in 1997, ten years after their civil marriage.
One of his first foreign trips as prime minister took Orbán to the Vatican where he was granted an audience with Pope John Paul II. The next important step came in 2000, when the thirty-seven-year-old prime minister, after six months of weekly evening discussions with Balog on questions of faith, was confirmed by the pastor, who had in the meantime become his friend. But it was only some years later that he openly spoke about the power of faith. On the night of the election defeat Orbán is said to have spoken with Balog for a long time about the strength that comes with belief. Two weeks later, on 21 April 2002, he said at an event in the Millenáris Park in Budapest: ‘He who carries within him faith, hope and love will see hardships as a salvation … Only a person who has lost faith can be vanquished.’ In 2007, at a public celebration of Advent in the small town of
Kaposvár, he stated:
We are of course constrained by laws. Parliament sets the boundaries, power is shared, but the ultimate barrier is nothing other than the fear of God. This is above all other laws, above the entire division of power and the constitution, the ultimate barrier of that dangerous activity that we call power.
Even Janke, who is generally very well disposed towards Orbán, says of his policies towards the Church that ‘In his activities the weighing up of opportunity was, and still is, always present. Politics gave him the impulse for his rapprochement with the Church.’ In his analysis of Orbán’s evolution, Janke adds that it is rare today to find a politician who speaks with such openness as the Hungarian premier does about the role that belief plays in his activities and political struggles. However, in his comprehensive two-volume guide to Orbán’s chequered political tactics and strategy, József Debreczeni comes to a different conclusion. ‘Viktor Orbán is a man who almost automatically believes in the veracity of whatever he considers to be politically useful to him.’3
In 2010, a mere eight stormy years later, Hungary and an astonished Europe were to learn the lessons that this highly talented and complex personality had drawn from his temporary loss of power. After his unexpected and painful defeat in 2002, Viktor Orbán, capable of doing whatever it took as opposition leader to regain power, has contributed more than any other Hungarian politician since 1989 to the disastrous political, moral, economic and cultural polarisation of Hungarian society.
6
THE GRAVEDIGGER OF THE LEFT
The developments during the eight years of Hungary’s second Socialist–Free Democrat government (2002–10) confirmed the observation of the German political scientist Wilhelm Hennis (1923–2012) that in order to maintain a system, the strength of institutions, the quality of the rulers and the virtue of citizens are required. Since 2010 Viktor Orbán and his team have almost effortlessly put in place, without any resistance worthy of the name, a skilfully veiled authoritarian system. This process would not have been possible without the moral bankruptcy of a system mired in corruption and increasingly discredited by political and economic incompetence, crowned by the all too evident failure of the centre-left elite. Finally, a deeply rooted mixture of frustration at the consequences of the system change of 1989 and nostalgia for the apparent stability of the Kádár era moulded not the virtues, but the disappointments, of Hungary’s citizens. For this reason the failures of the Socialist–Free Democrat government must not be glossed over, regardless of the fact that since that time the Orbán regime has both quantitatively and qualitatively far exceeded the mismanagement and corrupt networks of the state bureaucracy during those years.
The series of scandals and upheavals began no more than three weeks after the Socialist–Free Democrat government had assumed office in the spring of 2002, when Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy was exposed in the opposition newspaper Magyar Nemzet as having been a counterintelligence officer (a ‘D-209’) of the communist secret services. This hitherto concealed detail in Medgyessy’s otherwise glittering career in the Ministry of Finance and then after 1989 in the world of private banking deeply shocked the Hungarian public, as well as the Socialists’ coalition partners, the Free Democrats. The leaders of the latter had of course been informed long before the election about this skeleton in the closet of their leading candidate, nominally an independent. The day the bombshell dropped, Free Democrat MPs moved to replace Medgyessy. But the very next day they caved in to Socialist pressure and, despite the scandal, expressed their confidence in the head of government. The mentor and former Free Democrat leader, the philosopher János Kis, promptly lamented the moral bankruptcy of his party, condemning the deception of the voting public and predicting serious, long-term political consequences.
The controversial and impenetrable ‘D-209’ affair was but one of several reasons for Péter Medgyessy’s important place in recent Hungarian history. After all, two-thirds of respondents to a public opinion poll conducted soon after the affair was revealed had not seen this as sufficient cause to warrant his resignation. Given his previous career, his financial and economic policies have also remained a riddle to most observers. The new prime minister very much owed his slim victory over Orbán to his image as a self-confident, imperturbable, experienced and highly professional technocrat, an internationally accomplished expert with a veneer of statesmanship. He had worked for almost twenty-eight years in the Ministry of Finance, had been both before and after the collapse of the communist regime minister of finance and later the general director of the Budapest subsidiary of a large French bank. However, as head of government, he immediately began
throwing money around in his much-cited ‘100-day programme’. As the internationally respected economist András Inotai has put it: ‘His unforgivable crime was that, as a gentleman, he insisted on fulfilling all his election promises.’1
Perhaps never before had a Hungarian prime minister distributed so many electoral goodies in such a short time as Medgyessy did in the summer of 2002. The salaries of public sector employees (about 800,000 people) were raised by 50 per cent, scholarships and grants by 30 per cent, taxes on the minimum wage (already raised by Orbán), TV and radio licences were abolished, and from January 2003 the country’s approximately 3 million pensioners received a thirteenth monthly pension. This generosity, for which there was no money, when taken together with the modernisation plans for the construction of new motorways and the continuation of the Orbán government’s lavish subsidies on house-building loan interest rates, resulted in a budget deficit of 7.5 per cent of GDP in the first year of the programme. This was to put a great strain on the national budget in the coming years.
These and other measures of the Orbán and Medgyessy governments led to a 33 per cent increase in consumption by private households between 2002 and 2005, whilst GDP rose only by 18 per cent. In 2003 alone real earnings grew by 7.3 per cent in the private sector and 12.7 per cent in the public sector. While the Socialist–Free Democrat coalition partners, instead of reducing the deficit, were actually increasing it through enhanced expenditure on welfare and modernisation projects, the opposition, thirsting for revenge, was even demanding full implementation of the excessive electoral promises. Right up to 2009, no Socialist–Free Democrat government proved capable of escaping this vicious circle. There is unanimous agreement among all serious economists that the origins of this enormous burden placed on the public budget lay in the final years of the first Orbán government, a fatal policy continued with a vengeance by Medgyessy.
The reasons for Medgyessy’s relatively rapid fall did not lie in his mistakes in financial policy, deluded though he was by his sudden and rapid popularity. Against the background of his government’s evident lack of orientation and a Socialist Party paralysed by continuous internal bickering, Medgyessy, who had no party affiliation, did not radiate leadership and could not present ideas, let alone formulate a strategy against the revived forces of the opposition.
Measures taken to curtail the interest rate subsidies on housebuilding loans and to reduce or postpone various budgetary expenditures—cuts that were unavoidable but still relatively painless—led to an unprecedentedly swift deterioration in the mood of wide sections of the population during 2003. This was reflected in the prime minister’s fall in popularity in opinion polls. By the beginning of 2004, the leadership in the Socialist Party was already discussing how and when it could rid itself of Péter Medgyessy, who had fulfilled his historical duty by winning the 2002 elections for the Socialists—albeit by a small margin—but was now expendable.
The final straw, however, was a controversial personal initiative by Medgyessy that alienated the governing parties. Upon the advice of American media specialists, he proposed the introduction of a second chamber in parliament, a reduction in the number of MPs and direct elections for the state presidency. Additionally, he floated the idea of a common list of all parties in the forthcoming elections to the European Parliament and hinted at the possibility of a referendum on these questions. These hastily presented ideas were criticised by both the left and the right, and eventually shelved by the government. The European elections on 13 June 2004 unsurprisingly proved to be a resounding slap in the face for Medgyessy’s government and the Socialists. Fidesz won twelve seats to the Socialists’ nine, with two for the Free Democrats and one for the centre-right MDF.
The Medgyessy era was thus condemned to be little more than a brief intermezzo, one characterised by its lack of transparency in the construction of motorways, mutual recriminations of corruption between the Socialists and the Free Democrats, and, above all, infighting within the Socialist Party itself.
The following years, from September 2004 to April 2009, were shaped by the successes and setbacks, the splendour and decline of Ferenc Gyurcsány. The most capable, controversial and unpredictable (and certainly the richest) politician on the left, he has gone down in Hungarian history as one of the very few prime ministers in Europe who has publicly and completely unnecessarily committed political suicide; and that just shortly after his greatest personal triumph.
I first met Ferenc Gyurcsány in April 2004 when he was the minister for children, youth and sport in the Socialist–Free Democrat coalition led by Péter Medgyessy. I had read some of his articles, such as those on the necessity of discarding the paralysing post-communist ideological ballast and of transforming the Socialist Party into a modern, open, social-democratic party along the lines of the British and German models. Friends whose opinions I respected saw in him a beacon of hope, whilst leading left-wing politicians made little attempt to conceal their opinions of the ambitious young man, calling him an ‘enormously rich adventurer’ and a loose cannon. Everything I had heard about him before our meeting made him look almost like a exotic bird of paradise amidst the grey suits and boring cadres of late Kádárism who were still in charge of the Socialist Party.
Our conversation in his ministerial office lasted well over an hour and was surprisingly frank. Without openly criticising Medgyessy, whom he had served as chief adviser from the beginning of 2003 until his elevation to government, he tore the Socialist Party to pieces, deriding it as a party incapable of deciding whom and what it represented. Gyurcsány visited party organisations in various parts of the country two or three times a week. When asked what the point of all these activities was, he responded simply with a friendly smile: he just wanted to serve, to the best of his ability, the delayed but inevitable modernisation of the Hungarian left.
Gyurcsány is of unimpeachable proletarian origins, having grown up in abject poverty in the small provincial town of Pápa in southwest Hungary. By the time he was twenty-one this talented student had already moved to the top of the Hungarian Communist Youth Federation (KISZ) at the teacher training college in the city of Pécs.
Several months later Gyurcsány became a full-time secretary of the youth organisation at the local university merged with his college, earning a more than presentable salary for the time. The rise of the young party apparatchik within the Youth Federation was both rapid and smooth. By 1989 he had already moved to Budapest as a secretary of the Federation’s National Committee. When he (temporarily) quit politics, Gyurcsány was the number two in the Democratic Youth League, which, though renamed, was still controlled by the Young Communists; it would soon disappear. At that time, Viktor Orbán, two years his junior, described him with uncanny intuition, in an oft-quoted remark, as the only interesting and capable representative in the Communist Youth Federation.
After 1989 this ambitious young man from the provinces, like so many others, blithely exploited the opportunities thrown up by privatisation and the transition from a command economy to a free market system. In the early 1990s Gyurcsány, by now the father of two boys, was already being regarded as an adroit and successful businessman. An affair with Klára Dobrev, the attractive, talented multilingual daughter of Piroska Apró, herself a top official and later successful businesswoman, led in the autumn of 1994 to divorce and, in turn, to his third marriage. It was to be the start of a new and exciting phase in his life.
That Ferenc Gyurcsány, the thirty-five-year-old son of a single working mother, could become a forint billionaire within just four years was little short of sensational. The media duly paid the requisite homage to his achievements. However, Gyurcsány’s image in modern Hungarian history is more controversial than that of almost every other politician. This is primarily due to his family connection with his mother-in-law Piroska Apró, who was an influential businesswoman and previously also a top civil servant. How else could even a young man as talented as Gyurcsány have turned 3 million fo
rints into 3 billion—€10,000 into €10 million—in just a few years? When a journalist asked him in the autumn of 1996 whether he had always wanted to be a businessman, Gyurcsány replied, ‘No … I thought that I’d make a very good politician, I thought one day I’d be prime minister. My poor country—as if it doesn’t have enough problems without me! … Today, I’d laugh at myself, but then I quite seriously believed in all of this.’2
Eight years later the apparently modest entrepreneur had indeed become prime minister of Hungary. József Debreczeni correctly observes that Gyurcsány’s career was unprecedented in Hungarian history; it was in fact a phenomenon. In the post-1989 era, Gyurcsány was the first billionaire to become a top politician. Not only that, nobody had ever risen so quickly to the very summit of power: in 2002, Gyurcsány was not even in parliament; by 2004 he was prime minister. How did this almost inconceivable stroke of luck even become possible?
For an understanding of Gyurcsány’s dramatic rise, we have to recall the consequences of the fall of the sympathetic but politically weak prime minister, Péter Medgyessy. After the ‘D-209’ affair, the Socialist Party reacted with lightning speed to topple the victor of the 2002 election, a man who had become a liability overnight, and to designate as his successor the uncharismatic but dependable Péter Kiss, chief minister in the Prime Minister’s Office. The vote in the party presidium in favour of Kiss went off smoothly, without opposition. Within twenty-four hours, however, the party grandees were confronted with a grassroots revolt among the party members. Representatives of the various factions, its youth wing, supporters in the provinces and activists forced the calling of an extraordinary party congress to choose a new prime minister.
Communications experts gave the stolid Kiss no chance whatsoever against the charismatic Viktor Orbán in the parliamentary elections due two years later, in 2006. In this situation Gyurcsány’s friends and soon Gyurcsány himself sensed an opportunity for his own candidature. Under normal circumstances this would have been an enormous risk: he had after all only joined the Socialist Party four years previously. However, in just a week’s intensive campaigning on the telephone, Gyurcsány and his closest advisers were able to turn everything around and win over the support, above all, of the representatives from the provinces. In the parliamentary party’s preliminary vote, Kiss was still ahead and Gyurcsány came third behind the future finance minister János Veres. But from the party executive Kiss received just a few more votes than Gyurcsány, and both had to be nominated by a reluctant party leadership as candidates for the party congress to be held the next day, 25 August 2004.