Orbán
Page 9
A strange mood pervaded Budapest at the time. Even though the prospect deeply concerned them, Liberal intellectual circles were resigned to a clear victory for Fidesz. Knowledgeable commentators, foremost among them József Debreczeni, who has been quoted many times in this book, all warned of the consequences of Orbán’s winning a two-thirds majority as many feared. Yet even left-wing opponents of Fidesz found Debreczeni’s analysis and warnings unduly pessimistic. It should not be forgotten that for the previous eight years the Socialist–Free Democrat coalition had frequently been mired in sleaze, cronyism and political corruption. Some young commentators did not conceal their desire for a strong, ordering hand and mocked Debreczeni for his gloomy predictions. A well-known political scientist spoke of a ‘changed Orbán’, whilst moderate conservative supporters expressed their hope that a strong Fidesz government would indeed clean out the swamp of corruption and the system of clients that had fed off it. Nevertheless, even sharp critics of the Socialists remembered a speech by Orbán, held in a closed circle but later published in full in a Fidesz newspaper, in which he voiced his hope for the creation ‘of a central political force field’, in which a large, conservative party, i.e. Fidesz, could rule freely and unhindered by any opposition for the ‘coming 15 to 20 years’.
We spent the evening of the election, 11 April 2010, with several dozen liberal and moderate conservative artists, academics and journalists at an election party given by an artist couple. Soon after the polling stations closed and the first exit polls came in, Fidesz was felt to have scored an overwhelming victory. That same evening, even before the final result was known, the jubilation in the right-wing camp was entirely comprehensible. Fidesz had won 57.2 per cent of the popular vote and 206 parliamentary seats—with 192 MPs required for a majority in parliament, Orbán already had a clear majority in the first round. At issue was not only his own personal triumph but also the alarming rise of the extreme right Jobbik Party, which had won 17 per cent of the vote. Approximately 75 per cent of the Hungarian electorate had opted for right or far right parties.
The collapse of the post-1989 era’s two large moderate parties (the MDF, centre-right, and the Free Democrats, centre-left) facilitated Fidesz’s sweeping victory in the single-member constituencies. Both parties failed to win 5 per cent of the vote, the prerequisite to enter parliament. The election was also a catastrophe for the governing Socialists, who received only 19 per cent of the vote, down from 43 per cent in 2006. Two weeks later, in the second round of voting, the defeat of the left was complete.1 For the first time in the history of democratic Hungary, a political party had achieved a two-thirds majority: with a total of 263 MPs Fidesz held 68 per cent of the seats in parliament. The Socialists had a mere fifty-nine and Jobbik, in the first elections it had contested, forty-seven. Fidesz’s achievement, extraordinary by European standards, owed much to the Hungarian electoral system’s tendency to generate clear but disproportionate majorities.
For some of the guests, above all the younger ones, at the election party we were attending the gloom was relieved by the surprising success of the new LMP grouping (‘Politics can be different’). Thanks to the appeal of its green and youth-oriented programme, this new party won 7.5 per cent of the popular vote (10 per cent in Budapest) and sixteen MPs. It had excluded any cooperation, even in local elections, with the Socialists. After the election and especially before its split in 2012–13 (when approximately half of its MPs quit the party), rumours circulated about a covert electoral manoeuvre by Fidesz to support the politically diverse LMP, with the aim of isolating the left. Almost all our friends had voted for the LMP and were happy about its unexpected success on election night.
The overwhelming Fidesz victory marked a turning point in the political history of Hungary. The Socialists had suffered a debacle in every voter group. This was confirmed in subsequent analyses by pollsters. The reasons were not hard to find: the Socialists’ inability to act, their involvement in numerous corruption scandals and their almost constant factional struggles. The survey results among those aged between eighteen and twenty-nine were particularly ominous for the future of the party: only 10 per cent had voted for the Socialists, whereas the extremist Jobbik Party had attracted the support of 18–23 per cent of this age group.
The final result of the election was a clear and unequivocal message, one of great significance for Hungary. With 80 per cent of the right- and extreme right-wing MPs in parliament behind him following the ‘successful revolution at the ballot box’, Viktor Orbán could swiftly implement his vision of creating a ‘central political force field’. Given the annihilation of the left, in his seizure of absolute power, the only threat for the foreseeable future—if there was one at all—was from the right. The years since 2010 have provided ample evidence that the new strongman of Hungary would not be held back on his path towards an authoritarian order, neither by the political opposition nor by a functioning civil society.
The man who probably knows the Fidesz leader best, his biographer József Debreczeni, had warned earlier than most other commentators about the consequences of Orbán’s reckless opportunism and his insatiable greed for power and money. In the epilogue of his second book on Orbán, published in 2009, he wrote: ‘Once he is in possession of a constitutional majority, he will turn this into an impregnable fortress of power … Nobody should have any doubts that Orbán will recklessly and utterly exploit this power.’ The recent shifts in the governing and social structures of Hungary, pushed through at breakneck speed following Orbán’s brilliant electoral victory, have only confirmed Debreczeni’s warnings, previously dismissed by some as alarmist.
After ‘the Hungarian nation’s historic deed’ in delivering the 2010 election result, the pompous text of a ‘Manifesto of National Cooperation’ was approved by Fidesz’s two-thirds majority in parliament and hung (in a 50 x 70cm glass frame) in all public offices. The overblown speeches of the prime minister and his followers, together with their unctuous declarations at national celebrations, were intended to make clear to the masses the meaning of the ‘revolution at the ballot box’, and to whip up their enthusiasm for the new system. With an iron fist, the democratic and constitutional checks and balances built into the system in 1989–90 were removed. In his final speech of the new parliament’s first session, Prime Minister Orbán boasted that his ‘national centre’ had achieved more in fifty-six days than the Socialist–Free Democrat government had in eight years.2
Debreczeni has dismissed the lofty claims of a ‘system of national cooperation’ as a ‘falsification of history based on lies, pure and simple’. The 2.7 million votes won by Fidesz in 2010 comprised in reality little more than half of the actual vote, approximately one third of the electorate and about a quarter of the population. It was therefore stretching credibility to describe Fidesz as the embodiment ‘of the undivided will of the unified Hungarian nation’.3 Despite this legitimate argument, one must also remember the fact that in 1994 the Socialist Party had won a comfortable majority of 54 per cent of the parliamentary seats with only 31.6 per cent of the popular vote; when the support of its Free Democrat coalition partner was added to this, the new government held 72 per cent of parliamentary seats with only 49.9 per cent of the popular vote.4 In his reckoning with the taboos of the 1989 system change, the journalist János Széky came to the justified conclusion that the institutions created at that time bore within themselves the seeds of the subsequent abuses.
How was it possible for Fidesz to attain this two-thirds majority? One of the primary reasons was the explosive force of the national question in Hungary, banned from public discourse under the communists, then repressed or concealed for decades. Despite the eastern enlargement of the EU and the opportunity for over 2 million members of the Hungarian minority in Central Europe (with the exception of Serbia and Ukraine) to travel visa-free, the overwhelming significance of the trauma that has dominated everything else since the abusive Treaty of Trianon cannot be underestimated. No H
ungarian reacts with indifference when it comes to the architectural gems and memorials, the graves of mighty kings and the birth houses of great poets, in the old Hungarian towns in Transylvania (Romania), ‘Upper Hungary’ (Slovakia) and Vojvodina (Serbia). Novels and poems, paintings and family histories keep alive the memories of a glorious but irrevocably lost past. One must always remember that Hungary lost more than two-thirds of its territory and three-fifths of its population; after 1920 more than three million Hungarians lived under foreign suzerainty.
The populist rhetoric of the right and the passivity of the left have combined to create an interpretative narrative of Trianon that is dominated by right- and extreme right-wing views. The failure of the 2004 initiative, conceived by the right-dominated World Union of Hungarians and supported by Fidesz, to grant Hungarian citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring states had marked the beginning of the radicalisation of Hungarian policies on the minorities.5 This was also shaped by the periodical stirring up of historical resentments by right-wing parties in Slovakia, Romania and Serbia. The apparently indifferent (at times even hostile) attitude of the Hungarians in the mother country towards the citizenship question left deep wounds in the ranks of the Hungarian minorities abroad struggling for equal rights in culture and education.
Orbán’s statement in May 2009 about a ‘unified nation extending beyond national borders, belonging together’ caused outrage, as did the proposal to discuss the joint representation of the Hungarians from the Carpathian Basin in the European Parliament. Shortly after it assumed office in 2010, the Fidesz government rushed two laws through parliament: one on the right of all Hungarians living abroad to a Hungarian passport even if they did not have permanent residence in Hungary; and the other designating 4 June, the day the Treaty of Trianon was signed in 1920, as the ‘Day of National Solidarity’. These lightning moves were of course also motivated by the desire to outflank the aggressively nationalistic Jobbik Party after its surprising success in the election. Despite criticism from abroad and the exaggerated reaction in some neighbouring states, the move to undermine the extreme right paid off completely. In 2014 those Hungarian citizens residing abroad exercised for the first time the right to vote in a Hungarian parliamentary election. Reliable sources state that 95 per cent of this new electorate voted for Fidesz.6
Critical observers tend to recall a controversial remark made by the former health minister István Mikola before the elections of 2006: ‘If we win for four years, and then, let’s say, grant the 5 million Hungarians citizenship and allow them to vote, then everything would be decided for the next 20 years.’ Mikola almost immediately denied ever having said this.
The promotion of the Christian-national unity of the Magyars in order to seize and maintain power, regardless of borders or hostile international reactions, has been one of the decisive ideological and political successes of Viktor Orbán. In the Manifesto of National Cooperation, ‘work, home, family, health and order’ are named as the pillars of the ‘new system that has arisen through the will of the people’ and ‘of the connection between the members of the multifaceted Hungarian nation’. The preamble of the 2010 parliamentary declaration making 4 June the ‘Day of National Solidarity’ commemorating Trianon contains a telling phrase: ‘God is the Lord of history’.
10
THE NEW CONQUEST
Since Fidesz’s election victory in the spring of 2010, Hungary has lived in a new era. There is no longer any meaningful discussion, as there would be in other democratic countries, about whether and when this government could be replaced in an election. The tacit and general assumption is that after its two overwhelming electoral successes of 2010 and 2014 the Orbán regime cannot be defeated under ‘normal’ circumstances by any free and fair election in the foreseeable future. The bastion of power elaborately constructed since 2010 is, as far as it is humanly possible to tell, impregnable to external assault. The prospects of the opposition are so bleak and it is so hopelessly disunited that it offers no serious option for political change. It says everything that in all its brilliant essays, stretching to 1,750 pages, Bálint Magyar’s three-volume The Hungarian Octopus: The Post-Communist Mafia State, the most ambitious project yet describing and analysing the regime, has barely a word to say on realistic alternatives or promising, let alone possible, opposition strategies. Nevertheless, it represents a singular and highly original combination of insightful studies on the disastrous legal, political, social and economic consequences of Fidesz rule.1
The views of Hungarian commentators (some of whom already speak of ‘Orbánism’) on the nature of the Orbán regime are far from unanimous. Bálint Magyar, the inventor of the expression ‘Hungarian mafia state’, describes the regime as ‘the privatised form of a parasite state, an economic undertaking run by the family of the Godfather exploiting the political and public instruments of power’. This viewpoint—whereby the state institutions within the framework of the system serve the interests of one political family, and primarily those of its boss—is, for example, disavowed by the legal scholar Tamás Sárközy, on the basis that it is not a sociological academic analysis.2
Opinion is divided as to whether the structures established after 2010 are still those of a democracy or have already morphed into a kind of authoritarian system; there is only agreement that the system may no longer be considered a liberal democracy. Some believe that it may indeed be seen as a democracy of some kind because there remains the theoretical possibility of removing the government. In contrast the academics János Kornai and Lajos Bokros, as well as Bálint Magyar, speak expressly of an authoritarian system.3 Kornai cites ‘the systematic demolition of the fundamental institutions of democracy’, while Bokros believes that ‘an authoritarian and strongly centralised political power, a state without limits, has arisen’. The author and journalist Rudolf Ungváry even believes the regime (though this is still not evident to the majority of its citizens) to be a manipulated ‘fascistoid mutation’; the sociologist Ferenc Pataki defines it as ‘a neo-collectivist, neo-communist experiment’ and Erzsébet Szalai, also a sociologist, as a ‘semi-dictatorship’. The political scientist and former education minister András Bozóki speaks of a ‘hybrid regime’, in which ‘the features of an authoritarian system are stronger than those of a democracy’.
Tamás Bauer, an economist and professor emeritus at the University of Frankfurt, rejects the mafia-state interpretation because it ignores the societal basis of the regime. However, he judges the entire Orbán regime a tyranny, as the separation of powers has been abolished. For this reason he also considers any preparations the opposition may make for the elections due in 2018 a damaging illusion, citing here, as do many other commentators, Orbán’s famous interview with the Austrian tabloid Kronen Zeitung from 10 June 2011. Responding to a question as to whether the laws created through the new constitution, which can only be amended by a two-thirds majority, would tie the hands of future governments, the prime minister replied: ‘I will extend the two-thirds law only on one point: that of economic laws. And I make no secret of the fact that in this respect I would like to tie the hands of the next government. And not only the next one, but the next ten governments!’
As mentioned in Chapter 9, on 5 September 2009 at a private party in the village of Kötcse, Orbán had spoken openly for the first time about the creation of a ‘central political force field, of a great political party’, which would replace the dual system for ‘fifteen to twenty years’.4 At that point Orbán was only the leader of the opposition. However, by the time of his 2011 Kronen Zeitung interview he was the official head of a government speaking in a foreign newspaper. His casual remark laid bare two basic truths: little more than a year after winning power, Orbán could allow himself the frankness of a head of government at risk from nobody, whilst at the same time and without any scruple revealing to the world and to the Hungarian public his long-term plans to retain power. He provided further evidence of his self-confident handling of his pow
er at a Fidesz party congress on 13 December 2015. Referring to the approaching thirtieth anniversary of Fidesz’s founding, he said, ‘We have been here for thirty years and we will also be here for the next thirty.’ Fidesz was the most successful party in Europe and he was prepared, in two years’ time, if the trust was still there, to lead the party into the election campaign and, should it win, to continue as prime minister from 2018.
There is scarcely a country in Europe where the head of government is able to display so blithely and confidently his projections for staying in power behind a democratic smokescreen. The victorious Fidesz leader is thus thinking in terms of ten legislative periods—fifteen to twenty, even thirty years in power. In light of what has happened in the country since the breakthrough of April 2010, this brings us to the now almost forgotten debate at the time of that victory, over two diametrically opposed scenarios. One theory presumed the existence of a cogent master plan for a radical rupture with liberal democracy and also with the rule of law protecting minority and individual rights. The other saw the events mainly as a consequence of irrational and/or dilettante actions.5 Today, it is incontrovertible that what perhaps could most accurately be described as a new land conquest (a reference to the legendary conquest of the Danube basin by the Magyars in 896 AD) has been conducted following a precise script whilst, at the same time, the activities of the central administration have been characterised by improvised, non-ideological dabbling. The lightning-speed assault on the key institutions that traditionally served as a counterbalance to executive power and as a controlling mechanism had obviously long been prepared. It is no accident that Orbán’s infamous remark from his time in the opposition is quoted so often: ‘We have only to win once, but then properly.’