by Paul Lendvai
a highly centralised, partially illiberal democracy which systematically undermines the structures of checks and balances, which intimidates or de facto directly controls the media, which weakens civil society—and which makes it very likely that Fidesz will win elections in the foreseeable future (or, should it actually lose an election, can continue to control the important state institutions) … All this must in turn be seen in connection with a redrawing of parliamentary constituencies and local districts which creates enormous advantages for Fidesz so that it remains the strongest party. The parallels with Putin’s ‘guided democracy’ simply cannot be avoided. Certainly, elections will continue to be held in Hungary, Orbán’s opponents will be allowed to demonstrate in Budapest, critical voices will find a niche somewhere in the media. Power really changing hands, however, is increasingly unlikely—even in the case of opposition parties winning the next elections.6
These and similar court decisions, declaring sections of Fidesz laws null and void, were considered by the power-conscious Hungarian prime minister as intolerable humiliations, and he took his revenge for these embarrassments with a massive counter-attack. In March 2013 the parliamentary majority voted for a significant curbing of the constitutional court’s competences. Any review of the constitutionality of those laws concerning state finances was prohibited, and all laws previously overturned by the constitutional court were made into constitutional law and written into the constitution. This means that senior judges can neither examine nor cancel them. László Sólyom, the long-serving first president of the court (1989–98) and later state president (2005–10), described this ominous withdrawal of competences as an ‘act of revenge of the parliamentary majority’, enabling it to ‘liberate itself from the restrictions of the constitution and constitutional controls’.7
He also pointed out that, thanks to the two-thirds majority, parliament could enact any clause in the form of a constitutional amendment even if it diametrically contradicted other articles in the Hungarian Fundamental Law. The fourth amendment in March 2013 rescinded all decisions taken before the inception of the new constitution on 1 January 2012. With this, in Sólyom’s view, a significant portion of valid Hungarian constitutional law lost its binding force.
Since this first rather cautious criticism of parliamentary manipulation, Hungarian and international lawyers and academics have continued, much more openly, to raise the alarm about the looming consequences. With the notorious cardinal acts, the Orbán government has been able to create one fait accompli after another. Thus, for example, the reformed Budget Council, now anchored in the constitution, is authorised to veto at will any budget decided by parliament. Its three members are proposed by the prime minister and sent to the Budget Council by the governor of the National Bank, the president of the Court of Auditors and the state president. Their period of office is nine years and they cannot be dismissed. Their veto of the budget automatically triggers the dissolution of parliament and new elections. It goes without saying that the three members, in office until 2020, are loyal partisans of Orbán, who through this instrument are furnished with unprecedented power and who, even in the unlikely event of an election defeat, would continue to have a crucially decisive voice in Hungarian politics.
Another attempt, admittedly one that has at the time of writing so far failed, was the amendment of the law on the National Bank. At the end of 2011 the Fidesz government wanted to merge the central bank and the financial market authority into a new super-body, with a new chair to be named by parliament. The then independent and autonomous governor of the National Bank, András Simor, would become one of three deputies to the president of the new super-authority, and would thus be stripped of power. Through the energetic protests of the European Central Bank and the EU Commission, this provocative proposal, without parallel in European banking, was finally blocked and Orbán had to withdraw the bill. There was, however, no let-up on the intense pressure on Simor. When I visited him in the National Bank during this period, he told me that there were no fewer than five different investigations being conducted against him by various government offices.
Even before this the Fidesz-controlled parliament had, as an act of revenge, reduced Simor’s monthly salary by 75 per cent to 2 million forints (€8,000). At the end of his six-year term in office in March 2013, he was replaced by György Matolcsy, the former finance minister. Three years later Matolcsy’s remuneration was, without any explanation, raised to five million forints a month. (In November 2013, despite the opposition of Fidesz, Simor was elected vice-president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London.) As far as monetary policy is concerned, Matolcsy has shown himself to be just as obedient an executioner of Orbán’s policies at the head of the National Bank as in his previous position as minister of finance. However, within in two years of taking office, Matolcsy and the National Bank became, as will be described in Chapter 15, the focus of a major public corruption scandal.
Independently minded political scientists, legal experts and journalists have provided endless lists of names and details on how, in the filling of important positions, the rules on incompatibility have simply been thrown overboard.8 Orbán had a law specially changed to enable a specific army officer to become an MP. For another minion he had a sports college hived off from a university in order to name him its rector. Another creature in a key position is the long-serving public prosecutor Péter Polt, whose obligation to retire was waived and whose period of office was extended to nine years; moreover, he can no longer be questioned in parliament and his successor can only be nominated by a two-thirds majority. The introduction of special penalty taxes for international banks and for foreign financial and trading companies, coupled with particularly generous preferential treatment for supermarket chains whose Hungarian owners are politically close to Fidesz, the large-scale eradication of private small tobacconists and the allotment of multiple licenses (National Tobacco Shops) to relatives of Fidesz politicians or trusted supporters are further characteristic examples of how Orbán has systematically cemented power.
The centralisation of the school system was enabled by granting the minister responsible the power to nominate the 5,000 school heads and by subordinating the entire school sector to a new central administrative authority (KLIK). In 2016 the desolate condition of middle and vocational schools triggered an open conflict between protesting teachers and the principal KLIK office. The financing of the universities was also placed under the control of chancellors named by the government, whilst university rectors would be directly nominated by the minister. It is also of significance that the shady foundations set up by the National Bank to propagate the government’s unorthodox economic policies are alone equivalent in funds to the entire higher education sector’s eighteen-month budget.
There have thus been numerous examples since Fidesz took office in the spring of 2010 of the trend towards a consistent, even if somewhat veiled, eradication of the separation of powers (legislature, judiciary and executive) that lies at the heart of a democratic state under the rule of law. Since the 2014 election victory, the dismantling of parliamentary controls has been accelerated. A comparison of the first years of the 2010 and 2014 governments shows, for example, that the time devoted to enacting individual pieces of legislation sank on average from 2 hours and 12 minutes to 1 hour and 15 minutes—that is, by almost 50 per cent. The number of votes held in parliament also fell by two thirds between 2011 and 2015. The approval of the internationally controversial erection of a fence along Hungary’s southern border to keep out refugees, as well as the authorisation of the army’s deployment to police it, was dealt with in barely two hours. The favourite trick of individual MPs introducing draft legislation without any previous substantial debate has continued to enable fast-track procedures. An administrative record in this case was achieved on 21 September 2013: the amendment of a law was passed, from its first oral proposal in parliament to a final vote, in a mere ten minutes. In April
2016 the parliamentary majority granted the government the authority to amend the budget without consulting parliament. This momentous decision was considered by observers as a further step along the path to government by decree.9
The fourth amendment to the Hungarian Fundamental Law referred to above means that any violation of the constitution identified as such by the constitutional court can have no practical consequences if the government simply incorporates the controversial law into the constitution by means of its two-thirds voting machine. For good reason the constitutional lawyer Imre Vörös (himself a member of the constitutional court between 1990 and 1999) and the former president László Sólyom have both observed that ‘the end of the separation of powers means in reality’ that between 2010 and 2014 the Orbán regime was able to effect ‘an unconstitutional coup … [under] the cover of constitutionality, with constitutional means’.10
12
THE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE
In seizing and consolidating his hold on power Viktor Orbán has repeatedly demonstrated, especially when in difficult situations, an almost uncanny instinct for the mobilisation of Hungarians’ deeply rooted nationalist sentiments. When describing in my previous books the path to the collapse of historical Hungary and the developments after the suppression of the October 1956 uprising, I referred to ‘the sense of mission of an easily seducible nation’ and to the experience of ‘victory in defeat’.1 The trait which the Magyars call délibáb literally means fata morgana, an illusion. The talent for wishful thinking, a tendency which the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi describes as ‘magical thought’, this penchant for daydreaming has moulded the attitudes of the elite and the people in the repeated crises the nation has faced. In his standard work on the intellectual and social history of Austria-Hungary, the American historian William M. Johnson observes of délibáb:
Readiness to see the world through rose-coloured glasses induced Magyars to exaggerate their grandeur, while they ignored the misery of subject peoples … Capacity for dreaming has made Magyars superlative advocates, ever ready to defend Hungary as an exception among nations.2
As a consequence of the recurring misfortunes since the conquest of 896, fears of a slow death for a small nation and the loneliness of a people with a language unique across the Carpathian Basin have remained the decisive factors in Hungarian history. The interplay between openness and isolation, between lonely sentiments and a sense of mission, between fear of death and rebellion, has always had a marked influence on the changing times and culture of the Hungarians. Feelings of defencelessness (‘We are the most forsaken of all peoples on the Earth’ in the words of Sándor Petőfi, the national poet) have imbued almost every generation of Magyars with a deep-rooted pessimism.
The list of catastrophes is long: the devastation of a country left in the lurch by the Occident during the Mongol invasion in 1241, the defeat at Mohács in 1526, which resulted in a century-and-a-half of Turkish occupation, the crushing of the struggle for independence in 1848–9 by the combined forces of Austria and Russia, the destruction of historical Hungary with the diktat of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, the four decades of communism after the Second World War and the bloody suppression of the October Uprising in 1956. Taken together, these misfortunes have exacerbated the national sense of abandonment. In spite of the centuries of foreign rule, however, the Hungarians have been able to preserve their national identity. It is their passionate love of their motherland which has always given them the strength to survive and to overcome all calamities, trapped, as they believe they are, between the Germans and the Slavs, without any kith or kin and separated by the ‘Chinese Wall’ of their language.
In the introduction to my book The Hungarians: A Thousand Years Of Victory In Defeat (Hurst and Princeton, 2003), I wrote that the survival of the Hungarians and their nation state is a miracle of European history; but I also pointed to the ‘unresolved question of the conjunction of patriotism and liberalism, of the national idea and social progress’, and characterised the bridging of this yawning gap between Hungarian political culture’s two tendencies as the fateful question for the future of ‘the victors in defeat’, and for Hungary’s place in a changing Europe. Almost two decades later, the seven years of new ‘conquest’ superbly orchestrated by Viktor Orbán’s government apparatus have answered my question clearly and unambiguously, in favour of the pre-eminence of the nation. The nationalist-populist course charted since April 2010 confirms yet again the warnings of István Bibó, written in 1946 after the inferno of the Second World War: that democracy is threatened if, as a result of a catastrophe or an illusion, the cause of the nation is separated from that of liberty.3
These references to Hungarian history must always be considered in any analysis of the strategy and tactics of Orbán and his team in their major disputes with institutions like the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the IMF and the European Central Bank. This is not a question of individual cases but of the systematic character of a regime that violates the rules and values of the European Union. Fortunately, there is one reliable witness, one above suspicion, to the reasons behind the repeated conflicts between the Orbán government and the European Commission in 2010–14. This is Viviane Reding from Luxembourg, who in this period was vice-president of the European Commission for Justice, Basic Values and Citizenship. It is of significance that she also belongs to the European People’s Party (EPP), the strongest faction in the European Parliament; Viktor Orbán has for many years been one of its ten vice-presidents. A journalist before she entered politics, Reding, despite much opposition from within the EPP and despite a brutal campaign conducted by the Fidesz media, has resolutely reprimanded the Hungarian government; she has also succeeded in compelling the Orbán regime to retreat in a number of important areas.4
The victorious Fidesz party always insists that its two-thirds majority justifies its key claim: we and we alone represent the people, the true Hungarians. In this context it should not be forgotten that Orbán, after surprisingly losing the premiership in the 2002 parliamentary elections, maintained that the nation (obviously embodied only by Fidesz) could not be in opposition. This claim to the sole ideological representation of the Hungarian nation, irreconcilable with the inherent concepts of democracy, runs like a thread through the deeds and declarations of Fidesz governments. From the first disputes with the IMF and the European Commission about Fidesz’s financial, judicial and media policies, to the rejection of the international outcry against the treatment of refugees and the sealing off of borders, the struggle to protect ‘hard-working Hungarians’ against the domestic and foreign foes of the mother country has become a constant feature of Fidesz discourse. On 15 March 2011, the prime minister chose the traditional event held on the steps of the National Museum in Budapest to mark the national holiday to rebuke his critics in this unceasing struggle in defence of the homeland: Hungary is not a colony, he said, and, after the occupation of the country by the Turks, the Habsburgs and the Russians, will not let itself be oppressed by Brussels.
From the very beginning, the full-frontal assault on the EU, which provided financial aid to Hungary amounting to about €23 billion between 2007 and 2013, has formed the core of the rhetorical crisis management of the ‘liberation struggle’.5 Hence, the particular sensitivity to criticism when in the first half of 2011 Hungary was due to assume the revolving EU presidency (for the first time since joining the EU in 2004). The measures under attack, either already in force or announced, were aimed at seizing control of the state apparatus, the dismantling of the constitutional state, the introduction of special taxes against foreign banks and concerns, and above all the state control of the media.
The law on control of the media adopted on 20 December 2010 by the two-thirds majority (despite its draft being heavily criticised) immediately became the target of generally negative reporting in both the EU and the USA. Ever since his electoral defeat in 2002, Viktor Orbán has striven for a takeover of the public serv
ice media, in conjunction with building up a pro-Fidesz media empire run by friendly oligarchs. As a first step, the three public service TV stations (M1, M2 and Duna-TV), the three nationwide radio stations and even the official press agency (MTI) were amalgamated under the umbrella of the new Media Services and Support Trust Fund.6 The twin tasks of this enormous conglomerate, in which Fidesz people control all important positions, were a weeding out of unreliable employees, and the administration by a single office of the huge state subsidies available for friendly media. A centralised media authority was created to oversee the political control of the central editorial department, which provided the news ‘gratis’ to all broadcasters; other functions included the selection of directors-general and the allocation of frequencies, as well as the control of ‘balanced news reporting’ and the imposition of sanctions. Orbán personally named a trusted Fidesz official as its head for nine years. All members of the new Media Council were appointed from within the ranks of Fidesz loyalists for the same period.
The vague formulation of the guidelines and the authority to compel journalists to reveal their sources, or impose draconian punishments on newspapers and journalists in cases of libel, led to a European-wide storm of protest. As early as September 2010, Dunja Mijatović, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, observed that ‘Laws like these are actually only known in totalitarian countries where governments limit freedom of speech.’ She added that the law did not comply with OSCE standards, which Hungary had pledged to keep.
In light of the government’s casual approach to the rules of the EU, Jean Asselborn, the long-serving foreign minister of Luxembourg, cast doubt on the suitability of Hungary to assume the EU presidency. The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA), Reporters Without Borders, the European parliamentary leaders of the Liberals and Social Democrats, and the EU Commission have all criticised the media law. This is in addition to their negative observations on some cardinal acts and parts of the new constitution infringing the independence of the judiciary, of the data protection office and of the National Bank.