Orbán
Page 12
Orbán obviously underestimated the outrage of the international community at his attempt to keep the Hungarian media on a strict leash. His guiding principle of governance has remained unchanged to this day: ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’, take a step back to jump further. In a revealing phrase (revealing because it came impromptu in a speech given before a selected friendly audience on 31 May 2012, the second anniversary of the swearing in of the Fidesz government), Orbán characterised the virtuoso mastery of negotiation tactics with the EU as a ‘dance of the peacock’. This is the art of employing double-speak with critics in the governing organs of the EU and then bamboozling them so adroitly that they get the (false) impression that the Hungarian side had yielded, although in reality it had stuck unswervingly to the Orbán course:
Because of the diplomatic dance we must present the challenge in such a way as if we would like to make friends with them. Part of the skill of this dance is nodding our heads in agreement with two or three of their seven proposals (we had in any case already implemented them but they hadn’t noticed) and the other two, which we don’t want anyway, we reject so that we actually accept the majority. This complicated game is a type of dance of the peacock.7
Voluntarily admitting this in public was unprecedented. But it was also an arrogant confession as Orbán’s belief in his personal ability to masterfully fool his simpleminded opponents without them even noticing.
The dispute over the media law gave Orbán an opportunity in Brussels and Strasbourg to engage in this double-talk for domestic and foreign consumption, and to strut his peacock dance. In the years of both public and secret disputes with the EU’s institutions, as well as with critical media, the reactions of Orbán and his people have always followed the well-known steps of this dance. Before his trip to Strasbourg for his first official visit as the new EU president, he bragged on Hungarian TV: ‘We don’t even dream of changing the media law. Only a country that lacks self confidence would withdraw this law, and such a country we are not.’ Accompanying music was provided, as always, in the form of furious outbursts against left-wing conspirators abroad, who, hand-in-hand with his perfidious Socialist–Free Democrat predecessors, would like to torpedo the nationalist conservative policies of the Orbán government.
The hostile international reaction in Strasbourg to the presentation of the Hungarian presidency’s programme, then a year later to the negative statements of the Commission and, especially, to the July 2013 publication of the Taveres Report on Hungarian constitutional concerns (see below), were all accompanied by passionate and personal polemics traded between Orbán and his harshest critics. Among the latter were the former Liberal prime minister of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt, the Austrian leader of the Social Democrats in the European Parliament, Hannes Swoboda, and the legendary French-German rebel of 1968 and co-chair of the Greens, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. During the Hungarian premier’s inaugural visit to the European Parliament in January 2011, Green MEPs symbolically greeted him with their mouths taped over, waving banners on which the word ‘censored’ was plastered over the front pages of Hungarian newspapers. (Unfortunately, some pro-Fidesz newspapers with ‘censored’ all over them were also held up, a faux pas that unintentionally gave Orbán’s propagandists the easy argument that Hungary’s critics were very ill-informed.)
Under the pressure of international headlines, Orbán made a tactical withdrawal, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. Four points of the media law were amended. These cosmetic changes primarily affected the foreign media, no longer required to register with the media authorities or fined in cases of alleged violations of the media law. Among other concessions were the abolition of the obligation of ‘balanced news reporting’ and restrictions of the ambiguous rules on libelling individuals or groups. These minor adjustments left the essence of the media law, namely the restricting of press freedom by a media council stuffed full with Fidesz representatives, unscathed.
In a penetrating analysis, Mária Vásárhelyi,8 a communications scientist and a critic of the regime, confirms that despite such cosmetic concessions on the contested media law Fidesz was indeed able to achieve its political goals unhindered: total control of the public service media sector and the rapid expansion of its own media empire by friendly oligarchs. After his own apparent Humiliation of Canossa9 in Strasbourg, Orbán could with some justification boast before his domestic audience that ‘We have successfully defended the media law and rendered the arguments of our opponents risible.’
The media authorities have placed loyal Fidesz henchmen in all key positions. Over 1,000 experienced employees (including one with five children and another in the late stages of pregnancy) were dismissed without notice; influential and popular programmes were simply cancelled. Fidesz’s events manager was named director of the first TV channel (M1) whilst a man who was involved in two public scandals continued to be responsible as editor-in-chief for the news. On one occasion he had manipulated a report about a press conference given by Cohn-Bendit; on another, he had the face of the former president of the Supreme Court digitally removed from a TV report. Appearances by government members and other Fidesz politicians make up 70 per cent of the news on state TV and over 80 per cent of the daily programmes on Kossuth Rádió, the national radio station; two out of three reports trumpet government triumphs, whilst two thirds of the news about the opposition deals with its failures or internal disputes.
With its total control over the public service media, the creation of a media empire run by oligarchs close to Fidesz, the intimidation of the commercial media and the government boycott on advertising in liberal and left-wing newspapers and radio stations, the governing party has succeeded in ensuring that 80 per cent of viewers and listeners receive only information provided directly or indirectly by the government. After the international storm of protest in 2011–12, the regime’s approach towards the media was subtly changed. It no longer relies on relatively easily discernible legal levers but has turned to other means of manipulating the state broadcasters into becoming propagandists of the regime. This was achieved with the aid of the substantial Media Services and Support Trust Fund, whose budget was doubled to 80 billion forints (approximately €260 million) between 2010 and 2015. Light entertainment, shows and magazine programmes were purchased from pro-Fidesz media companies, primarily, at least until the beginning of 2015, from the empire set up by Orbán’s close friend Lajos Simicska and his partners. Hungarians spend on average four hours a day in front of the TV, and for 80 per cent of the audience their main source of information comes from the two large commercial broadcasters RTL and TV2. Fidesz also succeeded (at least until RTL was saved by Chancellor Merkel and TV2 was taken over completely by Andy Vajna) in depoliticising these two private stations through indirect pressure, targeted interventions and discreet threats of increases in advertising taxes.
In the print media, right-wing daily and weekly newspapers supporting Fidesz have been massively subsidised by a rapid increase in public service announcements and state advertising campaigns. Thus, for example, the weekly Heti Válasz, founded by the spokesman of the first Orbán government, received six times as many state advertisements as the business magazine HVG, which has a circulation three times higher. The declining market for daily newspapers offers a similar picture. In the first half of 2012 alone, the then Fidesz mouthpiece Magyar Nemzet received 17 per cent of all state advertising expenditure whilst Népszabadság, its centre-left competitor (again with a higher circulation), had to content itself with a mere 1.5 per cent. Hír-TV, a news channel à la CNN, and Echo-TV, founded by a pro-Fidesz multimillionaire and offering content wholly defined by Fidesz programming, are likewise generously subsidised by the government. In light of the double hegemony of the state-owned media and the private empire directed by Simicska, it is understandable that the prime minister easily succeeded in presenting himself and his party as heroic representatives of the spirit of the nation, at war on all fronts.
A rich s
ource of income has been discovered through the introduction of special taxes that flout the basic regulations of EU competition policy. These are aimed primarily at the dominant foreign banks, supermarket chains, and energy and telecommunications companies. Hungarian firms, especially those that are patrons of Fidesz, are spared such taxes. In order to bring down Hungary’s deficit to under 3 per cent and reduce state indebtedness, the government has taken measures that primarily hit foreign investors and multinational concerns. The EU Commission’s repeated threats of proceedings to protect democracy and the rule of law, as well as the temporary blocking of half-a-billion euros from the Cohesion Fund, only served as proof for regime propagandists of their complaints that the ‘Brussels bureaucrats’ have a double set of standards, one for larger states and one for smaller countries.
One of the ‘unorthodox’ laws most praised in the friendly media enabled the plundering of the private pension funds, which were nationalised overnight in December 2010, along with their assets of €10 billion (representing approximately 10 per cent of GDP), by the parliamentary majority. Economists point out that this money was used, without any oversight, partly to slash the budget deficit and partly for the (unsuccessful) reduction of foreign debts. The economist András Inotai has pertinently pointed to:
the absence of or, at least, an insufficient democratic awareness in society … The robbery of 3 million citizens would have led in any other state to mass protests and possibly to the removal (and criminal prosecution) of the government. The response of the Hungarian public was silence and apathy. From this Orbán could draw but one conclusion: if such a drastic step is possible without any counter reaction, then in such a society almost anything can be done.10
Inotai also points out that the anti-foreigner special taxes are supported by wide sections of society, poisoned by ‘xenophobia’, as well as by those domestic entrepreneurs who could not hold their own against foreign competition and who wanted to regain their lost market share. This is also the context of the 2014 land law with its retroactive provisions, which not only makes it difficult for foreigners to acquire agricultural land but also denies the existing property rights of foreign, above all Austrian, farmers.11
A side-effect of the nationalist-populist, right-wing course barely heeded abroad is the concerted campaign, both open and veiled, against critical reporting in foreign print and electronic media about the state of affairs in Hungary. This includes not only slanderous German language blogs and trolling in Internet fora but also regular direct interventions by Hungarian ambassadors with editors-in-chief and heads of TV stations in Germany, Austria, France and Sweden. Ernst Gelegs, the Budapest-based East European correspondent of the Austrian public broadcaster ORF, provides in his book many examples of these dubious practices.12
This pressure from the Orbán government on influential foreign newspapers and broadcasters has remained without effect. At home, however, between 2010 and 2014—that is, before Fidesz’s latest election victory—the public service broadcasters, as well as those owned by Simicska, complacently and obediently sang paeans to the national liberation struggle, embodied as always by Viktor Orbán. Watching some of these newscasts in Budapest takes one’s breath away: the degree of their similarity with the dishonest press and doctored TV reports of the communist era is chilling. The essence of news manipulation under authoritarian systems, and not only in dictatorships, is often primarily the power of silence, an invisible censorship.
The first of two examples: on the evening of 3 January 2012 the ceremony marking the introduction of the controversial Fundamental Law, which had come into force three days previously, was broadcast live on state TV from the Hungarian state opera house in Budapest. Outside, 10,000 people demonstrated on Andrássy Avenue with banners and loud chanting against the new constitution and against Orbán. Well-known artists and intellectuals gave short but passionate protest speeches. Yet, for hour after hour, public service TV showed only scenes from the official ceremony and interviews about the enormous significance of the Fundamental Law. The reporters mentioned, but almost as an aside, that ‘some people’ were demonstrating against the government, but there was not a single word about the protests of the EU, the USA and many international institutions at the Fundamental Law’s demolition of constitutional checks and balances being celebrated with such pomp.
A second example was the total silence in the regime’s media on the internationally recognised film director Béla Tarr when he won the Jury Grand Prix at the sixty-first Berlinale with his 2011 film The Turin Horse. The reason was simple: he had previously criticised government policy, particularly with regard to the centralisation of the film industry. Moreover, together with other famous artists such as the conductor Ádám Fischer and the pianist Sir András Schiff, Tarr had signed an ‘open letter to the artists of Europe and the entire world’ with an appeal to act against the media law, as well as against the growing anti-Semitism and nationalism in Hungary.13
From the very beginning, Orbán personally dictated the pace of the campaigns against his critics. Whether Liberals or Social Democrats, independent human rights activists or liberal artists, irrespective of their beliefs, everybody was herded into the ‘left corner’. In his speeches, for instance to the European Parliament in January 2012, and in interviews, especially with German newspapers, he conjured up a major European Kulturkampf between, on the one hand, a left-wing International and, on the other, the champions of piety, of the traditional family model and of the nation; unsurprisingly, he identified himself with the latter. The new constitution emphasises Christianity, family and national pride as the basis of Hungarian society, hence ‘the furious attacks from the camp of the international left’; Hungary is a country of freedom fighters: ‘Whoever doubts our will for the rule of law and democracy, we will fight fiercely.’ He is convinced that millions of EU citizens have had enough of thinking in old left-wing, ideological ways: ‘They don’t want to be forbidden to speak of values such as Christianity, the motherland, national pride or family. We stand for our values and our nation even if there is a headwind. And even if it reaches hurricane strength.’14
A year on from these 2012 interviews, a hurricane is exactly what grew in Brussels, and not only there, when the Fidesz government forced through the highly controversial fourth amendment to the constitution, clipping the wings of the constitutional court. EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding threatened the Hungarian government with the invocation of Article 7 of the EU Treaty—with the withdrawal of voting rights. Then in July 2013, after a year of careful research, the Portuguese Green MEP Rui Tavares presented a devastating forty-three-page report on civil rights in Hungary to the plenum of the European Parliament. This confirmed all the accusations of the critics so blithely dismissed by Orbán as ‘old left-wing conspirators’.15
The subsequent vote to condemn Hungary in light of the report, with 374 for, 244 against and eighty-two abstentions, represented a clear symbolic and moral defeat for Orbán, according to the American constitutional expert Kim Lane Scheppele. Only one third of MEPs were prepared to support Orbán even though the conservatives hold almost half the seats in the European Parliament.
Viviane Reding had warned in a series of interviews with Orbán that the constitution was ‘not a toy’, but noted with regret that the ‘atom bomb’ of the Article 7 withdrawal of voting rights was not applicable because opening proceedings required the approval of four-fifths of member states and a two-thirds majority in the European Parliament. The final decision would also have to be approved by all other EU member states. In a significant article published in September 2015, Reding (no longer a vice-president but still a member of the European Parliament) referred to the previous legal violations and condemned Orbán’s ‘fomentation of resentments’, ‘xenophobic stance’ and ‘intellectual poisoning of the well’ during the refugee crisis of that summer. She concluded her passionate accusations with a call to revoke Orbán’s membership of the European People’s Party: ‘
For too long we have allowed Orbán to cross red lines. For too long we have tolerated the violation of our values. Enough is enough. Orbán’s Fidesz should leave the EPP.’16
Nevertheless, such accusations—the counter-balance to the Kulturkampf unleashed by Orbán, as will be seen later in this book—is not unfavourable for his regime. In his weekly Friday broadcasts on Hungarian radio, Orbán can with some justification point to the fact that his anti-refugee measures aimed at sealing off Hungary are finding understanding in more and more countries, even being mimicked.17 However, the price that the Hungarian people are paying for their national liberation struggle à la Orbán is high. Almost half a million (overwhelmingly young) people have emigrated to Great Britain, Germany or Austria since 2010, above all to seek better wages but also to escape the state of siege in their motherland, contrived and orchestrated by Orbán.
13
A QUESTIONABLE ELECTION VICTORY
On 6 April 2014, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won what was by European standards an outstanding electoral victory, a renewal of his two-thirds majority. His loyalists quickly appeared on TV news and in discussion programmes where they displayed an almost provocative self-confidence whilst the Fidesz press virtually fell over itself in exultation. Magyar Nemzet, which was still at that time taking a pro-government line, ran the jubilant headline ‘Hungary has been dipped in orange’, a reference to the Fidesz Party colours.