by Paul Lendvai
In previous chapters we have seen how, in the years prior to his re-election, Orbán, unfazed by the justified warnings of a toothless EU, purposely set about laying the basis of an authoritarian system. The main features of this system after the first four years of Hungary’s new era were: the unassailable hegemony of the right-wing print and electronic media, strengthened by the silence of private broadcasters all too anxious about their advertising revenues; direct state control of all financial and credit policy (including the National Bank) and blithe discrimination against Western investors; the politically motivated personnel purges of the judiciary, higher education and the research institutes, and growing pressures on cultural and educational policy. Against this background, the election result was undoubtedly a personal triumph for the then fifty-year-old head of government.
Nevertheless, the image of an overwhelming mandate for another four years in office deceived, for the government had actually lost about 600,000 votes since 2010, almost one quarter of its support. In that election, Orbán’s party had won 53 per cent of the votes cast; in 2014 this dropped to 45 per cent. Yet despite this loss of eight percentage points (in an election where 40 per cent of the electorate abstained), Fidesz was still able to achieve exactly the number of parliamentary seats required to retain office with a two-thirds majority. Though Fidesz remained the most popular party in Hungary, Orbán was not satisfied with a simple parliamentary majority. Once again he had striven for the two thirds enabling him to make constitutional amendments at will.
How did Orbán and his party succeed in winning a two-thirds majority in parliament with the support of only one third of the electorate? This question was posed by Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton University and one of the few foreign observers who can speak Hungarian. In the introduction to her study on the 2014 elections,1 Scheppele refers first to the ‘scathing’ report of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) election monitors. They noted that the Fidesz government had an ‘undue advantage’ in the whole election process, from writing the rules to conducting the campaign. The report documented a general failure to separate party and state, a strongly biased media landscape, a partisan electoral apparatus and an election framework pushed through parliament without any input from the opposition. The monitors found that the Hungarian government had violated a number of important OSCE standards in the way that the election was run.
Scheppele was far from alone in emphasising that the new election law, most recently amended just a year before the election, had been tailor-made solely for the benefit of Fidesz. First of all, the Fidesz majority in the 2010–14 parliament had dramatically reduced the number of MPs from the next parliament onwards from 386 to 199, and redrawn all the constituency boundaries. This gerrymandering was not a proposal discussed publicly by experts, but a policy determined exclusively by Fidesz officials. Calculations made by Political Capital, a Budapest think tank, suggest that with this redistribution of seats the left-wing alliance would have needed 300,000 more votes than Fidesz to win a majority.
The governing party both abolished the previous two-round system in the individual constituencies and facilitated the proposal of candidates by ‘phantom parties’ and splinter groups. This new regulation favoured the largest party, Fidesz, as the divided left-wing opposition parties had to rally in an uneasy alliance behind a common candidate in order to have any chance of winning a single constituency. Fidesz also benefited significantly from the decision of the tiny, liberal-Green LMP not to join this five-party alliance.2 Scheppele calculates that the LMP’s determination to go it alone helped the ruling party to win eleven additional seats.3
What cannot be disputed is the fact that with 45 per cent of the votes in the new electoral districts Fidesz won 90 per cent of the seats (96 out of 106). According to Scheppele, it secured for itself six additional seats through a transferable voting system unique in Europe. As we’ve seen, Hungary has a combined electoral system, in which voters cast one vote in their local constituency and another one for a party list. In most European countries, the party lists are compensated when the individual candidates of a party win votes but lose in their actual constituency. Instead of offsetting the distorting effects of the first-past-the-post system, in Hungary it is the winning parties in the individual constituencies who are also assigned the transferable votes for the party list seats. This perverse winner compensation system, peculiar to Hungary, completely undermines proportional representation.
Scheppele’s judgement4 leaves no doubt about the dubious nature of the fudged Hungarian electoral system: ‘The combined effect of the gerrymander, the first-past-the-post system and the winner compensation rules, makes the Hungarian electoral system one of the most disproportionate in Europe. It turned a plurality into a supermajority.’ She also points out that this is by no means the end of ‘Fidesz’s tricks’. There is also the question of the foreign-based vote, composed of those ethnic Hungarians resident in neighbouring countries who, on account of the 2010 law (see Chapter 9), have acquired citizenship without actually living or paying taxes in Hungary. Of 500,000 such new citizens, approximately 200,000 have registered to vote—though in fact only about 90,000 actually went to the polls in 2014. According to official but unverifiable data, 95 per cent of these votes went to Fidesz. ‘Such a result is normally only achieved in countries such as North Korea,’ observed Scheppele, who, like other commentators, has emphasised the curious circumstances of the hasty registration process, the postal vote and the lack of oversight in the counting procedures. At any rate these ‘over-the-border’ voters added about 1.5 seats to the Fidesz list, just enough to secure Orbán his two-thirds majority.5
In stark contrast to the generous and unregulated6 treatment of the new ‘over-the-border’ citizens, the over half-a-million Hungarians working abroad in non-neighbouring countries often encountered (and still encounter) difficulties in dealing with Hungarian embassies and consulates. For those in countries such as Great Britain or Germany, voting often requires much time and money because of the difficult eligibility requirements. There is no postal vote—Hungarian citizens living abroad are only allowed to vote in person at embassies and consulates. For this reason, in 2014 only 30,000 Hungarians resident outside the country were able to register to vote. Most commentators see this as a deliberate tactic, because many of these primarily young Hungarians are critical of the regime.
The picture of this altogether bizarre election would not be complete without brief reference to the enormous preponderance of the government in the election advertising on TV and radio, in the print media and, not least, on giant billboards. Nobody who was in Hungary during the months and weeks before the election could have failed to recognise the oppressive hegemony of the right-wing media.
The absurdity of this manipulated election, organised by a ‘constitutional dictatorship’ (Scheppele), becomes particularly obvious when considering the simple fact, repeatedly stressed by Hungarian commentators, that Fidesz actually received fewer votes in 2014 (2.14 million) than it had in 2002 (2.31 million) and in 2006 (2.27 million). Fidesz had lost both of those elections, but following its electoral reforms was able in 2014 to gain a parliamentary supermajority with fewer votes—‘by rigging the rules,’ in Scheppele’s words.
However, it has to be conceded that in the election Fidesz was most effectively aided by the left, specifically by the Socialist opposition. The explosive news, revealed just before election day and of course massively played up by the Fidesz media, that the party’s number two, Gábor Simon, had about €800,000 stashed away in a secret bank account in Vienna utterly and finally discredited the Socialists. Neither they nor their liberal and left-wing allies were capable of presenting a clear and credible programme to win over the many voters disillusioned with Orbán. The Left Alliance, hastily cobbled together, received only 25.5 per cent of the vote, ahead of the hard right Jobbik (20.2 per cent) and the LMP (5.3 per cent).
In the four years between the two
parliamentary elections, the internal struggles for power in the centre-left camp dominated media reports. Many liberal and left-wing intellectuals had seen a beacon of hope in Gordon Bajnai, who had been a successful prime minister in 2009–10—but his political activity had lasted less than two years. In the 2014 election the crowning achievement of Attila Mesterházy, the hapless head of the Socialist Party, was preventing the timely merger of the opposition groups under Bajnai’s leadership. Despite his great promise and international respect, after the disappointing performance of his group Bajnai quit politics on the eve of the local elections in the autumn of 2014.
In the European Parliament elections of May 2014, just after the Hungarian parliamentary elections in April, Fidesz increased its share of the vote to 57 per cent and won twelve seats. The extreme right-wing Jobbik Party gained almost 15 per cent of the vote and three seats. The Socialists and Gyurcsány’s Democratic Coalition each won two seats, whilst the Bajnai group had to content itself with just one. This surprising high-profile success of the far right—particularly in the year marking the seventieth anniversary of the mass murder of Hungarian Jews—raised concerns, and not only in Hungary itself.
The third set of elections in 2014 was the nationwide local elections, another resounding success for Fidesz. In twenty-one of the twenty-three most important towns in the country a Fidesz party member was elected mayor; in the capital Budapest, the sitting Fidesz mayor was re-elected with an increased majority. Whilst these superlative majorities were undoubtedly favoured by the election law and some shady tricks (as for example in Budapest), the scale of victory also owed much to the apathy of the population.
This unprecedented series of election victories gave rise to feelings of resignation and fear in the left-wing and liberal camps. Presenting his new government,7 Orbán, exuding self-confidence, announced a ‘new and hopeful epoch … The next four years will be not an epoch of great ideas but one of great deeds.’ Orbán had been highly successful in selling himself and his policies, by means of a kind of perpetual communications process aimed at both his domestic audience and the international public. He wanted to anchor in the public consciousness the idea that Fidesz’s assumption of power was not just a normal change of government, but something that had revolutionary dimensions. Many of his voters now expected the promised and long overdue reforms of the health and education systems, and confidently looked forward to a bright new future. They were soon to get the shock of their lives.
14
THE PRICE OF ‘ORBÁNISATION’
Despite the successful establishment of a centrally directed authoritarian system, Hungary remains a country of surprises. Within a few months of the 2014 election triumph there was a rapid reversal in the general mood. Many reasons lay behind this: serious misjudgements on taxation and domestic policies; murky corruption affairs; the dramatic split between Viktor Orbán and his oldest friend, the media mogul Lajos Simicska; tensions in relations with the USA and, to cap it all, the Hungarian premier ingratiating himself with Vladimir Putin. Even before the end of 2014 pollsters were unanimous that Orbán, the ‘strongman of Central Europe’, could no longer get his own way in everything.
An unparalleled wave of protests began at the end of October 2014 after the prime minister, evidently blinded by his recent election success, announced that his minister for economic affairs had submitted a draft law for the introduction of a new Internet tax (as always, without any prior or wider discussion in public). In the country with the highest rate of VAT in Europe (27 per cent), the initiative led to passionate protests by young urban Internet users. More than 10,000 angry people took to the streets holding candles and waving banners or EU flags. The anti-government demonstrators had been quickly and efficiently organised not by one of the opposition parties but by a spontaneously organised independent Facebook group (Hundred Thousand Against the Internet Tax). In view of the surprisingly resilient mass demonstrations and the promise of further protests, Orbán personally withdrew the controversial bill three days after it was proposed on 28 October.
The revolt against the Internet tax coincided with an unusual scandal in the relations between Washington and Budapest. It became known through a deliberate leak in a pro-Fidesz newspaper that the USA had imposed a travel ban on six high-ranking government civil servants and businessmen close to Orbán because of their involvement in corrupt practices that were damaging to American investors. Among those banned was Ildikó Vida, the head of the National Tax and Customs Administration since 2010, along with members of her staff.1 The reports about this strange affair strengthened the feeling among Hungarians that groups of oligarchs in receipt of state favours were orbiting around Orbán and Simicska, like cancer tumours eating their way slowly but surely into the tissues of society and the state. Almost weekly until the end of the year, thousands demonstrated on the streets, mobilised through Facebook and buoyed up by their victory against the failed experiment of an Internet tax.
Pollsters were all in agreement that, in the course of just two months (October and November 2014), Fidesz lost twelve percentage points—the support of around 900,000 voters. Orbán’s popularity plummeted from 48 to 32 per cent. Leading foreign newspapers wrote of ‘nervousness and cracks’ in the Fidesz camp.2 On 17 November in Budapest and other cities, over 25,000 people participated in demonstrations under the banner of a ‘day of general outrage’ against corruption, welfare cuts and the growing arrogance of the new power elite. The demonstrators demanded Orbán’s resignation, and continued their protests into December and January 2015. At the beginning of February, thousands protested in front of parliament, calling on the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to exhort Orbán to defend European values during her visit to Budapest the following day.
The pro-Russian policy was also attacked at many demonstrations. President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Budapest, just two weeks after Merkel’s, symbolised the Fidesz government’s demonstrative rapprochement with Russia. The individual initiatives were coordinated on social media, via email, Twitter and Facebook, by young students, trade unionists and, often, hitherto apolitical citizens.
In just five months, between December 2014 and April 2015, Orbán’s party lost nine out of eleven regional and communal elections. The most serious setback was the loss of the precarious two-thirds parliamentary majority after the surprising byelection victory of independent opposition candidate Zoltán Kész in the west Hungarian town of Veszprém; the standing MP, Tibor Navracsics, had been named EU Commissioner. The supermajority, decisive for constitutional amendments, had depended on a single vote, lost simply because during the February byelection one in two former Fidesz voters stayed at home.3 In other words, the government’s defeat in no way represented the recovery of the opposition, which remained as divided as ever, but reflected its own declining popularity.
Then, just eight weeks after this major unexpected setback for Fidesz, the Orbán regime suffered what a foreign correspondent called a second ‘slap in the face’. In a byelection in the western town of Tapolca following the death of its MP, a candidate of the extreme right-wing Jobbik Party (founded in 2003) won a direct parliamentary seat with a clear majority. Thus for the first time since the Second World War in a free democratic election the candidate of a party which, following a court ruling,4 can be called neo-Nazi, entered the Hungarian parliament after a free democratic election.
During a visit to Budapest in those weeks I perceived a deep sense of despair on the left, helplessness amongst liberals, secret anxiety in the Jewish community and an almost astonishing change of mood in some hitherto pro-Fidesz media. In the smaller towns and villages particularly, a series of corruption scandals had often lain behind the clear shift towards Jobbik. After its ‘historic victory’, the thirty-six-year-old leader of the party, Gábor Vona, quickly distanced himself from right-wing extremism and openly called upon anti-Semitic and anti-Roma members to leave the party. As with Marine Le Pen and the Front National in France or the Freedom Party
(FPÖ) in Austria, Vona wants to play down the right-wing extremist messages and present Jobbik as a respectable alternative for middle-class voters disillusioned by rampant state and party corruption. The writer and journalist Rudolf Ungváry has observed that ‘right-wing extremist elements, fascists, [form] the basis of Jobbik, even if these are far fewer than the number of [Jobbik] voters’. The broad mass of people only sees them as young men who have not lied. And for them this suffices as a political standard.
After an unfortunate spring for the ruling party, with a string of corruption and financial scandals and the wanton recklessness of certain Orbán loyalists, some opinion pollsters and sociologists began to anticipate an unstoppable rise in Jobbik’s popularity. The petty corruption, promoted and politically instrumentalised by the state, and ranging from the carefully regulated allocation of lucrative concessions for the National Tobacco Shops to the distribution of leases of state-owned land, only excited attention within Hungary itself. However, the collapse of several financial services providers (Buda Cash and Hungaria), above all the brokerage firm Quaestor (which was closely associated with the Foreign Ministry), was already attracting international interest. Almost 100,000 savers and investors were estimated to have been affected by the failure of Quaestor, which had launched fictitious bonds amounting to half-a-billion euros. Several ministries, in particular the Foreign Ministry, had deposits with the firm, some of which were withdrawn a few hours before its insolvency became public. There were contradictory statements about the total failure of the financial supervisory authorities and even about the exact point in time of the direct intervention by the prime minister, who had instructed government departments to remove their deposits from the brokerage firm. Orbán stated that he had ordered the withdrawal of public money after the insolvency of Buda Cash. The public had not been informed to avoid panic breaking out. The arrest of Quaestor’s boss, his wife and his closest associate, all of whom had a good relationship with Fidesz, only took place three weeks after the announcement of the bankruptcy.5