Orbán
Page 14
The government had to retreat not only on the Internet tax but also in the battle about the discriminatory top marginal tax rate on advertising revenues. As with the banking taxes, special taxes and other regulations for supermarket chains, this primarily affected foreign firms. The maximum top rate, retrospectively imposed on the private broadcaster RTL-Klub (a subsidiary of the German RTL group) in the summer of 2014 and raised to 50 per cent that November, not only sparked off strong protests by the company itself but also led to sharply critical comments in the international media. It was an open secret that Fidesz politicians considered RTL’s regular main evening news coverage of the numerous financial and corruption scandals involving government departments or high-ranking officials to be the single most important reason for the party’s election defeats and the government’s precipitous fall in popularity. The German broadcaster (majority-owned by the giant Bertelsmann corporation) has by far the largest audience in the country, due to the quality of its entertainment programming.
RTL filed a complaint with the EU Commission, which launched an investigation on the grounds of suspicion of discrimination. During her flying visit to Budapest Chancellor Merkel met with representatives of the most important German companies, including the RTL group, and discussed their complaints regarding the discriminatory special taxes. This, together with the intervention of the EU, contributed to the abolition of the controversial tax by parliament at the end of May 2015 and the introduction of a uniform tax rate of 5.3 per cent. The RTL group withdrew its complaint from the EU Commission. Rumours of a horse trade—a watering down of political news reporting in exchange for a relaxation of the tax laws—have not been substantiated.
These political developments provide the framework for the changes, staggering even to experienced observers, described here. But our main focus is the figure behind it all, Viktor Orbán. ‘Our freedom is as great as our power,’ Orbán said during his first period in office.6 In possession of the two-thirds majority between April 2010 and February 2015, his actions reflected the unmistakable characteristics that have shaped his entire political career. Gregor Mayer, the seasoned Budapest correspondent for a number of Austrian and German media organisations, identified very clearly both during the demonstrations and before the election defeats the reasons for the change in mood in the late autumn of 2014. ‘The steam roller’s motor is sputtering, because after his election triumph in the spring, instead of consolidating his gains, Orbán has opened up new battlefronts in the political war.’7 Most other politicians in the recent history of Hungary, after such unprecedented successes, would have rested on their well-deserved laurels. This, however, would have been almost inconceivable for the victorious but highly emotional Orbán.
At the end of July 2014 he had delivered a public speech at the usual summer meeting of young ethnic Hungarians in Romania. This address gained notoriety worldwide for its strident and undisguised tone, as Orbán threw off the mask of a democrat and finally revealed his true colours as an admirer of nationalistic, populist and authoritarian regimes. In it Orbán declared his total rejection of liberal democracy and announced his aim of establishing an ‘illiberal state’. He mentioned Russia, Turkey and China as shining examples of success.8 The dramatic shift towards Putin’s Russia and the attacks on Washington for its travel ban on Hungarian civil servants—a conspiracy, the Orbán regime claimed, aimed at ‘regime change’ in Hungary—led to sharp rebukes in both the EU and the USA.
For Orbán, as a rule, personal admonitions and attacks are never an occasion for reflection, but rather for an aggressive reaction. According to Tamás Sárközy, he is courageous and remorseless. ‘He never asks for mercy and he never gives it.’ Like many other observers Sárközy admires Orbán’s tremendous fighting spirit. He is always to be found on the front line; a long-term weighing up of the risks in the heat of battle is not his strong point. Exaggerations, at times the gravest violations of any sense of proportion, are recurring features of his sweeping declarations.9 A similar conclusion is reached by the publisher and author János Gyurgyák, who has known the prime minister since they worked together on the Bibó College magazine Századvég in the mid-1980s, and considers Orbán ‘the greatest political talent of his generation’. One discrepancy is characteristic:
He acts very well in situations coming to a head, in the solving of conflicts, through strength, in election campaigns; yet, how vulnerable and how unsuccessful he is in daily events, in the minutiae of government, in the selection of his staff, in the motivation of an efficient and well cooperating team, in assigning tasks.10
These mild words of criticism came from the mouth of the man who had rewritten and shaped the famous speech Orbán delivered at Heroes’ Square in 1989. Three years after this 2013 interview, Gyurgyák was far more sceptical about Orbán’s fundamental ideas of establishing a total political hegemony of the right, stressing that the attempt to completely eliminate the Hungarian left, which has always been one of the faces of the nation, would almost certainly fail. Ultimately, this was a battle that could not be won. At the same time Gyurgyák rejected the assertion that, by exploiting its huge majority, Fidesz would like to restore the Horthy regime of the interwar years. Orbán’s practice of government had a modern character and it followed no historical example. Gyurgyák noted: ‘Although his practice of government undoubtedly strives for the concentration of power and although some autocratic features are undeniable, in my opinion these spring from the personality of the head of government, from his impatience, his loneliness, from his by no means unfounded grievances and his extreme mistrust.’11
These characteristics complement possibly the most important quality of a born political leader—namely, his effective force to carry something through, without which there is nothing. Orbán is not a team player, but a leader who trusts only in his own strength and demands absolute loyalty from his friends and associates. That even in power he has remained a fighter at heart is shown by his words in an off-the-record and very revealing speech given to students at the Bibó College, in the very hall where thirty years previously Fidesz had been founded. The students asked him for his opinion about the prime ministers of the future. Orbán replied:
Politics is a battle. The most important quality of the premier of the country would have to be the ability to cope with smears. You have to put up with them or ward them off or strike back even harder. Whoever takes their opponents’ attacks personally or translates them into their own personal moral catalogue of values is a loser and that doesn’t work in a battle. The leader who cannot put up with slanders, who suffers from them, who is emotionally offended or who makes a moral dilemma out of them is unsuitable. If I stand in the field with a big sword in my hand and three people attack me, then I cannot start moralising or arguing; then there is only one task, slaughter all three of them. To endure all that is a talent that cannot be learned.12
In the course of this dialogue with the students Orbán repeatedly returned to the themes of character assassination and vilification. This, he said, was why he did not have women in his government, because they would not be able to bear such attacks. He further mentioned personal attacks aimed at him in the past as an example of how election campaigns and smear campaigns are two different things. His wife had had to appear and smile before the TV cameras because the communists had spread a story in all media outlets that he had hit her so hard that she had bled. There had been a book published about him to coincide with the elections in 2002. About 90 per cent of the text was given over to how he, Orbán, had allegedly raped women at the Bibó College. The aim, according to Orbán, had been ‘the destruction of the moral basis of your very existence … That you can never again appear before the people as a trustworthy, honest citizen.’13
Orbán also returned several times to the theme of the perils for women in politics. That such patriarchal attitudes can be turned seamlessly into exaggerated macho claims of male superiority is demonstrated by a distasteful speech given b
y the speaker of parliament, László Kövér, at a Fidesz party congress, which caused a great deal of offence. ‘The crowning of the personal fulfilment of women is that they give birth to as many grandchildren as possible for us.’14 It is therefore no wonder that there are no female ministers to be found in the Fidesz government and that the percentage of women in the Fidesz-dominated Hungarian parliament, a mere 9.5 per cent, is the lowest in the EU. Among the 133 Fidesz MPs there are only nine women.
During this relaxed informal meeting with students at his old college, Orbán, at the time only fifty-two, willingly replied to their questions about the ideal character traits of a future prime minister. But he left no doubt that he still saw ‘enormous possibilities’ for himself and that he wanted to remain active ‘for quite a few years’ yet. Indeed, his speeches and interviews in recent years have radiated an exaggerated self-confidence, complacency and conceit. An interview given in The Wall Street Journal Europe on 13 July 2013, notable for the prime minister’s choice of words, revealed that success had not left him untouched:
People like me would like to do something meaningful, something extraordinary. History grants me this opportunity … In the leadership position I have always been confronted with historic challenges … In a crisis you don’t need governance by institutions. What is needed is somebody who tells the people that risky decisions must be taken … and who says to them follow me … Now strong national leaders are required.
Two-and-a-half years later, in the middle of the refugee crisis in Europe (and after his second victory at the polls in April 2014), Orbán stated with unmistakable hubris in a Christmas interview with the new Fidesz newspaper Magyar Idők that ‘In the great crisis Europe made a bad choice, under the illusion that the era of personalities such as Kohl, Aznar, Sarkozy etc. has passed. That is the root of the problem. If something goes in the wrong direction, bureaucracies can no longer react. Then you need strong personalities.’ He did not add ‘one like me’, but his meaning was crystal clear. He, Viktor Orbán, is such a strong man, one whose time has not passed but who, on the contrary, is only now maturing for his great deeds.
For a man with such ambitions and such an unprecedented personal concentration of power, the second electoral triumph in 2014 made it increasingly intolerable for Orbán to share decision-making in economic, personnel and media policy decisions (not to speak of the division of spoils) and to cooperate with Lajos Simicska, his oldest and most reliable friend of thirty-five years. Despite Orbán’s indisputable political talents, Fidesz as a party would long since have sunk into oblivion without, in the words of the political scientist László Lengyel, the ‘brilliant mafioso’ Lajos Simicska. Without Simicska, Orbán would never have become prime minister and without Orbán, Simicska would never have become a billionaire. It was an alliance, a tried and tested male friendship between two equals.
This was the conclusion reached by Lengyel after the open rupture between the two men: Orbán and Simicska had broken a cardinal rule, and had turned on each other. There was no longer any honour among the rogues. And in this rift Lengyel also saw the end of strength through unity, of the unitary Fidesz centre—from now on, within Fidesz, everybody can rob everybody else, and anybody can put anybody under pressure. According to Lengyel, Orbán lost two of his best friends within six months: László Kövér and Lajos Simicska. They were the last two people who could speak openly with him—but nobody is allowed to be on an equal footing with Orbán, nobody may be completely frank. Though this analysis may well be correct, at the time of writing (2017), Kövér, at least to all appearances, remains in power and in office.15
What had happened? Why, after thirty-five years, did this friendship between two men once as thick as thieves, who had gone through everything together, fall apart? Lajos Simicska, after all, was the man who was always in the background and who, as the architect of the pro-Fidesz financial, construction and media empires, had made possible the development of Orbán’s unlimited power. Simicska was also a man who never gave interviews and of whom there were scarcely any photographs. The political earthquake within the Orbán regime was thus all the greater and unexpected when, on 6 February 2015, he levelled virulent personal attacks against the prime minister in a series of TV and media interviews using some of the most vulgar verbal abuse possible in the Hungarian language.16
In a long interview with the liberal weekly Magyar Narancs, Simicska accused Orbán of wanting to establish a new dictatorship. ‘My alliance with Orbán proceeded from the assumption that we wanted to tear down the dictatorship and the post-communist system. But in this alliance there was never, damn it, any idea that we would instead set up a new dictatorship. I am not a partner to this.’ Simicska bitterly rejected Orbán’s pro-Russian foreign and energy policies, his media policy and the planned advertising tax on all media companies. For him, Orbán had proved a great personal disappointment: ‘He is not a statesman.’ Simicska also made it clear that he could barely discern any real difference between the behaviour of the Soviets in the past and that of present-day Russia. He revealed that the perceptible cooling of his relationship with Orbán went back to a conversation in April 2014 after the election victory, in which the prime minister outlined to him unspecified ideas for the future. Simicska did not like these and told Orbán that he did not want to be his partner in them.17
Despite Simicska’s assertions, this all-out war between the former closest of friends was not—or not primarily—a question of differing values, but of concrete conflicts of interest. Even shortly before the 2014 election, there were rumours of a deep split in the structures of the Orbán regime. The minister for development, a Simicska loyalist of many years standing, was removed. In the new appointments to both the central and regional administrations, of those responsible for the allocation of public contracts and the distribution of EU money, Fidesz officials not loyal to Simicska were given jobs. In the Ministry for Development alone, 200 people were replaced. The prime minister more or less openly indicated to friendly politicians and oligarchs that Simicska had become too mighty for him. He is reported once to have said in an informal conversation with foreign ambassadors, ‘I have learnt. If you have an opportunity to eliminate your rivals, then don’t think about it, do it.’18 After Simicska’s media (the daily Magyar Nemzet, the news channel HírTV, Lánchíd Radio and the weekly Heti Válasz) had begun to criticise individual government measures, Orbán hit back with his announcement that they could no longer count on receiving advertising from state-owned and state-affiliated enterprises.
Simicska’s unprecedented outburst against Orbán was provoked by the simultaneous and totally unexpected resignation of his six top media managers and editors-in-chief for ‘reasons of conscience’, announced on 6 February 2015. This pincer movement against the Simicska empire was planned well in advance and ruthlessly executed. Its consequences were not limited to an upheaval in the media world. On the one hand, a new media empire, completely controlled by Orbán’s people, was set up, in part with the aid of these ‘traitors’ (Simicska’s description) who had jumped ship; on the other, there were to be no more public contracts, not only for Simicska’s media empire but also for his construction company Közgép. Thanks to his contacts within government, it is estimated that since 2010 Simicska and his partners had won about 40 per cent of all tenders in which EU transfers to Hungary were awarded; these amounted to several billion euros.19
Orbán now set about restructuring the Hungarian economy by calling on oligarchs dependent on his favour, as well as enlisting some new ones. In this he was aided by two men personally loyal to him, the ministers János Lázár and Antal Rogán, at the head of the hugely expanded Prime Minister’s Office. They worked hand-in-hand with his loyal supporter in the central bank, the former finance minister György Matolcsy, in politically and financially destroying the shady empire of the brilliant financial juggler, Simicska. This reorganisation executed through his subordinates, at times quite brutally, was not without its prob
lems for Orbán. For the moment, at the height of his tirades against Orbán, Simicska remained combative. ‘I have known Orbán for thirty-five years. Yes, I know a lot about him,’ he told Magyar Narancs. To the reporters’ question as to whether that did not imply a political risk for the prime minister, his answer was: ‘And if somebody shoots me for this? [Laughs.] Let’s hope it won’t come to that.’ That the media mogul even mentioned the possibility of an assassination attempt in several interviews highlights Hungarian realities. Today, Simicska’s construction and media empire is in inexorable decline. Nevertheless, with his intimate knowledge of Orbán’s career and the financial circumstances of his family, Lajos Simicska, a man who likes to drink, remains a potential danger for Hungary’s strongman.
The three elections defeats of 1994, 2002 and 2006 failed to rock the unity of the small group of men who founded Fidesz, but in 2014 its epochal second victory did. Its paradoxical consequence has been the combination of the open rift between Orbán and Simicska, the two strongest personalities in the erstwhile leadership circle, and the gradual stripping of power and influence from other well-known members of the Fidesz old guard.
The deceptive unity that endured after the earlier electoral defeats ultimately cracked because the architect of the later victories claimed absolute power. Viktor Orbán is today no longer primus inter pares, but the uncontested leader of the country. There has certainly never, in the history of Hungary since the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918, been another figure who has concentrated so much power within himself in such a relatively short time, virtually unchallenged. By international standards, Orbán is still a relatively young man. This personal concentration of power, unique in the EU, is shaping the emergence of a new elite, which—as in medieval times—is in part built on the feudal rights conferred by Orbán; moreover, it is entirely moulding Hungary’s foreign, economic and social policies.