by Paul Lendvai
If we compare the government’s enormously expensive advertising campaigns blaring out the fantastic results of the Orbán years with the actual performance of the economy, and the doleful consequences for Hungary’s education and healthcare systems, and contrast this with the achievements of the neighbouring countries, then we should heed the warning of the incorruptible István Bibó (1911–79): ‘In contrast to the widely spread view we can only observe that there must be no lying in politics. Put more precisely: now and then it is permissible to lie but it is impossible to build a political construct, a political programme on lies.’6
Citing Bibó, the economist István Csillag concludes that it is only the annual transfers from the EU cohesion fund, amounting to €2.5–5 billion, which have enabled the maintenance of the facade of a positively growing economy. Without the EU, without the transfers, which make up 2.5 to 5 per cent of GDP, the collapse of the Hungarian economy would be unavoidable. In the decade preceding 2014, Hungary experienced an annual growth rate of a mere 0.9 per cent whilst in the Czech Republic GDP rose by 125 per cent, in Slovakia by almost 150 per cent and in Poland by 170 per cent. All these countries joined the EU at the same time as Hungary in 2004. The much hyped 3.7 per cent rise in economic performance in 2014 was, according to Csillag, an exception, due to a particularly high rate of transfers amounting to €5.4 billion (5.2 per cent of GDP); additionally, there was a record performance in the agricultural sector. Without the transfers from the EU, Csillag notes, the economy would be stagnating or suffering a mild recession. The facts that the much vilified foreign banks, despite the special taxes, have also contributed to economic stabilisation by raising their capital by €4.8 billion, and that the equally despised multinationals have paid taxes of €5.8 billion (three times the amount paid by domestic enterprises), is often overlooked or deliberately ignored. Over-centralisation, dependency on the state, and a nation marching in the direction of a dictatorship with voluntarist economic policy-making, are all, in Csillag’s opinion, stifling the Hungarian economy. It lacks decentralised economic actors, predictability, honesty and credibility, as a result of the demolition of the rule of law and constitutional checks and balances.7
The extremely harsh observations of those respected economists who had occupied important positions in the first Orbán government have attracted particular attention in recent years. One of them is Attila Chikán, the director of the Research Institute for Competitiveness at Corvinus University and Orbán’s minister for economic affairs between 1998 and 2000. In a series of disparaging interviews given to opposition newspapers and magazines he did not mince his words:
Government propaganda about successful reforms has little to do with reality. A series of statistics reveal that we are falling more and more behind developed countries. In 2001 we were ranked number twenty-nine on the global competitive listing of the World Economic Forum; today we are number sixty-nine. Even worse is the fact that among the former Socialist member states we were the best; today we are one of the stragglers. Most of all, corruption paralyses the performance of our entrepreneurs, for wherever cronyism or bribery and not entrepreneurship are rewarded, there is no incentive to work harder and at the same time there is no trust. That does not mean that everybody [in Hungary] is corrupt but the influence of those who are in the key positions of the economy is so strong that this colours everything else … The runner who always begins the 100-metre race with a 20-metre lead at a domestic track meet is hardly likely to break the world record at an international competition.8
Whilst Chikán fully acknowledges the prime minister’s political success, he is very negative about the consequences of Orbán’s financial and economic policies:
The illiberal democracy and the unorthodox economic policies go hand-in-hand. Four factors determine economic policy: the central role of the state; the priority of short-term political factors; the predominance of political and of power interests at the expense of economic rationality; [finally] social questions are pushed strongly into the background and are solved not by economic but by political means.’
Chikán repeatedly points out that the observance of internationally required monetary obligations has not been achieved by the promotion of investments, of small and medium-sized enterprises or of production, but at the expense of the social sphere, primarily the healthcare and education systems. It is intolerable that Hungarian productivity is only 50 per cent that of the European average. Chikán does not foresee the danger of an economic collapse but rather of a steady decline of the economy.
That the ever-growing corruption, whether tolerated by or originating from those ‘up there’, is destroying the moral fibre of the nation is becoming a major source of concern in Hungary. It is not the enrichment of individuals that is interesting, but rather the structures of cronyism and nepotism; equally of concern is the fact that it is always the same groups or individuals that are awarded the lion’s share of public contracts. All this eats away at competition and causes incalculable moral damage, says Chikán. An even harsher and more comprehensive critique of government policy comes from Tamás Mellár, a professor of economics and a man who had held a leading position in Orbán’s first government.9 He does not believe that economic and social policy is conservative or right-wing but is rather a hodgepodge, partially recalling the communist era in Hungary and in many ways the Horthy regime of the 1930s. Mellár speaks of the establishment of a semi-feudal regime, of a concentration of land ownership unprecedented in modern Europe. ‘The only thing that is missing,’ he writes, ‘is the feudal droit du seigneur for the new landowners’; he also mentions the fact that the several-thousand-hectare estate of the head of the OTP Bank, Sándor Csányi, has been declared a model farm by the government. The regime has done nothing for small and medium enterprises or for agriculture in the successful manner of Holland and Denmark. Mellár, a conservative thinker, finds utterly disgusting the politics of the strong hand, the cant about illiberal democracy and the shocking extent of corruption.
Mellár, who was president of the Central Statistical Office from 1998 to 2003, has on more than one occasion heavily criticised the ending (in mid-2015) of the publication of official data about poverty and subsistence levels in Hungary, observing that ‘As someone who is aware of the non-manipulated data, it is no exaggeration to observe that Hungary is once again a country of 3 million beggars’ (a reference to the conditions in the Horthy era). The poverty and hopelessness in the lowest third of society has reached unprecedented levels. Mellár estimates that the number of poor people has reached 4 million, and in a number of interviews he has castigated the yawning gap in living standards. ‘Health conditions and life expectations in the second district in Budapest correspond to the average achieved by the Scandinavian countries, while those for the inhabitants of the villages in Szabolcs county [situated in northeast Hungary, bordering on Romania and Ukraine] barely reach the average of central African countries.’ Novelists such as Krisztina Tóth and Ferenc Barnás or the playwright Győrgy Spiró have described in their works the collapse of living standards and the consequent moral degradation of the lower middle classes, of those families without employment or homes, of pensioners living in the countryside or even in the suburbs of Budapest, all of whom are hardly ever seen by foreign visitors.
The recurring demonstrations of teachers and nurses are also a warning. They reflect a growing dissatisfaction with the consequences of increasing economic hardships and considerable discontent due to the grotesque contrasts between the conspicuous consumption of the nouveaux riches and the general impoverishment of wide segments of society. These miserable conditions are all too evident in the areas of northern and eastern Hungary where the Roma live. Like so many other cleverly packaged Fidesz programmes, the measures presented in 2011 (during Hungary’s EU presidency) for a qualitative improvement in the position of the country’s estimated 800,000 Roma have proven a pipedream.
Leading economists and sociologists believe that the
Fidesz regime is living on borrowed time. If the estimates that the transfers from the EU and foreign capital are financing 90 per cent of industrial and infrastructure investments and that the subsidiaries of foreign concerns account for 80 per cent of exports are indeed correct, then it is evident that in the run-up to the 2018 elections the government will seek to generate as many as possible of the transfers from Brussels foreseen for the period up to 2020, in order to finance wage and salary increases, as well as other projects popular with the electorate.
Critical economic experts such as Tamás Mellár, Attila Chikán or János Kornai believe that the huge sums from abroad, as well as the 2010–11 state expropriation of the €3 billion reserves of the private pension funds, a de facto ‘legalised robbery’ (see Chapter 12), have not been invested systematically but, against all economic common sense, stuffed into the pockets of a chosen few oligarchs.
Those who have been disgraced or who have voluntarily drawn back from the circle around Orbán whisper of the considerable rifts in the Fidesz camp, of the jealousies among the forint billionaires and their retinues. It would, however, be wrong to underestimate Orbán’s political instincts and his determination to use his powers of decision-making. His speedy withdrawal of the Internet tax after the wave of protests in 2014, the abolition of the ban on Sunday opening by retail businesses in 2016 as a response to the suddenly strong public support for a referendum on the matter, the cancellation in February 2017 of Budapest’s bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games after a new opposition group, Memento, had collected 266,000 signatures for a referendum, and the successful restructuring of Fidesz’s financial and media empires after the breach with Simicska, provide convincing evidence that Orbán remains a nimble and experienced technician of power despite his numerous critics’ prophecies of doom. He is only too conscious of his unique position as the head of the government, the leader of the parliamentary majority and of his party; in a crisis situation he can take decisions, alone if necessary. Thus most commentators, whether pro- or anti-Fidesz, agree that power rises and falls with the person of Viktor Orbán.
Even after thirty years of toiling on behalf of his party, Orbán’s perception of politics remains one of conflict rather than consent, battle instead of compromise. The political scientist and director of the Institute for Political Science at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, András Körösényi, the man who coined the phrase vezérdemokrácia (Führer democracy), sees no ‘Orbán system, only an Orbán regime’ because a system is predictable, stable and lasting:
The most important feature of the Orbán regime is the unprecedented concentration of power and the manner in which power is exercised. The assertion of political will and power interests have priority over the constitutional state and concrete issues. A certain tinkering with the policies of the regime is characteristic because its narrative has been assembled from elements stolen from here, there and everywhere. The new post-2010 regime has endeavoured to legitimise its power with the person of Orbán and for this reason it presents him as a leader of extraordinary capabilities.
Körösényi believes that the survival of the regime after Orbán is questionable.10
The stocktaking of this political scientist, who regards himself as a conservative, stands of course in stark contrast to Orbán’s own claims and those of his pseudo-academic lackeys such as Gyula Tellér and other highly paid propagandists.11 This debate illustrates, not for the first time, the truth that it is sometimes more difficult to create or to craft an ideology to justify personal rule than it is to achieve and enjoy power. Here the biography of Mussolini is enlightening.12 Regardless of how we assess the rifts in the power structures of Fidesz and possible incipient power struggles within the circle around Orbán, now three-quarters of the way through his third period in office, nothing but question marks hang over the economic and social policies of the regime. A balance cannot yet be drawn.
18
‘THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE EU’
Three times in the last sixty years refugees have played a special role in Hungarian history. In 1956 the world watched with a mixture of admiration and sympathy as almost 200,000 Hungarians fled to Austria after the bloody suppression of the October Uprising. More than three decades later the reform communist government removed the first brick in the Berlin Wall by allowing East German citizens to leave Hungary, thereby making a significant contribution to the reunification of Germany. On the third occasion, it was TV pictures of tens of thousands of refugees, mostly from Syria and Iraq. Their harrowing situation at Budapest’s Keleti (East) railway station, at the southern refugee camp at Röszke on the Serbian border, and finally during the long march to the Austrian border, once again put the focus on Hungary in the autumn of 2015.
Astonishing things were happening in Germany and Austria in those weeks, as well as in other West European countries. Opinion on the whole issue of asylum shifted: dismay, compassion and a desire to help temporarily replaced fear, rejection and mistrust. The public perception of asylum seekers changed, even in the tabloid press and in the political world. The speedy reaction of the German and Austrian governments to the issue of opening their borders to approximately 20,000 (later hundreds of thousands) refugees would have been unthinkable a few weeks earlier. The response was primarily due to the power of the image. The photographs of the drowned three-year-old boy washed up on the Turkish coast, of the father with his wife and child who threw themselves onto the railway tracks and began crying and screaming amidst Hungarian policemen, or of the asylum seekers who were dragged off the Hungarian train bound for Germany—it was these dramatic TV reports about people who had nothing to lose that shook the governments in Berlin and Vienna.
On 4 September 2015, as a direct consequence of the patent failure of the Hungarian authorities and their chaotic crisis management, thousands of refugees set off on foot for the Austrian border from Keleti station in Budapest. On what was, for me personally, this unforgettable Friday, I witnessed the mood in Hungary at first hand. Travelling from Vienna to Budapest for a friend’s birthday party, I was unexpectedly phoned by the editor of the Austrian public TV channel (ORF) and asked to give a live interview on the situation in Hungary for its 10 p.m. news bulletin, as the resident correspondent was out of the capital reporting on events on the border. However, it was impossible to find a free studio in Budapest and so I had to make my way to the front of Keleti railway station, where Eurovision technicians would set up a line to Vienna for the interview. There I met a truly international team: a Serb producer, a Slovak sound engineer and an Irish cameraman.
As I waited for more than half an hour on that mild summer evening for the transmission to begin, I saw all around me a world of unbelievable contrasts. In the lower part of the station there were still thousands of refugees, among them many families with children, sitting or standing out in the open with blankets and the food they had been given by volunteers. Above, looking down from the street, Budapesters, in their hundreds, gawked at the extraordinary goings-on in the heart of the city, at times with loud comments. Meanwhile, other groups and interested people had gathered in front of the station entrance, which was crammed with the cameras and equipment of TV teams from all over Europe reporting directly on the refugee drama.
Waiting for the link to Vienna, I could hear a cacophony of voices; near me a Finnish journalist was describing her impressions to the camera whilst a little further away a German colleague was interviewing a Hungarian woman. Groups of curious passers-by immediately formed around interviews or wherever a camera team popped up. Nearby, there also stood a handful of dubious looking men waving the Árpád flag with its five red and five white stripes. This had been used by the national socialist Arrow Cross Party and is associated with its reign of terror from mid-October 1944 to the end of the war in 1945. Historically rooted in the medieval Árpád dynasty (ninth to fourteenth centuries), today the flag is usually brandished by extreme right-wing activists.
The old man who recogn
ised me had probably come from this group: he hurled abuse at me non-stop even during the live interview with the anchor in Vienna. Standing just a few metres away from me, in Hungarian he very loudly called me an ‘enemy of Hungary’ and a ‘Mossad agent’. Despite the presence of a couple of policeman at the entrance to the station, this was an unpleasant situation, a mood that—I later learned back in Vienna—was conveyed to the viewers and listeners, perhaps through my facial expressions or my repeated references to the tense atmosphere in Budapest. In any case I was lucky. The loudmouth, who went away still shouting insults at me after I finished my live report, failed to get anybody else interested in me.
It was already evident on that first day, as well as subsequently from both personal conversations and media reports, that the majority of the population had no empathy for these people in need. To this day they support the government position: the 175-kilometre-long fence along the border with Serbia (and the later one with Croatia), as well as the deportation or punishment of refugees, protects not only Hungary but all of Western Europe from the masses of foreign people who, in the words of Orbán, ‘are overrunning us and threatening our civilisation’. In stark contrast, the cultural philosopher Sándor Radnóti expressed the feelings of shame among the intellectual elite in the liberal magazine Magyar Narancs: ‘The Orbán regime with its ruthlessness and barbarity is the embodiment of everything that is bad in Europe.’
Lurid scenes abounded that autumn on the border with Serbia as tens of thousands of refugees were transported to the Austrian frontier from the reception camps there in special trains. A spokesperson of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee complained that the Hungarian government and authorities were totally panic-stricken and simply wanted to get rid of the refugees. Responding to the huge media campaigns and the urgent need to deal with the refugee question, the constitutional scholar Gábor Halmai pointed to the absurdity of the government’s attempts to portray Hungary as an acutely endangered frontline state. Just two comparisons: the proportion of foreign citizens among the Hungarian population amounts to 1.4 per cent, while in Austria it is 13.3 per cent; only 4.5 per cent of Hungarians were born abroad (and these are overwhelmingly ethnic Hungarian immigrants from Romania), whereas in Austria the equivalent figure is 16 per cent.1 Yet according to a poll conducted between 11 and 15 September 2015, two thirds of those questioned in Hungary supported the building of the fence along the Serbian border, 79 per cent argued for even harsher treatment of asylum seekers and 41 per cent were even for using weapons to defend the border against illegal immigrants. Between June and September 2015 Fidesz’s poll ratings rose by the equivalent of 300,000 votes and Viktor Orbán’s popularity ratings rose from 43 to 48 per cent.