Orbán
Page 19
The developments in Hungary in 2015–16 confirmed yet again the well-known maxim of the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931): ‘People in masses are like children, easy to influence and even easier to steer if the message is well packaged and repeated often enough.’2 Opinion polls leave no doubt that Viktor Orbán has once again succeeded in exploiting a single issue, in this case immigrants and refugees, to achieve a turnaround in his support. In the summer of 2016 a representative poll conducted by the American Pew Research Center in ten European countries3 ascertained that the fear of a terrorist attack by refugees was strongest in Hungary: 76 per cent of those questioned agreed with this, compared with a statistical average of 59 per cent for the ten polled countries. Even greater was the fear of refugees taking jobs at the expense of Hungarians: 82 per cent of Hungarians were of this opinion as against an average of 50 per cent elsewhere. Hungary also topped the list in the expression of anti-Muslim sentiment (76 per cent): on anti-Semitic (32 per cent) and anti-Roma feelings (64 per cent) it was beaten only by Greece.
In all of these comparisons, it must be borne in mind that in contrast to countries like Germany (over 1 million asylum seekers) and Austria (90,000 refugees in 2015) Hungary has had practically no refugees in the current crisis, since they have been quickly transferred to third countries or threatened with jail. There are hardly any Muslims in the country. Regardless of political setbacks to the regime, such as the loss of the migrant quota referendum in the autumn of 2016, all opinion polls confirm the deeply rooted anti-foreign attitudes present in Hungarian society: a February 2017 survey, for example, revealed that 60 per cent of respondents regarded migrants as a serious threat to the EU. The one-time liberal leader, then Fidesz MP and now independent conservative political analyst Péter Tölgyessy observes that since the Treaty of Trianon Hungarian society has been one of the least solidarity-minded societies in Europe, and is still one of the most closed and culturally least colourful.
How, with this single issue, was Orbán able to dictate the narrative about refugees, initially in Hungary and subsequently across the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe? Here the national tradition of the ‘victor in defeat’, together with two predominant elements of Hungarian self-image—the victim myth and the will to survive—must always be considered. The notion of Hungarian exceptionalism, of Hungary’s superiority to other nations and of a special mission flowing from this, was official state doctrine from the Compromise of 1867 (and despite the diktat of Trianon in 1920), save of course for the four decades of communist rule. Since the mid-1990s, Fidesz has presented itself as a type of national liberation movement feeding on the deep collective sentiments of secular humiliation and affront. Once in power Fidesz exploited its huge communications apparatus to promote the notion of mobilising all forces to liberate Hungary from its political and economic dependency on foreign powers. The desire no longer to be deluded or told what to do by the mighty EU (despite the enormous transfer payments from the cohesion fund) has been the watchword of all three Fidesz governments. The denunciation of ideas of European integration, liberalism, social democracy and enlightened conservatism as both obsolete and yet detrimental has gathered momentum, especially since Orbán’s controversial stand in favour of the ‘illiberal state’ and ‘illiberal democracy’.
Following the terrorist attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, Viktor Orbán, alongside numerous other heads of states and governments, participated in the huge solidarity march in Paris. Perversely, it was during this event that, for the very first time, he publicly and demonstratively announced
zero tolerance against immigrants … As long as I am prime minister and as long as this government is in power, we will not allow Hungary to become the destination of immigrants by planned actions steered from Brussels. We do not want to see in our midst any minorities whose cultural background differs from our own. We want to keep Hungary for the Hungarians.4
The fact that the Hungarian prime minister chose precisely the occasion of an impressive solidarity demonstration in Paris to express words of xenophobia instead of sympathy or unity was condemned as outrageous by representatives of civil society and the liberal media. However, Orbán’s emerging strategy was politically much more decisive. His declaration in Paris was the signal for major campaigns based on national and Christian roots, spreading fears of being swamped by foreigners and terrorists, and calling for the right to seal Hungary off. This costly propaganda operation launched by the government, with huge posters and signs all over the country, was ostensibly aimed at foreign migrants: ‘If you come to Hungary, you must not take jobs away from Hungarians!’; ‘If you come to Hungary, you must respect Hungarian culture!’ But all the billboards and the government-sponsored advertisements were in Hungarian. What Syrian or Afghan migrant who had by chance ended up in Hungary on their way from the Balkans to Western Europe would be able to understand them? It is no wonder this grotesque and profoundly unethical exercise was mocked and condemned in equal measure abroad. Yet, what cannot be denied is the reality that this transparent and crude attempt to rouse public opinion against foreign refugees was a great public relations success for the Orbán regime.
The far right Jobbik Party was no longer able to outflank the Fidesz steamroller of panic-making; the challenge from the other end of the spectrum also vanished into thin air. The divided and disheartened left fell silent in the face of callous government propaganda deliberately conflating economic migrants with potential terrorists, and asylum seekers with illegal immigrants. The response of the weak Socialist Party’s leadership, still reeling from internal power struggles, was to sit on the fence.
On the other hand, Orbán has been proved correct with his early assessment of the refugee crisis as social cement for communal and national cohesion—as a unifying bogeyman. This was a particularly seductive message in ethnically and religiously homogenous countries such as Hungary and Poland without any tradition of immigration, countries with deeply rooted nationalistic and racist prejudices, which were swept under the carpet in communist times and which since 1989 have again become virulent. It is no accident that the ethnic and religious marginalisation of ‘the other’, by no means restricted to Muslim immigrants, practised in Hungary and Poland remind the billionaire and philanthropist George Soros (and in this he is far from alone) of the regimes of Admiral Horthy in Hungary and Marshall Piłsudski in Poland in the interwar years.5
In one of my weekly columns in the liberal Austrian daily Der Standard (28 December 2015), entitled ‘Orbán’s year’, I described the prime minister, purely in terms of his accumulation of power, as the most successful politician in Europe. This was hyped in Index, a Hungarian online news site, presumably without any knowledge of the entire text, as a hymn of praise for Orbán by one of his sharpest critics.6 This, of course, was a wildly exaggerated interpretation even if, for example, the liberal thinker János Kis and Der Spiegel had in essence reached exactly the same conclusion. ‘The Hungarian premier is at the moment the political victor of the refugee crisis which has shaken the Continent for weeks,’ noted the German news magazine, whilst Kis, the first Free Democrat chairman after 1989 and today a professor at the Central European University, also stressed that the refugee crisis had strengthened Orbán’s position. He added:
Before the crisis he was a pariah in Europe. Now he is the leading figure in the coalition of those countries refusing to accept refugees. With the building of the fence he is, moreover, no longer reliant on the goodwill of others, especially as there are [in Hungary] practically no refugees.7
The international response was initially ambivalent. The representatives of the European People’s Party held back, as usual, from any criticism of the Fidesz government or Orbán personally. However, neither the Social Democratic president of the European Parliament Martin Schulz nor the head of the liberal faction, former Belgian premier Guy Verhofstadt, minced their words in their judgement of Orbán.
> The Hungarian leader, for whom the refugee crisis had proved a godsend, responded to all the public criticism with a forceful and unscrupulous offensive in interviews and speeches. In particular, he made common cause with the internal party critics of Angela Merkel, who had on 4 September 2015 opened Germany’s doors to Syrian war refugees and sought support for this policy with her frequently quoted and overly self-confident sound bite ‘Wir schaffen das!’—‘We can do it!’ Abroad, Orbán first shared his populist narrative as truth-telling courage at a much-publicised meeting of the German Christian Social Union (CSU) held in a Bavarian monastery on 23 September 2015. The leader of the CSU and minister president of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, who was vying with Merkel for influence within the Union, opportunistically seized the chance of inviting the German chancellor’s most vocal foreign critic. The guest did not disappoint. Orbán delivered a speech, peppered with sarcasm, accusing the German government of ‘moral imperialism’ in the refugee crisis. ‘Irrespective of how Germany decides, it will be only for itself,’ said Orbán on the dispute about the proposed allotment of refugee quotas in the EU, adding that ‘the Hungarians do not want that!’
This speech presented Orbán’s deeds in a much better light then they deserved. At the closed meeting of the CSU, he once again gave a masterful and shameless performance of his famous dance of the peacock (see Chapter 12). On the one hand, he reaffirmed his admiration for Merkel and stressed that he did not want to interfere in German domestic politics. On the other, Orbán expressed pity for the refugees, who had been deceived by people smugglers and by politicians who had given the impression that they were welcome and that there was room for everybody. Though he did not mention Merkel by name, he in fact charged her with indirect responsibility for the deaths of refugees. With an easy cynicism, Orbán momentously and self-righteously declared that ‘Hungary has cheated nobody.’
Seehofer also criticised Merkel at this event. Her decision to allow the refugees marooned in Hungary to enter Germany had created ‘chaotic conditions’ in Europe. Seehofer defended the dialogue with Orbán: ‘It is a question of restoring European rules. And for this Viktor Orbán deserves support, not criticism.’ In contrast, Thomas Oppermann, the head of the Social Democratic Party parliamentary group, censured the invitation to Orbán to address the CSU meeting. In dealing with the challenge of the refugee crisis in Europe, he maintained, Orbán was not part of the solution but part of the problem. ‘Mr Orbán has trampled over human rights and Mr Seehofer rolls out the red carpet for him. That is not right.’8
Nevertheless, the impassioned public dispute ever since the refugee crisis on Orbán’s role and the splits it has revealed within the European Union has provided ample proof that his calculated jingoism has paid off internationally. László Lengyel believes:
Orbán has the feeling that the Hungarian liberals and the politicians of international liberal capitalism are just as much cynical hypocrites as their Christian Democrat colleagues, who preach morality in order to maintain their position of power and to cloak their own crude interests … When in the summer of 2015 he resolutely entered the European international arena he made it plain that liberal democracy was politically weak and non-functional; compared to its hypocritical and dishonest model there was, however, the exemplary, strong, functional and transparent model of illiberal democracy. Orbán’s words are clear: the wolf should be a wolf and not pretend it is a sheep. But the sheep should also not wish to masquerade as a wolf.9
Orbán remains without doubt a radical fighter who thrives on confrontation. Brexit has confirmed his conviction that a weakened EU and the grand coalition led by Angela Merkel are on the verge of collapse and failure. According to Lengyel, after the unanimous rejection of Merkel’s refugee policy by the four post-communist new EU member states—the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia—after the abortive quota scheme and the shaky agreement with Turkey on refugees,10 Orbán saw 2015 as the triumph of the Hungarian model in Eastern Europe. Against his liberal critics in Germany or the USA, Orbán can rely on the argument that even states such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, governed (at least nominally) by social-democratic politicians, celebrate him as a trailblazer and role model; an argument that has gained weight since the October 2015 election victory of Jarosław Kaczyński’s right-wing populist Law and Justice Party in Poland, the most significant central European state. It is reasonable to conclude that the majority of Romanians and Croatians think similarly. However, the difference is that, as Lengyel so aptly formulates it, the nationalists in those countries are still all in the chorus line—it is Orbán who is starring as the soloist. This is also confirmed by the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev: ‘The Bulgarians have identified themselves completely with Orbán’s reading of the refugee crisis; they feel they are represented by him.’11
It can of course be argued that it has been the failure of European leaders to deal with the twin crises of the euro and the refugees that has enabled both Orbán’s success and the rise of populist and nationalist parties across Europe. Observers have dismissed the idea that Orbán, the bombastic and ferociously nationalistic leader of a landlocked country with a population of less than 10 million, could shape European politics and seriously challenge Merkel’s dominant position as ‘grotesque’ and ‘absurd’. Nevertheless, the effects of Orbán’s rabble-rousing in Central and Eastern Europe should not be underestimated. It is primarily due to his influence that the four Visegrád states (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) have emerged as a nationalistic group, blocking European integration, thereby also assisting Russia’s expansive strategy. In the West, Orbán can boast of numerous admirers not only in Bavaria but also in neighbouring Austria. In September 2016 the leader of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), Heinz-Christian Strache, publicly advocated Austria’s joining the Visegrád alliance. Public opinion polls from spring 2017 confirm that one in three Austrians would vote for the FPÖ. Even critics of Hungary’s brutal treatment of asylum seekers and the elimination of checks and balances admit that Orbán saw earlier than most of his EU colleagues that borders had to be controlled before relocation plans for refugees could be agreed upon. His public casting of doubt on the distribution of refugees has been borne out by the failure of the grand EU project to move 160,000 refugees even to willing countries.
Orbán’s numerous declarations, speeches and interviews since the beginning of the refugee crisis offer an insight into his character and ambition, not to speak of his endeavours to emerge as a leadership personality on the European stage with the aim of starting what Jan-Werner Müller of Princeton University calls ‘a pan-European culture war’. We need not have any illusions about his true role as a convinced wrecker of the supranational humane values and principles that underpin the EU. As he stirs up opinion against Angela Merkel behind the scenes, Orbán has become the ‘most dangerous man in the EU’. Thus argued Gerald Knaus, the founding chairman of the European Stability Initiative (ESI) think tank, at the same international meeting in Vienna where Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, condemned Orbán’s behaviour over the refugee crisis as ‘abhorrent’ and ‘shameful’.12 The East European correspondent of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Cathrin Kahlweit, described him as ‘one of the most hated and most quoted politicians in Europe.’13 The Hungarian János Kis notes that what represents success for Orbán means failure for the rest of Europe.14
In a speech held on 5 September 2015 in front of his party faithful before his appearance at the CSU in Germany, Orbán made no secret of his satisfaction at the misery of the refugees. ‘The crisis offers the chance for the national Christian ideology to regain supremacy not only in Hungary but in the whole of Europe. This situation poses a big risk and a great opportunity: we are experiencing the end of all the liberal babble. An era is coming to an end.’15 He gleefully announced at this closed meeting that the refugee issue had created ‘the first good identity crisis’ he had ever seen, because it was boun
d to destroy the ‘hypocritical’ liberals.
Three months later, the independent opinion research institute Median confirmed the shift towards Orbán, at least in Hungary, where his popularity rose in one year from 32 to 48 per cent. 87 per cent of respondents (including, in several interviews, even the well-known liberal author and sharp critic of the prime minister, György Konrád) approved the government policy on the refugee question, while the business magazine HVG declared Orbán the ‘victor of the refugee crisis’.
It was thus hardly surprising that almost at the same time the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, now a mouthpiece of the right-wing conservative Swiss People’s Party, published a gushing title story devoted to Orbán, praising him as ‘the only European politician who correctly assesses the situation.’ Beneath a veneer of seeming modesty the Hungarian politician replied with deeply rooted conceit: ‘The monopoly of interpretation in Europe is dominated by the left. If you debate values, you need strong backing. Not many politicians have such strong electoral support as I do. It was not the dream of my youth to one day become the enfant terrible of Europe.’ But he is ‘ready to take on the task for the bourgeois, Christian Democratic camp, a burden no one else can cope with …’ In his answers, riddled with sarcasm, there was a venomous reference to Merkel: