Three decades after the fall of communism in Hungary, the country faces a familiar foe: authoritarianism
Viktor Orbán was not destined to be a leader. Born the son of a poor working class couple in the humble Hungarian villages of Alcsútdoboz and Felcsút, he spent many of his childhood days as a farmhand in nearby fields, pulling beets, sorting potatoes, or otherwise playing soccer with his friends when he got the chance. At 15, he used a bathroom with running water for the first time. At 18, he was an unwilling and insubordinate conscript of the communist government, often going AWOL to watch the World Cup on television.
In spite of his youthful rebellion, or perhaps because of it, Orbán was a man of extraordinary ambition. In 1988, he co-founded the youth-oriented and decidedly liberal political party, Fidesz, under its now-defunct slogan, “Don’t trust anyone over 35.” His famous speech at the reburial of Imre Nagy, a martyr of the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution, captured the attention of the nation by openly challenging the communist government to “face free elections” and “fulfil the will of our revolution.” Just one year later, Orbán won a seat in Hungary’s first democratic Parliament. Eight years after that he became one of the country’s youngest prime ministers — at the age of 35, no less.
Unfortunately for him, the country was struggling to cope with a burgeoning economic crisis fuelled by outstanding debts from the communist era and an uncritical embrace of Western development plans, including crippling austerity measures and the privatization of state assets to foreign investors. By the end of its first term, the Hungarian public grew impatient with Fidesz and elected to power a series of left-wing coalitions. These governments, too, failed to deliver on the promise of Western-style economic prosperity, particularly as the global financial crisis began to take hold in 2008. Their failure, coupled with a number of embarrassing corruption scandals and political gaffes, considerably weakened the position of the Hungarian-left ahead of the 2010 elections. Fidesz returned to power with a landslide two-thirds majority in Parliament — but this time, things were very different.
According to Paul Lendvai’s Orbán, the Hungarian strongman was power-hungry and embittered by nearly a decade in the political wilderness; having long since abandoned his commitment to liberal democracy, he now sought to create “a central political force field” of unhindered single-party rule that would last for the “coming 15 to 20 years.” He’s already halfway there.
The first step was to corrupt the institutions designed to uphold democratic norms. A new constitution was announced in 2011, and after just nine days of deliberation in Parliament without any previous national consultation, the Orbán majority adopted it into law. Thanks to this change, Parliament gained new jurisdiction over nominations to the constitutional court and soon took advantage of this power to expand the number of justices on the bench from 11 to 15; each of the party’s appointees were Fidesz loyalists, granting the government a definite majority in the judicial branch. Fidesz also passed laws to purge the state’s key public offices, including those of the prosecutor general and the head of the election commission. These positions, too, were later filled by party loyalists.
To guarantee Fidesz’s continued electoral success, Orbán slashed the number of elected representatives in Parliament from 386 to 199 while egregiously gerrymandering the new constituency boundaries. In 2014 and 2018, Fidesz retained its two-thirds majority in Parliament despite securing less than half the vote each time.
Next, Orbán assumed control of the media by unifying all public services under the authority of Fidesz allies and by generously assisting the consolidation of private media into the hands of friendly oligarchs. Today, the party owns, directly or indirectly, over 90 per cent of all media in Hungary.
This friendly media environment has granted the government a mouthpiece with which to relentlessly promote anti-immigrant propaganda and unfounded conspiracies about the role of Hungarian-born billionaire, George Soros, in funding the wave of refugees seeking asylum in Europe. Curiously, stories about government corruption — including an investigation by a German NGO that revealed how four Fidesz-friendly oligarchs received €1.8 billion worth of public contracts in just six years — often fail to receive coverage.
There are of course many in the country who have expressed concern over these recent developments. “It has become irrefutable that the country is not democratic,” said Zoltán M., a 46-year-old wrestling coach in an interview with The Ontarion, “Viktor Orbán continues to slip into autocracy.” Nevertheless, others feel that condemnation of Orbán by international leaders and political bodies is unfair. Their perspective is perhaps best summarized for The Ontarion in the words of Hungarian schoolteacher Angelika O.: “Why do some people think that a democratically-elected government (that won a two-thirds majority three times in a row) should be overruled from the outside because it has a different position on certain issues than the groups that call themselves the guardians of democracy?”
Arguably, Orbán was a harbinger for the illiberal populism that is now visible in an increasing number of Western democracies. His anti-democratic tactics have been faithfully adopted in Poland by the ruling Law and Justice Party. His polarizing rhetoric has also been embraced by other illiberal leaders, perhaps most strikingly in President Trump’s recent suggestion that Soros has personally funded a caravan of Honduran migrants seeking to reach America. What remains to be seen is to what extent the citizens of Hungary, and the citizens of all other societies facing the rise of similarly authoritarian figures, will tolerate attacks on their democracy.
Editor’s note: The last names of those interviewed have been withheld for privacy reasons and safety concerns.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons