Viktor Orban’s Mandate By Michael Brendan Dougherty
The Hungarian prime minister has succeeded through democratic means
When Hungary declared a state of emergency in March to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, commentators in the West immediately spread the news that the European Union’s first dictatorship had arrived. Parliament was suspended. There would never be elections again. Hungary’s health-care system would collapse because its prime minister, Viktor Orban, had given the nation’s money away to cronies and squandered more of it in a doomed attempt to make soccer more popular. Criticism of the government was forbidden, forevermore. Political arrests would begin. A colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, Dalibor Rohac, wrote in the Washington Post that, absent a major pushback from Brussels and Washington, D.C., Hungary would emerge “a full-fledged dictatorship.” The U.S. political analyst Liz Mair — no fool, I think — confidently predicted of Orban, “He’s going to wind up putting Gypsies in permanent detention.”
Of course all of this was wrong. There was no diplomatic pushback. Brussels gave a preliminary ruling that the emergency law contained no threat to democracy; it was passed constitutionally. Hungary experienced its relatively small surge of cases and deaths, but its hospital system survived, even if it’s not up to Western European standards, and did just fine. Orban’s rule by decree included scoring some opportunistic points: He rushed through a park renovation opposed by a mayor of the opposition party and made it so that state-issued ID cards carry the birth sex of the holder. If these are abuses, they are more mild than the attempt by California governor Gavin Newsom to make rent-control schemes permanent through emergency powers. Two Hungarians were detained by police departments for criticizing the government, suspected of breaking laws against spreading misinformation during the pandemic. In each case it was determined that they had committed no crime, and they were released. By comparison, a law against online disinformation in Angela Merkel’s Germany is so broad and censorious that Russia and the Philippines cite it as a model they would imitate.
As for Gypsies going into permanent detention, that didn’t happen either. And it would be curious if Orban sent someone to detain Livia Jaroka, a member of the prime minister’s own party who became the second Romani ever elected to the European Parliament and the first to serve as its vice president. Quietly, the European Union has shelved all Article 7 procedures against Orban’s Hungary, an admission that he has not traduced the rule of law there.
Perhaps there is something misunderstood about Hungary. It is true that in 2012, Orban’s party revised Hungary’s constitution, and Orban has created centralized political structures. Orban, in a widely noted speech in 2014, promised to build an “illiberal democracy” and illiberal state in Hungary. In the following year he became much more famous and infamous internationally as the face of resistance to a wave of migrants and refugees. Smarting from the first time he was ousted as prime minister in 2002, he took the opportunity after 2010 to make state media — always sycophantic to the government — more baldly propagandistic. Pro-Orban business leaders have bought up some opposition organs and made them pro-government.
But if Orban did not make himself dictator for life, as some predicted during the recent pandemic, what is he? Orban has not much used the phrase “illiberal democracy” since 2014, but what could he have meant by it? Some have alleged that he has set democracy against liberal ideas. And others that he’s traducing democracy.
At Vox, Zack Beauchamp held that democracy was the missing piece of “illiberal democracy.” He has held that Orban in 2012 had rewritten the constitution in ways that were advantageous for his party, Fidesz. True, though Beauchamp fails to mention that the party had based the previous campaign on major structural reform of the government and had won its landslide victory on it, and that the government had the lawful supermajority support to pass it. Beauchamp’s conclusion that this renders elections “functionally non-competitive” is simply not true. Like so many analysts of Orbanism, Beauchamp is unwilling to discuss its Hungarian opponents.
Fidesz was born as a radical anti-Communist movement. It banned members over age 35, to keep out those who had compromised with the system. Orban made himself famous for a televised demand for the Soviets to exit Hungary. As the movement matured into a political party, Orban led it through a broad middle of the Hungarian electorate. To their left was the socialist party, MSZP, which was stacked with ex-Communists and fell into disrepute from the economic ruin of the first decade of the new millennium. Their reign between Orban’s first term and his next featured a prime minister caught on tape saying, “We have obviously been lying for the last one and a half to two years.” The socialist party had turned toward the Russian-style politics of patronage-privatization. At the turn of the millennium they could be, in the words of British novelist Tibor Fischer, “about as socialist as Al Capone.” Outside Hungary, it has been little noted that one of the party’s leaders, Gabor Simon, was found with a false Guinea-Bissau passport, hundreds of thousands of euros in foreign accounts, and millions of Hungarian florints in accounts under the identity of his false passport.
To the right of Orban’s Fidesz is the occasionally outright fascist party Jobbik. Whereas Orban’s Fidesz aligned with Christian Democratic parties across Europe, including Germany’s CDU and Ireland’s Fine Gael, Jobbik was in league with the no-kidding goose-steppers of the British National Party and France’s National Front. Some Western liberals, such as the Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, are so fearful of the continuing triumph of Viktor Orban that they counseled voting for Jobbik in the last election, though it was led by a man who had founded a far-right paramilitary.
But now, having run through the middle of them all, Orban himself is becoming the new rightward pole of Hungarian politics. The remains of Jobbik, the socialist party, and others have found that they can beat Fidesz candidates in local elections when they unite, and slowly they are beginning to do so for the next national contest. Orban has lampooned this emerging threat as “a joint march of red shirts and brown shirts.” But having failed while running on their own respective records and ideologies, they are now coming into their best position to succeed. In a two-party race, Fidesz would have to win an absolute majority in 53 districts to retain control. This is possible, but it would be no easy feat.
The clash between Orban’s Fidesz and the non-Fidesz alternative would look remarkably like the contest that now defines politics in Poland, where a conservative nationalist party, Law and Justice, occupies the “populist” pole and advocates welfare for families and natalist inducements. It faces a more socially progressive party that is more classically liberal in its economic orientation.
The attempts by Orban and his allies to create a conservative and faithful media should be deemed a hubristic failure. What the state-backed and -allied outlets produce is of a substandard quality and has none of the influence that the major online outlets that mostly oppose Orban have. The government’s attempt to stand up a patriotic media has been so aggressive that even a recent blowup at the previously anti-Orban outlet Index has seen Orban and his government blamed as guilty bystanders to a conflict that did not directly involve them.
The case that Hungary is a particularly unsavory actor on the world stage is often made by listing odd facts about it without context. In a recent issue of National Review (“Orban Plays with Fire,” August 24), Dalibor Rohac mentioned a few:
Orban has cultivated ties to both Russia and China and has acted repeatedly against U.S. interests in the region. The stories of large-scale investment projects are well known, the most prominent involving the Russian nuclear-energy monopolist, Rosatom, which was awarded a contract for the Paks nuclear power plant without an open tender. The details of the contract for 10 billion euros, financed by loans from Russia, are classified. In May 2019, Hungary struck a deal for the construction of a railway connection — with Serbia’s capital, Belgrade — worth 1.9 billion euros and built and financed by China.
If doing deals with Russia and China is evidence of serious democratic backsliding, what is Germany’s interest in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline? Or the endorsement of the South Stream pipeline project by the previous Hungarian prime minister? Or the EU’s own ongoing talks about a major investment partnership with China? It is true that Orban may not have had U.S. interests top of mind when signing these deals. Like Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron, Orban is elected to see to the interests of his own people.
Hungary’s tender for the railway connection received only two bidders. Taking a bid from China is no more evidence of an authoritarian turn than the United Kingdom’s initial 5G deal with Huawei. Chinese companies now regularly do infrastructure projects in the United States. China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation has contracts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Boston and is in the mix for major contracts with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Hungary’s contracts and those mentioned above could be criticized for a variety of reasons, but there is little to distinguish one set as democratic and Hungary’s as evidence of creeping authoritarianism.
Orban’s political success is due not to authoritarian structures but to the delivery of consistent economic growth. The early post-Communist years were known for stagnation and the rude awakening that a free Hungary was not the breadbasket for Europe, as it had thought itself to be, but rather a strange dependent country where EU money passes through but doesn’t remain invested, having a final destination back in the West.
Orban’s government set a target of growing the economy at a rate 2 percent higher than the average growth of the European Union as a whole. Although nearby countries including Poland and Slovakia outpaced it recently, Hungary has consistently delivered on this promise. And even in the COVID crisis, it is poised to hit the 2 percent mark the other way, seeing its economy shrink by 13 percent against an average European collapse of 15 percent. Orban’s government has managed this while delivering a tight labor market and rising wages. The minimum wage has more than doubled during his tenure. At the beginning of Orban’s second turn as prime minister, he promised 1 million new jobs — quite a lot for a country of 10 million people. A decade later, the count stands around 800,000. Labor participation soared from 50 to 63 percent.
That growth is aimed at halting and eventually reversing a major problem that has bedeviled Central and Eastern European nations that joined the European Union: the problem of emigration and brain drain. And these are just two parts of the larger problem that Orban sets himself to address: the viability of the Hungarian people, their society, and the state in the 21st century.
Orban certainly used the migration issue of 2015 to political advantage. But there was a chimerical aspect to it. The idea that Muslim migrants from Iraq and Afghanistan want to settle permanently in nations such as Hungary or Poland, known for emigration, was always fanciful, even if some Europeanists claimed to believe it. In such countries those migrants, who would have been allocated from Italy, would have to be settled somewhere. Because there are no preexisting communities for them to join, the process would be quite visible and disruptive. Not to mention highly unpopular. Any government that had tried it would have been thrown out. And the migrants themselves, after sufficient time, would likely have left anyway, making their way to the richer cities with more-established Islamic communities in Western Europe.
But Orban used the issue, to dramatize himself as standing against the great powers in the European Union, but also to dramatize the long struggle of the Hungarian people to survive the political domination of outsiders. In his 2019 state-of-the-nation address, he connected the immigration issue to Hungary’s birth dearth, a Continental phenomenon in Europe and a regional catastrophe in Central Europe. “People in the West are responding to this with immigration,” he said. “They say that the shortfall should be made up by immigrants, and then the numbers will be in order. Hungarians see this in a different light. We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children.”
Immigration can be politically destabilizing even in much stronger, richer nations. It can lead a democratic people to vote for Donald Trump, for instance. In Hungary the calculations are even finer. In a country with a tradition of emigration, any decrease in living standards or quality of life can spur a further exodus of the most talented, who have, in their EU passports, a right to move to richer nations.
In Hungary the fertility rate is at national-suicide levels, 1.53 children per woman. Orban has learned that a small country cannot exercise effective sovereignty without economic growth, and economic growth is more difficult, almost impossible, with a contracting population. “It is not written in the great book of humanity that there must be Hungarians in the world. It is only written in our hearts,” Orban said in his 2019 speech, before announcing a variety of natalist measures, including one that would eliminate income tax for life for any woman who had four children.
Orban’s theory is that small nations must have strong and nimble states that can intervene to protect democratic peoples from the bullying of multinational corporations and larger states. And the process of centralizing political structures is not outside the European norm, even if American conservatives look at it with suspicion. The constitutional reforms removed some checks and balances in the Hungarian system, moving it away from an American-style system toward a more British style of parliamentary supremacy. Orban’s reforms could be compared to Margaret Thatcher’s in the 1980s, which pulled powers away from local government and put them into Whitehall and its archipelago of quangos. But even in “authoritarian” Hungary, the power of the prime minister would still fall short of the kind of authority enjoyed by European leaders such as French president Emmanuel Macron.
Orban’s reforms are alleged by critics including Rohac to have strengthened the majoritarian features of Hungary’s constitution. Effectively, Rohac is criticizing Hungary for being democratic. But these reforms make sense if you see an alliance of nongovernmental organizations, multinational business, and an activist judiciary as a progressive battering ram against the majority wishes of the people. In his attack on Orban as antidemocratic, Beauchamp concluded by noting that Orban’s techniques were, with “some nouns changed,” not so different from those of Republicans. This tends to emphasize that the objection to Orban has to do not with legal niceties but with his political success.
In the end, we find in Orban neither an infallible hero for the Right internationally nor the dictator feared by liberal democrats. Orban stands in the tradition of capable and canny European nationalist and conservative leaders, who include Ireland’s Eamon de Valera and France’s Charles de Gaulle. Each of these men made his career, as a younger man, standing against foreign government. And each spent his time in elected leadership annoying the Europeanists by striking political deals better than their nations were held to deserve. Each presented himself as indomitable, even unconquerable, when held aloft by popular opinion in his nation.
Dev and de Gaulle were eventually succeeded in democratic contests. And one day Orban will be too.
Orban has mostly retired the term “illiberal democracy.” But there may be a meaning in it. Orban was articulating not an authoritarian turn but an anti-ideological one. Ryszard Legutko, the Polish philosopher, MEP, and member of Law and Justice, is, like Orban, a veteran of the resistance to Communism and has written a book, The Demon in Democracy, that may help us understand this uniquely Central European and post-Communist politics. In that book Legutko describes how the veterans of anti-Communism recognize something that Westerners don’t see as readily. The partisans of liberal democracy often have the same political eschatology as Communists, believing that the democratic process and the power of markets will dissolve the supposedly irrational attachments to nation-states, their ethnicities, and their religions, leaving the rights-bearing individual not just healthier and wealthier but ultimately liberated from prejudice and superstition.
Orban has instead vowed that Hungary’s language and culture ought to survive the 21st century and prosper. This is a tricky task, and it has made Orban more flexible than most conservatives, and more intransigent than most democrats. With memories of 1956, and caution against the corruption of power, conservatives should hope his task is a success.
Comments are closed.
