By Dalibor Rohac
Thursday, August 06, 2020
President Donald Trump’s emphasis on “winning” illustrates the perennial tension in politics between principles and impact. Too much ideological rigidity relegates conservatives to the role of standing “athwart history, yelling Stop.” In the effort to “defeat the enemy and enjoy the spoils,” in contrast, principles and ideas become irrelevant — what matters is brute force. However, there are better examples of the perils of conservative politics focused on “winning” than Donald Trump. After all, Trump has not really fought the liberal and progressive Left as much as he has trolled it and wound it up. In contrast, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has indeed crushed his opponents throughout his ten years in office, making it next to impossible for them to compete on a level playing field.
Much like Trump’s, Orban’s political success has been based on rhetorically exploiting the failures and the corruption of the Left and on feeding the most atavistic and conspiratorial impulses of the electorate. Unlike Trump, who has been mostly a paper tiger throughout his presidency, Orban is a skilled political operator who, in a way that is without parallel in the region, has used the past decade to entrench himself, his political party (Fidesz), and the economic elite surrounding the party.
Many Western conservatives have cheered him on in the process. According to Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. administration “must befriend Hungary’s populist leader.” Even the late Sir Roger Scruton (in his own words “neither a friend nor an enemy of Orban”) claimed that Hungary’s prime minister was “not the kind of demagogic tyrant that the liberal establishment in Europe want to make him out to be,” although he did throw “his weight around more than most Western politicians would.” Some conservatives have even speculated about emigrating to Budapest to escape the decadent West.
To be sure, Gonzalez had a point — the United States needs a constructive relationship with Orban’s Hungary. Yet it is also true that the Hungarian government has played the current administration like a fiddle, extracting favors such as the Defense Cooperation Agreement, while avoiding any accountability for its domestic behavior and overtures toward Russia and China. More important is that the perceived ideological affinity that conservatives feel with Orban is misplaced. Yes, Orban has a record of “winning,” but has he advanced conservative principles or made Hungary a better, more successful country?
If you are a politically connected “entrepreneur,” such as Istvan Tiborcz, Orban’s son-in-law, or Lorinc Meszaros, the mayor of Orban’s home village of Felcsut, the answer is an unambiguous yes. Worth $1.2 billion, Meszaros and his wife own over 100 companies that have been extraordinarily successful in winning government contracts. Eighty-three percent of the earnings of the family’s companies are believed to come from EU funds distributed by the Hungarian government. When asked once what he owed his success to, he responded, “God, luck, and Viktor Orban.”
While some have done extremely well under Fidesz, the gap between Hungary and its neighbors has widened since 2010. Once the second-most prosperous of the four Visegrad countries, trailing only the Czech Republic, Hungary now comes last, behind Poland. Budapest used to be home to the leading academic institution in Central and Eastern Europe, the Central European University (CEU), founded by George Soros. CEU provided a home not only or even mostly to “grievance studies” but also to top-notch scholarship in social sciences relevant to post-Communist transitions. Since Orban chased the CEU and its surrounding intellectual ecosystem away on petty legalistic grounds, while bringing the Hungarian Science Academy under political control, Budapest today is an intellectual backwater. Perhaps a wave of immigration by Western conservative intellectuals will fill the void, but as of now there is more evidence of a brain drain. As many as 600,000 Hungarians (from a nation of fewer than 10 million), overwhelmingly young and educated, have settled in Western European countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and Austria.
Since 2019, Freedom House has classified Hungary as merely “partly free.” Before discussing the organization’s real or imagined left-wing bias, note that Hungary has also dropped on the World Bank’s Doing Business and Worldwide Governance Indicators (showing, notably, worsened corruption and less rule of law), Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, and the Cato Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Index. Even on the economic-freedom index produced by the Heritage Foundation, the past decade has been one of stagnation, at best.
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According to Orban’s defenders, this is all an overreaction. They expressed more than a little glee when the Hungarian government ended the indefinite state of emergency, introduced through a law at the end of March as COVID-19 forced much of Europe into lockdown. “The 82-Day Dictatorship” was the title of a piece by Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review Online in late May.
The legislation introduced by Orban in response to the pandemic was far from innocuous, however. There was no sunset clause to the law that gave the government the power to legislate by decree, without parliamentary scrutiny and without the possibility of an early election. It also created two new categories of crimes. Interfering with the quarantine could lead to a prison sentence of up to three years (or five years if “perpetrated by a group,” or eight if anyone died as a result). To “claim or spread a falsehood or claim or spread a distorted truth in relation to the emergency in a way that is suitable for alarming or agitating a large group of people” became punishable by up to three years of imprisonment.
True, the original “enabling act” has now been repealed, but the legal instrument used for its repeal preserves many of the emergency powers it afforded itself earlier. Under the new bill that has superseded the legislation from March, on the advice of Hungary’s chief medical officer, the government can declare a state of “medical emergency” and thereby curtail freedom of movement and assembly for six months. The emergency would be “renewable indefinitely,” according to legal analysis by the Hungary Helsinki Committee. “Both introducing and ending this legal measure would be entirely up to the government, with no parliamentary scrutiny and little to no possibility for judicial review.”
Extending a degree of deference to the government of a pandemic-stricken country might be in order if Orban had no previous track record. Since its landslide victory in 2010, Fidesz has gradually dismantled checks on government power and tilted the political playing field in its favor. Hungary’s prime minister made it no secret that he wanted to part with Western European “dogmas,” especially with the liberal notion that people “have the right to do anything that does not infringe on the freedom of the other party.” He singled out China, Russia, India, Turkey, and Singapore as the “stars of international analysts.”
Shortly after arriving in power, Fidesz imposed a 98 percent retroactive “tax” on severance pay of civil servants leaving the public sector. On the same day that the country’s Constitutional Court struck down the tax as unconstitutional, a constitutional amendment was passed to allow explicitly for such retroactive legislation and to remove the jurisdiction of the court over tax and budgetary matters. The European Court of Human Rights later ruled unanimously that the retroactive, confiscatory “tax” violated the right to peaceful enjoyment of property and contravened the European Convention on Human Rights.
Fidesz used its large parliamentary majority to draft and adopt a new constitution (called the “Fundamental Law”), which came into force on January 1, 2012. It was drafted by a small group within Fidesz and adopted on purely partisan lines. The new constitutional architecture removed some of the constraints on the power of the parliamentary majority.
While in the past anyone could challenge the constitutionality of Hungarian legislation at the Constitutional Court, under the new constitution that right is reserved only to the government, to a quarter of all members of Parliament, and to the commissioner for fundamental rights. A constitutional amendment from 2013 stipulates that freedom of speech may not be exercised in such a way as to violate the dignity of the “Hungarian nation or any national, ethnic, racial, or religious community.” The same amendment prevents the Constitutional Court from reviewing budget and tax laws passed when the debt–GDP ratio exceeds 50 percent. Even if, for example, a tax infringes on constitutionally guaranteed rights or applies selectively to an ethnic or religious minority, the court does not get to have a say — not even after debt is reduced to less than 50 percent of GDP.
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The Fundamental Law opened the way to reducing the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 62, instantly removing the most senior 10 percent of the judiciary, including 20 percent of the Supreme Court judges and more than half the presidents of all appeals courts. This was declared illegal by both Hungary’s Constitutional Court and the European Union’s Court of Justice. But by the time the judicial decisions were made, most of the judges had already left. Fidesz used its two-thirds majority in Parliament to dismiss the president of the Supreme Court, who was also the president of the National Council of the Judiciary, before the end of his term — a decision that violated the European Charter of Human Rights. Furthermore, Fidesz increased the number of Constitutional Court justices from eleven to 15 and changed the procedure for their election to require only a single vote by a two-thirds majority, effectively packing the court with four additional judges loyal to Fidesz.
Fidesz also overhauled Hungary’s highly complex electoral system to strengthen its majoritarian features. Two-round races in local constituencies were replaced by a simple first-past-the-post system, and the minimum turnout threshold (for the seat to be awarded) was scrapped. Geographic boundaries between constituencies were redrawn in ways that benefited Fidesz. Several constituencies dominated by socialists or left-liberal parties were split up (for example, in Budapest) or merged with suburban areas (in Miskolc, Pecs, and Szeged) to ensure Fidesz’s dominance. Ethnic Hungarians in Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine, many of whom were granted dual citizenship by Orban’s government — and among whom Fidesz enjoys high levels of support — were made eligible to vote.
With a comfortable governing majority, the Fidesz-dominated Parliament has ceased to be a place of legislative deliberation. Instead, writes Janos Kornai, Hungary’s most eminent free-market economist, it has “become a law factory, and the production line is sometimes made to operate at unbelievable speed: between 2010 and 2014 no fewer than 88 bills made it from being introduced to being voted on within a week; in 13 cases it all happened on the same or the following day.”
The combination of dwindling advertisement revenue and the overwhelming economic power of businesses with ties to the governing party has had adverse effects on media independence. In 2016, the eminent center-left daily Nepszabadsag was closed down by its Fidesz-connected owner after it uncovered blatant conflicts of interest surrounding the governor of the central bank. In late July, the staff of Index, one of Hungary’s few remaining independent news websites, resigned en masse when its editor in chief was dismissed under pressure from advertisers.
Moreover, following the occasional raids of offices of nongovernmental organizations deemed unfriendly, Hungary adopted new legislation that echoed Russia’s infamous law from 2012, which required foreign-funded NGOs to register as foreign agents and be subjected to strict disclosure requirements. The objective was clear: According to Fidesz deputy chairman Szilard Nemeth, NGOs funded by George Soros “must be pushed back with all available tools, and I think they must be swept out.”
Like Vladimir Putin’s regime earlier, Hungarian officials compared the new legislation to the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). But FARA applies narrowly to organizations involved in “political or quasi-political” activities and not to foreign-funded NGOs at large. Unlike the Hungarian legislation, it explicitly exempts organizations involved in “religious, scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits” as well as organizations “whose foreign principal is a government of a foreign country . . . vital to the defense of the United States.” Furthermore, “since 1966 there have been no successful criminal prosecutions under FARA and only 3 indictments returned or information filed charging FARA violations,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
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Hungary remains an ally of the United States. But the notion that the perceived ideological overlap between America’s “national conservatives” and Orban’s political project is a solid foundation for the alliance is mistaken. Throughout his tenure, 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.
In 2014, after Russia had cut off natural-gas supplies to Ukraine, Hungary followed suit, notwithstanding the EU’s concerted efforts to provide Ukraine with energy. Under the pretext of defending the interests of the ethnic-Hungarian minority in Ukraine, Hungary’s government opposed Ukraine’s participation at the NATO summit in Brussels in July 2018.
Hungary’s government refused to extradite two suspected Russian arms dealers, Vladimir Lyubishin Sr. and Vladimir Lyubishin Jr., to the United States in 2018, citing an existing extradition treaty. The two are suspected of organizing arms shipments (including advanced missile systems) to Mexican drug cartels and trafficking cocaine to the United States — they could face jail time of up to 25 years in the United States. While awaiting a decision on their extradition to the United States, the Russian government filed its own extradition request, and Hungary’s ministry of justice quickly dispatched the Lyubishins to Moscow. Last year, the government concluded an agreement with the International Investment Bank, a relic of the Cold War era and based in Moscow, to move its headquarters to Budapest.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Orban’s rule is its revisionism. Much of Hungarian politics takes place in the shadow of the Trianon Treaty of 1920, through which the Kingdom of Hungary lost a staggering 72 percent of its land and 64 percent of its population. The treaty also guaranteed statehood to nations that had long felt oppressed within the confines of the dual, Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. Still, it is perfectly understandable that Hungarians continue to see the treaty as unfair.
Those fond of Orban’s “winning” should pay close attention to his recent speech at Trianon’s centennial commemoration. Far from being a manifesto for conservatism, it revives the worst demons of Europe’s past: a stab-in-the-back myth, playing on a deep-seated paranoia about the West, and with emphasis on Hungary’s power in its neighborhood; he concluded with an ominous rallying cry for the coming “decisive battle.” Orban has spent a good part of the past decade inserting his fingers into the old wound — giving Hungarian citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, and Serbia, buying soccer clubs in neighboring countries, and even channeling funds into ethnic-Hungarian parties there. In a region that has seen more than its fair share of ethnic conflict, he is playing with fire.
The impulse that has brought conservatives in the West to embrace Orban and Orbanism is understandable. The Left’s excesses and hypocrisy are real. But authoritarianism, corruption, and grievance-driven revisionism do not become any more justifiable just because they are practiced by someone whom the Left sees as its nemesis.
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