Budapest: Hungary, Democracy and the Liberal Media

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, 15 per cent of all countries were full democracies in 2010 and 31.7 per cent were flawed democracies. So 11.3 per cent of the world’s population enjoyed the benefits of democracy, such as they are, while 37.1 per cent put up with an ersatz version.

Of course assessments like this depend not only on the definition of democracy, but on who is doing the defining. For example, the conservative Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán is fiercely attacked by mainstream and leftist American and European commentators for its “authoritarian” nature. It is claimed that the Magyar press is not free (although the best-selling daily paper in Hungary fills almost every issue with vitriolic denunciation of the government), that the judiciary has been tampered with, that jobs in the public sector are exclusively reserved for government supporters (although the same practice, followed for years in Greece, not to mention by Left-liberal Hungarian governments, did not provoke outrage), that the constitution is illiberal (although the constitutional jurist and former German cabinet minister Rupert Scholz describes it as “exemplary” and a clear declaration of allegiance to EU values and human rights), that the government is abominably corrupt—and much more. Some of this criticism might to a greater or lesser extent be justified, but there is a problem: Orbán has twice won two-thirds of the Hungarian parliamentary seats in OSCE-monitored elections: so either the electors don’t care that they are being oppressed, or they are not as oppressed as the Americans and Europeans claim. Either way most people would put Hungary in the category of a “flawed democracy” and Orbán himself characterises his preferred version of democracy as “illiberal”.

But now let’s look at America, which presumably imagines itself to be a model of democracy, since it takes it upon itself to lecture others, in this case Hungary, on their democratic performance. In the decade after 2000, the US used torture as a judicial mechanism (you can be sure we would have heard from vigilant American liberals if there was even a single instance of state-authorised torture in Hungary); the revelations of Edward Snowden have shown that the US operates massive and generalised surveillance of its citizens; US prosecutors often falsify evidence, especially against black defendants; there are more than two million people currently in American jails, 40 per cent of them African-Americans, who make up only 13 per cent of the population; new prisons were erected at the rate of one every ten days between 1990 and 2005; from time to time cases emerge of African-Americans being beaten up by the police or shot out of hand—and these are only the ones caught on video; some American states still administer judicial murder (for which the official euphemism is “death penalty”), which every other democracy of the developed world (including Hungary) has abolished; people spend years on death row and it is almost certain that innocent people are periodically executed; despite frequent massacres in the US, all attempts to limit gun possession founder on the American constitution, which US politicians evidently think so superior to Hungary’s.

Further, the members of the US Congress and the Senate are beholden to the vested interests that financed their election campaigns and are monitored by hordes of lobbyists to see that they stick to the script. Instead of addressing this gross infringement of democratic principles, in 2010 the Supreme Court sanctioned so-called Super-Pacs, which are vehicles for raising unlimited amounts of money for a candidate, with the laughable proviso that their organisers are not supposed to collaborate directly with the beneficiary. (Is it any wonder that a survey in 2013 found that Congressmen and Congresswomen were less popular than cockroaches and traffic jams?) Then again, an American Appeal Court judge recently ruled in the BP oil spill case that the company should pay out compensation even to claimants who had suffered no loss or damage (so much for the rule of law and property rights); electoral boundaries are openly and regularly gerrymandered, because the boundaries in some states can be set by politicians (as opposed to the independent electoral commissions which operate elsewhere); and so on, and on, and on.

American academics, in common with European commentators, claim to be outraged by the new Hungarian constitution (which replaces an incompletely amended Stalinist one). However, as Professor Alan Sked has pointed out, the sacred US Constitution privileged slave-owners and helped to cause a civil war. Its three different and staggered elections for the Presidency, the Senate and the House were designed as a patriarchal method of obviating popular majorities, with the resulting unedifying gridlock that we see today. Its Supreme Court, of which the American elite is particularly proud, “allows a handful of politically appointed judges to decide the fate of political issues such as abortions, healthcare, gun control, campaign funding and presidential elections”. When the conservative Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia died suddenly in February 2016, all pretence that the court is above political influence was abandoned as Democrats and Republicans manoeuvred over who would get to appoint his successor. (The same American commentators who think this is a wonderful system threw their toys out of their prams when the current Hungarian government merely decided to fix a retirement age for judges.)

So which is the more democratic country: America or Hungary?

It is widely proclaimed that the basis of democracy, beyond free and genuine elections, is compromise and consensus. Contrary to what many seem to assume, the two are not identical. A compromise is an agreement hammered out between two or more parties and is required even in the cabinet of a government consisting of a single victorious political grouping. Consensus (“general or widespread agreement”) may not even be on the table (for example if a majority of voters want the return of the death penalty, but no party is offering that). Consensus may also be an insidious form of propaganda: for example “metropolitan liberals” who exercise a kind of hegemony over large swathes of the American press and organisations like the BBC or the German broadcasters, often act as if it was self-evident what the “mainstream” or “consensus” view was on any given issue and they were the guardians of it. They are continually surprised when the “mainstream” seems to have flowed elsewhere. Conversely the right-wing media (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Murdoch press) instinctively feels it represents the “silent” or “moral” majority. It is likewise taken aback when it turns out that many conservatives turn out to be more liberal in their views (on homosexual marriage, say) than expected or assumed.

More importantly, “consensus” may not be as inherently desirable as it is presented (and manipulated). Mrs Thatcher put this point with her usual forcefulness:

[Consensus is] the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: “I stand for consensus”?

Consensus as a lazy line of least resistance and a reluctance to face unpleasant realities is widespread in democracies. It is often encouraged by people who fear that realist attitudes (rather than fudge) are likely to result in demands on their moral, or even physical, courage. “In order for evil to triumph,” said Edmund Burke, “it is sufficient for good men to do nothing.”

These considerations are relevant to Hungary, where society is dramatically polarised and the political struggle is waged across a chasm that is deeply embedded in Hungarian history—to some extent not even, or only, in recent history. The failure—or, I would rather say, unwillingness—to reflect this problem honestly has led to a partisan and often untruthful coverage of the Fidesz government led by Viktor Orbán since 2010.

The disastrous conduct of the previous alliance of liberals (in fact, neo-liberals) and ex-communists was glossed over, the EU even conspiring with it to conceal the extent of the country’s debt before the 2010 election. From the outset the EU proved less indulgent with the Orbán government, deliberately painting it as an imminent danger to democracy and raising endless legal objections to its measures. Moreover the supporters of the opposition, realising that the Hungarian electorate would not give them the time of day after the full extent of their malfeasance had been revealed, decided on a strategy of undermining the government from abroad. In mature democracies (where there is anyway a tradition that opposition politicians do not attack their own government when abroad) this would be an indication of political and moral bankruptcy; but the Western press, with little knowledge of Hungarian history and usually none at all of the Magyar tongue, wheels out the same spokesmen to say the same things again and again on the (correct) assumption that their texts will in due course become the received opinion.

So what exactly has Orbán done to attract this cacophony of abuse and often calumny? First, in Hungary itself, he has upset the intellectuals’ image of themselves as the makers of the “system change” (significantly, no one refers to 1989 as a “revolution”). He has exposed the old nomenclatural incumbents, their children, their hangers-on and (most sensitively) self-proclaimed dissidents as the corrupt parasites they became once they had in their hands the three pillars of the state—the media, the economy and (from 2002 to 2010) the government.

Second, he has upset often corrupt foreign investors and businessmen by insisting that Hungary will accept investment only on its own terms and reversing some of the unsavoury deals that have been made. In particular, to their manifest surprise and indignation, he took on the banks that had massively mis-sold mortgages in Swiss francs and forced a settlement on them.

Third, and most outrageously to the bien-pensants, he has decisively rejected the dogmas of multiculturalism. Not only does he keep insisting that Hungary is a sovereign state—which the EU’s liberals nowadays regard as a violently nationalistic assertion—but he also says he prefers Hungary for Hungarians, who have the right to decide whom they wish to admit to their country. Most inflammatory of all, he says that, if other (sovereign) countries decide to create islands of Islam within their borders, they have the right to do so; equally, Hungary has the right not to do so.

How could such a terrible person be twice elected with a two-thirds parliamentary majority in OSCE-monitored elections? During Orbán’s first term (2010 to 2014) the Austrian media gave generous coverage to the noisy protests in Budapest against the Fidesz government, but mostly failed to notice some rather bigger and entirely peaceful ones supporting Orbán (journalists are busy chaps, they can’t be everywhere). The idea was that the people would soon come to their senses once they had all the “facts” assembled for them by the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting) and vote in a government that liberals approved of. However, having been thwarted in its attempts to undermine support for Orbán in Hungary itself (Orbán was re-elected in 2014, again with a two-thirds parliamentary majority), the Austrian media has now resorted to indoctrinating Austrians in contempt for Hungarians that verges on racism.

The refugee crisis (the word migrant has quietly been dropped from the script) seemed like a golden opportunity to make up for previous setbacks. The ORF coverage in the summer and autumn of 2015 carefully avoided anything that might remind viewers that the outright refusal of the “asylum seekers” to co-operate in any way with the Hungarian authorities was a contributing factor to the crisis. Most refused point-blank any instruction to register and many had anyway torn up their papers. If it was mentioned that the (extremely restrained) police were giving water to those on a train parked at Bicske, this was only to describe (and film) how the intended recipients hurled it back at their “jailers”. A Syrian was paraded before the cameras to shout, “I would rather die in Syria than be in this hell”, which seems rather unlikely. There were many other similarly sophisticated propaganda touches. When the refugees eventually arrived in Vienna, the ORF went into overdrive with its coverage of the magnificent reception they received—before they were quickly sent on to Germany.

This propaganda, as with several other ploys of the Western media, has boomeranged. Initially, the Austrian authorities were able to sluice the new arrivals from Hungary straight through to Germany, while simultaneously denouncing the Magyars for their alleged inhumane treatment of “refugees”. The beauty of this operation, from the Austrian point of view, was that it combined seamless buck-passing with unlimited opportunities for self-righteousness. Alas! The policy hit the buffers when Germany suddenly closed its border with Austria, sparking barely concealed panic in the Chancellery. Thereafter the Austrians sent troops to their own borders (cuddly Austrian troops, you understand, quite different from the thuggish Magyar soldiery who, the ORF did its best to persuade us, had been sent to the Hungarian border to beat up defenceless refugees). By October, Austria was also planning a border fence (not a brutal Magyar fence, you understand, such as Austria had recently denounced, but a friendly Austrian fence designed to make the migrants feel more at home). By then, Chancellor Faymann had thought better of his rhetoric implying that Hungarians are the new Nazis (in Austria, “playing the Nazi card” has a habit of blowing up in its user’s face).

Even the ORF, whose features on Hungary seem to have been scripted by the Hungarian opposition, began recalibrating its mendacious anti-Hungarian propaganda as the struggle to misrepresent why Austria was now pursuing the policies it had previously excoriated became increasingly arduous. By November, Austria’s Foreign Minister was saying that the hopeless EU approach to this issue could best be described as a “subsidy to people-traffickers”. By February 2016 Austria had run into trouble with its big sister Germany by limiting asylum applications to eighty per day while waving through the rest to Germany, thus infuriating the Germans, who were trying to limit the fallout from Mutti Merkel’s insane “Willkommenskultur”. Soon Austria was getting slammed by the EU for contravening the Geneva Convention, the European Convention of Human Rights and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. Schadenfreude in Budapest!

I have dwelt on the migrant crisis not only because it is currently the top political issue in Europe, but also because it illustrates most vividly the eagerness with which double standards are applied by the liberal-leftist camp. As soon as one questionable accusation from that quarter is revealed as less than solid, another is wheeled out. Philip Stephens sums up the prevailing line in the Financial Times, namely that Viktor Orbán “presides over an authoritarian regime that is hostile to Muslims, permissive of anti-Semitism and blames foreign capital for the country’s economic ills”. Notice how disingenuously this is phrased: for example, the slipperiness of the expression, “permissive of anti-Semitism”, since, after all, in May 2013 Orbán gave the keynote speech at the Plenary Assembly of the World Jewish Congress in Budapest? As for “blaming foreign capital”, this neatly sidesteps the appalling rent-seeking behaviour since 1989 of far too many foreign enterprises in Hungary which, in another context, Stephens would have been the first to criticise. The “hostile to Muslims” accusation is fatuous because it deliberately obscures the issue that Orbán was addressing in the relevant speech, namely the risks to a small country of admitting substantial Muslim immigration: it is not as if Western Europe is ignorant of the dangers of radicalisation and terrorism that such an influx has already produced, not to mention the problem of the anti-Semitic mindset of Islam that presumably Stephens would be the first to denounce. Even the phrase “authoritarian regime” is disingenuous, notwithstanding Orbán’s authoritarian political style, since his government is legitimated by free elections and very considerable popular support, which is seldom the case for “authoritarian” regimes classically defined. Stephens is also evidently proud of his earlier coinage, “pocket Putin”, implying that the Orbán regime is indistinguishable from that of President Putin. But the last time I looked, Orbán had not started a war, annexed part of a neighbouring state, thrown his opponents into jail on trumped-up charges or sent murderers abroad to poison his critics with polonium. The phrase is simply a smear by a liberal journalist who believes that Hungary is fertile ground for “virtue-signalling”.

Viktor Orbán’s unpardonable crime has been to take on the complacent liberal consensus with its cross-border cronyism and show up its pharisaism, its frequent mendacity and its opportunism cloaked in self-righteousness. He has the populist’s knack of turning attacks on himself to his advantage: “Enemies,” wrote the seventeenth-century Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián, “are of more use to the wise man than friends are to the fool.” When he had been given a roasting in the European Parliament by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a man who had confessed in his memoir to misbehaviour with young persons in his care and who was a friend of the 1970s terrorists in Germany, he was solemnly warned by the Socialist President of the Parliament not to exploit the attacks made on him for domestic political advantage!

Then again, a great caterwauling was set up when Orbán reformed the religious law that had allowed bogus sects like the “Worshippers of the Womb” to claim tax breaks or subsidies (there were over 300 claimants!); but the new law simply limited the claimants to genuine religions and did not (as claimed) prohibit the others from performing their rites if they so wished. Moreover, closer inspection of it revealed that it was actually more liberal than the religious laws in some of the countries from which attacks on it emanated (notably France). This failed campaign was all of a piece with the double standards epitomised by a British scholar critiquing Hungary’s new constitution who, in a moment of absent-mindedness, expressed his dismay that Orbán (who is legally trained) had justified various aspects of the said constitution that were under attack by pointing out identical or parallel aspects of other European constitutions. The liberal-Left consensus has determined that Orbán’s role is to be pilloried. That being the case, showing up the hypocrisy of the would-be philosopher kings at home and abroad is clearly an appalling act of lèse-majesté.

None of this should blind us to the fact that Hungary, like most of the other “new democracies” of Central Europe, is a flawed democracy, as stated above. The main problem is that Kádárism, or “goulash communism”, was remarkably successful at corrupting at least two generations of Hungarians. The “rush hour on the road to Damascus” in 1989-90, described by the writer Péter Eszterházy, has been followed by an unedifying politics of posturing, denial, calumny and manipulation. Because there was neither a “truth commission” on the South African model that dealt with the crimes of apartheid, nor even the reasonably successful “lustration” process adopted by the Czechs to cleanse their system of communism, disillusion with the political class has fed on revelations, accusations (true and false) and a feeling not only that the same type of people remained in charge, but too often the same people. Viktor Orbán has skilfully exploited this last point, even though there are plenty of opportunists on the Right, as there are on the Left, and claims that he has presided, through the ballot box, over the revolution that was not allowed to take place in 1989. As it happens, this chimes with the frustration of many voters who feel (with some justification) that the change to a capitalist system has not brought them much benefit, indeed seems only to have benefited “the usual suspects”. This explains why Orbán’s policy mix contains a number of “anti-capitalist” elements, particularly his determination that the banking sector should be at least 50 per cent in Hungarian hands and the utility companies should be forced to give customers a better deal.

The Left complains that Orbán’s policies are populist, and they are. So were those of the preceding ex-communist-liberal coalition which (for example) promised to raise salaries in the state sector by 50 per cent, and whose prime minister was caught on tape admitting he had lied consistently to win the election. The Left also complains that Orbán is a dangerous nationalist, because he has offered moral, diplomatic and constitutional support (voting rights in Hungary) to the disadvantaged Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries. To the liberals of Brussels and the Western press, otherwise ever alert for the slightest disadvantage to a minority, this is an embarrassment. After all, it was the US and Western Europe that cooked up the grossly unjust Treaty of Trianon at the end of the First World War, which reduced Hungary by two-thirds and left three million Magyars stranded in states anxious to persecute them. Liberalism is of course customarily rather selective in its indignation, but in this case a bad conscience is allied to hypocrisy. I have been told with owlish solemnity by an Austrian historian that changing the official name of the country to Magyarország (“Hungary”) was an act of provocative nationalism not only because the “Republic of …” had been dropped, but because “ország” (he maintained) means “Reich” (empire). Unfortunately for this line of argument, ország means “land” (as in England, Holland or, er, Deutschland as we must now call it), something my friend could have ascertained by looking it up in a dictionary (and was he not concerned about the reich in Österreich?) As to the worry about the absence of the word Republic, if he’d bothered to read the constitution of which he was so critical, he would see it stated in Clause II that the country’s “form of governance shall be that of a republic”.

The two accusations which have most substance are that of a too highly centralised form of government, and widespread corruption. Orbán has gathered presidential-type power in his own hands (one of the figures he most admires in modern history is General de Gaulle) which results in a top-down form of governance with too many arbitrary or misconceived decisions, some of which have had to be reversed in the face of popular resistance. The opposition has coined the phrase, “Hungary is not a dictatorship but Orbán is a dictator,” which looks like an update of Herbert Marcuse’s dishonest slogan about “repressive tolerance”, parroted by student radicals in the 1960s. Still, style matters in politics and this perception, even if designed to have it both ways (Hungary is, or is not, a dictatorship according to how well-informed you deem your interlocutor to be), has wide currency.

As to corruption, it was moderate under the Antall and first Fidesz governments (1990–1994 and 1998–2002), rampant under the ex-communist-liberal alliances (1994–1998, 2002–2010), and is now as bad (and as brazen) as it ever was. Corruption and its attendant ills disfigure all the new democracies of Central Europe, partly because there has always been a tradition of it (in Bulgaria, for instance, the cynics say that other states also have a mafia, but in Bulgaria the mafia is the state). Political parties regard taxpayers’ money as honeypots to be plundered and many go into politics with the aim of self-enrichment. It will take years for a culture of self-restraint to prevail (look at Greece) and parties sloganeering about the corruption of incumbents are usually just angry at being denied access to it. This is deeply depressing, but not about to change soon. Meanwhile what Hungary desperately needs is a functioning, patriotic, reasonably honest and moderate left-of-centre opposition to hold the Fidesz government to account and provide an alternative government-in-waiting. What it’s got is a weak, fragmented and incoherent opposition which is in cahoots with a profoundly dishonest class of whining intellectuals, who run round the world denouncing not only the government but the electorate itself for not returning their crooked friends to power.

The other day I mischievously asked one of Orbán’s fiercest critics to list Orbán’s achievements in his two terms of office so far. There were none, he almost shouted. Not restoring the economy to a modest surplus in his first term after the mismanagement of the socialists? Not bringing down the deficit to the Maastricht criterion and paying back early the IMF loan necessitated by the mismanagement of the socialist-liberal alliance that had bankrupted the country? Not obliging the EU to remove Hungary from the deficit monitoring process and thereby releasing the cohesion funds for infrastructure spending? Not returning the economy to growth? Not making the banks accountable for their massive mis-selling of foreign currency mortgages? Not dealing decisively with the migrant crisis, despite vilification from abroad, in a manner that is now being adopted by all his calumniators? None of the above, it seems, can be accounted an achievement. Clearly, even if Orbán turned Hungary overnight into the richest country in the world and walked upon the waters of the Danube, only misguided fools could account these feats as achievements. One is reminded of the British politicians who couldn’t think of a single achievement of the Thatcher years, notwithstanding her success in toppling an Argentinian dictator, the restoration to health of a basket-case economy and one or two other things that made her a leader respected throughout the world. 

The attacks on Viktor Orbán often tell us more about the character of the attacker than they tell us about Orbán. In due course the Hungarians will tire of the “Viktator”, as his enemies call him (another boomerang, as his supporters find the nickname quite entertaining); for the moment, however, there seems no credible alternative and all his mostly lazy, dishonest and corrupt opponents seem able to do is to get the foreign media to repeat their propaganda. Until they can think of something better, they do not deserve to win back power, nor do the Hungarians seem keen to have them back.