Homo Orbánicus

Jan-Werner Müller
APRIL 5, 2018 ISSUE
Orbán: Hungary’s Strongman
by Paul Lendvai
Oxford University Press, 273 pp., $29.95

Visitors to Budapest may have read

somewhere that Hungary has the first
autocratic regime in the European
Union. The capital on the Danube does
not feel like that: the atmosphere is
relaxed, not repressive; no
paramilitaries are marching; if
anything, one might come across a
small demonstration against the
government, politely escorted by
police. The ruling “ism” would appear
to be not authoritarianism but
hedonism: from the beautifully restored
thermal baths to the beer gardens in the
old Jewish quarter, affluent natives and
an ever-growing number of tourists just
seem to be enjoying themselves.
There is no personality cult around
Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, who
has been prime minister since 2010.
Orbán has understood that authoritarian
populism must never evoke images
familiar from twentieth-century
dictatorships: no violence in the streets,
no knocks on doors by the secret police Viktor Orbán; drawing by Siegfried Woldhek
late at night, no forcing citizens to
profess political loyalty in public. Instead, power is secured through wide-ranging control of
the judiciary and the media; behind much talk of protecting hard-pressed families from
multinational corporations, there is crony capitalism, in which one has to be on the right
side politically to get ahead economically.

Like all populists, Orbán has no difficulty in presenting himself as an underdog fighting
“the elites”—preferably “shadowy” ones that threaten the nation with their “globalist”
networks. This past fall, the government waged a vicious campaign against the Hungarian-
American hedge fund manager and philanthropist George Soros, alleging that his “empire”
is bent on striking a “final blow to Christian culture.” It is worth remembering that Orbán
was the first major European politician to endorse Trump (whose victory he celebrated as a
“return to reality” in the face of political correctness and liberal hypocrisies). Hungary is of
course not the US, but the country shows clearly how populists with enough power operate
when in government.
Paul Lendvai, a Hungarian-Austrian journalist who spent several decades reporting on
Central Europe for the Financial Times, has written a highly illuminating biography of
Orbán, whom he calls “the ablest and most controversial politician in modern Hungarian
history.” Orbán: Hungary’s Strongman also serves as a useful overview of Hungarian
history since the fall of communism—after all, Orbán has been central to the country’s
development since at least the late-1990s, when he was first elected prime minister. Lendvai
portrays him as ruthless, absolutely relentless in the pursuit of power, and, on many
occasions, outright vengeful.

Orbán has long cultivated the image of a man born to fight: his passions are for soccer and
spaghetti Westerns. The avenger played by Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the
West is a particular favorite; he claims to have seen the movie at least fifteen times. He likes
to brandish his “plebeian” origins and values: his family lived without running water; the
children had to labor in the fields during school holidays. This picture leaves out the fact
that Orbán’s father was the typical Homo Kádáricus, the product of “goulash communism”
under János Kádár, who led the country from 1956 to 1988. Kádár had struck a tacit deal
with Hungarian society: politics should be left to him, and in return people would not have
to pretend to believe in communism; instead, they could find happiness in family life and
even run small businesses. Back then, Western accounts of the country invariably contained
the cliché of the “happiest barracks in the Eastern Bloc.” Part of an upwardly mobile rural
middle class that both despised and served socialism, Orbán’s father became the head of the
machinery department in a local farm collective. Orbán was a good student, and in the mid-
1980s he joined the István Bibó College in the Buda hills, a kind of intellectual fraternity
house for law students from the countryside. The college had been set up by the socialist
regime, but some of the tutors teaching there were dissident intellectuals. Soros supported it
financially.

In 1988, Orbán and other students set up the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz). They
took the word “young” literally: no one above the age of thirty-five was allowed to join.
Their program was liberal, anticlerical, and suspicious of nationalism. Eventually, the
Fidesz founders were to abandon these ideals for their exact opposites. But they never
abandoned one another. Today the country’s president, the speaker of parliament, and the
author of Hungary’s 2012 constitution all happen to be Orbán’s friends from university
days.

Lendvai emphasizes the particular characteristics of this political brotherhood. They shared
relatively humble origins in the countryside and grew resentful of the urbane intellectuals
who tutored them. Some of these older liberals had formed a successful party, the Free
Democrats, after the Kádár regime and, in the eyes of Orbán and friends, patronized the
young firebrands as a not yet fully educated youth branch of their party. Whether the
country boys split from the older liberals because they had a chip on their shoulder is
debatable—after all, this story is just another version of the populist notion that the country
is forever divided between “the real, rural Hungary” and the cosmopolitan (sometimes
called “foreign-hearted”—i.e., Jewish) Budapest liberals. What is beyond dispute is that
Orbán discovered that resentment could be turned to political advantage. As he put it in an
interview, “By origin I am not a sensitive intellectual…there is in me perhaps a roughness
brought up from below. That is no disadvantage as we know that the majority of people
come from below.”

Orbán took up a Soros-sponsored scholarship to go to Oxford, where he set out to research

the idea of civil society in the history of European political thought. But he cut his stay
short to enter the fight for the leadership of Fidesz. He managed to purge all his opponents
and radically altered the party’s program after Hungary’s major center-right party, which
had formed the first government after the fall of communism, dramatically lost support.
Orbán, nominally a Protestant, suddenly discovered religion and sought an alliance with the
churches. He explained that he could not “talk to the people” if he did not understand the
churches’ “important part in Hungarian life.” His party’s image utterly changed: the former
long-haired student leaders began to advocate the ideal of the polgári, a civic-minded,
patriotic bourgeois akin to the German Bürger, with a strong work ethic and a commitment
to traditional family values. Evidently, that vision appealed to voters: in 1998, Orbán, at the
age of thirty-five, became Europe’s youngest prime minister.

Hungary was then still seen as a leader in the process of “transition” from state socialism to
a market economy and also as a model pupil of the European Union, which the country
joined in 2004. It was the shock of Orbán’s political life when he unexpectedly lost the
2002 elections to a technocrat who had been nominated by the Hungarian Socialist Party,
the successor party to the Communists. Initially Fidesz alleged election fraud. Orbán
exclaimed that the nation simply could not be in opposition (thereby, like all populists,
claiming that he and only he represented the people). The surprise was even greater as his
government had showered welfare benefits on the electorate before election day — a
practice that the new left-wing government would continue. It put Hungary on an
unsustainable financial trajectory that nearly led to bankruptcy in 2008.

In 2010, power virtually fell into Orbán’s lap: the left had been discredited by a disastrous
economic record and corruption scandals. Lendvai describes the Hungarian Socialist Party
as “a disgusting snake pit of old Communists and left-wing careerists posing as Social
Democrats.” Hungary’s peculiar electoral system ensured that the 53 percent Fidesz won at
the polls translated into a two-thirds majority in parliament. Declaring that this had been no
ordinary election but a “revolution at the ballot box,” Orbán proceeded to establish an
Orwellian-sounding “System of National Cooperation.” He also reinforced Hungary’s
“Trianon Trauma,” the country’s self-image as a great power that had been victimized by
the West because of the post–World War I Treaty of Trianon, as a result of which the
country lost two thirds of its territory and a third of ethnic Hungarians ended up in
neighboring countries. And he had his party pass a new constitution that codified the
nation’s Christian character in a preamble beginning with an appeal to God.

Already in 2009 Orbán had announced that the country was in need of a “central political
forcefield” that would dominate politics for fifteen to twenty years. The major check on
power in the two decades after 1990 had been the constitutional court. After 2010, Fidesz
first packed it and then took away most of its powers. From his defeat eight years earlier
Orbán had drawn the lesson that his government’s achievements had not been
communicated “efficiently enough.” Accordingly, Fidesz now took over the public and
most of the private media. The government also started a campaign against foreign banks
and supermarkets, levying special taxes on them. This economic nationalism distracted
from the fact that Hungary today has both the highest value-added tax in the EU and the
lowest corporate tax—hardly policy choices one would associate with “plebeian values.”

Fidesz changed not only the state, the economy, and the culture; it also changed the people
themselves. About a million ethnic Hungarians in neighboring states were given citizenship;
meanwhile, for a variety of reasons, about 500,000 people left the country. Almost all the
new citizens who participated in the 2014 elections voted for Fidesz, while the emigrants
found it difficult to register at consulates in New York and London. In 2014, Fidesz
received another two-thirds majority in parliament, even though its share of the vote had
dropped from 53 to 45 percent. International observers, noting well-executed
gerrymandering and the ruthless use of the entire state apparatus for pro-Fidesz propaganda,
declared the election free but not fair.
Orbán now proclaimed his aim of creating an “illiberal state” based on the values of work,
family, and nation (the very slogan that the wartime French Vichy regime had once
adopted). He cleverly ran together the political and economic meanings of “liberalism,”
leaving open whether he was propounding economic nationalism or something politically
authoritarian. The latter interpretation was ever more plausible, as Budapest sought to
strengthen ties with Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and other illiberal states.
Given memories of the Soviets and the Ottoman occupation, Orbán’s “opening to the East”
was hardly popular, but it allowed Hungary’s leader to present himself as a cunning
underdog who would play East and West off each other, all to the Magyars’ advantage.

Domestically, Orbán’s vision of a dominant central force seemed to have been realized: the
major opposition parties were the post-Communists and a new far-right party, Jobbik, the
only major political organization not tainted by corruption. It seemed that the two could
never unite against the government. Jobbik’s rise enabled Orbán to answer EU criticisms of
his undermining the rule of law by warning of a horror scenario: if an overweening Brussels
weakened him, he threatened, the EU might one day have to deal with real neo-Nazis in
power.

Yet in the months after his triumphant reelection things went awry for the man now often
referred to as the “Viktator.” Orbán fell out with one of his oldest friends from school,
Lajos Simicska, a powerful oligarch and the brains behind Fidesz’s party finances. Simicska
switched his allegiance to Jobbik, explaining that he could not tolerate Orbán’s cozying up
to Putin. The two-thirds majority in parliament disappeared after an independent candidate
won a by-election. And a new generation of Fidesz leaders, for whom the hard days at the
Bibó College were familiar only from history books (which Fidesz now also fully
controlled), made their luxury lifestyles all too conspicuous: their expensive watches
screamed nouveau riche, as opposed to the discreet charm of the polgári. The party’s
popularity plummeted.

Then Orbán hit on the issue that not only saved him from domestic troubles, but also made
him a figure of real consequence in Europe. In the spring of 2015, the government decided
to build a fence on the border with Serbia to keep out refugees, and it staged a “national
consultation” on immigration. An enormous campaign for “yes” accompanied this exercise
in fake direct democracy, and Orbán did not hesitate to invoke conspiracy theories to
generate fear of people who, according to Fidesz propaganda, had to be either economic
migrants or Muslim terrorists. The exact results of the “consultation” have never been
revealed, let alone checked by independent observers.

Orbán’s strategy of presenting himself as the last protector of a Europe in which

Christianity and the nation-state are sacred succeeded both domestically and internationally.
At home, he outflanked Jobbik on the right. In the EU, Orbán managed to turn a conflict
that should have been about institutions—could the EU tolerate the abolition of the rule of
law in a member country?—into one about ideals: his “Christian national identity” versus
what he derided as “liberal babble” from Brussels. Henceforth, critics of his attacks on the
basic rules of liberal democratic governance were regularly dismissed as just having
different, and subjective, values.

Few politicians outside Hungary were eager to take up Orbán’s call to wage a pan-
European Kulturkampf. But plenty on the respectable center-right were happy to use him for
their own short-term purposes: Bavarian conservatives celebrated Orbán at a meeting in a
monastery in the fall of 2015 to make a show of their opposition to Angela Merkel’s
refugee policies. The Christian Democrat Sebastian Kurz, who was sworn in as Austria’s
chancellor in December, praised Orbán to prove his own toughness on immigration. Surely
they all know that Orbán is in effect leading a far-right government in which religion is
never about ethics—what we actually believe or do—but purely about identity: who we
think we are.

As with Trump’s victory, Orbán’s success over the years does not demonstrate that right-
wing populism is an unstoppable force. Rather, his victories have been enabled by the
cynicism of center-right politicians in Europe who refuse to distance themselves from what
is in fact a white nationalist government. German Christian Democrats, for instance, are less
concerned about the rule of law in Hungary or other supposed “European values” than
about major investments by automobile companies, such as Audi, the second-largest
employer in Hungary, and Mercedes, both of which receive subsidies from the Hungarian
state.

Are there limits to what Orbán can do? For years, there have seemed to be three red lines:
conflicts with neighboring countries over their large Hungarian minorities, violence on the
streets, and open displays of anti-Semitism. Orbán has by and large eschewed conflict with
successor states to the Habsburg Empire. In fact, the more he has been criticized by
Brussels, the more he has tried to build up the Visegrád Four (or V-4)—Poland, Hungary,
Slovakia, and the Czech Republic—as a bloc that protects the supposedly real European
values of Christianity and nationalism by refusing to take in refugees.

At home, Fidesz has been extremely careful to avoid anything that could look like serious
human rights violations. When tens of thousands demonstrated in the spring of 2017 against
the threatened closure of the Central European University (founded and endowed by Soros),
the police were restrained. Free speech is not suppressed in Hungary, at least not openly;
bloggers are free to criticize the government, and all kinds of debates can be staged in
Budapest coffeehouses. The government seems to use other means to control speech. In
2015, Hungary’s largest left-leaning newspaper was bought by a dubious Austrian investor
and, a year later, abruptly closed down, supposedly for financial reasons.

As my colleague Kim Lane Scheppele has emphasized, the very instruments that the West
once considered crucial for a transition from socialism to liberal democracy—law and the
market—have been used to establish a soft autocracy: after all, the creation of a new
Hungarian constitution and Orbán’s capture of the judiciary were done in a procedurally
correct manner, as one would expect from a party of clever lawyers. And the closing of the
liberal newspaper was, ostensibly, caused by the market, not politics.

Without a functioning media, a government’s missteps, corruption, and embarrassments

will not show up at all on screen or paper. Consider, for example, the mayor of Orbán’s
hometown and one of his friends from primary school, Lőrinc Mészáros, who was an
unemployed pipefitter a decade ago. He is now the fifth-richest man in the country, and his
business has grown faster than Mark Zuckerberg’s. With disarming frankness, Mészáros
once explained that “the good Lord, good luck and the person of Viktor Orbán have
certainly all played a role” in his success. Orbán’s own family is listed in a Forbes report as
being worth €23 million.

One reason for Orbán’s opening to the East—and his enthusiasm for strongmen from
Azerbaijan to China—is that standards of transparency in business transactions are
decidedly lower there than in the West. Construction in the beautiful new Budapest, often
funded by the EU, also provides excellent opportunities for submitting inflated bills. But
since 90 percent of the media is effectively controlled by Fidesz or its allies, most people
will not be aware of these abuses. Local newspapers are now all owned by oligarchs close
to the government—a situation that recently prompted the US State Department to make a
grant available to support “fact-based” reporting in rural Hungary.
As Lendvai emphasizes, Orbán relishes conflict and positively needs enemies. While
populist leaders use the pompous rhetoric of “National Cooperation,” what they really do is
relentlessly create and recreate divisions in society. This partly explains the latest campaign
against what Fidesz calls the “Soros Plan.” This plan, Fidesz has informed all eight million
voters, mandates the transportation of a million migrants into the EU each year and would
force states to be soft on crime committed by migrants. In billboards and TV ads, Soros has
been portrayed as a grinning puppet master controlling not just left-liberal parties in
Hungary but also the major EU institutions. This imagery evokes the worst anti-Semitic
stereotypes from European history, drawing from conspiracy theories favored by the Nazis:
the Jewish financier as the evil genius behind Bolshevism. Orbán has compared the “Soros
Empire” to the Soviet Union and alleges that, together with “Brussels bureaucrats,” this evil
empire is forging an alliance “against the European people,” as “Europe is currently being
prepared to hand its territory over to a new mixed, Islamized Europe.” A faithful Fidesz
deputy felt compelled to attribute the “Soros Plan” to Satan himself.

Once again, the campaign is designed to outflank Jobbik on the right, since it is perceived
as the most significant threat to Fidesz in the spring 2018 elections. But it also serves to
justify an attack on the remnants of civil society. NGOs that have benefited from grants
given by Soros’s foundations have exposed government scandals. A law passed earlier this
year forces all NGOs that receive more than €24,000 from abroad to declare themselves as
“foreign-supported.” Orbán also ordered the secret services to investigate these NGOs,
claiming that they could pose a threat to “national security.” In Orbán’s rhetoric, Hungary is
locked in a fight with Soros for nothing less than its national existence.

The EU has reacted helplessly to such Putin-like measures. Orbán has gloated that in
response to criticisms from Brussels, he has performed a “peacock dance”: pretending to
listen, making cosmetic adjustments to laws, and then proceeding as planned with the
consolidation of power. His regime has been possible not despite but because of the EU.
When measured in relation to GDP, Hungary is the top recipient of EU funds, which have
contributed decisively to the country’s economic growth and which are to the regime what
oil money is to Arab despots: a free resource that can be distributed at will to buy political
support and strengthen Fidesz oligarchs. In effect, the EU finances its most vocal internal
enemy, an enemy who says he feels more at home with politicians in Astana, the capital of
Kazakhstan, than in Brussels. Open borders for one’s own citizens and closed borders for
refugees are an ideal combination for Orbán: the former ensures that frustrated citizens can
just leave (and probably will have no time or energy left to organize political opposition
after waitressing in London or Berlin for ten hours a day).

Lendvai is unsure of how to classify Orbán’s regime. Like any successful political
movement, Fidesz has produced ideologues. But its right-wing think tanks have contributed
little more than statements such as, “If something is done in the national interest, then it is
not corruption.” Meanwhile, Orbán has become a hero of the far right all over the world,
with fans such as the Republican US congressman Steve King, who tweeted that “Orban has
uttered an axiom of history and of humanity. Western Civilization is the target of George
Soros and the Left.” A conference about the future of Europe, organized and financed by
the Hungarian foreign ministry to mark the country’s presidency of the V-4 in 2017–2018,
featured among the invitees Milo Yiannopoulos and Götz Kubitschek, a leading figure of
the German far right whom even Bavarian conservatives would not touch with a barge pole.
Fidesz’s vision of the V-4 appears to be a kind of Disneyland of the far right: Christianity
reigns supreme, no Muslims are allowed, the traditional family triumphs. (Orbán’s cabinet
contains exactly zero women; according to the prime minister, females are just not tough
enough for politics.)
Like other populist leaders, Orbán presents his government as being based on direct
democracy (on account of the frequent, highly manipulative “national consultations”) in
contrast to what he dismisses as “liberal nondemocracy.” Some critics have called Hungary
fascist, but the system is clearly not—after all, the government does not seek to mobilize
people, encourage mass violence, or demand total ideological conformity; in that regard, it
actually resembles Kádárism (under which the discontented were also readily given
passports).

In the end, Lendvai settles on the term “Führer democracy” to emphasize the extraordinary
centralization of power in the Viktator’s hands. And he endorses the idea of the “mafia
state,” a term coined by the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar to suggest that the reign of
Fidesz has little to do with political ideas, but is simply a means for a “political family” to
plunder the country under the protection of its godfather. Lendvai’s characterization of
Orbán as capable of adopting any belief according to political expediency chimes with that
interpretation.

The last chapter of Lendvai’s book is entitled “The End of the Regime Cannot Be
Foreseen.” What seems foreseeable is another victory for Fidesz in 2018. The opposition
remains divided and largely demoralized. Apart from Fidesz, the successor party to the
Communists still has the best political infrastructure, but not much moral credibility.
Lendvai observes that socialists are the only Hungarian politicians who appear in the
Panama Papers. This certainly helps to make the common Fidesz claim that “all sides steal”
more believable.

Surprisingly, Fidesz lost a by-election in a stronghold in southern Hungary at the end of

February, after all opposition parties had effectively backed an independent candidate. If
Orbán were to lose a national vote, would he really go quietly, or is he, like Putin,
determined to die in office? Many of his cronies, apparently wishing to live like nineteenth-
century magnates, have acquired huge landed estates. Hungary now has, according to
Lendvai, a concentration of land ownership unprecedented in modern Europe. As far as a
peaceful transition to democracy is concerned, this is worse than money stashed away in the
Caribbean. But however the story ends, a country that already has a deeply tragic view of its
own history will one day have to come to terms with the years lost to a kleptocracy veiled in
national colors.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/05/homo-orbanicus-hungary/