Orbán’s to blame

The prime minister has released the long suppressed, xenophobic hatreds festering in Hungarian society.

By THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND, BUDAPEST
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban 311 R (photo credit: REUTERS)
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban 311 R
(photo credit: REUTERS)
NUMEROUS statues and memorial plaques are being unveiled and prominent squares and avenues renamed up and down Hungary in honor of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the country’s wartime regent and the politician most responsible for the Holocaust murder of close to 600,000 Jews.
Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, recently returned a prestigious decoration bestowed upon him by the Hungarian government in protest against its rehabilitation of two minor deceased writers whose only claim to fame was their anti-Semitism. The latest International Religious Freedom report issued by the US State Department criticized the rise of anti-Semitism in Hungary and the failure to prosecute the disseminators of anti-Semitic statements.
Much of the blame for all this must lie with Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian, populist, ultra-conservative Hungarian prime minister. But, in a timely and brilliant new political analysis, Paul Lendvai, the doyen of European foreign correspondents, carefully and rightly refrains from calling him an anti- Semite.
In his unbridled lust for personal power, Orbán has released the long suppressed, xenophobic hatreds festering in the collective consciousness of this much-abused society.
Those demons are now poised to destroy him and capture his people. Lendvai and many others well disposed towards Hungary fear that, in the absence of a credible, coherent, democratic-minded parliamentary opposition, the rising discontent of the electorate may one day force Orbán’s Fidesz administration to share power with the aggressively growing far-right Jobbik party, a creature of his own making.
Lendvai has been based in neighboring Vienna since the failed anti-Soviet Hungarian revolution of 1956, in which he participated as a freedom fighter. He is a Jew, who lost much of his family in the Holocaust and witnessed, as a young adolescent in Budapest, the gratuitous murder of tens of thousands of civilian captives by the Nazi rabble of the Hungarian Arrow Cross – the role models of the Jobbik party today – during the final phase of World War II.
His sympathetic coverage of Hungary’s now floundering efforts to build a liberal democracy after the painful decades of Soviet tyranny that ended nearly a quarter century ago have won this country many friends abroad.
I worked with Lendvai for years when he was Central Europe correspondent for The Financial Times newspaper and I was on the desk in London – and I learned to respect the insightful, reliable, sober accuracy of his reportage. Now aged 81 and the editorin- chief of the Viennese journal Europäische Rundschau, Lendvai is often quoted and consulted by the English and German language press and academia.
But his name is constantly being smeared by the rightist Hungarian mass communication media linking him, without any verifiable evidence, to the bygone Communist secret police. His book launches in the Germanspeaking world are occasionally marred by threats of physical violence posed by the vociferous expatriate Hungarian far-right.
His present book should be required reading for diplomats, politicians and investors as well as the informed public concerned with the phenomenal current rise of anti-Semitism in this region. The book has been endorsed by the Hungarian political and intellectual elite, in their own way. The first prospective publisher of an earlier, Hungarian version of this book, backed out from the project under government pressure; but the book was eventually published last year, and immediately became a best seller.
The book describes Orbán as a “master tactician,” “a gifted populist,” a “radical and consummate opportunist,” a “ruthless power politician who believes not in ideas but in maximizing his power without any compunction,” an irresponsible manipulator “giving vent to Hungarian nationalism” and as “tapping into fear and prejudice at a moment of crisis.”
Orbán hails from a family of semiskilled workers who prospered under the communist regime. He later acquired great wealth during his two stints at the helm of power. His second period of rule was secured by a landslide election victory in April 2010, following a sustained campaign of violent street demonstrators fuelled by the frustration and insecurity sparked by the global recession.
Hungary’s neo-Nazis seized the opportunity to emerge as the nastiest and best organized of their ilk within the 27 member countries of the European Union (EU). Xenophobia here feeds on fertile soil.
Some seven decades after the Holocaust, Hungary still doggedly declines to confront its murderous past. As the generations march on, their inherited sense of suppressed guilt consequently surfaces in aggressive denial.
For example, the Hungarian history atlas prescribed for secondary school use in 2009 did not even mention the wartime anti-Jewish racial laws, the deportations to Auschwitz, or the Holocaust.
Lendvai quotes a long list of depressing educational and social data. Only four percent of the present generation of Hungarians aged 18-30 years know the meaning of the word Holocaust. Only 13 percent can give a figure for the number of its victims. Two-thirds of the adult population believe that the Jews of Hungary are too powerful. Half squarely blame the Jews for the world economic crisis.
Jobbik won 47 of the 386 seats in the single-chamber Hungarian parliament in the last elections. Its supporters are mostly young men, and their numbers are dramatically swelling at the expense of Orbán’s Fidesz party. This lures Orbán further into the mire of radical rightist politics as he courts the young racists in the hope of reversing the trend.
So the police stand by idly as Jobbik’s uniformed paramilitary wing, outlawed by the courts under a previous administration, marches again displaying the regalia of the defunct Arrow Cross. There have been numerous recent attacks in the old ghetto district of Budapest on unaccompanied elderly Jews, including a widely loved and respected retired chief rabbi, aged 90.
Lendvai notes that “the genies Orbán has conjured up in his thirst for power have spun out of control... [Yet] I still believe that the real danger comes not from the neo-Nazis or those who seek solutions in violence but rather from the fine silence of the political right around Orbán and, with a very few exceptions, the Catholic and Protestant churches.”
Paradoxically, the cur-rent decline of Orbán’s electoral popularity stems from his astonishing success. He has built a political establishment totally subject to his personal control and reduced the legislature to a reliable rubber-stamp. Fidesz won 53 percent of the vote in the last elections, cast in a 64 percent turnout. By means of a quirk of the electoral law, this gave the party a two-thirds parliamentary majority. All deputies and even the state president and the chairman of the legislature have been chosen personally by Orbán.
In just over two years, this parliament has managed in a frenzy of legislation to disable the essential checks and balances of democratic control. No aspect of Orbán’s radical reform program had been disclosed, let alone debated, before the elections.
The centerpiece of the reform is a new constitution passed unilaterally and already modified six times. It shirks Hungary’s enduring culpability for the Holocaust and trivializes its significance by equating that crime against all humanity with the subsequent Soviet occupation.
A long series of new laws and decrees exposes the press to prohibitive fines at the hands of a committee of political appointees, emasculates the judiciary by replacing independent-minded judges with party hacks, and redraws the constituency boundaries to favor Fidesz. Orbán’s extra-parliamentary power extends through cliental networks embracing the mass media, business, industry, agriculture, diaspora organizations, art and education funding, regional administration and, of course, the civil service. Many of the key relationships in this informal maze of dependence were originally forged in the dying days of Soviet power. Its dominant participants then were among the brightest communist cadres, like Orbán, who learned how to secure for themselves and each other the choicest pieces from the disintegrating state structure. Today, they are the Hungarian oligarchs.
To survive, an autocratic, populist regime must focus the hostility of its exploited electorate on real or imagined enemies abroad. Orbán has thus declared a national “freedom struggle,” in the idealized spirit of the 1956 revolution, against such safe targets as the EU, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, of course, foreign correspondents, especially Lendvai. All this has frightened away foreign investors. The three principal global credit rating agencies have responded by downgrading Hungary’s public debt to junk status.
Lendvai quotes Charles Gati, the distinguished, Hungarian-born American academic, as saying, “This country is no longer a Western-style democracy. It is an illiberal, or managed, democracy in the sense that all important decisions are made by Orbán.”
George Konrad, the sociologist and bestselling novelist and Lendvai’s lifelong comrade in the struggle for liberal democracy, shrugs. Despite all the efforts since the collapse of communism, Hungary, to him, has remained “a junk country with a junk administration and a junk prime minister.”
Lendvai grimly states in the book “In my view, there is nothing to suggest that the Orbán regime could be seriously threatened [at the polls] by the left in the foreseeable future.”
But politics, as I observe it, works in simpler ways. Lendvai despairs, but I do not.
The tyrants of the modern world tend to survive for any significant length of time only when protected by mighty domestic industrial infrastructures or by foreign interests. Orbán enjoys no such support. He is in charge of a weak European economy surrounded by neighbors committed to integration with the mature Western democracies.
The Hungarian prime minister is a lonely, frail man driven by a fatal attraction to power and plagued by its attendant paranoia. His command structure is based on the unquestioning obedience of professional managers prepared to serve any cause or master.
When Orbán inevitably succumbs to the intolerable, intensifying pressures generated by his own style of administration, his painfully constructed edifice of control must collapse with him.
Thomas Ország-Land is a poet and foreign correspondent who writes from London and his native Budapest. His forthcoming book ‘The Survivors’ deals with Holocaust poetry.