ow
is it that Hungary, Central Europe’s democratic wunderkind of 1989,
could find itself the European Un-
ion’s problem child two decades later, with a nationalist strongman at
the helm, the economy in shambles and a ferocious far right both in its
Parliament and in black uniforms patrolling its suburbs? Hungary’s dire
condition – and how it came to pass – is the topic of the veteran
Mitteleuropa expert Paul Lendvai’s most recent book, Mein Verspieltes
Land: Ungarn im Umbruch, or My Squandered Country: Hungary
Transformed, released last year in German and in Hungarian this past
January.
The 81-year-old Lendvai is one of the grand old men of
central European journalism, author of a stack of books translated into
a dozen languages. But never before has one of his titles provoked such
fierce reactions from the powers that be. The right-wing network of the
Fidesz party, led by its undisputed frontman and Hungary’s current prime
minister, Viktor Orbán, has done all it can to discredit Lendvai. Thanks
to a landslide victory in the 2010 elections, Fidesz now controls more
than two-thirds of Parliament and the liberal and leftist oppositions
have imploded. Yet the right is paying attention to My Squandered
Country – perhaps too much attention for its own good. Without a
penny of advertising, the book emerged as Hungary’s best-selling
non-fiction title this spring.
The son of middle-class Hungarian Jews, Lendvai was
already covering politics in Hungary when the first major challenge to
Soviet power in the eastern bloc broke out on the streets of Budapest in
1956. An avid supporter of the revolutionary government of Imre Nagy,
Lendvai and his peers hoped to see a non-Stalinist – democratic –
socialism take root in their country. Lendvai was, according to his own
testimony, on the front lines of the student protests and the bloody
house-to-house fighting when Nagy’s government was crushed by the Soviet
army, its members executed or jailed. Like tens of thousands of others,
Lendvai fled the rule of the Soviet-installed regime. Via Prague and
then Warsaw, he finally set up shop in cold war Vienna where he spent
decades as a correspondent for London’s Financial Times and then
as head of Austrian Broadcasting’s eastern Europe coverage. At home
today between the old Habsburg capitals of Vienna and Budapest, his
commentaries still appear regularly in the German language and
liberal-minded Hungarian press.
Lendvai has closely observed Hungary’s uneven transition
from communism for 20 years. But nothing he has seen during that time
worries him more than Orbán’s authoritarianism and the policies of
Fidesz during the first six months of its current rule. Fidesz, Lendvai
argues, is trying to turn the entire state apparatus into its own organ.
Orbán has disabled the opposition, consolidated political power and
gained control of the media and the culture industry to a degree no one
thought possible following communism’s downfall. Much like Vladimir
Putin in Russia, Orbán has also established cliental networks deep in
the business world. His connections to wealthy bankers and
industrialists, diaspora organisations and media outlets have created a
vast extra-parliamentary power base.
But most disturbing of all, Fidesz’s supermajority in
the Parliament has enabled it to pass controversial legislation without
opposition, including far-reaching constitutional reforms that favour
the perpetuation of Fidesz rule long beyond the current four-year term.
The new Constitution limits the independence of the judiciary, curtails
civil liberties and forces Christian ideology on the country.
According to the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, the Fidesz
Constitution “undermines democratic political competition and makes
political change more difficult by transforming institutional
structures”. Thanks to what The Guardian describes as a “much
enfeebled new constitutional court”, the system of checks and balances
has deteriorated.
As one would expect from a writer of Lendvai’s scope,
his book reaches back further than the 1980s to explain Hungary’s
current quandary. He focuses on how the abuse of history and persistent
anti-Semitism taint Hungary’s political culture. Never, he argues, has
Hungary – or, for that matter, its central European neighbours – come to
terms with the less illustrious episodes of the 20th century, as Germany
has through its postwar vergangenheitsbewältigung (roughly,
“struggling with the past”). Hungary’s alliance with Nazi Germany, the
World War II deportation of Jews and an ethnic ultra-nationalism
complete with greater-state fantasies and minority-bashing have never
been self-critically processed.
As a result, the cultural sources of these ugly affairs
live on beside a version of history that portrays the good Magyars as
victims of an array of enemies from international Jewry to Slovak
patriots. The post-World War I Trianon treaty – which pared Habsburg
Hungary down to its current size, leaving Magyar minorities stranded in
neighbouring Serbia, Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania – remains an open
wound for Hungarian nationalists nearly 100 years later. One of Fidesz’s
first moves after its 2010 victory was to introduce a “Day of National
Belonging” on the 90th anniversary of the Trianon treaty, a symbolic act
that ensures the trauma of modern Hungary’s birth lives on, as does
simmering resentment towards the country’s neighbours. More and more
private cars in Budapest bear stickers showing greater Hungary – the
current territory plus a chunk of northern Serbia and swathes of fellow
EU members Austria, Slovakia, and Romania – in red, white and green.
The Fidesz administration doesn’t explicitly propagate a
greater-Hungary ideology but nor do its representatives – in secondary
schools, university faculties and other influential positions – nip it
in the bud. Fidesz and its allies on the right have taken advantage of
the prevalence of nationalist discourse to tap into illiberal traditions
and lionise authoritarian leaders of the past such as Hungary’s World
War II dictator, Admiral Miklós Horthy.
The resurrection of Horthy’s image plays well for Orbán
who, over the course of 25 years in politics, has taken on something of
his predecessor’s disdain for democratic principles. To his admirers,
Horthy was an uncomplicated, anti-communist statesman who won back
Hungarian territories. Others see him as a reactionary who did nothing
to stop the anti-Jewish laws instituted in 1938. Ultimately, the Horthy
cult is part of the bad-things-happened-to-us mentality now enshrined in
the Constitution, which effectively declares that the Hungarian state
was not legally competent from March 1944, when the Germans invaded, to
May 1990, when the first democratically elected government took office.
In other words, Fidesz argues, the state isn’t responsible for its own
recent past and its more distant past presents nothing to complain
about. All of this is especially troubling for historically persecuted
communities, in particular Hungary’s 1,00,000 Jews.
Lendvai picks up Orbán in 1988 when, along with several
law school classmates, he called Fidesz (the Alliance of Young
Democrats) to life as a stridently liberal party intent on upending
communism and re-linking Hungary to the West. The iconic Fidesz poster
of the time captured the spirit of the velvet revolutions: it shows the
communist leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker locked in an
awkward smooch and below it a young Hungarian couple kissing gingerly.
“Choose one,” the caption reads.
At the time Orbán was just one of the Fidesz crew, a
thoroughly appealing bunch. Orbán, born in 1963 in the village of
Alcsútdoboz, graduated from high school with a special concentration in
English and went on to Budapest’s esteemed Eötvös Loránd University law
programme. Like the other good-looking Fidesz guys – they were mostly
men – he immediately impressed western journalists, such as me, as
exactly the kind of young central European who would one day take the
reins in these countries and steer them into the West once and for all.
Orbán was exceedingly bright, unabashedly ambitious and as straight as
an arrow. An athletically built former professional soccer player and
devout Calvinist family man, he was already on the way to fathering five
children with his wife.
His first moment in the limelight was June 16, 1989 when
he addressed a packed-to-the-brim Heroes’ Square in central Budapest.
The occasion was the public reburial of Nagy and other martyrs of the
1956 revolution, a pivotal turning point in the delegitimisation of the
communist regime. Orbán and other speakers demanded free elections and –
the first to do so in the eastern bloc – the withdrawal of Soviet
troops. His address brought him national and even international acclaim.
Nagy’s reburial marked the beginning of the end for Hungary’s communist
rulers, the beneficiaries of the Soviet suppression of 1956. It
dislodged one of the fundaments upon which the Soviet bloc rested.
After the Heroes’ Square event, as the regimes in
Central Europe unravelled, Orbán distinguished himself as the most
determined among Fidesz and turned the party into his personal vehicle.
As Lendvai, one journalist who never took to Orbán, sees it: “The
absolute will to power defined Orbán as a student leader and through his
entire career even if – thanks to incredible media savvy – the public
saw him as a modest, goal-oriented politician with character and a clean
slate.”
Over the course of the 1990s Fidesz shed its neo-liberal
garb for the trappings of a right-wing volkish party that played up to
popular fears of “foreign capital” buying out a Hungary that was
struggling with economic transition and the demands of EU integration.
After Hungarian voters ousted the ruling moderate nationalists in 1994
and the reform communists and liberals in 1998, Fidesz and two smaller
coalition partners cobbled together a government with the 35-year-old
Orbán as prime minister. Lendvai argues that although this government
also survived just one term, Orbán’s consolidation of power began then
with the placement of cronies in key media and bureaucratic positions
and the cementing of close ties with nationalist-minded businessmen and
industrial tycoons.
Lendvai describes in precise detail how, even when
Fidesz was voted into the opposition in 2002, these connections to
Hungary’s super-rich – figures such as Gábor Széles, Zoltán Spéder,
Tamás Fellegi, István Töröcskei and Kristof Noblis, all among Hungary’s
wealthiest men – enabled Orbán to build a brashly nationalist, partisan
media empire that spans print, television, radio and the Internet. The
mass circulation dailies Magyar Nemzet and Magyar Hírlap;
the publicly funded MTV and numerous smaller private television and
radio stations such as Hír TV and Lanchid Radio; free subway
tabloids; and countless websites such as inforadio.hu are reliable
Fidesz supporters. After the 2002 election, their shrill tone turned
Hungarian politics into a shouting match that the loudest were certain
to win. The socialists were repeatedly demonised as “national traitors”
who, Orbán claimed, “stole” the election. The Orbán-loyal media hammered
away at national populist themes such as the injustice of Trianon, Roma
crime and the unfairness of EU diktats.
More than any other factor, Lendvai argues, this
discourse laid the groundwork for Fidesz’s overwhelming 2010 victory.
Along with it rose the overtly xenophobic and anti-Semitic Jobbik party,
a by-product of Fidesz that made the Roma, law and order and greater
Hungary its raisons d’ętre. Jobbik, essentially a fascist party,
garnered an astounding 17 per cent of the vote in 2010 – and, even more
shocking, 23 per cent of those cast by 18-29-year-olds. For this
generation, most of them teenagers or younger when Hungary joined the
European Union in 2004, the vulgar diet of the Fidesz and Jobbik press –
Magyar Hírlap in particular gravitates toward Jobbik – is
mainstream stuff. “It’s no wonder,” Lendvai writes, citing surveys,
“that never since WWII have so many Hungarians thought in ethnic and
nationalist categories.” The difference between Fidesz and Jobbik, he
says, is a “question of nuances”.
It can’t be overlooked that Orbán’s return to power –
and the scale of Fidesz’s majority in Parliament – was unthinkable
without the audacious corruption and bumbling of the socialist-liberal
governments of 2002-2010. The socialists, a reformed version of the
communist party, were unable to turn themselves into a genuine
social-democratic party like those in western Europe. The Free
Democrats, the country’s once proud little party of intellectuals and
urban liberals, tore itself to pieces. Orbán eliminated conservative
rivals by breaking them apart and absorbing their remnants, leaving most
of Hungary’s conservative-oriented centrists nowhere to turn but Fidesz.
Never before had Fidesz’s opponents been so feeble and
by the time the spring 2010 elections came around, the polls left no
doubt that Fidesz would win big and Jobbik would be close behind. Since
Fidesz’s “revolution at the ballot box”, Orbán has proceeded as
radically as promised – which is more radically than anyone, even
Lendvai, believed possible.
In its first half-year under the current Fidesz
government, the national legislature worked at breakneck speed, passing
43 new laws, changing 107 more and modifying the Constitution six times.
Relations with central European neighbours nosedived when the leadership
offered dual citizenship to the Magyar minorities in the near diaspora.
A law that gave the government far-reaching power to penalise critical
media was passed on the eve of Budapest’s ascension to the EU council
presidency. The resulting outcry led to the law’s partial revocation but
critics in the European Parliament, including the vocal German
legislator Daniel Cohn-Bendit, say it is essentially unchanged. Orbán
has bluntly told them to mind their own damn business. And even though
the European Union now has its eye on Hungary, there isn’t a lot it can
do. The union has little influence on the internal political struggles
of member states and it has faltered before in this regard, such as when
Austria’s far-right Freedom Party joined the government there in 1999.
Fidesz contends that critics, including Lendvai,
exaggerate, that Fidesz is a normal conservative party. The party has
publicly condemned Jobbik and stands firmly by Hungary’s current
borders. It is a member of the European Parliament’s conservative
coalition, alongside Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. It has made
Roma inclusion one of the centrepieces of its EU presidency.
But the politics-as-usual image that Fidesz and Orbŕn
project to the outside world is belied by its domestic activities. There
is no better example of how the Fidesz state works than its reaction to
Lendvai’s book. The crackdown commenced even before it came out in
Hungarian. At the first readings that Lendvai gave in Austria,
Switzerland and Germany, the World Federation of
Hungarians – a nationalistic association of worldwide Magyars
with chapters on four continents, including in the United States – was
out in force. Though ostensibly independent, the right-wing exile lobby
is part of Fidesz’s extra-parliamentary network, an inexpensive, dogged
proxy easily set into motion.
Lendvai and the organisations that hosted him were
bombarded with vicious emails and phone calls, some plainly
anti-Semitic, accusing him of slander and hatred towards Hungary.
Diaspora Hungarians picketed readings. Hungarian television broadcast
the picketers – “Who are these lies helping?” read one placard,
insinuating that unnamed, external, “non-Hungarian” forces (typical code
in Hungarian for a perceived global Jewish conspiracy) were at work. In
these news programmes, nothing was reported about the readings or the
book. A November 2010 talk at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Frankfurt
was cancelled due to threats of violence, including to Lendvai himself.
The foundation, a staunch proponent of human rights, said the security
risk was simply too great and that its request for police protection
from the city was refused.
By then the vast Orbán-loyal media in Hungary had set
its wheels in motion. In addition to reporting on the diaspora reaction
– in the opinion of the Hungarian media, the protests were peaceful and
justified – the press lashed out at Lendvai. Under a massive front page
headline, the weekly Heti Válasz accused him of being a mole for
the Hungarian intelligence services during the 1980s. From then on, the
Fidesz media empire rehashed the charge as fact. Even friends of mine in
Budapest – no fans of Fidesz – repeated the allegations to me,
suggesting the effectiveness of this sort of smear campaign in which
repetition and volume trump reason. Lendvai calls the charges
“completely absurd”, a transparent move to discredit him and the book,
ultimately the objective of the campaign.
In addition to defaming Lendvai, the Fidesz media have
questioned his motives. In Magyar Hírlap, the columnist György
Vámos wrote that figures such as Lendvai and the US-based Hungarian
philosopher Agnes Heller make a living by defaming Hungary and are the
source of Hungary’s negative image in the world. “For 20 years, since it
was first possible to talk openly about Hungary’s Jews,” Vámos wrote,
“Lendvai has jumped at every opportunity to drum the revival of
‘anti-Semitism’ in Hungary into the western press... For how much longer
does he intend to vilify his former homeland? ...What harm did his
homeland ever do to him to deserve this?”
As the campaign against Lendvai heated up, his Hungarian
publisher, Corvina Press, lost interest in the translation. Corvina is a
reputable, good-sized publisher that in the past has not shied away from
titles that ruffle nationalist feathers, including the translation of
Kati Marton’s Enemies of the People. But just as the Hungarian
edition of Lendvai’s book was in its final stages, Corvina went silent.
When Lendvai inquired into the matter, the house’s director hemmed and
hawed. Perhaps, he said, it was still too early to judge the Fidesz
administration and maybe it was the job of historians, not journalists,
to do so. To Corvina’s obvious relief, Lendvai withdrew the manuscript
and terminated the contract, opting instead for his old publisher,
Kossuth.
But if Fidesz’s aim was to steer Hungarians away from
the book by tarnishing Lendvai, its strategy appears to have backfired,
at least in the short run. The controversy surrounding the book
generated a dozen interviews and reviews in the German language press
and extensive coverage in Hungary’s independent and socialist-leaning
media, newspapers such as Népszabadság, Népszava, 168
Óra, HVG and Hetek; smaller, like-minded radio and TV
stations; as well as blogs and online newspapers. The first run of 3,000
copies sold out in days. With a 5,000-run second printing selling
briskly, Kossuth has scheduled a third, updated edition. These are
impressive numbers for the Hungarian market. Lendvai’s readings and
signings in Hungary have been packed to capacity, some sold out a week
in advance.
Why are Hungarians scrambling to get their hands on
Lendvai’s book? József Körössi, who directs the division of Kossuth that
published My Squandered Country, believes many Hungarians are
struggling to comprehend “what has gone wrong in Hungary over the last
20 years”. The paucity of credible opposition has created a vacuum, he
says, leaving leftist and liberal-minded Hungarians without a home,
without a source to explain the Orbán phenomenon and Hungary’s dilemma
more generally. Lendvai, Körössi says, is “one of the few Hungarian
figures who is not associated with one of the current or former
parties”. Körössi also believes that attacks from the right have
generated increased interest.
Even though the book has sold surprisingly well, it is
difficult to judge whether it has had an impact on Hungarian politics.
Opinion polls, though, show that Fidesz’s radical policies have already
cost it about a quarter of its 2010 support. Yet none of the opposition
parties have gained from the rising disillusionment. Dissent seems to be
finding its home in the streets: March demonstrations against the media
law and the new Constitution drew around 25,000 protesters in Budapest
and elsewhere. These were the largest political protests since 1989.
I had lunch with Lendvai when I passed through Budapest
in April. He’s tickled that he has finally written a best-seller. We
walked along the Danube to a local bookstore, a hole in the wall place
called Láng Téka Könyvesbolt. The women in charge couldn’t repress
smiles when we came in and they hovered over Lendvai as he signed
copies. “This kind of brouhaha is good for sales but not for my blood
pressure,” he said in his low, gravelly voice, grinning. He didn’t feel
threatened at his home or even on the streets but nor, he said, would he
give a reading at Heroes’ Square, one of Budapest’s most open, public
venues. “It’s hard to gauge how far they’ll go,” he said of the regime
and its supporters. “With people like this, everything is possible.”