A Cautionary Tale

A cautionary tale: Viktor Orbán's Hungary

POSTED APRIL 7, 2022

In May of 2019, Donald Trump welcomed a kindred spirit, Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orbán, to the Oval Office.   Coincidentally, I was sightseeing in Budapest, Hungary's capital city, on that day.  Thankfully, I missed the post-meeting festivities as the two leaders heaped fulsome praise upon each other.  

The authoritarian Orbán leads the most right-wing government in Europe.  In power since 2010, the Hungarian prime minister has "accomplished many of the anti-democratic actions Trump can only tweet about. He has rewritten Hungary’s constitution and dismantled judicial checks on power, stifled a once vibrant media, forced a top university out of the country, and criminalized the activities of some human rights organizations. Meanwhile, he has won deeply flawed elections by vilifying migrants, Muslim 'invaders' and the Jewish 'financiers' that supposedly support them." (Washington Post) 

On Sunday, April 3, to the delight of America's far right, Orbán won re-election to his fourth term as the Prime Minister of Hungary.  On the surface, it may have looked like a free and fair election but it was far from it.  For the past 12 years, Orbán  systematically worked to turn Hungarian democracy into a sham. Through tactics ranging from extreme gerrymandering (his party won 53% of the vote nationally but nearly three-quarters of the seats in parliament*) to media control (90% of all the media in Hungary is owned by the government or an ally of Orban's) to unfair campaign finance rules, he has made it almost impossible for the opposition to defeat his Fidesz party at the ballot box.  (Vox)

This year's election season in Hungary saw the introduction of a fresh round of election law changes that benefited his party, an inflammatory L.G.B.T. referendum to energize his base, and legalization of "voter tourism",  the registration of voters outside of their home districts until now a criminal offense.

As the election approached, the Orbán government system set up during the height of the pandemic blasted out an email alert that wrongly claimed his opponent would drag Hungary into the war in Ukraine.  With the most popular independent news website, Index, taken over by an Orbán ally in 2020 and the opposition-friendly radio station, Klubradio, taken off the air in 2021, there was little to counter the misinformation.

In his more than a decade in power, Orban has not hesitated to use the levers of government power to erode democratic norms and cement one-party rule. He has rewritten the Constitution, remade the courts and used state-run and privately owned television stations — even school textbooks — to advance his agenda or push misinformation about his rivals. [NY Times (link below)]

In an unusual move for an EU member state, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) deployed a full-scale mission involving over 200 observers to Hungary for the election.  The mission found that although there were few procedural problems on election day, the contestants did not compete on an equal footing.  

The preliminary conclusions of the observing team noted a pervasive overlap between the ruling coalition and the government, lack of transparency and insufficient oversight of campaign finances, and “bias and lack of balance in monitored news coverage and the absence of debates between major contestants [that] significantly limited the voters’ opportunity to make an informed choice."  

Hungary is a cautionary tale for the United States.  The right's enthusiasm for Orban's victory tells you just what kind of country they would like to see and how close they are to getting it.  They already control the Courts and most State houses and governorships, and they are on the verge of retaking Congress in the midterms. 

Consider:

• Right-wing populism vilifying migrants, Muslims and BLM demonstrators was enough to get Donald Trump 74 million votes in the 2020 elections.  

• The Republican controlled Supreme Court gave partisan gerrymandering a green light even as it gutted the Voting Rights Act that protected the rights of historically discriminated minorities.  

• Trump's January 6 rant was enough to send his supporters to attack the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the presidential election.  

• The Post-Truth era ushered in by Trump is still with us and going strong.

  • The Big Lie of voting fraud supercharged Republican efforts at voter suppression and vote nullification.

  • Republican activists have introduced measures at all levels of the educational system to censor teachers and discourage the development of critical thinking skills.   

  • In a throwback to the 1950's "Red Scare", a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis will require Florida state schools to survey the political affiliations of all their teaching staff.  

  • The less than credible members of the Trump Administration are finding jobs and platforms at Fox and even some non-Fox outlets.

    • The worst secretary of state in several decades, disgraced liar and hawk Mike Pompeo, landed a job at Fox.

    • The Washington Post gave the disastrously hawkish John Bolton a platform to try to scuttle the potential return of the United States to the Iran Nuclear Deal.

    • CBS News hired former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney as a news commentator.  Mulvaney, a long-time Republican functionary, distinguished himself during his tenure in a variety of positions in the administration as a loyal Trump lackey.  He was involved in both the "Covid is a hoax" pandemic response and in defending Trump's strong-arm attempt to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden.

As the excellent article in Vox [link below] notes, "Hungary is a warning of what could happen when a ruthless, anti-minority populist backed by a major political party is allowed to govern unchecked. Americans need to pay attention."

Related: 

Countering the Reactionaries, May 29, 2019 

Coronavirus Protests and Politics, Aug 10, 2020  

Note: *Ninety-three seats of Hungary's parliament are proportionally elected, with parties getting a percentage roughly equivalent to their national vote total. The remaining 106 seats work like American or British elections, with one member elected to represent a specific legislative district.  Before the 2014 election, Orbán’s government redrew the single-district map to pack opposition supporters in a handful of districts while spreading their supporters across many. Since then, it has won more than two-thirds of seats in three consecutive elections despite smaller shares of the popular vote — 45 percent in 2014, 49 percent in 2018, and 53 percent in 2022