Viktor Orban Steers Hungary Toward Russia
25 Years After Fall of the Berlin Wall
By Rick Lyman and Alison Smale
 |
Viktor Orban has been elected prime minister three times, most
recently in 2010. He firmly
controls the governing party. Credit Akos Stiller
for The New York Times
|
BUDAPEST — A
quarter-century ago, as Hungary helped
ignite the events that would lead to the collapse of communism, the ferment
produced a new political star.
Viktor
Orban was 26 then and a longhaired law graduate. In June 1989,
five months before the Berlin
Wall came down, he lit up a commemoration of the failed 1956 revolt
against Moscow with a bold call for free elections and a demand
that 80,000 Soviet troops go home.
Now, as the 25th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is
commemorated Sunday, Hungary is
a member of NATO and the European Union and Mr. Orban is in his third term as
prime minister. But what was once a journey that might have embodied the
triumph of democratic capitalism has evolved into a much more complex tale of a
country and a leader who in the time since have come to question Western
values, foment nationalism and look more openly at Russia as a model.
After leading his
right-wing party to a series of national and local election victories, Mr.
Orban is rapidly centralizing power, raising a crop of crony oligarchs,
cracking down on dissent, expanding ties with Moscow and generally drawing
uneasy comparisons from Western leaders and internal opponents to President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“He is the only
Putinist governing in the European Union,” said Joschka Fischer, the former
German foreign minister.
Some other
Eastern European countries, especially Poland, have remained oriented toward
the West and still harbor deep suspicions of Russia long after the Cold War
ended.
But Hungary is
one of several countries in the former Soviet sphere that are now torn between
the Western ways that appeared ascendant immediately after the fall of the
Soviet Union and the resilient clout of today’s Russia. Money, culture and
energy resources still bind most regional countries to Russia as tightly as to
Europe. Mr. Putin’s combative nationalism is more popular here than what many
see as Western democratic sclerosis.
Mr. Orban has
laid out a philosophical vision and justification for his authoritarian-leaning
approach that suggests a long-term commitment to turning Hungary into something
quite different from what the West anticipated when the Iron Curtain collapsed
and the Berlin Wall came down.
In a speech this
summer, Mr. Orban declared liberal democracy to be in decline and praised
authoritarian “illiberal democracies” in Turkey, China, Singapore and Russia.
He traced his views
to what he portrayed as the failures of Western governments to anticipate and
deal adequately with the financial crisis that started in 2008 and the ensuing
deep recession. He called that period the fourth great shock of the past
century — the others being World War I,World War
II and the end of the Cold War — and the impetus for what he
called today’s key struggle: “a race to invent a state that is most capable of
making a nation successful.”
Western
democracies “will probably be incapable of maintaining their global
competitiveness in the upcoming decades and will instead be scaled down unless
they are capable of changing themselves significantly,” Mr. Orban said in the
speech, according to an English translation on the government’s website.
Hungary, he said,
will be “breaking with the dogmas and ideologies that have been adopted by the
West” and will instead build a “new Hungarian state” that will be “competitive
in the great global race for decades to come.”
Achieving that
vision will require tougher stances toward outside forces, including
nongovernmental organizations, the European Union and foreign lenders and
investors, he said.
As recently as
2008, Mr. Orban was a fierce critic of Mr. Putin. But the tone has changed, and
the two have grown friendly, with Russia investing heavily in Hungary.
“Orban
is a populist who acts, doesn’t just talk,” said Peter Kreko, director of the
Political Capital Institute in Budapest, an independent research organization.
As a result, he added, Hungary “can serve as a role model in Eastern Europe,”
enticing countries like Romania and Bulgaria to follow an authoritarian path.
The only difference between Mr. Orban and
authoritarians in other countries, Mr. Kreko said, is that “when they turn to
the West, they try to smile, and Orban doesn’t even try.”
The grand center of Budapest, with its floodlit
palaces flickering in the Danube, its sophisticated cafes, crowded theaters and
the tourist-choked streets, betrays little sense of authoritarian unease. Yet
behind the designer boutiques, young and struggling artists worry about when
their state financing might be cut off if they fail to hit the proper note, and
government watchdog groups suffer attacks in the state-controlled media while
waiting anxiously for the arrival of investigators.
In the west of
Hungary, German auto plants and other foreign investments create the semblance
of a Western European lifestyle. But the feeling is quite different in the
rural east, where destitute families, many of them Roma, either toil in one of
Mr. Orban’s public works projects or languish in hopes the economy will
improve.
Even the
iconography of Budapest has taken on Mr. Orban’s stamp, exemplified by a
much-derided statue unveiled last summer near Parliament showing a German eagle attacking an angel,
meant to represent the Hungarian people — widely seen as an attempt by
Hungarian nationalists to whitewash the country’s alliance with the Nazis
during World War
II.
Mr. Orban’s
subordinates in the ruling party, Fidesz, which he firmly controls, say that he is
unchanged from the anti-communist rabble-rouser of the past and that charges of
incipient dictatorship are left-wing fantasies.
“He is the same
guy he used to be 25 years ago,” said Zoltan Kovacs, the prime minister’s
international spokesman. “He wants to get rid of the attitudes, the remnants of
the former system — get rid of the attitude that people live on social aid
rather than work.”
Even his harshest
critics concede that Mr. Orban has gone to nowhere near the lengths of Mr.
Putin in silencing opponents. No one has been tossed in prison for criticizing
the government. There has been no overt censorship. Recent mass protests against a proposed Internet tax were
allowed to proceed and ended up forcing a retreat by Mr. Orban.
Nonetheless,
foreign criticism is mounting. When President Obama recently listed states that
are silencing civil society groups, Hungary was the only European country
named. Washington has barred six unidentified public officials, deeming them too corrupt to enter the United States.
After the first
free elections in 1990, Mr. Orban was one of several figures who had helped
topple communism to jostle for power and influence. Most Hungarians, like
others in Central and Eastern Europe, had unrealistic expectations of a quick,
good life under democracy and capitalism.
They embraced
NATO membership, which in 1999 came with the immediate duty to oppose Russia
and fight in the war over Kosovo. They chafed at long negotiations, but like
seven other former Soviet bloc nations welcomed European Union membership in
2004.
Hungarians
perhaps felt the hardship of transition more bitterly than most because they
had lived better than many others in the Soviet bloc under communism.
Hungary had
“goulash communism,” said Balint Ablonczy, domestic political editor of the
pro-government journal Heti Valasz. Liberal democracy brought freedom of
speech, but also the loss of jobs and of a sense of security, he said.
In 1998, voters
threw out the Socialist government and handed power to Mr. Orban and his party.
But as prime
minister in that first term, “he overdid the nationalist ideology,” said Julia
Lakatos, an analyst at the Center for Fair Political Analysis, a research group
in Budapest. In 2002, the Socialists won back power.
In 2010, though,
voters turned back to Mr. Orban, who appeared to have learned from his previous
mistakes.
Critics contend
that the government uses its purse strings to control the arts and make the
news media compliant. Dissent is attacked in the official press and sometimes
investigated by the government.
Even some
conservative supporters are slightly wary of the extent to which Mr. Orban has
systematically assembled power: packing courts and the chief prosecutor’s
office with loyalists, altering the Constitution and laws so his party
dominates.
“He ran as
someone who would bring the two sides together in Hungarian politics, but when
he got in he said, no, it is the time of the right, the time for revenge on the
left,” said Mr. Ablonczy, the editor. “For him, politics is fighting. I am a
man of the right, but my deepest disappointment with this government is this
logic of always fighting.”
Fidesz won a
second consecutive four-year term in April, its coalition again eking out a
two-thirds majority in Parliament that essentially allows it to pass whatever
laws it pleases. The party also won the European Parliament elections in May
and local elections Oct. 12, a rare triple in fractious Europe these days.
Signs abound of
the distance Hungary has traveled since communism’s fall.
Laszlo Magas
helped organize a Pan-European picnic in Sopron on the Austrian border that, in
1989, provided a first death knell for the Berlin Wall. Hundreds of East
Germans used the occasion to pour across the once-sealed frontier.
Now a Fidesz
member of the Sopron City Council, Mr. Magas refused to discuss politics at
all, he says, because foreigners do not understand the country. Western news
media, he says, seek out only opponents of Mr. Orban, who are a tiny minority
in today’s Hungary.
Palko Karasz and
Andras Nagy contributed reporting.
