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The recent rise of authoritarianism in Eurasia and
elsewhere seems to be encouraging further destabilization of other
fragile democracies. As if the Russia-instigated and still ongoing
Ukraine crisis was not enough, liberal regression and uncertainty in
the region continues to take new and alarming forms. This time
Hungary’s brash Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is making headlines;
during a visit to Baile Tusnad, Romania this past weekend, Orbán
spoke to local students and made a series of bold statements about
his vision of a new Hungarian that is a “work-based society that
will abandon liberal democracy.”
Two days later, two articles titled “The Era of
the Welfare State is Over” and “The Era of the Work-based State is
Approaching” appeared on the Hungarian government’s official
website--the quotes below are taken from these articles. According
to these articles, Orbán has organized a “new Hungarian state” after
the recent parliamentary elections in which Orbán’s Fidesz- NKDP
alliance received an overwhelming support and entered the parliament
with two-thirds majority. “The basis of the newly organized
Hungarian state is a work-based society that is not liberal in
nature,” states Orbán.
Not surprisingly, it appears that Orbán views this
recent victory as validation for his increasingly authoritarian
actions which continue to receive the international community’s
criticism. Orbán uses the recent economic failures and the image of
a weakened West as a sign that Hungary needs to seek alternative
ways of political and economic governance. The Prime Minister
appears to think that a “great global race” for identifying a brand
new, most optimal way of governance is taking place. He stated:
There is a global race to invent a state
that is most suited to achieving the success of the nation. Today,
the world is trying to understand systems that are not western, not
liberal, perhaps not even democracies, but are nevertheless
successful, and the ‘stars’ of the analysts are Singapore, China,
India, Russia and Turkey.
While breaking with the dogmas and
ideologies that have been adopted by the West, we are trying to find
the form of community organization, the new Hungarian state, which
is capable of making our community competitive in the great global
race for decades to come.
In the last year Orbán managed to suspend the IMF
from Hungary, rewrite the constitution in an unconstitutional way,
and made Euroskepticism an acceptable form of Hungarian foreign
policy. If these actions were not enough for the European
authorities to become convinced that Hungary was backsliding away
from political pluralism, this brand new manifesto should help
clarify all misunderstandings. During his speech in Romania he went
on to say that: “We must break with the liberal principles and
methods of social organization … the new state that has been
constructed in Hungary is not a liberal one.”
Orbán’s perception of the European Union, its role
and membership requirements also seem to be significantly distorted,
given his statement that “I don’t think that our European Union
membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based
on national foundations.”
Perhaps being perceived as an informal institution
like a neighborhood book club is a price the European Union has to
pay for not addressing Orbán’s authoritarian tendencies on time.
According to a June 2013 Venice Commission report, the
constitutional changes implemented by Orbán have gutted the power of
the Hungarian Constitutional Court and have taken unconstitutional
laws and reintroduced them at the constitutional level, seriously
threatening democracy and the rule of law in the country.
These actions, among many others in the Orbán
government’s democracy-undermining actions, have had practically no
consequences for Orbán. The European Parliament has had many
opportunities to sanction Hungary for its actions. At the time when
the Venice Commission report was issued, Hungary was still well
within the EU orbit of influence, and unlike in the case of Russia
today, sanctions, economic and other, would have had robust enough
influence. One of such appropriate sanctions would have been the
suspension of Hungary’s parliamentary voting rights as an EU member,
through the employment of the EU’s Article 7. However, the lack of
resolve within the EU has made this impossible.
Other than the fact that Orbán seems to be an
ego-centric, power-hungry leader, what else could explain this
confident new turn in his already alarming actions? He is certainly
not motivated by an ideology he strongly believes in, or by his
commitment to the greater good of the nation that will come by
creating a brand new way of more centralized and increasingly
centralized form of governance and authority. Quite the contrary,
Orbán appears to be driven by his aspiration to emulate the likes of
Russia’s president Putin, and by the need to justify his own
incompetence by criticizing the West.
For example, Orbán is notoriously handicapped when
it comes to basic management of the country’s economy. The aftermath
of the global financial crisis, which he has used to his advantage
when arguing against the concept of the European economic structure,
was severely mishandled by his team. Some of his famously unorthodox
measures in dealing with Hungary’s economic recession included the
nationalization of private pension funds to offset the budget
deficit, retroactive industry taxes especially for foreign-owned
companies, and mandatory energy price cuts. Despite the fact that
Hungary received a bailout of over $25 billion (jointly from the EU,
the IMF and the World Bank), its national debt remains over 84% of
GDP (the highest among the EU’s 11 post-communist member states) and
its economic growth remains very modest.
In 2013, Orbán and his team decided to pursue
“economic self-rule” after the multiple rounds of IMF aid
negotiations failed. This type of rogue position has enabled Orbán
to institutionalize nationalism in Hungary. He has been targeting
foreign investors, business owners and NGO’s in Hungary, questioning
the legitimacy of their interests.
According to Orbán's manifesto, in the case of
"certain non-governmental organizations that are often in the public
gaze, we are in fact dealing with political activists who are being
paid by foreigners, who are attempting to enforce foreign interests
in Hungary. ... This is why it is extremely justified that the
Hungarian Parliament has formed a Committee to regularly monitor,
record and make public foreign influence.”
In regards to foreign debtors, Orbán stated: “we
are living in a world in which anything can happen, even that when
the various court proceedings are over, the Hungarians could receive
back from the banks hundreds of billions of forints that they should
never have had to pay in the first place.”
At this point Orbán’s rhetoric starts to sound
much like that of Vladimir Putin’s. He attempts to rally up his
people against the West with statements like“provincialism is the
copying of the West and it is something we should put behind us,
because it is killing us,” prepares them for short-term sacrifices
in the name of long-term gains, and warns them of an unsure future:
Instead of fear, isolation and withdrawal,
I recommend courage, thinking ahead and rational but courageous
action for the Hungarian community of the Carpathian Basin, and in
fact for the whole Hungarian community throughout the world. Since
anything can happen, it could easily be the case that our time will
come.
Orbán also seems to be taking a bolder stand to
defend Russia. According to the Hungarian government's website:
Mr. Orbán also said it had been
self-agitation to state that we would be “swept into the clutches of
the Russian bear”. Hungary is a member of NATO and the European
Union, and our “biggest problem” is that two-thirds of our exports
go to the EU, which is an unhealthy balance. What would be healthy
is if this ratio was 50 percent and the other half went to the
world’s various other regions so that we “stood on multiple legs.”
On the subject of the South Stream gas pipeline,
the website states that
He emphasized that Hungary is showing
solidarity with the people of Ukraine and agrees that territory
cannot be taken away from a country, in addition to which they are
aware of the terrible economic conditions now prevailing in Ukraine.
In the Prime Minister’s opinion, Russia would soon stop exporting
gas to Ukraine because they will be unable to pay for it, and this
means that the transport of gas to Europe would eventually be
blocked. It is in the interests of Hungary that there should exist a
method of gas transport that assures a steady supply even in a
situation of this nature. We cannot throw our own interests aside in
such a conflict, Mr. Orbán stressed.
Orbán’s recent speech would appear to be genuinely
inspired by Russia’s recent rise and Putin’s “bravery”, if the
international news headlines did not talk about the extensive
leverage of Russian oligarchs on Hungarian oligarchs, its heavy
dependence on Russia’s energy strategy and interests, and a recent
$13.4 billion dollar deal with Moscow, according to which Hungary’s
only nuclear plant will be expanded by Russia’s Rosatom. It appears
that Orbán will accept certain foreign involvements in his country,
preferably those deriving from Russia.
Further undermining the European values and the
importance of the European Union, Orbán also seems to support
separatism within the EU borders:
If the community in Transylvania ever found
itself in a situation in which it did not receive the resources for
which it was eligible from the Romanian budget, it could count on
the support of Hungary.
Conclusion
It is difficult to argue that the European Union
must act right away in order to prevent Orban from running Hungary’s
democracy into the ground, when it has proven to be so weak in
dealing with the much larger and more alarming issue of Ukraine. On
the other hand, the EU’s continuing lack of resolve in dealing with
serious derailment from democracy within its own borders makes its
weakness in regards to the Ukraine crisis quite understandable.
However, Orban’s bold new “manifesto” combined
with his high domestic approval ratings and the re-election of his
Fidesz party should be a good enough reason for the EU to sanction
Hungary before it is too late. Hungary’s EU parliament voting rights
should be temporarily suspended, all EU financial aid to Hungary
must be put on hold, and the idea of its EU membership suspension
must be introduced. This should, of course, be done with a clear
understanding that unless the EU officials deal with Hungary’s
leadership in a proper way, there is a danger of pushing Hungary
into the arms of Russia.
For the broader international community and the
Western nations in particular, Hungary’s backslide should serve as
further proof that authoritarian regression in Eurasia is only
worsening and that the hard-won democracy there is very fragile at
the moment. This makes modifying Putin’s far-reaching influence that
much more crucial. The United States should work closely with its
European allies to ensure that the EU takes measures against
Hungary’s democratic regression, and furthermore, that the EU takes
a bolder stand against Putin’s growing aggression and influence in
the region.
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