‘Orbán’ Review: Hungary’s Strongman

There is no personality cult around Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, who has been prime minister since 2010. Orbán has understood that authoritarian populism must never evoke images familiar from twentieth-century dictatorships: no violence in the streets, no knocks on doors by the secret police late at night, no forcing citizens to profess political loyalty in public. Instead, power is secured through wide-ranging control of the judiciary and the media; behind much talk of protecting hard-pressed families from multinational corporations, there is crony capitalism, in which one has to be on the right side politically to get ahead economically.

Like all populists, Orbán has no difficulty in presenting himself as an underdog fighting “the elites”—preferably “shadowy” ones that threaten the nation with their “globalist” networks. This past fall, the government waged a vicious campaign against the Hungarian-American hedge fund manager and philanthropist George Soros, alleging that his “empire” is bent on striking a “final blow to Christian culture.” It is worth remembering that Orbán was the first major European politician to endorse Trump (whose victory he celebrated as a “return to reality” in the face of political correctness and liberal hypocrisies). Hungary is of course not the US, but the country shows clearly how populists with enough power operate when in government.

Paul Lendvai, a Hungarian-Austrian journalist who spent several decades reporting on Central Europe for the Financial Times, has written a highly illuminating biography of Orbán, whom he calls “the ablest and most controversial politician in modern Hungarian history.” Orbán: Hungary’s Strongman also serves as a useful overview of Hungarian history since the fall of communism—after all, Orbán has been central to the country’s development since at least the late-1990s, when he was first elected prime minister. Lendvai portrays him as ruthless, absolutely relentless in the pursuit of power, and, on many occasions, outright vengeful.

Orbán has long cultivated the image of a man born to fight: his passions are for soccer and spaghetti Westerns. The avenger played by Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West is a particular favorite; he claims to have seen the movie at least fifteen times. He likes to brandish his “plebeian” origins and values: his family lived without running water; the children had to labor in the fields during school holidays. This picture leaves out the fact that Orbán’s father was the typical Homo Kádáricus, the product of “goulash communism” under János Kádár, who led the country from 1956 to 1988. Kádár had struck a tacit deal with Hungarian society: politics should be left to him, and in return people would not have to pretend to believe in communism; instead, they could find happiness in family life and even run small businesses. Back then, Western accounts of the country invariably contained the cliché of the “happiest barracks in the Eastern Bloc.” Part of an upwardly mobile rural middle class that both despised and served socialism, Orbán’s father became the head of the machinery department in a local farm collective. Orbán was a good student, and in the mid-1980s he joined the István Bibó College in the Buda hills, a kind of intellectual fraternity house for law students from the countryside. The college had been set up by the socialist regime, but some of the tutors teaching there were dissident intellectuals. Soros supported it financially.

In 1988, Orbán and other students set up the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz). They took the word “young” literally: no one above the age of thirty-five was allowed to join. Their program was liberal, anticlerical, and suspicious of nationalism. Eventually, the Fidesz founders were to abandon these ideals for their exact opposites. But they never abandoned one another. Today the country’s president, the speaker of parliament, and the author of Hungary’s 2012 constitution all happen to be Orbán’s friends from university days.

Lendvai emphasizes the particular characteristics of this political brotherhood. They shared relatively humble origins in the countryside and grew resentful of the urbane intellectuals who tutored them. Some of these older liberals had formed a successful party, the Free Democrats, after the Kádár regime and, in the eyes of Orbán and friends, patronized the young firebrands as a not yet fully educated youth branch of their party. Whether the country boys split from the older liberals because they had a chip on their shoulder is debatable—after all, this story is just another version of the populist notion that the country is forever divided between “the real, rural Hungary” and the cosmopolitan (sometimes called “foreign-hearted”—i.e., Jewish) Budapest liberals. What is beyond dispute is that Orbán discovered that resentment could be turned to political advantage. As he put it in an interview, “By origin I am not a sensitive intellectual…there is in me perhaps a roughness brought up from below. That is no disadvantage as we know that the majority of people come from below.”

Orbán took up a Soros-sponsored scholarship to go to Oxford, where he set out to research the idea of civil society in the history of European political thought. But he cut his stay short to enter the fight for the leadership of Fidesz. He managed to purge all his opponents and radically altered the party’s program after Hungary’s major center-right party, which had formed the first government after the fall of communism, dramatically lost support. Orbán, nominally a Protestant, suddenly discovered religion and sought an alliance with the churches. He explained that he could not “talk to the people” if he did not understand the churches’ “important part in Hungarian life.” His party’s image utterly changed: the former long-haired student leaders began to advocate the ideal of the polgári, a civic-minded, patriotic bourgeois akin to the German Bürger, with a strong work ethic and a commitment to traditional family values. Evidently, that vision appealed to voters: in 1998, Orbán, at the age of thirty-five, became Europe’s youngest prime minister.

Hungary was then still seen as a leader in the process of “transition” from state socialism to a market economy and also as a model pupil of the European Union, which the country joined in 2004. It was the shock of Orbán’s political life when he unexpectedly lost the 2002 elections to a technocrat who had been nominated by the Hungarian Socialist Party, the successor party to the Communists. Initially Fidesz alleged election fraud. Orbán exclaimed that the nation simply could not be in opposition (thereby, like all populists, claiming that he and only he represented the people). The surprise was even greater as his government had showered welfare benefits on the electorate before election day—a practice that the new left-wing government would continue. It put Hungary on an unsustainable financial trajectory that nearly led to bankruptcy in 2008.

In 2010, power virtually fell into Orbán’s lap: the left had been discredited by a disastrous economic record and corruption scandals. Lendvai describes the Hungarian Socialist Party as “a disgusting snake pit of old Communists and left-wing careerists posing as Social Democrats.” Hungary’s peculiar electoral system ensured that the 53 percent Fidesz won at the polls translated into a two-thirds majority in parliament. Declaring that this had been no ordinary election but a “revolution at the ballot box,” Orbán proceeded to establish an Orwellian-sounding “System of National Cooperation.” He also reinforced Hungary’s “Trianon Trauma,” the country’s self-image as a great power that had been victimized by the West because of the post–World War I Treaty of Trianon, as a result of which the country lost two thirds of its territory and a third of ethnic Hungarians ended up in neighboring countries. And he had his party pass a new constitution that codified the nation’s Christian character in a preamble beginning with an appeal to God.

Already in 2009 Orbán had announced that the country was in need of a “central political forcefield” that would dominate politics for fifteen to twenty years. The major check on power in the two decades after 1990 had been the constitutional court. After 2010, Fidesz first packed it and then took away most of its powers. From his defeat eight years earlier Orbán had drawn the lesson that his government’s achievements had not been communicated “efficiently enough.” Accordingly, Fidesz now took over the public and most of the private media. The government also started a campaign against foreign banks and supermarkets, levying special taxes on them. This economic nationalism distracted from the fact that Hungary today has both the highest value-added tax in the EU and the lowest corporate tax—hardly policy choices one would associate with “plebeian values.”

Fidesz changed not only the state, the economy, and the culture; it also changed the people themselves. About a million ethnic Hungarians in neighboring states were given citizenship; meanwhile, for a variety of reasons, about 500,000 people left the country. Almost all the new citizens who participated in the 2014 elections voted for Fidesz, while the emigrants found it difficult to register at consulates in New York and London. In 2014, Fidesz received another two-thirds majority in parliament, even though its share of the vote had dropped from 53 to 45 percent. International observers, noting well-executed gerrymandering and the ruthless use of the entire state apparatus for pro-Fidesz propaganda, declared the election free but not fair.

Orbán now proclaimed his aim of creating an “illiberal state” based on the values of work, family, and nation (the very slogan that the wartime French Vichy regime had once adopted). He cleverly ran together the political and economic meanings of “liberalism,” leaving open whether he was propounding economic nationalism or something politically authoritarian. The latter interpretation was ever more plausible, as Budapest sought to strengthen ties with Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and other illiberal states. Given memories of the Soviets and the Ottoman occupation, Orbán’s “opening to the East” was hardly popular, but it allowed Hungary’s leader to present himself as a cunning underdog who would play East and West off each other, all to the Magyars’ advantage.

Domestically, Orbán’s vision of a dominant central force seemed to have been realized: the major opposition parties were the post-Communists and a new far-right party, Jobbik, the only major political organization not tainted by corruption. It seemed that the two could never unite against the government. Jobbik’s rise enabled Orbán to answer EU criticisms of his undermining the rule of law by warning of a horror scenario: if an overweening Brussels weakened him, he threatened, the EU might one day have to deal with real neo-Nazis in power.

Yet in the months after his triumphant reelection things went awry for the man now often referred to as the “Viktator.” Orbán fell out with one of his oldest friends from school, Lajos Simicska, a powerful oligarch and the brains behind Fidesz’s party finances. Simicska switched his allegiance to Jobbik, explaining that he could not tolerate Orbán’s cozying up to Putin. The two-thirds majority in parliament disappeared after an independent candidate won a by-election. And a new generation of Fidesz leaders, for whom the hard days at the Bibó College were familiar only from history books (which Fidesz now also fully controlled), made their luxury lifestyles all too conspicuous: their expensive watches screamed nouveau riche, as opposed to the discreet charm of the polgári. The party’s popularity plummeted.

Then Orbán hit on the issue that not only saved him from domestic troubles, but also made him a figure of real consequence in Europe. In the spring of 2015, the government decided to build a fence on the border with Serbia to keep out refugees, and it staged a “national consultation” on immigration. An enormous campaign for “yes” accompanied this exercise in fake direct democracy, and Orbán did not hesitate to invoke conspiracy theories to generate fear of people who, according to Fidesz propaganda, had to be either economic migrants or Muslim terrorists. The exact results of the “consultation” have never been revealed, let alone checked by independent observers.

Orbán’s strategy of presenting himself as the last protector of a Europe in which Christianity and the nation-state are sacred succeeded both domestically and internationally. At home, he outflanked Jobbik on the right. In the EU, Orbán managed to turn a conflict that should have been about institutions—could the EU tolerate the abolition of the rule of law in a member country?—into one about ideals: his “Christian national identity” versus what he derided as “liberal babble” from Brussels. Henceforth, critics of his attacks on the basic rules of liberal democratic governance were regularly dismissed as just having different, and subjective, values.

Few politicians outside Hungary were eager to take up Orbán’s call to wage a pan-European Kulturkampf. But plenty on the respectable center-right were happy to use him for their own short-term purposes: Bavarian conservatives celebrated Orbán at a meeting in a monastery in the fall of 2015 to make a show of their opposition to Angela Merkel’s refugee policies. The Christian Democrat Sebastian Kurz, who was sworn in as Austria’s chancellor in December, praised Orbán to prove his own toughness on immigration. Surely they all know that Orbán is in effect leading a far-right government in which religion is never about ethics—what we actually believe or do—but purely about identity: who we think we are.

As with Trump’s victory, Orbán’s success over the years does not demonstrate that right-wing populism is an unstoppable force. Rather, his victories have been enabled by the cynicism of center-right politicians in Europe who refuse to distance themselves from what is in fact a white nationalist government. German Christian Democrats, for instance, are less concerned about the rule of law in Hungary or other supposed “European values” than about major investments by automobile companies, such as Audi, the second-largest employer in Hungary, and Mercedes, both of which receive subsidies from the Hungarian state.

Are there limits to what Orbán can do? For years, there have seemed to be three red lines: conflicts with neighboring countries over their large Hungarian minorities, violence on the streets, and open displays of anti-Semitism. Orbán has by and large eschewed conflict with successor states to the Habsburg Empire. In fact, the more he has been criticized by Brussels, the more he has tried to build up the Visegrád Four (or V-4)—Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic—as a bloc that protects the supposedly real European values of Christianity and nationalism by refusing to take in refugees.

At home, Fidesz has been extremely careful to avoid anything that could look like serious human rights violations. When tens of thousands demonstrated in the spring of 2017 against the threatened closure of the Central European University (founded and endowed by Soros), the police were restrained. Free speech is not suppressed in Hungary, at least not openly; bloggers are free to criticize the government, and all kinds of debates can be staged in Budapest coffeehouses. The government seems to use other means to control speech. In 2015, Hungary’s largest left-leaning newspaper was bought by a dubious Austrian investor and, a year later, abruptly closed down, supposedly for financial reasons.

As my colleague Kim Lane Scheppele has emphasized, the very instruments that the West once considered crucial for a transition from socialism to liberal democracy—law and the market—have been used to establish a soft autocracy: after all, the creation of a new Hungarian constitution and Orbán’s capture of the judiciary were done in a procedurally correct manner, as one would expect from a party of clever lawyers. And the closing of the liberal newspaper was, ostensibly, caused by the market, not politics.

Without a functioning media, a government’s missteps, corruption, and embarrassments will not show up at all on screen or paper. Consider, for example, the mayor of Orbán’s hometown and one of his friends from primary school, Lőrinc Mészáros, who was an unemployed pipefitter a decade ago. He is now the fifth-richest man in the country, and his business has grown faster than Mark Zuckerberg’s. With disarming frankness, Mészáros once explained that “the good Lord, good luck and the person of Viktor Orbán have certainly all played a role” in his success. Orbán’s own family is listed in a Forbes report as being worth €23 million.

One reason for Orbán’s opening to the East—and his enthusiasm for strongmen from Azerbaijan to China—is that standards of transparency in business transactions are decidedly lower there than in the West. Construction in the beautiful new Budapest, often funded by the EU, also provides excellent opportunities for submitting inflated bills. But since 90 percent of the media is effectively controlled by Fidesz or its allies, most people will not be aware of these abuses. Local newspapers are now all owned by oligarchs close to the government—a situation that recently prompted the US State Department to make a grant available to support “fact-based” reporting in rural Hungary.

As Lendvai emphasizes, Orbán relishes conflict and positively needs enemies. While populist leaders use the pompous rhetoric of “National Cooperation,” what they really do is relentlessly create and recreate divisions in society. This partly explains the latest campaign against what Fidesz calls the “Soros Plan.” This plan, Fidesz has informed all eight million voters, mandates the transportation of a million migrants into the EU each year and would force states to be soft on crime committed by migrants. In billboards and TV ads, Soros has been portrayed as a grinning puppet master controlling not just left-liberal parties in Hungary but also the major EU institutions. This imagery evokes the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes from European history, drawing from conspiracy theories favored by the Nazis: the Jewish financier as the evil genius behind Bolshevism. Orbán has compared the “Soros Empire” to the Soviet Union and alleges that, together with “Brussels bureaucrats,” this evil empire is forging an alliance “against the European people,” as “Europe is currently being prepared to hand its territory over to a new mixed, Islamized Europe.” A faithful Fidesz deputy felt compelled to attribute the “Soros Plan” to Satan himself.

Once again, the campaign is designed to outflank Jobbik on the right, since it is perceived as the most significant threat to Fidesz in the spring 2018 elections. But it also serves to justify an attack on the remnants of civil society. NGOs that have benefited from grants given by Soros’s foundations have exposed government scandals. A law passed earlier this year forces all NGOs that receive more than €24,000 from abroad to declare themselves as “foreign-supported.” Orbán also ordered the secret services to investigate these NGOs, claiming that they could pose a threat to “national security.” In Orbán’s rhetoric, Hungary is locked in a fight with Soros for nothing less than its national existence.

The EU has reacted helplessly to such Putin-like measures. Orbán has gloated that in response to criticisms from Brussels, he has performed a “peacock dance”: pretending to listen, making cosmetic adjustments to laws, and then proceeding as planned with the consolidation of power. His regime has been possible not despite but because of the EU. When measured in relation to GDP, Hungary is the top recipient of EU funds, which have contributed decisively to the country’s economic growth and which are to the regime what oil money is to Arab despots: a free resource that can be distributed at will to buy political support and strengthen Fidesz oligarchs. In effect, the EU finances its most vocal internal enemy, an enemy who says he feels more at home with politicians in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, than in Brussels. Open borders for one’s own citizens and closed borders for refugees are an ideal combination for Orbán: the former ensures that frustrated citizens can just leave (and probably will have no time or energy left to organize political opposition after waitressing in London or Berlin for ten hours a day).

Lendvai is unsure of how to classify Orbán’s regime. Like any successful political movement, Fidesz has produced ideologues. But its right-wing think tanks have contributed little more than statements such as, “If something is done in the national interest, then it is not corruption.” Meanwhile, Orbán has become a hero of the far right all over the world, with fans such as the Republican US congressman Steve King, who tweeted that “Orban has uttered an axiom of history and of humanity. Western Civilization is the target of George Soros and the Left.” A conference about the future of Europe, organized and financed by the Hungarian foreign ministry to mark the country’s presidency of the V-4 in 2017–2018, featured among the invitees Milo Yiannopoulos and Götz Kubitschek, a leading figure of the German far right whom even Bavarian conservatives would not touch with a barge pole. Fidesz’s vision of the V-4 appears to be a kind of Disneyland of the far right: Christianity reigns supreme, no Muslims are allowed, the traditional family triumphs. (Orbán’s cabinet contains exactly zero women; according to the prime minister, females are just not tough enough for politics.)

Like other populist leaders, Orbán presents his government as being based on direct democracy (on account of the frequent, highly manipulative “national consultations”) in contrast to what he dismisses as “liberal nondemocracy.” Some critics have called Hungary fascist, but the system is clearly not—after all, the government does not seek to mobilize people, encourage mass violence, or demand total ideological conformity; in that regard, it actually resembles Kádárism (under which the discontented were also readily given passports).

In the end, Lendvai settles on the term “Führer democracy” to emphasize the extraordinary centralization of power in the Viktator’s hands. And he endorses the idea of the “mafia state,” a term coined by the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar to suggest that the reign of Fidesz has little to do with political ideas, but is simply a means for a “political family” to plunder the country under the protection of its godfather. Lendvai’s characterization of Orbán as capable of adopting any belief according to political expediency chimes with that interpretation.

The last chapter of Lendvai’s book is entitled “The End of the Regime Cannot Be Foreseen.” What seems foreseeable is another victory for Fidesz in 2018. The opposition remains divided and largely demoralized. Apart from Fidesz, the successor party to the Communists still has the best political infrastructure, but not much moral credibility. Lendvai observes that socialists are the only Hungarian politicians who appear in the Panama Papers. This certainly helps to make the common Fidesz claim that “all sides steal” more believable.

Surprisingly, Fidesz lost a by-election in a stronghold in southern Hungary at the end of February, after all opposition parties had effectively backed an independent candidate. If Orbán were to lose a national vote, would he really go quietly, or is he, like Putin, determined to die in office? Many of his cronies, apparently wishing to live like nineteenth-century magnates, have acquired huge landed estates. Hungary now has, according to Lendvai, a concentration of land ownership unprecedented in modern Europe. As far as a peaceful transition to democracy is concerned, this is worse than money stashed away in the Caribbean. But however the story ends, a country that already has a deeply tragic view of its own history will one day have to come to terms with the years lost to a kleptocracy veiled in national colors.

Protests against Viktor Orban in Budapest this April



Heavy hand: Viktor Orban now leads a one-clique state
The Sunday Times, October 8 2017, 12:01am

Book review by Victor Sebestyen:

Orban: Europe’s New Strongman by Paul Lendvai

The rise of Hungary’s nationalist leader is a sign of what’s to come in eastern Europe.

IIn those giddy days when the Iron Curtain was torn down and East Europeans liberated themselves from Soviet communism, it seemed that one country would have an easier transition to freedom than the others.
Hungary was already part of the way there by the time the Berlin Wall fell. It was still a one-party state, but it was relatively relaxed, with a burgeoning opposition and a freeish press. Hungarians were allowed to travel, unlike Czechs or East Germans. The Russians occupied the place with 75,000 troops, but Hungary was called “the merriest barracks in the camp”.
They were heady times, full of optimism, when anything seemed possible in eastern Europe. Now Hungary is a trendsetter again, in the new age of revolutionary populism — leading the way, according to this disturbing biography of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, in hurtling Mitteleuropa back towards ultra nationalism and reactionary extremism.
Paul Lendvai’s excellent book is a lively account of how one very smart politician has changed the weather in his own country. It is also an invaluable guide to what has happened over the past years elsewhere in the erstwhile Eastern bloc, while the rest of Europe has barely been noticing.
The first part of Orban’s story is cliché. Of dirt-poor farming stock — “The height of luxury until my late teens was hot running water,” he has said — Orban was plucked from a provincial backwater to attend the best schools and universities in Budapest. In the late 1980s he went to Oxford, on a scholarship from a George Soros foundation, and wrote a dissertation on democratic accountability.
He drifted naturally towards opposition politics. He could speak good English, was fearsomely clever and quick-tongued, and liked drinking beer late into the night. He was the “go-to” dissident for reporters covering eastern Europe in the twilight years of Soviet communism. As one of them, I knew he would always be good for a quote, an original insight or some gossip.
He wore longish hair, jeans, three-day stubble. He was infuriatingly popular among the female journalists. He said that what he admired most about the West was its free press. Once, before the Iron Curtain came down, I asked him what his hopes for Hungary were. “Well, I hope we’ll turn into a normal European country…dull, say Sweden.” A country less like Sweden than the one he runs now is hard to imagine.
In 1988, with a group of student friends, Orban formed Fidesz (aka the Alliance of Young Democrats). It was a byword in revolutionary cool, with enthusiastic activists. “We are against communist boredom. We are the party of fun,” was one of Orban’s own favourite slogans.
He became a national figure in 1989 at one of the landmark events in modern Hungarian history: the ceremonial reburial of Imre Nagy, the man who led the failed 1956 uprising against the Soviets and was later hanged. Aged 26, in front of 250,000 people, Orban made an electrifying speech demanding that Russian troops leave Hungary, still a taboo subject then.


Within 10 years he was elected prime minister. He had transformed Fidesz from the party of cool into a Christian and nationalist movement, but one that was still mainstream conservative to western eyes.
His first premiership was by his own admission a failure — he was too timid, he said. After he lost power in 2002 he remade his party and himself. From firebrand dissident, he became a right-wing demagogue. Which is the real Orban is difficult to say and no longer matters.
Lendvai a Vienna based Hungarian exile from 1956 and longtime columnist on the Financial Times quotes a former friend of the premier: “Orban believes in the veracity of whatever is politically useful to him.”
He won a landslide victory in 2010, which gave him power to change the constitution. This second act in his life, Lendvai observes, goes beyond cliché and enters the realm of tragedy. He has used winner-takes-all democracy to replace the communist one-party state with a one-clique state that resembles something from Central Asia.
In Hungary there is no longer an independent judiciary, no separation of powers; commissions of Fidesz party apparatchiks on guaranteed 10-year contracts run the judiciary, firing and hiring judges. Fidesz controls a media committee with powers over the press, broadcasting and libel laws that are unrecognisable in western Europe. His oligarch chums have bought most of the newspapers and TV stations, as well as getting the lion’s share of the state- awarded infrastructure projects. From abject poverty, his family has somehow become extremely rich.
He used his majority to gerrymander the voting system; in 2014 he won another two-thirds majority with little more than 40% of the vote. He looks unassailable ahead of elections next year. He has become good friends with Vladimir Putin, and is an open admirer of Recep Erdogan and Donald Trump.
Orban was early to spot the opportunities offered by “illiberal democracy”, as he puts it, and populism — deep-rooted in central European political culture, and now updated for the modern age. Yet the formula still depends on identifying “enemies of the people”: Muslims (though there are barely any in Hungary), foreign do-gooding meddlers. He has built a new Iron Curtain of wire fences to keep out asylum seekers. Orban is not personally anti-semitic, but many around him are. The government’s latest campaign — against the émigré financier Soros, who has invested millions in educational institutes throughout central Europe — unashamedly uses dog-whistle anti-semitic imagery.
Lendvai occasionally exaggerates: Orban hasn’t jailed opponents and there have been big demonstrations lately against his regime. Yet for anyone who knows Hungary, it feels less free and more oppressive than at any time in the past 20 years.
And where Orban led, many of his neighbours have followed. Poland has a right-wing government that threatens to prosecute historians for writing books that conflict with leading politicians’ favoured view of the past. It is glib to suggest we are in a rerun of the 1930s, but, as this important book shows, on the periphery of Europe, where democratic institutions have traditionally been weak, there has been a slide backwards into the simplicities of the past. And we can all remember what a terrific success that was, last time it was tried.

Review by Tony Barber The writer is the FT’s Europe Editor
 

A thoughtful and entertaining biography of the head of an illiberal regime

No EU national leader reigns supreme in the way that Viktor Orban is lord and master of Hungary. Having tasted power as prime minister from 1998 to 2002, he reclaimed office in 2010 after a landslide election victory. Over the past seven years, he has cocked a snook at the EU and systematically dismantled the checks and balances built into Hungary’s political system after the end of communism in 1989. It is scarcely imaginable that Mr Orban, 54, will lose next year’s parliamentary elections. The opposition is divided and demoralised. In any case, Mr Orban amended the electoral law in 2012 in a manner blatantly favourable to his ruling Fidesz party. This secured Fidesz an overwhelming majority of seats in the 2014 elections and will surely produce much the same outcome in 2018. As Paul Lendvai observes in Orban: Europe’s New Strongman, his thoughtful, entertaining biography, Hungarian political scientists wrestle over how to define Mr Orban’s proudly illiberal regime. One brands it a “fascistoid mutation”. Another calls it a “neo-collectivist, neo-communist experiment”. Such labels seem exaggerated or wide of the mark. More accurate, arguably, are the words of two men with experience of government in Budapest. Balint Magyar, a former education minister, known for having coined the term “Hungarian mafia state”, says that Mr Orban’s regime is “the privatised form of a parasite state, an economic undertaking run by the family of the Godfather exploiting the political and public instruments of power”. Andras Bozoki, a former culture minister, says Mr Orban presides over a “hybrid regime [in which] the features of an authoritarian system are stronger than those of a democracy”. If this seems too mild a description, it nonetheless captures an important point, identified also by Jan-Werner Müller, a Princeton University professor. Unlike in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Mr Orban’s opponents are not bumped off. Critics hold demonstrations in Budapest. They occupy niches in the media. However, real power, from 2010 on, has seemed unlikely to change hands. Lendvai, an 88-year-old Hungarian-born author and journalist, left his native land for Austria after the 1956 anticommunist uprising. In recent years he has been a persistent thorn in Mr Orban’s side and a target for smear campaigns in the Fidesz media. In his view, Mr Orban “has contributed more than any other Hungarian politician since 1989 to the disastrous political, moral, economic and cultural polarisation of Hungarian society”. The value of Lendvai’s book lies in his penetrating explanation of why Hungary’s post-1989 institutions have proved so vulnerable to Mr Orban’s assault. Four factors stand out. The first is Mr Orban’s dark talents. “There is not a single politician in Budapest or Brussels who has been able to hold a candle to Orban with regard to his political cynicism, his gifts as an orator and his talent for intrigue,” Lendvai writes. The second factor is the Hungarian left, which the author dismisses contemptuously as “a disgusting snake pit of old communists and leftwing careerists posing as social democrats”. It was the left’s moral bankruptcy and economic incompetence in power that paved the way for Mr Orban’s election victory in 2010 and his swift creation of “a skilfully veiled authoritarian system”, Lendvai says. Thirdly, many Hungarians felt let down by the switch from communism to free-market capitalism after 1989. Nostalgia rose for the era of Janos Kadar, Hungary’s relatively restrained communist ruler from 1956 to 1988. Last and not least, there is the Trianon factor: Hungary’s inability to draw a line under the harsh 1920 treaty which left several million ethnic Hungarians, to this day, outside the post-first world war state. Most Hungarian politicians are tempted to play on a sense of national loss. Mr Orban does it best. Because Poland is bigger, the EU tends to regard the ruling conservative nationalists in Warsaw as a more serious threat than Mr Orban to the bloc’s future. But if the twin themes of modern Hungarian history are fulfilment of the national idea and aspirations to a liberal political order, there can be no doubt where Mr Orban has nailed his colours.

Viktor Orban is the bugbear of Brussels, the power-crazed champion of what he calls illiberal democracy, a fierce opponent of Angela Merkel’s policy of open borders, a fan of Vladimir Putin and in spite of, or because of this, one of the most successful leaders in Europe. The riddle is posed, but not entirely solved in a new biography of the Hungarian prime minister.

Paul Lendvai, a veteran eastern Europe watcher, tracks the career of a man who started out as an anti-communist rebel and gradually turned into an autocrat. In a moving early passage he describes how in June 1989 the remains of the reformer Imre Nagy, executed after a secret trial 31 years earlier, were transferred from an unmarked grave to a place of honour in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. The communists were still in power, and tens of thousands of Soviet troops were stationed in Hungary, but the event, an act of protest, was staged before a huge crowd who had lost their fear.

Suddenly a 26-year-old student stepped forward and with the kind of clarity rarely heard during the communist decades declared: “If we trust our own strength, then we will be able to put an end to the communist dictatorship. If we are determined enough, then we can compel the ruling party to face free elections . . . we will vote for a government which will at once enter into negotiations on the immediate beginning of the withdrawal of Russian troops.”

That was Orban’s arrival on the political stage and it had quite an impact. He had been a founding member of Fidesz, a youth organisation that aimed to stick pins in the communists, but until then he wasn’t in the front line of the revolution. Since the days of the 1981 military crackdown in Poland, foreign correspondents travelled frequently to Budapest and Prague to get a sense of where communism was going. When the Soviet-backed regime put tanks on the streets of Warsaw, it had become clear that there was no such thing as reformist communism, only a system that was ready to use force against its own people.

In Hungary we found a “liberal communist” country where most people were ready to muddle through and keep their heads down. We met dissidents such as Miklos Haraszti and Laszlo Rajk, who were frustrated with the conformism of the Hungarians and were hungry for the modern world. Yet the young Orban, in 1989, was a new voice for a new era. Within months the Iron Curtain had been breached and for me the penny dropped: it was free spirits such as Orban who were about to become the new political class.

Orban came from a modest background — he was 15 before he used a bathroom for the first time, marvelling at warm-water plumbing; he was a turbulent, argumentative pupil who was capable of switching on the charm. There was no hint of privilege about him, just a raw physicality. He needed to win: at football, and in politics. The bearded and bejeaned Fidesz was transformed into an efficient vote-winning machine. At the first free elections in 1990, it won 22 of the 386 seats. At fast pace Orban and a close band of brothers turned it into a party that now dominates the Hungarian political scene. “Untroubled by any sense of scruple,” writes Lendvai, “Viktor Orban, not yet 30, single mindedly and quite openly pursued his goal of seizing total control over Fidesz.” In 1990 he was elected to the national assembly and has served as prime minister from 1998 to 2002 and then from 2010.

The closing of Hungary’s borders to refugees turned Orban into Europe’s pariah
Budapest-born Lendvai fled to Vienna after the bloody Soviet-led crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Since then, writing for the British and Austrian press, he has become the doyen of central European analysis; his book Eagles in Cobwebs on nationalist currents in the Balkans was particularly prescient.

Lendvai is no fan of Orban. In this political biography Orban ticks all the boxes to qualify as a proto-dictator: Fidesz controls a media committee with wide press powers; the independence of the judiciary has been undermined, judges are hired and fired. Lendvai leaves no doubt as to where he thinks this is going; he borrows the sinister term “Führer democracy”, authoritarian rule that renews its mandate at the ballot box with large majorities and low turnouts. And that is largely the view of the European Commission and the western liberal consensus. The commission tries to threaten and punish Orban, but he surfs each crisis and with the help of uncritical local media depicts himself as a plucky David facing down Goliath.

The closing of the Hungarian borders in autumn 2015 was for Lendvai proof positive that Orban had turned his back on western European values. In 1956 200,000 refugees left Hungary for the West. In 1989 Hungary helped to bring down communist rule on the Continent by allowing thousands of East Germans to cross the country and the barbed-wire border to freedom.

In Orban’s Hungary in 2015, however, those fleeing war in the Middle East were turned back or thrown out. Lendvai claims that his biography is dispassionate, but in Orban’s treatment of refugees it is anything but. It was the moment when Orban’s strongman pose, when his accumulated domestic powers, turned him into Europe’s pariah.

Yet large chunks of Orban’s policy on refugees reinforcing the EU’s external borders, faster processing of asylum requests followed by speedy deportation have been adopted by the rest of the EU. His readiness to take the argument to Brussels and fight his corner has won the respect of other central Europeans. In Orban they see not a Putin or an Erdogan, but simply a practitioner of realpolitik. Many Britons too would agree on Orban’s view of the right balance between the nation state and the EU.

One can take this Orban, a stubborn resistance fighter against the mush of globalised politics, and declare him a success. There is little doubt that he will be re-elected next year. But I share Lendvai’s judgment that in his rush to increase his power, Orban has trampled on too much. There is a darkness to a government that singles out the philanthropist George Soros for a propaganda campaign, as fierce and as misguided as the two-minute hate sessions against Goldstein in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

If Orban were truly a strong leader, he would find the courage to put an end to such venomous nonsense among his supporters. The younger Orban, the man who denounced the Russian troop presence in Hungary, would never have put up with it.

Orban Europe’s New Strongman by Paul Lendvai, Hurst, 274pp; £20

Newsweek:

Before Sándor Márai left Budapest in 1948, the author and journalist said that one of the biggest threats to his nation was loneliness: Invaded and occupied by everyone from the Mongols to the Turks to the Soviets and isolated by its unique and impenetrable language, the Hungarian learned that “there wasn’t a people in Europe to whom he could speak in confidence [...] there was no one, near or far, he could count on.”
Márai, who went into exile first in Switzerland and then the U.S. as Soviet-backed Hungarian communists took power at the end of World War II, warned: "[It] poses a great danger [...] of turning karstic, of erosive marcescence that threatens everyone—the individual and the people."
 

Hungarian author and journalist Paul Lendvai was also exiled from his native Hungary, a year after Soviet tanks crushed the country’s short-lived pro-democracy uprising in 1956, and echoes Márai in his own memoir, Blacklisted: “The Magyars [Hungarians] are among the great losers of European history," he writes. "With the possible exception of the Albanians, they are the loneliest nation of Europe.”

Born in 1929 into a Jewish-Hungarian family, Lendvai lived through World War II, survived the German occupation, Holocaust and experienced first-hand his country’s slide into Soviet dictatorship after its liberation by the Red Army in 1945. As such, there can be few authors more qualified to document Hungary’s current descent from democracy to authoritarianism and its chief protagonist, Viktor Orbán.In his latest book, Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman, Lendvai explains how Orbán, who began his political life as an anti-Communist democrat, used an ideology of aggressive nationalism to turn a left-wing student movement Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz) into a right wing populist party in a litle under a decade.
In 1998, Fidesz would win elections and make its 35-year-old leader the youngest in Hungary’s history. Orbán would lose power in 2002 to a liberal coalition government, but a catalogue of dramatic political and economic events including the 2007-08 financial crisis and the spectacular downfall of Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány would enable Fidesz to make a spectacular comeback in 2010, seizing a two-thirds majority in parliament that it retained when re-elected in 2014.
It was this majority, Lendvai states, that allowed Orbán to change the Hungarian constitution and systematically dismantle democratic institutions including the constitutional court and the civil service that challenged his power. Through both legislation and a network of rich and powerful friends, Orbán has crushed the free press, creating what Lendvai brands “Hungary’s Fuhrer Democracy.”
“After seven continuous years of Fidesz rule and in light of all opinion polls, even Viktor Orbán’s fiercest critics concede that at the age of fifty-three his position appears impregnable. His unlimited personal power is virtually unchallenged within Hungary, nor is it under threat from the EU,” he writes.
Lendvai traces Orbán back to his family roots in rural Hungary and through his education in Budapest and briefly at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1989, on a scholarship paid for by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. A year before he left, Orbán and 36 other students founded Fidesz as an independent youth organization, a bold move in a country still ruled by the Communist regime of János Kádár.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of Hungary in 1989, Orbán abandoned his studies at Oxford and was elected in 1990 as a Fidesz MP. By 1993 he was president of the organization and had begun the process of turning Fidesz politics from centre-left to populist right. Orbán justified the need for this stark political shift with a calculated pragmatism:
“In the centre we have, if we stand alone, no chance against either left or right. To my mind there is no possibility of cooperating with the left. My answer is that Fidesz must seek cooperation with the forces politically right of centre,” Orbán told his Fidesz colleagues, in a move that Lendvai describes as “superbly executed.”
Orbán had plenty of ammunition for his new nationalism in Hungary, “the great loser of European history,” invaded and conquered at regular intervals by a variety of aggressors including the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Nazis and finally the Soviet Union. But first and foremost was the legacy of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when the victorious powers of World War I divided 75% of Greater Hungary between its neighbors—Romania and the-then Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, displacing 40% of the population, or one-in-three Hungarians.
Trianon was a source of resentment in Hungary long before the arrival of Orbán, but as prime minister he was quick to exploit it. One of his first acts in office was to declare June 4, the day the agreement was signed, as National Solidarity Day. He also restored voting rights and citizenship to the descendents of those displaced Hungarians (who, in 2014, voted by a margin of some 95% for Fidesz).
A more contemporary rallying cry for Orbán has been the refugee crisis, his hardline reaction to which brought him to worldwide attention and made Hungary a darling among the global far right. Lendvai, who was granted Austrian citizenship when he fled Hungary along with almost 200,000 other Hungarians following the 1956 uprising, dedicates an entire chapter to Orbán’s outspoken anti-migrant stance.