Hungarians look ready to be fooled again
Russian President Vladimir Putin may not be able to save himself, but he may already have saved another despot, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. There’s an election in Hungary next Sunday, and it looks like Orbán may actually win it. A month ago he was trailing the opposition badly, but then Russia invaded Ukraine.
Hungary is one of the new-model ‘soft’ dictatorships that look like democracies to the average passer-by.
After all, there are no secret police, you can criticize the government publicly, and they actually count all the votes in the elections. Sometimes they find a few extra votes as well, but Orbán really has won three more or less fair elections in a row.
Yet he actually is a dictator (‘The Viktator,’ some people call him) despite the free elections. They don’t need to be rigged in advance, because Orbán controls almost all the media that the voters get their information from. And he doesn’t even need to win a majority of the votes, because the election districts are gerrymandered in his favour.
He eliminated the ‘liberal’ media by making them unprofitable (no government advertising, expensive lawsuits, etc.), and then getting rich friends to buy them up at bargain prices and sing his praises in them. Over 90 per cent of the Hungarian media are pro-Orbán, although there is no formal censorship.
He got away with it by expanding the constitutional court and packing it with stalwarts of his ‘Fidesz’ party. He also took control of the lower courts by forcing all judges over 62 to retire and appointing Fidesz members instead. And he sometimes creates fake political parties in election years to draw off some of the anti-Orbán vote.
Orbán’s greatest success was extending citizenship to over a million ethnic Hungarians who live as minorities in surrounding countries – and also giving them access to generous Hungarian social benefits. They may never have been to Hungary, but they make up one-tenth of the electorate, they take the money – and 95 per cent of them vote for Fidesz.
In the media, there is a ceaseless torrent of hate propaganda against minorities (Jews,
Roma and gays) and especially immigrants. For a dozen years the country has been told that Fidesz is their only defence against an Islamized Hungary where real Hungarians would be an oppressed minority, although no sane Muslim would ever voluntarily choose to live there.
A depressingly large number of Hungarians, mostly older, poorly educated or rural, believed the whole package, but Orbán’s victories also depended on the fact that the opposition parties were chronically at war with one another. This time he was in serious trouble, because all six of them had managed to come together and back the same candidate.
They couldn’t agree on much else, so the challenger they chose was a rather colourless centre-right politician called Péter Márki-Zay. Nevertheless, enough people were fed up with the cronyism and the lies that by a month ago Fidesz and the opposition alliance were running neck-and-neck. And then Russia invaded Ukraine.