Hungary’s autocratic challenge to EU values wins imitators in Europe
It was a continentwide party to mark the end of history.
On a spring night in 2004, a chorus sang in a Warsaw square. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy — the anthem of the European Union — echoed across once-bloody frontiers. Midnight fireworks sparkled along the Mediterranean. The next morning, organisers set a white-tablecloth breakfast on Budapest’s Chain Bridge for revellers still celebrating the dawn of a new era for Europe.
“The divisions of the Cold War are gone — once and for all,” declared then-European Commission President Romano Prodi as he welcomed 10 new members to the EU , eight from the former communist East.
And yet, 14 years later, the triumph of liberal democracy is being attacked from within by EU members that openly deride the club’s values, principles and rules. The bloc, meanwhile, has been incapable of fighting back, its weakness a side effect of the optimism with which it grew.
Ground Zero for the rebellion is here in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban is running for re-election on Monday with boasts of his illiberalism, swipes at the hostile EU “empire” and promises to further tighten his grip on a country dancing ever-closer to the edge of autocracy.
Orban’s defiance presents the EU with a far different threat than the one it faced in 2016, when Britain voted to exit and speculation swirled over who might go next. It may be more serious than that — a challenge that endangers the character of the union.
“Orban doesn’t want to leave the EU,” a senior German official said. “He really wants to change the EU.”
By some measures, he’s succeeding. Far from being a pariah, Orban has found imitators in Poland and admirers in the Czech Republic, Austria and even at top political levels in Germany.
Orban’s European opponents, meanwhile, have proved unable to curb his behaviour. Rather than punish Hungary for its intransigence, Brussels continues to supply the Government with billions of euros in EU subsidies.
“Orban is waging his freedom fight against the EU with huge amounts of EU money,” said Peter Kreko, executive director of the Budapest-based policy research firm Political Capital. “Lenin said ‘Capitalists will sell the rope to us with which we’ll hang them’. Well, the EU is not selling. It’s giving it to Orban for free.”
The EU never gave itself the tools for dealing with a wayward leader such as Orban because it never imagined needing them.
At the start of the millennium, the bloc had just 15 members — none of them east of the old Iron Curtain. But after the fall of communism, Eastern European countries that had been in the orbit of the Soviet Union looked to the EU and Nato as institutions that could bind them to the West and keep them out of Moscow’s grasp. Prosperous western neighbours spotted a chance to spread their influence across the continent.
Everyone assumed that differences would recede as the new members grew to adopt the values, rules and institutions of the old ones.
“It was a fantastic constellation. We wanted it. The West wanted it. It was back wind in every respect,” said Peter Balazs, a former Hungarian diplomat who was deeply engaged in the EU accession process.
Balazs, who would go on to become the country’s Foreign Minister, said Hungary spent a decade proving to the EU that it was worthy of membership.
But once Hungary joined, the union’s best leverage to keep the country on a free and democratic path evaporated and no one planned for what would happen after Hungary and others joined the bloc — a failure Balazs attributed to parallel illusions.
“A Hungarian illusion that the EU would do it, that somebody else would solve our problems,” he said. “And for Europe, the illusion that they would be like us.”
The result was fertile ground for Orban. Since coming to power in 2010, he has simultaneously used the bloc as rhetorical foil and cash spigot.
Orban brags of his aim to build “an illiberal state based on national foundations” and cites Russia and China as exemplary models. He has consolidated his party’s influence over arms of the Hungarian state and society, including prosecutors’ offices, government auditors and the media.
On the campaign trail, he delights crowds by lashing out at Brussels, part of a trinity of enemies that also includes Muslim refugees and the Hungarian American investor George Soros.
As recently as 2011, Hungary scored the highest rating possible from Freedom House, an international non-governmental organisation, but it is now the among the least free and most corrupt of all EU members.
And Brussels-based investigators are virtually powerless to do anything about it. Authority to pursue the matter resides in Hungary, with prosecutors widely perceived to do the bidding of the ruling party.
That is typical of the EU’s dilemma in how to address Hungary’s piece-by-piece moves against the rule of law and democratic norms.
Until recently, the bloc did not even have measures to address rule-of-law violations that fell short of triggering the bloc’s nuclear option — EU sanctions that would suspend a country’s voting rights. But that option has effectively been neutralised. The problem was underlined after the European Commission triggered the article for the first time in December against Poland. But the like-minded governments in Poland and Hungary have vowed to protect one another should either be targeted.
Other countries, too, may have Hungary’s back. Away from the campaign trail, Orban can often be seen joking with fellow leaders at EU summits in Brussels. If they were to move against Orban, it would cost them comity and allies at an already fractious time.
It could also cost them politically at home. Orban’s relentless attacks on refugees and immigrants have been a winning message in Hungary. Others, including Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, have taken notice and adopted similarly hard-line messages, while publicly welcoming the Hungarian Prime Minister as an honoured guest.
Far from fearing the EU’s wrath, Orban’s allies see the historical pendulum swinging their way.