It’s a long time since a mayoral by-election in a small Hungarian town excited international news coverage. Some weeks before Hungary’s general election, a stronghold of the governing party was lost to the opposition. It’s funny how, according to most of the international media, when the opposition wins, Hungary is a democracy, but when Viktor Orban wins, it isn’t.
Viktor Orban’s landslide victory now makes him the most successful Hungarian politician ever. That’s not my opinion. That’s a fact. He had his first term as prime minister in 1998 at the age of 35, and, since 2010, has won three successive terms. He has not just won them Theresa May-style or Angela Merkel-style with a few seats, but with a gob-smacking two-thirds majority. Quite a hat trick.
Why do Hungarians vote for Orban? Perhaps some of them, like me, are outraged by the venom directed at him. He has been vilified (chiefly by journalists who have spent a weekend in Budapest) as xenophobic, anti-Semitic and far-Right. He is none of these things. His government passed a Holocaust denial law, made Holocaust education compulsory and financed an Oscar-winning film about Auschwitz. His party has Roma MPs. It has offered student scholarships to Syrians and Iraqis.
Orban’s election campaign has been characterised as anti-migrant. That’s misleading. His campaign was anti uncontrolled, illegal migration, and the EU dumping people who claim to be asylum seekers in Hungary. He believes a country should have some say in who enters its borders, a view, I suspect, many voters in Europe would agree with.
Why is his reputation so bad? The former Communists, until recently the main opposition, have suckered Western liberals, the Left and the EU’s Left-leaning management into believing that Orban is evil personified. So skilfully that The Guardian ran a column suggesting that voters should support the neo-Nazis in Hungary to dislodge Orban. You couldn’t make it up.
There are two more factors to his success that the opposition and the Western media simply can’t accept. Orban is popular. He is the only Hungarian politician to enjoy genuine, personal popularity, however much theatre directors in Budapest hate him. He lost two elections in 2002 and 2006, but only just. His personal support has been unwavering.
The other factor that I haven’t seen mentioned once is the economy. Orban, like David Cameron, inherited an economy that was on its knees. He’s done a good job: low unemployment, steady growth. Voters go for that.
The Hungarian opposition will be bleating that the election wasn’t fair. It points out state television is subservient and over-reverential to the government. That’s true. But most Hungarians get their news online, and the state channels were like that when the opposition party was in power. If it is such a big fan of independent journalism, it should have done something when it was in office.
No effective opposition
As we’re discussing the football-mad Orban, let’s have a footballing analogy. If your team is beaten 10-nil, week after week, it’s nothing to do with the pitch or a refereeing decision. The Hungarian opposition couldn’t organise a barbecue in a backyard and has lost touch with reality. Hungary is unfortunate in that there is no adult debate or civility in politics, and there is no effective opposition.
The Left in general holds those with different views in contempt. Donald Trump’s presidency and Brexit only happened because of stupid racists; similarly the Hungarian opposition believed that only thick yokels would vote for Orban. It believed that a high turnout would help it, not him. The polling station for expats in London had a queue nearly half a mile long. One hopes after three cataclysmic defeats the opposition will pay attention to what goes on around it.
This isn’t to say that Orban’s report card is perfect. He may be a truly great politician, but the jury is out on his performance as prime minister. When it comes to corruption, “must do better” is the appropriate entry. One of the few books every Hungarian will have read because it’s been on the school syllabus for 50 years is Zsigmond Moricz’s Relations, a comic novel about political corruption, published in 1932. It could have been published last week. Orban’s financial attempts to resuscitate Hungarian football, apart from one glorious night at the European championships, have yet to bear fruit. Healthcare might have been a better bet. A large majority induces hubris: Lord Acton was on the money. Orban’s government contains charmless goons who spend too much time training their gun dogs and worrying about how to heat their swimming pools. It was shameful that one of the few journalists to really know Hungary, the BBC’s Nick Thorpe, who’s not even hostile to Orban, was summoned into a ministry for a dressing down.
It is ironic that it’s thanks to the opposition that Orban has become an international figure. His re-election will infuriate many people, but then, democracy has many enemies.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2018
Tibor Fischer is the author of How to Rule the World.
