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Hungary's election · Apr 08, 2006
Tomorrow will be the first round of parliamentary election in Hungary. The current government is a coalition between MSzP (Socialist Party) and tiny SzDSz (Free Liberal Alliance), challenged by Fidesz (right wing opposition) and a multitude of other smaller parties with no chance of making it into the Parliament. The Economist reports:
Looking at the government, spendthrift and sleazy, it is easy to see why the opposition is cross. The Socialist-liberal coalition has presided over the worst mismanagement of public finances anywhere in post-communist Europe.
Most damage was done in the government’s first two years, in a bid to reward its supporters. As one finance minister from a neighbouring country comments, “I can understand why they made these idiotic promises, but not why they kept them.”
The opposition Fidesz (the name comes from the Latin ‘fides’ for loyalty) is led by Viktor Orban.
Mr Orban has impeccable credentials as a brave and effective communist-era dissident. But he has moved sharply away from the radical liberalism of his youth, in a conservative, nationalist and populist direction. Many Hungarians’ discontent with the government tends to evaporate as soon as they look at the opposition.
Orban is a cynical demagogue who appeals to xenophobia and he allows members of his immediate entourage to use coded anti-Semitism. He himself tries to maintain a barely ‘plausible’ deniability in this regard. His speeches sound like
“Grant us…a national government in Hungary, which sees the world through Hungarian eyes, thinks with a Hungarian mind and senses in its heart a Hungarian beat.”
His colourful election tactics put one question-mark against Mr Orban’s suitability for office.
Another problem is Orban’s record as prime minister between 1998 and 2002.
He ran the economy well — until a vote-grabbing binge in the final year. Hungary gained NATO membership and moved fast towards the European Union. But relations with the neighbours were scratchy. Fidesz still hankers after justice for the Hungarians deported from neighbouring countries after 1945. “Sooner or later, they have to pay,” says one senior figure, “200,000 Hungarians were expelled and lost all their possessions.” That contrasts sharply with the present government’s emollient foreign policy of being friends with everybody.
There is no question that Hungarians left in the neighboring countries after World War I suffer to varying degrees. The reality, however, is that Hungary can’t do much to prod its neighbors to treat them better. If Hungary confronts them with revanchist rhetoric, the ethnic Hungarians stuck outside the borders will pay the price. The parties in Hungary should not use the minority ethnic Hungarians in the neighboring countries for their domestic vote-getting maneuvers—yet Fidesz found wrapping itself in the flag too tempting to resist.
The Economist does not even mention that Fidesz damaged Hungary’s relations with the US in 2001-2002 – and Viktor Orban had a huge personal responsibility in that debacle (I will blog about that separately).
My observation is that, psychologically, mostly everyone in Hungary is a socialist—by which I mean that they expect the state to take care of them in fundamental ways. Taxes are high and the welfare and educational bureaucracies are gargantuan and, unsurprisingly, extremely ineficient. Essentially no education and healthcare reform took place in the decade and a half since Communism’s demise. In fairness, MSzP supports free markets and foreign investors slightly more than the ostensibly right-wing Fidesz, but people on both sides of the political spectrum tolerate expect a large role for the state.
Two smaller parties are also running in the election and have historic importance. The liberal party (SzDSz) has a sensible platform but is perenially stuck just above the threshold of entry into Parliament (currently 5% of votes). Its members are left-wing urban (read: Budapest) intellectuals more comfortable at smart seminars than in smoke-filled backrooms. SzDSz was at the vanguard of regime change in 1990 but has failed to transform itself from a dissident movement into an effective national party and has not developed any convincing approach to the minority Hungarians abroad. In practice, SzDSz has allowed itself to be emasculated by the MSzP juggernaut to the point that today it is little more than an upmarket brand of MSzP. The other smallish party, MDF, which formed the first post communist government of 1990-1994 has all but disappeared, its members ingested by Fidesz.
In summary, the choice is essentially between two dreadful alternatives: right-wing statists with a marked populist and nationalist bent (Fidesz) and the corrupt left-wing socialists (the current ruling party, itself the repainted former Communist party of the pre-1990 era).
In private, both parties say much the same things: in the short term, there must be fiscal tightening and, thereafter, radical public-sector reform. The first, particularly, will be an unpleasant shock for Hungarians, who have got used to living well but dangerously on borrowed money.
