Back in Budapest for the first time in two years, I find Viktor Orbán’s electoral authoritian regime unexpectedly shaken. Last time, in autumn 2022, my friends were in deepest gloom following the failure of an only superficially united opposition to defeat Orbán in a clearly unfair election. Now it feels different for three reasons: growing discontent in society, nervousness and missteps in the regime, and the fact that the two are being pulled together for the first time by a potentially credible opposition leader called Péter Magyar. Astonishingly, from a standing start earlier this year, his Tisza party – named for the great Hungarian river – won 30% of the vote in June’s European elections, to Fidesz’s 45%. In the latest opinion poll, Tisza is at 39% to Fidesz’s 43%.
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Magyar’s meteoric rise started with the revelation of a paedophile scandal earlier this year, which cost both the country’s president and its justice minister (Magayr’s ex-wife) their jobs. But the underlying discontents are much deeper: all the accumulated dissatisfactions of 14 years under one and the same government. Inflation last year was 18%. People see the failings in public services and read about Orbán’s cronies getting fabulously rich.
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Magyar, in his 40s, smart and determined, has a populist knack for highlighting these failings. For example, I was told that over the summer he went round hospitals with a thermometer, showing how swelteringly hot it was in the wards, because the air-conditioning wasn't working. Nick Thorpe, the BBC's outstanding Central Europe correspondent, told me that he saw Magyar attracting crowds of 400 in villages where previously the leaders of the democratic opposition from the big cities would have been lucky to get seven men and a dog (if they went there at all). He speaks a very different language from those urban liberal cosmopolitan leaders (‘He doesn't speak to me at all,’ one urbanite grumbled) but he has their votes anyway. Maybe it takes a populist to beat a populist.
A magazine editor added an interesting comment. For many years now, if you were young and ambitious, the only way up was through the Orbán system, formally styled the System of National Cooperation. Now, for the first time, ambitious, talented young Hungarians see the chance of taking a different, fresh path. They are flocking to Tisza, which is building up its organisation, using some of the techniques – such as local ‘civic circles’ – that Orbán himself pioneered 20 years ago.
And the government is making mistakes. Defending its Trumpo-Putinesque position that Ukraine must be compelled to negotiate ‘peace’ with Russia, Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation) suggested on a podcast that the Hungarians probably should not have fought against the Russian invasion in October 1956. Since the heroism of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 is a core part of the foundational mythology of Fidesz, and a source of entirely justified national pride in the wider society, Viktor Orbán rapidly distanced himself from this. But it was still an extraordinary and revealing blunder.
The rather elegant Hungarian edition of Homelands: A Peersonal History of Europe, which I was presenting in Budapest
Now a huge word of warning. There is still a year and a half to go until the next national election. That's an eternity in politics. Orbán still has the levers of control firmly in his hands, including most of the media. That same Balázs Orbán described the significance of this with extraordinary frankness: 'whoever controls the country’s media controls that country’s mindset and through that, the country itself’. (Orwell, thou shoulds’t be living at this hour!)
As I recalled when presenting the Hungarian edition of Homelands at the book fair in Budapest, back in 1989 we identified the apparently liberal democratic young Viktor Orbán as the most talented politician of his generation – and we were not wrong. He just used those talents in the wrong direction.
I was touched to be asked several times to autograph dog-eared copies of this 1989 Hungarian samizdat edition of my essays on Central Europe
Among other things, he is now betting on his ally Donald Trump being elected president of the US. Orbán has become an unlikely ideological hero for the American MAGA right, and he's hoping that this will bring him significant advantages – starting with a US ambassador to Budapest who doesn't excoriate him as the current ambassador just admirably has.
Beyond that, for the last 10 years he has argued that the future lies with anti-liberal, non-Western versions of modernity, as seen in China and elsewhere. And, building on earlier Hungarian traditions, he has tried to play all sides, enjoying all the benefits of membership of the EU and NATO, while having good relations with Vladimir Putin and being Xi Jinping’s most favoured partner inside the EU. Last week he elevated this into a doctrine which he called ‘economic neutrality’. This is definitely paying some benefits, with China and South Korea being major sources of foreign investment in Hungary, alongside Germany and the US, and Hungary last year the leading destination for Chinese foreign investment in Europe.
One thing that globally diversified investment doesn't give him, however, is the free billions of euros from EU funds that he has used in the past to reward friendly cronies (including media owners) and stuff voters’ pockets as an election approaches. The EU is currently holding back a significant level of funds because Hungary clearly does not comply to EU standards of the rule of law, media pluralism and liberal democracy.
Whether or not Hungary finally turns to the path of re-democratisation, as Poland did last year, will depend on the Hungarians. But it’s vital that the EU doesn’t effectively aid the defence of an electoral-authoritarian system by placing billions of euros of patronage largesse into Orbán’s hands, as what may be a crucial election approaches in early 2026.
Only the Hungarians can change Hungary for the better, but at least the EU shouldn't hinder them from doing so.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
Reprinted from the timothygartonash.substack.com with the author's permission. You can find the original here.
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