Hungary on the Road to Democracy
KENEZ, PETER
Transition Pains Hungary on the Road to Democracy By Peter Kenez Budapest With Right-wingers flexing their muscles in parts of Europe, while in other parts unreconstructed Communists...
...The clear implication was that anyone who voted against FiDeSz is not a real Hungarian...
...During the first round of voting, on April 7, the Hungarian Socialist Party barely edged ahead of the Alliance of Young Democrats-Hungarian Civic Party (FiDeSz-MPP), 43 per cent to 42...
...The Hungarian Socialist Party was composed of reformed Communist survivors...
...Following Magyar Nemzet's example, some of the most vulgar and demagogic FiDeSz politicians have taken to habitually referring to the PM by his old code number, D-209, not by his name...
...Among other things, the curators apparently believe "terror" began here on October 15,1944, after the lion's share of Hungary's Jews had already been deported...
...Stephen should be kept in the National Museum, where it was on display, or in the Parliament, where the FiDeSz government decided to put it...
...Practically everywhere in what was the Soviet bloc unrepentant Communists are enjoying a striking revival...
...Friends have stopped talking to one another...
...Their rhetoric notwithstanding, on fundamental issues like joining the European Union or securing foreign investments there is little disagreement...
...Within two weeks one of the coarsest FiDeSz leaders, Zoltan Pokorni, who had fiercely attacked Medgyessy, quit Parliament after it was divulged that his father had been a longtime secret police agent...
...Presumably he wanted to embarrass Medgyessy...
...On the one hand, Orban and his comrades do want to join the West and they understand that electoral procedures have to be respected...
...They did everything they could to limit freedom of expression, including taking total control of the national television service and using public money to fund publications that shared their views...
...A two-party system is arguably beneficial for a young democracy, but the acrimony dividing the camps is certainly not a happy development...
...He adopted a slash-and-burn style, paying little attention to its longterm impact on Hungarian democracy...
...More than half the electorate apparently believes Orban is a greater threat to democracy than a onetime Communist counterintelligence agent...
...The main figures of FiDeSz, as its name indicates, are young people, most of whom have never held a job outside of politics...
...When the Socialists narrowly lost in 1998 they did not ask for a recount...
...the last few years it has enjoyed some of the region's healthiest economic growth rates...
...As a matter of fact the Socialists were comfortably ahead according to several polls...
...As it happens, Medgyessy 'srole in the secret police was anything but dramatic...
...By any standard, Hungary ranks among the most successful of the Eastern European nations experiencing transition pains...
...The Socialists were frustrated by the FiDeSz regime's social schemes favoring the middle class, and by the way its excessive nationalism poisoned relations with neighboring Slovakia and Romania...
...There has always been at least an ambivalence in FiDeSz' attitude toward the legitimacy of the opposition...
...Predictably, forces on the Right created a hullabaloo, asking for Medgyessy's resignation, insisting on a fresh election, etc...
...Janos Pokorni had been coerced into collaborating...
...At that point FiDeSz reinvented itself, turning sharply to the Right, and lost some of its original leaders...
...the victims of Communism...
...But the long road to a stable democracy still has many potholes...
...When the first free elections were held in 1990 no fewer than 28 parties participated, six surpassed the 5 per cent qualifying mark, and the new Parliament also had 11 unaffiliated members...
...Stunned by the initial results, FiDeSz launched an exceptionally vicious campaign in the two weeks leading up to the April 21 second round for undecided contests...
...Most important, FiDeSz did not distance itself from MIEP, whose leaders do not hide their pathological hatred of the Jews...
...The transfer, implying that the country remains under the Holy Crown, has not appealed to neighbors who perceive it as an expression of Hungarian revanchism...
...It printed pamphlets claiming the Socialists were planning to introduce tuition at the universities, raise the price of gas and sell farmland to foreigners...
...Though that is less true in Hungary, anti-Communist harangues have lost their appeal...
...Whether militant radicalism will serve FiDeSz' interests in the long run is clearly open to question...
...we are the nation...
...Even in this apple, though, there is a worm-as the vicissitudes of moving from Communism to democracy demonstrate...
...Soon, though, it became known that five members of the Orban Cabinet once had secret police ties...
...On June 18 the Right-wing daily Magyar Nemzet revealed that Prime Minister Medgyessy had been an agent of the Communist counterintelligence from 1978 to '82...
...That is not to say the two sides are ideologically identical...
...families are split up according to political allegiances...
...But his task was to report on others, and he did that until the collapse of the system...
...After a long period, the police again intervened and a number of people were injured...
...Within four years the Socialists rose to the top, and the strength of the SzDSz and Forum declined greatly...
...This past July 4, for the first time since 1990, the streets actually became violent...
...Although FiDeSz received the larger number of votes in the second round, the Socialists and the SzDSz ended up with 198 seats in the 386-member Parliament and assumed control of the government...
...and the Forum, a nationalist body that looked back at Hungary's preCommunist era rather nostalgically...
...By contrast Fidelitas, the FiDeSz' youth organization, asked loudly this year...
...In the immediate post-Communist period two principal political forces emerged: the Western-oriented SzDSz, founded by the most prominent former dissidents...
...The lifestyle of a substantial part of the middle class is increasingly indistinguishable from that of Western Europeans...
...it has continued with even greater intensity...
...and now, finally, real incomes have started to climb as inflation has abated...
...It appears the Socialists have been cowed, too, by the storm FiDeSz stirred up prior to the second round of balloting and will not scuttle programs benefiting the well-off...
...Nationalism proved a richer vein for Orban...
...Yet more important than the polarization itself is its underlying cause: An extraordinary bitterness between the Right and Left has become the foremost characteristic of modern Hungarian politics...
...When the police dispersed them, protests continued in front of Parliament, where a crowd of 2,000 to 3,000 demanded a recount or a new vote...
...The hotly contested issues of the last few years have almost exclusively involved symbolic issues...
...The SzDSz hesitated before deciding to save the coalition and support the Prime Minister...
...Orban regularly appeared on a virulently anti-Semitic radio program, thereby lending it credibility...
...One was whether the crown of St...
...Interestingly, the party's propagandists, most of whom are too young to have suffered the worst of Communist tyranny, miscalculated when they set off an extreme anti-Communist barrage expecting to pick up votes...
...Losing the election was such a shocking blow that today, despite their having appointed the commission that oversaw it, they obliquely hint the vote was rigged...
...It is possible that FiDeSz overplayed its hand because it was buoyed by an unexpected development a few weeks earlier...
...In stressing other aspects of the country's history that coincided with the party's ideology, it persuaded many that it was the defender of Hungarian interests everywhere...
...On the other hand, they have never truly acknowledged that "the enemy" has a role...
...In short, at bottom there is a disproportion between the significance of the points of contention here and the zeal both sides bring to these conflicts...
...The Right is firmly convinced that any setback it suffers at the polls must be due to the maneuvers of sinister forces...
...The vast majority of Budapest residents, including a sizable portion of FiDeSz supporters, disapproved of the disturbance of the peace...
...But for pragmatic reasons the Left largely went along with the Right...
...Voters therefore feel they cannot afford to cast a ballot for a small party that might not capture any seats...
...Its basic rallying cry was that the "enemies" (not the "opposition") were Communists serving the interests of international capital...
...But perhaps what the elections showed most of all is that in Hungary, as elsewhere in Europe, the Right is on the attack and the Left is on the defensive...
...Indeed, the aggressive crusade FiDeSz began after its surprising opening round defeat has not been abandoned...
...But a survey conducted after the "scandal" broke showed Medgyessy's popularity had not declined...
...And they have not dissociated themselves from the extreme Right's explicitly nondemocratic call for the overthrow of the government...
...Why the son had to resign in the light of his father's actions remains uncertain...
...The two scandals were hardly similar...
...Their reign undermined democratic institutions...
...From their point of view the Socialists are traitors to the nationalist cause, the remnants of the criminal Communist regime...
...Another heated controversy concerned how much space a new museum called the House of Terror should allocate to the victims of Nazism vs...
...A former high-ranking official in the Ministry of Finance, he was supposed to guard economic secrets and analyze economic material that Hungary had acquired both legally and illegally...
...Remarkably, as early as 1994 the SzDSz found it easier to create a coalition with the Socialists, their onetime tormentors, than to work with the increasingly chauvinistic Right-wing groups...
...Between the two voting rounds Orban and his associates formed thousands of "citizens' circles" that have since been mobilized against the Socialist government...
...In the end, FiDeSz drew much of its strength from the villages and the middle class groups it had showered with subsidies...
...The Socialists and the SzDSz prevailed by carrying the workers and the intelligentsia in the cities, especially Budapest...
...While in power it absorbed all the other moderate Rightist entities and formed a tacit alliance with the extremely conservative, ferociously anti-Semitic MIEP...
...Simultaneously, FiDeSz sought to exploit existing deep cleavages in Hungarian society...
...In 1998 it was able to fashion a government with several smaller Center Right parties...
...The FiDeSz was then considered a junior organization of the SzDSz and was sometimes dubbed ZsiDeSz, a none-too-subtle allusion to its connections with liberal Jews (Zsido means Jew...
...The answer cannot be that profound policy differences account for the hostility between the antagonists...
...Nevertheless, one expects to see some redistribution of the wealth now to help the underclass, the unemployed and the Gypsies...
...Each side is now passionately committed not merely to advancing its views but to wiping out the other side...
...Defying the predictions of all opinion polls, the victors overcame the regime's control of both the national television service and the electoral process...
...The Medgyessy affair opened a hornet's nest...
...When Victor Orban became Prime Minister in 1998 he had not yet turned 35...
...ONE CONSEQUENCE of Hungary's post-Communist political evolution has been a growing polarization...
...In the past decade it has attracted more foreign investment per capita than any other former Communist satellite...
...When FiDeSz was in power they could express contempt for their foes by disregarding them...
...Why has this bitterness replaced the high expectations and euphoria that were widespread after the fall of Communism...
...The incoherence of the argument somehow did not diminish its effectiveness...
...Transition Pains Hungary on the Road to Democracy By Peter Kenez Budapest With Right-wingers flexing their muscles in parts of Europe, while in other parts unreconstructed Communists are gaining popularity, liberals can draw some comfort from the results of the recent Hungarian elections...
...His closest collaborator, Laszlo Kover, discussed the "Jewish question" in Hungary, a distasteful subject in view of the past...
...Disproportion aside, it is also true that charismatic ex-Prime Minister Orban and his colleagues are responsible for a good deal of the present political animosities...
...It must be added, however, that the most popular independent newspapers did not toe the government line, and the state TV lost viewers to commercial channels beyond FiDeSz' reach...
...FiDeSz managed to stage mass demonstrations involving tens of thousands of people...
...On May 27 a coalition of moderate Socialists and Leftists took office after winning a hard-fought battle against an autocratic, divisively nationalist Right-wing government...
...But crucially FiDeSz' probable ally, the farRight Justice and Life Party (MIEP), fell short of the 5 per cent threshold required to remain in the race, while the liberal Federation of Free Democrats (SzDSz) garnered a little over 5 per cent of the vote and linked arms with the Socialists...
...Peter Kenez, a longtime NL contributor, is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the director of its program in Budapest...
...This time around nine parties competed, only four made it into the legislature-where, in fact, just two are major players-and there are no independent MPs...
...At one of his rallies he famously said, "We cannot be in opposition...
...Nonetheless, in a country with a Communist history, resurrecting the past can have unforeseen consequences...
...Conservatives have a degree of self-confidence and self-righteousness that their adversaries lack...
...The suggestion was strengthened by invoking the old image of a Christian, exclusionist Hungary and seducing the churches to advocate party positions...
...To gain backing from the peasantry, it spewed out antiurban oratory in the countryside...
...Still, the Medgyessy revelation did create a crisis, and did occasion some soulsearching among liberals...
...A few hundred demonstrators blocked the Elizabeth Bridge in Budapest, disrupting traffic in the capital...
...The style of governance they introduced may or may not be related to their age, but in any case it was exceptionally arrogant, autocratic and belligerent...
...A narrow definition of Hungarian identity inevitably has anti-Semitic overtones, and FiDeSz hardly repudiated such connotations...
...The number of meetings of the Parliament was cut down considerably...
...The election thus provides an opportunity to examine the shifting political scene here...
...It spread rumors that the rival candidate for prime minister, Peter Medgyessy, was suffering from cancer, and that an Israeli company which had an enormous amount of "Hungarian money" was aiding his bid for office...
Vol. 85 • September 2002 • No. 5
