Hungary's Polarized Politics
KENEZ, PETER
Voting on History and Health Hungary's Polarized Politics By Peter Kenez Budapest It is difficult for an outsider to understand the bitterness that pervades Hungarian politics. The...
...Aside from the extremists on the Right and the Left, there was consensus on joining the European Union (EU...
...Nothing, though, has stirred as much passion as the plebiscite conducted on December 5,2004...
...Only the naïve anticipated that membership would immediately improve basic national conditions...
...The well-to-do now travel abroad more often, while the young and ambitious apply to foreign universities and receive scholarships...
...In 2002 a Museum of Terror opened in Budapest...
...Two lessons can be drawn from this...
...Fidesz can therefore be expected to focus on attacking the Socialists' economic policies in the future...
...Second, it appears that today there is little political capital to be gained by playing the nationalist card...
...In order to be binding on Parliament, a proposition has to win the backing of at least 25 per cent of all eligible voters...
...Fidesz politicians compounded the problem by presenting the issue in a highly abstract manner...
...The party's posters depicted a mother and child with the caption: "Health is not a matter of business...
...By early evening on December 5, it was clear that the nationalists had suffered a resounding surprise defeat...
...The vast majority of the exhibition space is devoted not to Nazi, but to Communist terror...
...The Socialists would have been wiser to confront the issue head on and explain that in the modern world narrowly defined nationalism is bound to have negative consequences...
...In public opinion surveys the party gathers support below 1 per cent...
...As the visitor enters the first hall he or she is confronted with a map showing the "tragedy of Trianon," the great loss of territory and population Hungary suffered at the conclusion of World War I. The presentation implies that Hungarian history began in 1920 and that Hungarians have always been victims, a view again reminiscent of the Horthy regime...
...Since 1990, every party in power has been defeated in the next election...
...MIEP, a tiny and pathologically anti-Semitic party, spoke of Israeli money behind health privatization...
...But the initiative itself was badly phrased...
...Hungarian hospitals do not have profit margins that would make domestic or foreign capitalists eager to take them over...
...And any attempt to do so is bound to increase tensions between Hungary and its neighbors at a time when their relations are already strained...
...On the other hand, the very same man, obviously courageous in some realms, helped pass anti-Jewish legislation in Parliament that was in places even more restrictive than contemporary Nazi laws...
...The Right employs populist rhetoric more often than the Left, though when Fidesz was in power it did not introduce policies favoring the poorest...
...Fidesz politicians managed to confuse the issue and mislead the public by peddling the notion that universal access to healthcare was atrisk...
...The Socialists are in fact more likely than Fidesz to supportprivatization...
...In Hungarian political parlance the terms "Left" and "Right" do not have much to do with economics...
...Although the majority of Hungarians probably opposes hospital privatization, the proposition did not pass...
...Last year politicians and intellectuals of the Left and the Right heatedly debated whether it was morally justifiable to erect a public statue of Paul Teleki, prime minister between 1939 and 1941...
...It failed to make clear exactly what extending citizenship meant...
...Citizenship for those Hungarians who through no fault of their own now found themselves outside the country's borders would right this injustice, and would boost the size of the nation from 10 million to 15 million...
...To the innocent Hungarian it might have seemed that the Arab-Israeli conflict was to be played out in the Hungarian health care industry...
...Not only did the insufficient turnout at the polls sink the proposition, but barely half of those who did cast their ballot—less than one-fifth of the voting age population—supported it...
...Upon its debut critics pointed out that the exhibition indicated terror began here in October 1944—when Ferenc Szâlasi, a German puppet, was in control—so by implication, the interwar Horthy regime was blameless...
...Political struggles, in any event, are most often played out in the guise of historical debates...
...Since the country's population is shrinking and aging, immigration would actually be beneficial...
...Only 38 per cent went to the polls, so it didn't matter that 65 per cent of them supported the restriction...
...Still, Fidesz stands a good chance of trumping the Socialists in 2006...
...That argument was not only morally unattractive but also probably false, because young people would be the ones most likely to come to Hungary...
...In fact, the health care system suffers from a shortage of capital and would benefit from any nongovernmental investment...
...Now at least they can enjoy the pleasure, every four years, of removing the scoundrels from office...
...The advertising successfully built on the general hostility among the population toward private business and globalization...
...Did it give them the right to vote, or to receive Hungarian pensions and medical care, which are considerably more generous than what is available in some neighboring lands...
...The two major parties, the Center-Right Fidesz and the Center-Left Social Democrats, expend most of their energies undercutting each other...
...The list of recent pseudohistorical disputes is endless...
...Wary of appearing unpatriotic, the Socialists were at first hesitant to adopt a negative stance on the citizenship question, and into the campaign the party remained divided...
...Thus the social and economic programs advocated by the two major parties are rather similar...
...The interpretation of history is the most contentious subject...
...They spoke of overcoming the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that ripped away two-thirds of historical Hungary's territory and reduced its population from 18 million to 8 million...
...In that era Slovaks, Serbs and Romanians often chose to become Hungarians...
...A responsible government in Budapest would undertake diplomacy in the hope of encouraging respect for ethnic Hungarians abroad...
...Nor can Hungarians unilaterally improve the lot of kindred minorities in adjacent sovereign states...
...Peter Kenez, a longtime NL contributor, is a professor of history at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz campus...
...It managed to collect enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot because Fidesz, for unsavory reasons, was willing to ally itself with the extreme Left...
...The museum was the brainchild of the Fidesz government then waging a desperate electoral battle against the resurgent Social Democrats...
...After some time, however, the leading Socialist figures spoke out in opposition to the initiative, arguing that granting citizenship to millions would prove too expensive...
...Fidesz regards itself as a patriotic organization above all, so it had to come out energetically in favor of the idea...
...After the vote, the leaders of Fidesz, particularly former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, shifted ground and maintained that Hungarians were unwilling to be generous because they are worried about the economy...
...Teleki committed suicide rather than agree to let the Germans use Hungarian troops in an attack on Yugoslavia...
...A famously pessimistic people, Hungarians always expect more than their governments are able to deliver...
...Indeed, Hungary today is hardly different from a year ago...
...Did it mean merely providing a passport to any ethnic Hungarian who asked for one...
...Those whom the initiative aimed to help would face backlash politics at home, for neighboring governments were hostile to the very idea of a Hungarian plebiscite on extending citizenship...
...The push to grant citizenship to Hungarians residing beyond the nation's borders came from an extreme Right-wing organization, the World Alliance of Hungarians, led by an irresponsible, demagogic politician, Miklós Patrubâny...
...Fierce passions are flamed by issues that have scant effect on the lives of average citizens...
...A few years ago, for instance, the most hotly debated question was whether the crown, "the symbol of Hungarian statehood," should be kept in the National Museum (where it belongs) or in Parliament...
...The first proposition was introduced by the Workers' Party, a fringe Leftist group that proudly regards itself as the Communist Party of today and embraces the legacy of the last half century...
...Stronger feelings were aroused by the second initiative...
...Voters were asked to decide two unrelated questions: whether they would like to stop the privatization of hospitals...
...The Socialists, at least in the eyes of the Right, are the Communists' successors and thus somehow responsible for past crimes...
...But for most people the benefits are still not visible...
...Trianon, however unjust, cannot be undone...
...and whether they would like to extend citizenship to Hungarians living outside of the country, specifically to the Hungarian minorities in Serbia, Ukraine, Romania, and Slovakia...
...Cities that were Hungarian in the recent past no longer retain that identity...
...Politicians of the far Right hinted menacingly that Arabs would take over Hungarian hospitals...
...Once they twisted the proposition into a question of patriotism, Right-wing politicians declared that a vote against it, or staying at home and thereby denying the 25 per cent needed for adoption, constituted treason...
...Hungarian nationalists may deplore the state of affairs, but it is worth recalling that a century ago the shoe was on the other foot...
...In part, this is a result of the nationalist policies of Serbia, Slovakia and Romania, but it owes more to low birth rates, emigration and especially assimilation...
...It must further be recognized that the proportion of Hungarians in neighboring countries is diminishing...
...Yet because Hungary is a relatively poor country, where little wealth is at hand for distribution to favored constituencies, the options open to any government are highly circumscribed...
...Every year hundreds of doctors emigrate and earn much higher salaries in the more advanced countries of the EU...
...Among the portion of the population that is politically aware, polarization causes friends to avoid one another, and in some families relatives have decided to cease discussing politics...
...First, its very conception was unfortunate, because its defeat gave Hungarians who live beyond the country's borders the impression that their countrymen do not care about them at all...
...In reality the idea of extending citizenship rights, whether narrowly or broadly understood, is mischievous...
...Its ostensible purpose was to commemorate the victims of Nazi, Soviet and Hungarian Communist murderers...
...Some groups have gained more than others from the initial changes...
...In that case the Right prevailed...
...In pushing this message, the Fidesz government was trying to score points against the opposition by calling attention to Communist wrongdoings...
...The decision of the government in power to regard the crown as a national symbol rather than a historical relic signaled that it had taken up the rhetoric of the interwar Miklós Horthy regime—a warning sign to neighboring countries that Hungarians reserved in some form their claim to the lands they once ruled...
...On its face, opposing privatization made little sense...
...They predicted a veritable invasion of elderly people seeking pension benefits...
...a person's view of the past determines his current politics, or, perhaps, vice versa...
...A lack of adequate resources has resulted in outmoded facilities and poorly paid staffs...
Vol. 88 • February 2005 • No. 1
