Péter Boross: No longer the wise man of Hungary?

The other topic I have been thinking of sharing with you is the upheaval Péter Boross, former prime minister between December 1993 and May 1994, created a few days ago. He gave an interview to Heti Válasz that appeared in the print edition on August 27. Thanks to MTI, the Hungarian news agency, soon enough the Hungarian media were full of the story. And not without reason. In the interview Péter Boross said some pretty outrageous things and, considering that he is one of the six people who are supposed to advise Viktor Orbán on the main outlines of the new constitution, it is not immaterial that as far as Boross is concerned the restoration of Hungary as a kingdom would not be out of the realm of possibilities.

Most people got stuck on Boross's off-the-cuff remark about a possible restoration, but this is not what Hungarians should worry about when it comes to the new constitution. Much more worrisome was Boross's suggestion to further strengthen the competence of the prime minister which is already quite extensive, although in this interview he wasn't explicit. However a couple of days later he gave another interview to Népszabadság in which he elaborated on the point, and the more he talked the worse it got. According to Boross, the prime minister should name the chief justice of the supreme court, all the ombudsmen, and the chief prosecutor. In certain cases the prime minister could govern by decree instead of in accordance with the laws passed by parliament. At this point some people like Géza Kilényi, former justice of the constitutional court, not so gently suggested that perhaps Péter Boross should take a long holiday to restore his health. I assume he meant that the eighty-two-year-old Boross had lost his sanity.

But Boross didn't stop here. He expressed his hope that Fidesz had "effectively smashed the left for good." Anyone who suggests destroying either the moderate left or the moderate right is no democrat. Moreover, no democrat would want to erect a statue in honor of Anna Ratkó, minister of health between 1948 and 1956, whose name is associated with the period when abortions were made illegal and women and men between certain ages who were childless had to pay a tax amounting to four percent of their wages. Thus, it seems that Boross wouldn't even mind using dictatorial methods to reverse the national and European birthrate trends. The last time such draconian laws were applied was in Romania during the rule of Ceauşescu. In Boross's place I wouldn't be too proud of the comparison.

I guess the public is stunned by these utterances because in the last two or three years of his public life Boross positioned himself as a moderate conservative. Therefore he often criticized Viktor Orbán and the radicalization of Fidesz.

Péter Boross became prime minister after József Antall's sudden death in December 1993. I remember quite well the reaction of the majority of the Hungarians when they heard that the MDF leadership had designated him as Antall's successor. Most people hated the "snowy owl," as they called Boross. Indeed there is a very strong resemblance between him and the large Arctic owl. Boross, who was born in 1928, was sixty-one years old at the time of the change of regime and was already a pensioner. Prior to his retirement he was the director of a chain of restaurants and never entertained any thoughts of entering politics. Yet within a few months he was minister without portfolio in charge of the secret service and later minister of interior in the Antall government. The reason? They were old friends and both were very  interested in history. Antall was an academic historian while Boross was a history buff.

Both men came from fairly comfortable backgrounds. Antall's father was a high-level civil servant and Boross's was a forester on a large estate. Politically, I would say that Boross's family was a great deal more conservative than the Antall family. As Boross often said, his family always sided with the government parties which thanks to the electoral laws always had such a large majority that they governed without any real opposition. Boross's father was also the kind of patriot who would send his older son Péter at the age of ten to military school in 1938! Yes, in 1938! The military school he attended was the same one that Géza Ottlik (1912-1990) wrote about in his famous novel Iskola a határon (School at the Frontier). The novel is a horror story about the sufferings of the boys in that school. Boross loved it, though: he learned order there. After four years in Kőszeg, he was sent to another military school in Pécs. In November 1944, when the Soviet troops were getting close, the Szálasi regime that had taken over the reins of government on October 15 ordered the school to evacuate. The boys were taken to Germany, but in January 1945 Boross and some of his fellow cadets escaped and joined a Hungarian unit in today's Slovakia to fight the advancing Russians. Boross claimed that his father "didn't like the Germans but the Russians even less so" and therefore it is not terribly surprising that the sixteen-year-old boy, instead of trying to get home, went off fighting against the invading armies.

It is fairly difficult to figure out from Boross's stories what his father's attitude was toward the Germans, but it seems that after the war he ended up for a while in an internment camp and even spent a short stint in jail. Péter Boross entered law school in 1947, graduating in 1951. One needed a strong stomach to practice law in the 1950s, but perhaps his job with the city of Budapest dealing with finances was less politically charged.

He and Antall, already friends, were not interested in the pre-revolutionary activities that excited the intellectuals of the country because in their eyes a "communist is always a communist." They still remembered that those who were laying the intellectual foundations for the revolution were faithful supporters of the regime a few years back. But then how can Boross be such a great admirer of Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza(1875-1890), who was a fierce opponent of Ferenc Deák, the man largely responsible for the compromise between the Hungarians and the Austrian court, and who a few years later changed his mind and took over the party of Deák? Boross doesn't always use the same measure when judging people. A Kálmán Tisza can change, a former communist cannot.

During the revolution of 1956, according to his own admission, he did nothing except make speeches against Rákosi, but he lost his job anyway and for a while he earned a living by working at odd jobs. At one point he was a bartender and it was here that he began his climb to one of the top jobs in the business. By 1971 it seems that his sins were forgotten.

I happened to be in Hungary at the time of Antall's death and was rather ignorant of Hungarian politics. Therefore the references to the snowy owl didn't make much sense to me.  The people I talked to didn't like the Owl at all. Actually by that time it didn't make any difference who was taking over the job of prime minister. The MDF was on its last legs. Antall called his cabinet a "kamikaze" government because he knew that the changeover from socialism to capitalism would be terribly difficult and costly. Millions lost their jobs, living standards dropped. People were in a terrible mood and it was predicted that the right-wing coalition would lose badly. Indeed, the socialists and the liberals together received two-thirds of the parliamentary seats.

Boross remained a member of parliament until 1998. One didn't hear too much about him when he was in parliament, and after he lost his seat he really disappeared from sight.

Then came the unlikely return of MDF as a separate party in the 2006 elections and because Boross led the Pest county list he became a member of parliament again. It was at this point that, instead of a snowy owl, people started calling him the "wise man of the country."  His wisdom seemed to have stemmed from his frequent references to the necessity of moderate conservatism as opposed to the radicalized Fidesz. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Ibolya Dávid. He liked to bring up examples from the 1930s when the growth of the Hungarian far right drove the country into the abyss, and he warned against a repetition of such a development. He expected Fidesz to distance itself from and fight against Jobbik. At the same time Boross bemoaned the fact that the left had won the elections and blamed Viktor Orbán for the defeat of the right. Orbán in his ill-conceived goal to create only one party on the right actually deprived himself and his party of victory. If Fidesz had not attacked MDF and told people that voting for Dávid's party was the waste of a vote MDF might have received not 5% but 8% of the votes and in that case "there could have been negotiations." Meaning coalition negotiations which might have prevented the formation of a socialist-liberal government. Moreover, he continued, MDF in coalition with Fidesz could have had a moderating influence on the radicalized party of Viktor Orbán.

So it's no wonder that observers are taken aback by Péter Boross's new attitude toward Viktor Orbán and Fidesz. It seems that Boross's moderate conservatism was only skin deep. Perhaps because of his family background he actually feels quite comfortable with a governing party that has no real opposition. After all, this was case when his favorites, Kálmán Tisza, István Tisza, and István Bethlen were prime ministers. Then everything was wonderful. Perhaps Boross in his old age thinks that a new era has arrived in which Hungary will thrive just as it did after 1875. In any case, I have the feeling that Boross is a fallen hero in some eyes.

Comments

[Pásztor Szilárd]

Pathetic. You put the label "moderate conservatism" on people who agree with your anti-national, destructive views. People receive this label as they conform your unnatural standpoints, and lose it when they seem to contradict you. It has always been your tactic: never argue, never counter the arguments, just dismiss or praise people. Praise destructive ones, refer to them as "sovereign, standard-setting" to use their virtual or real acclaim to strengthen your otherwise completely unsupportable point, and diss others to just exclude them out of any type of conversation, claiming they are unworthy of it.

Accept it: your time is over in this poor country. You lost by a huge margin on the elections in the spring and your destructive pursuits will not have effect any more because the society most probably never votes your garniture into power again.

[Pete H.]

Lizard, perhaps you have only been reading this blog for short while. I have read several posts where she critics the left. They are no longer in power, so I wouldn't expect her to give them as much attention.

Looking forward to reading your blog over the coming months, Eva.

[Pásztor Szilárd]

Insect, such posts are all over the 'left-liberal' press and always have been. They haven't changed one bit in "tactic" and topics in the past 20 years. They are all alike.
One single person would be more than enough to write all these articles, instead they are a few thousand with exactly the same worn-out panels.

[John T]

Szilárd - mate, you are losing the plot her. As far as I know, Eva writes most of these articles, with a few contributors submitting them on occasions. But this is a small scale blog we are talking about, not some mass political movement. And what stops you from doing the same?

[Pásztor Szilárd]

John T: I'm referring to the fact that the posts on this blog are so exactly the same as what you can find in all newspapers and web sites that are considered "left"-wing in Hungary.
Look up the archives of Népszava or the former Magyar Hírlap, 168 Óra or any of those papers and you can find a carbon copy of the very few topics touched on this blog, with the same expressions, same wording, even maybe complete sentences, even from 10 or more years ago.

And you are right, nothing stops me from doing the same, except that besides my civil duties, I have a daytime job to do - I don't live off of writing such articles. But I do what I can, in these comments, to show the readers of this blog a much more widely accepted and considered point of view, according to which most of the posts here are based on heavy anti-Hungarian and anti-conservative bias that doesn't stop at expressing differing opinions (which is fine) but mainly operates with falsifying even basic facts (which is not fine) and drawing unreal and destructive parallels (like Orbán would be in any way comparable to Gömbös).

[John T]

Szilárd - I hardly think that Eva can make a living from this particular blog. But being able to express your opinion is a key princople of democracy. I (and clearly others) don't agree with some of Eva's viewpoints (I think she can be rather too forgiving of the failures of MSZP for example), but I appreciate the time she puts into writing the content. And, the articles stimulate some very good discussions.

I also think (and this is from wider experience, not just this thread) that Hungarians are too quick to label criticism (even if put forward constructively) as anti-Hungarian hatred.
I certainly don't hate Hungarians. I have a large number of relatives in the country and also friends. I want them to have a good, fulfilling life with as few problems as possible. And just as important, I'm Hungarian myself through descent. But, there are things that have happened / are happening in Hungary that I would be critical of and I will give my opinion on them. But that is all it is, an opinion - people can take it or leave it.

[Pásztor Szilárd]

John T: I'm no newcomer at all to such debates, they have been going on for two decades. And what we see from Eva and the like has been the same.
This is what may come through as a quick and simple labelling from my part - there is a lot of track record behind it.

[John T]

Szilárd - So are you suggesting that opposing views shouldn't be put foward? They might be right, they might be wrong, but they should certainly be aired. Clearly, you disagree with most of the viewpoints expressed. But its not healthy for democracy if different viewpoints are stiffled or people simply vilify the messenger without constructively discussing the issues raised.

From your posts, you clearly welcome the new government. But are you going to support everything they do without question? Or are you going to be critical of them on occasions too? The best democracies work where there is health debate in the policy making process and where people can challenge rationally.

One of my worries about Hungary (and this has applied to most administrations since 1989) is that when the new government comes in, they limit the scope for debate and challenge, by filling jobs with their own supporters, regardless of how qualified they are. And compared to the UK for instance, there is a lot more meddling with the media. I firmly believe the media should be independent of political parties, otherwise they are nothing other than mouthpieces for the party. Again, in the UK, newspapers will express support for a party (the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail traditionally support the Conservaties while the Daily Mirror and Guardian have supported Labour). However, because they are still independent, they do strongly criticise all parties and have often changed "allegiance" where they believe it is right to do so. And if the ruling parties control the media, it lessens the chance for alternative opinions to be voiced or for new parties to get established. As you know, I have a very low opinion of all the current political parties in Hungary. I think there needs to be new blood coming through, that is aware of how the world works and that recognises we are living in 2010, not the past and where sensible co-operation achieves more than division. However, for a party to get established, they need to get their voice heard. I doubt that any grass roots centrist party would get a fair hearing in the established media in Hungary now.

[Pásztor Szilárd]

John T: to say that I wouldn't want different opinions to be expressed couldn't be farther from the truth. For example, I'm very open to any economic debate, or any other topic that may arise between people capable of highbrow discussion.

The only things I'm not open to are the long worn-out vilifications towards the Hungarian so-called "right-wing". The discrediting statements I'm referring to are, I must sadly say, very common and well-known to mindful followers of Hungarian politics and media, and a very characteristic collection of these can be found on this blog and everywhere where this new "Galamus group" - with seemingly existent financial support - is expressing opinions.
To name one such worn-out panel, the ever recurring outrageous comparison of the moderate Hungarian right to the Nazis easily qualifies. And such a comparison is usually made by the very persons who, while having been links in the chain of the communist regime, are playing the democratic teacher now.

About the parties, and your question: yes I certainly welcome the new government as they are an entirely different class and company than the basically and inherently anti-democratic and vocationally inept "socialists".
And I'm far from being a loyal supporter. It just seems that the current opposition is completely unable to hit the spot of truth with their critics. The problems are elsewhere than where they, ineptly again, see it: it's the rivalry within the governmental structure, or the problem with some inappropriate candidates for the local elections that should be tackled.