Hungarian Spectrum

The Hungarian right after the EU elections: Orbán's dilemma

Although Viktor Orbán and the Fidesz leadership tried to hide it, the spectacular showing of the extreme right in the EU parliamentary elections had to be an awful blow. Their worst fears materialized: years of diligent work of trying to bring all shades of political opinion right of center under Fidesz's umbrella failed. MDF, the moderate right of center party led by Ibolya Dávid who seems to have a great deal of political savvy and who cannot be easily intimidated, managed to get enough votes to send one member to the European Parliament. And that member is an influential economist of international fame: Lajos Bokros. Jobbik, the racist, antisemitic and nationalistic party on the extreme right of the Hungarian political spectrum, received almost fifteen percent of the votes and thereby three delegates out of the twenty-two. In order to appreciate the magnitude of this win one should keep in mind that the socialist party with the greatest number of representatives in the Hungarian parliament won only four seats!

Indeed, this had to be an unexpected event for Fidesz. Between them, MDF and Jobbik, the two other parties on the right, received about 20% of the votes. Admittedly, the turnout was low and most of the disaffected MSZP voters stayed home, but so did Fidesz sympathizers. In spite of the party's greatest efforts, Orbán and his friends were unable to mobilize their voting base. About one million Fidesz voters didn't bother to go to the polls. So there was a lot to talk about at the hastily convened meeting of the Fidesz top brass right after the elections: where to go from here? What should they do with Jobbik? The more moderate Fidesz sympathizers like István Elek whom I mentioned almost a week ago suggested a move toward the center and a vigorous campaign against Jobbik. Knowing Viktor Orbán, I was almost certain that he was not going to follow Elek's advice.

After two days of talks Orbán came out with an interesting solution that József Debreczeni (Népszava, June 13) called "comical." He didn't mention Jobbik at all. In fact, he repeated that "the camp and the flag" is still one and stronger than ever. Instead of talking about the real problem he turned against the socialists, whom Fidesz just beat to a pulp. He insisted on early elections by demanding the immediate resignation of the government. "Last Sunday the voters withdrew their support from the socialist party and therefore in a democracy early elections must be held." Surely, Orbán knows full well what the Hungarian constitution says about elections and therefore understands that the dissolution of parliament can be done only within the walls of parliament. As usual and not without reason he takes advantage of the ignorance of the majority of Hungarians.

Orbán even wrote a letter to Ildikó Lendvai, president of MSZP, in which he outlined his demands. The government should stop all privatization. It should withdraw the bill, currently under discussion, to introduce property tax. It should immediately abandon all work on the new civic code. It should suspend the reorganization of the administration. It should immediately end all work on reforms of higher education. And it should immediately stop preparation to set up a Hungarian company to handle the natural gas coming from the Southern Stream. In brief, the government should stop functioning. One must admit it takes chutzpa to write a letter like this simply because there were elections for the European Parliament where the governing party didn't do well. It especially takes gall to demand such things when Orbán and his government in 2002, between the first and second rounds of the election, privatized twelve state enterprises and passed them on to friends and clients. Ildikó Lendvai at the time charged that Orbán's government greased the palms of friends and supporters to the tune of about 275 billion forints. Fidesz sued and lost.

This weekend, following on the heels of the two-day meeting of Fidesz big wigs, over 2,016 party members held a congress which included election of the members of the "presidium."  Surprise, surprise: Orbán was renominated and so were his four vice-presidents--Mihály Varga, Zoltán Pokorni, Lajos Kósa, and Mrs. Pelcz née Ildikó Gáll. There was no opposition. Orbán received 2,011 votes out of 2,016! Then Orbán gave a fairly lengthy speech that ended thus: "The time is now! The camp is one and huge! There is only one flag that furls high and proud. On it is written: Go Hungary, Go!"

I must say that I found the whole speech frightening because it was easy to see the outlines of a one-party system emerging. He has quite openly turned away from a democratic multi- or two-party model where at specified intervals there are general elections in which people choose their government. Sometimes they choose the socialists, sometimes the conservatives. Or in the United States sometimes the Democrats, sometimes the Republicans. That's how democracy works. But that's not Orbán's vision of the future for Hungary. Hungary's political map, according to him, has changed for good. In the past, he admits, there were times when either this or that color dominated the political map but "the red was always too much" and he hopes that the defeat of the socialists is permanent. "This will be the last battle." After this fight there will be only one party left: Fidesz, with Viktor Orbán at its head. This party will not have to compromise with anybody, this party will not have to set up a coalition government. With the help of "free Hungarians" they will rule in the name of justice.

What Viktor Orbán says in this speech is that although there was an ostensible change of regime from one-party dictatorship to multi-party democracy, the change wasn't real. He always had the feeling that the forces of the old regime were pulling the strings from the background. "The old and the new lived side by side but I always felt that the old had the upper hand." Those communists who were defeated in 1989-1990 "had a plan about how it was possible within a democratic framework to operate a dictatorship." And the Hungarian people must be careful because "they didn't give up their plans. We can be certain that new plans are being hatched at this very moment." And he continues by claiming that the socialists became frightened after the mayoral election in Pécs and the EU elections, and now they are trying their best to change the current political map of the country. Well, it would be mighty strange if a party that in the last two years has been losing support simply gave up and didn't want to devise a winning strategy. According to Orbán they have the gall even to think of "returning one day." These are frightening words. Words of a man whose thinking is far, far from democratic norms. Meanwhile the Fidesz audience was in ecstacy and the former president, Ferenc Mádl, a legal expert, nodded in agreement.

In the whole speech not a word about Jobbik and only a passing mention of the extreme right. But even here, as he referred to armed groups marching up and down and people throwing Molotov cocktails into houses, he placed responsibility squarely on the government. According to Orbán it is to the advantage of the socialists for these people to do their evil deeds in relative freedom.

I'm only hoping that Orbán in his eagerness overstates his case. Because if his ideas are translated into action the country is in trouble.

The Hungarian EP elections--time for reassessment and reflection

The gloom is palpable. The greatest disappointment is in SZDSZ. Gábor Fodor, who usually is optimistic and rosy-cheeked, looked positively sick on election night. Tamás Bauer, one of the founders of the party, gave an interview tonight on József Orosz's Kontra (KlubRádió) that sounded more like an elegy. He wasn't surprised at what most people think is the end of the Hungarian liberal party. He was only very, very sad. Bauer said that the handwriting had been on the wall for at least fifteen years, but the absolutely erratic political moves of the last three years that practically no one could follow really did them in. As Bauer said, the supporters of SZDSZ fell out of love. MSZP is obviously in big trouble. After all, it barely surpassed Jobbik at the polls. MSZP received 502,607 votes while Jobbik got 427,213. And Fidesz isn't sitting on its laurels. It is true that it received 56.37% of the votes, but it managed to mobilize only 1,630,482 voters. It didn't seem to matter that Fidesz tried to convince people that this election was all-important because if Fidesz wins big the government will fall. Orbán had said that too many times before and nothing happened. It didn't seem to matter that every poster told them that it was "Enough!" and urged them to go and vote; only about half of Fidesz supporters did so. The other reason for the disappointment must be that the main thrust of Viktor Orbán's strategy, criticized by many earlier, failed spectacularly on June 7. The slogan was "One camp, one flag." That meant an absolutely unified right represented by Fidesz alone. It turned out that the right is anything but unified. Orbán tried his darndest to incorporate the moderate, conservative MDF and wanted to be the representative of the extreme right as well. It didn't work. MDF is hanging in there and, although MIÉP is only a shadow of its former self, there is the "new force" as Jobbik calls itself.

And now let's take a look at the actual breakdown of the election results. In order to make it a little easier I attached a map of Hungary that shows the counties. Jobbik did best in the northeastern corner of the country: in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén (22.88%), Szabolcs-Szatmár (18.49%), Hajdú-Bihar (18.68%), Nógrád (18.68%), and Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok (19.02%). Most analysts claim that the reason for Jobbik's success in this region is the high concentration of Romas in these counties. However, in Baranya where there are also a lot of Gypsies Jobbik didn't do well at all (10.7%). I couldn't find detailed breakdowns of voter turnout, but in the poor counties of the northeast participation is usually very low, so this may have pumped up Jobbik returns. Fidesz, as usual, did very well in the westernmost counties: Győr-Moson-Sopron, Vas, Zala, Tolna and Bács-Kiskun, the only county lying east of the Danube. All others are situated in Transdanubia. To clarify further, I'm reproducing a series of maps of the spread broken down by parties. Those who claim that Jobbik took votes from MSZP base their assertion on the results of the 2006 elections. MSZP was strong in the eastern counties while Fidesz triumphed in counties close to the Austrian border. They point to the fact that in the EU elections Jobbik did worse in Fidesz territories than in the country as a whole. However, there is a fairly powerful argument advanced by Zoltán Somogyi (Political Capital) which makes sense to me. Pollsters were wrong about the chances of Jobbik and Fidesz. But they were spot on for some time before the elections about the MSZP numbers. They steadfastly maintained that the party would send no more than four representatives to Brussels. At the same time they predicted sixteen or seventeen seats for Fidesz. Jobbik would get one, at most two. Since their predictions for MSZP turned out to be accurate, most of the Jobbik votes must have come from Fidesz. Of course, neither Somogyi nor I claim that no former MSZP supporter voted for Jobbik on Sunday, but I think that by and large Jobbik's gain was Fidesz's loss.

Although Viktor Orbán allegedly told his associates not to spend their time worrying about Jobbik because their win was so spectacular, he immediately convened a two-day pow-wow to "analyze the results." One doesn't need a vivid imagination to figure out the main topic of the meeting. Even István Elek, a staunch supporter of Fidesz in the past, wrote an analysis in Népszabadság in which he called Fidesz's performance a failure (kudarc). Success, according to Elek, would have been a two-thirds majority instead of 56.37%, and it would have been a source of great satisfaction if Jobbik hadn't been able to send a single delegate to Brussels. Fidesz's message to voters on the right not to "waste" their votes on Jobbik seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Some people predict that Jobbik will build on its success in the EU elections.  According to some analysts 10% of Fidesz voters sympathize with the radical right, and that is a big chunk. What if at next year's national elections more former Fidesz voters defect to Jobbik? The question now is what Fidesz is planning to do.

According to Elek, Orbán has no choice but to move toward the middle. After all, if he wants to be accepted by the Western European Christian Democratic parties he cannot join Gábor Vona's and Krisztina Morvai's Jobbik. As it is, a lot of people in liberal and socialist circles blame him for the strong showing of Jobbik. After all, it was he who picked Gábor Vona as a promising young man and took him under his wings. Krisztina Morvai has a more checkered ideological past, but her strictly political career began under Fidesz tutelage in the fall of 2006 when she, together with Zoltán Balog, a Calvinist minister and member of parliament, began a frontal attack on "police brutality." Critics also mention that Fidesz introduced a political culture (if one can call it culture at all) to Hungarian public discourse that led straight to the language Krisztina Morvai and Gábor Vona use. As Tamás Bauer said, everything that Jobbik's leadership says today was already said by Orbán and Fidesz but they did it more carefully and not in such a vulgar manner.

Some people argue that Jobbik's success is simply part of a European trend and highlight the British and Dutch examples. But the extreme right-wing parties of Western Europe focus most of their attention on immigration. Jobbik, by contrast, is racist and increasingly antisemitic. Krisztina Morvai has managed to stir up antisemitism among those who used to spend their time celebrating the glory of pagan Hungary and intimidating Gypsies. Morvai has reframed the debate. Her favorite comparisons are to Israel and Palestine. Jobbik "will not allow Hungary to become a second Palestine," and "Hungarians will not be second-class citizens in their own country." No foreigners will be allowed to buy cheap Hungarian land as happened in Palestine. Morvai's most recent "not for prime time" performance took place on the Internet. As it turns out, there is a conservative Hungarian political discussion group to which Morvai belongs. On that list a man who called himsef a proud Hungarian Jew objected to something Krisztina Morvai said. Morvai answered: "I would be glad if those who call themselves proud Hungarian Jews in their spare time would play with their tiny little circumcised tails instead of abusing me. Your kind expect that if you fart our kind stands at attention and caters to all your wishes. It's time to learn: we no longer oblige! We hold our heads high and no longer tolerate the terror your kind imposes on us. We are taking our country back!" In Morvai's language, of course, "our kind" means Christians and "your kind" means Jews. Well, our conservative gentlemen were horrified! Géza Jeszenszky, foreign minister under József Antall and ambassador to Washington under Viktor Orbán, was flabbergasted: a woman! How can she? A woman? That's not the real problem, is it? (A footnote for those who don't know: Krisztina Morvai is married to a Jew and they have three daughters. Relations between the couple are obviously strained; as she said recently, they believe that "the best thing for the children is when both parents are there for them, but we no longer live together as a couple. We live in the same house, but in two separate households.")

In today's Népszava a cartoon appeared that says a lot about Fidesz's predicament. The background is as follows. About a year ago Viktor Orbán after having a few glasses of wine became expansive and described his "real" plans to a group of young political scientists, students of László Kéri. It was a revelation. While in public he never talked about an austerity program, he told the students that the future under Fidesz would not be as rosy as he was leading people to believe. Then a student asked him what he was planning to do with the Hungarian Guard and the extreme right. He jokingly said that he would do the same as Miklós Horthy, governor of Hungary between the two world wars, did: he would slap them around a bit and that would take care of things. When Orbán's private conversations with the students leaked out, Fidesz's support dropped precipitously. At least for a couple of months. Commentators at the time pointed out that Orbán's knowledge of history left something to be desired because it is a well known fact that in the end the Hungarian Nazi party, the Arrow Cross Party, came into power in the fall of 1944 with German help. Horthy's slapping them around didn't work. The caption reads: "Er! How did our Father Horthy handle this situation with a couple of smacks in the face?" Well, indeed. It's a dilemma.

European parliamentary elections: Hungary

Let me start at the end, with the results. There were plenty of surprises. The biggest is that Jobbik got 424,000 votes, 14.77% of the total. So Jobbik will send not one, not two, but three delegates to the EU parliament. No one, but no one expected that. Pollsters talked about one, perhaps two seats. The second major surprise is that MDF after all will be able to send Lajos Bokros to Brussels. The party received 5.3% of the votes. This is a great victory for Ibolya Dávid who would surely have been removed from the chairmanship of the party if her strategy of putting Lajos Bokros on the ticket didn't pan out. Although it was a risky decision, it was obviously not a bad one. Even a couple of days ago reporters were joking about the choice of Bokros. Here is a man who keeps telling the electorate that further cuts should be made in the social welfare system and that the property tax should be universally applied. What kind of campaign is that? When pollsters asked about the popularity of the top candidates on the lists, Bokros was the least popular. Well, obviously 5.3% of the voters thought he was credible.

When rumors hit the TV stations about two or three minutes before the official announcement that Jobbik won three seats and MDF one, I said to myself: if this is true, Viktor Orbán is not a happy man because that means that Fidesz will have two or three fewer seats than he was expecting. Earlier opinion polls had talked about 16 or 17 seats, and at the end Fidesz had to be satisfied with 14. Of course, he put on a happy face because, as he proudly announced after the election results were made public, Fidesz's 56.7% victory is a record in the history of European parliamentary elections. But how much sweeter victory would have been if Századvég's prediction had become reality. Századvég, a think tank and public opinion firm close to Fidesz, was almost certain that Fidesz would have seventeen seats and Jobbik only one. Wishful thinking, in retrospect.

Jobbik's success was stunning. Everybody anticipated enough far-right votes for Jobbik to send Krisztina Morvai to Brussels. There was some tentative speculation that Jobbik might be strong enough to have two delegates in the European Parliament. But three? Readers of this blog may have noticed that Fidesz realized the ever increasing growth of Jobbik in the last few weeks and began campaigning against it. Viktor Orbán repeatedly mentioned the necessity of right-wing unity. He told people who used to be in Fidesz camp that voting for another right-wing party is a lost vote. He emphasized the necessity of achieving a two-thirds majority in order to change the constitution. People didn't listen to him. Fidesz lost about half a million votes to Jobbik.

As for the MSZP, it did miserably. It received four seats and 17.37% of the votes. Only about 3.5% more than Jobbik. That sounds as if MSZP were finished. As if the Hungarian socialists ended up where the Polish socialists did. Of course, this is still a possibility, but there are a couple of (admittedly weak) mitigating factors. First and foremost, the percentage of MSZP core voters hasn't changed since Gordon Bajnai's government enacted legislation that seriously curtailed entitlements. It was low then, low now, but not lower. Second, the far left wing of the party didn't switch to the far right, a sadly common occurrence in politics. Most of the Jobbik vote came from former Fidesz supporters. I know, little consolation, but I find solace in small things.

SZDSZ is gone. It received only 2.2% of the votes. Surely, there will be consequences of this defeat within the party. Gábor Fodor already announced that he would offer his resignation as party chairman. Note that he offered his resignation; he didn't resign. Some commentators think that as a result of the EU elections SZDSZ might change its mind and refuse to support Gordon Bajnai's government, forcing early elections. Well, if they are stupid enough, they might, and I must say there are an awful lot of stupid people in the SZDSZ leadership. But in the parliamentary caucus at least half of the people, about ten of them, would not go along with it, so the government would still have the necessary support. By the way, SZDSZ might have gotten in if there hadn't been a new party called "Politics Might Be Different" (LMP). Most likely LMP got the lion's share of its votes from disappointed SZDSZ voters, and they must have been numerous because LMP got more votes than SZDSZ, 2.6% or 75,00 votes as opposed to 2.2% or 62,000 votes.

In the next few days there will be a frenzy of political analysis, but in my closest circle of friends most are horrified at the strong showing of Jobbik. They already envisage a scenario that would lead to Fidesz's further courting Jobbik voters by moving farther and farther to the right. Or they are certain that Fidesz would get together with Jobbik and form a coalition. They are sure that MSZP will shrink to the point of becoming a small or nonexistent party. Some commentators blindly extrapolate the results of this election to the national elections. One thing about politics--it doesn't fall into the two areas of certainty in this life, death and taxes. Which makes it fluid, open to potential upsets (who would have thought that Obama with if I recall correctly a 28% support rate among Democrats would have overtaken Hillary Clinton?), and always worthy of dialogue and debate. And so tomorrow is another day.