Hungarian News

I thought the post about the detention of Boyko Borisov was very insightful as it relates to the future of Orban. I would actually take it a step further Istvan. This reality of the legal actions being taken against Borisov for his role in an organized conspiracy to steal EU funds after being removed from power indicates Orban has to remain effectively in power for life or eventually face jail time. Moreover if Russia implodes due to the war in Ukraine his option of flipping over to the evil empire ends. My guess is Orban discounts that possibility in Russia, but it is clearly no longer impossible.

Like you Istvan, I am sure Orban is aware of these possibilities. My conclusion is that Orban will in the contest against MZP use every legal and illegal method to stay in power. I also assume Fidesz and Orban will if Fidesz wins in this coming election continue to change laws effectively creating a dictatorship in a manner similar to Putin’s method in Russia. As I have said before this election is the last chance for Hungarian democracy.

Putin is now apparently jailing in their homes some of the leadership of the FSB and apparently removing some of his military leadership too. Putin is a student of Stalin and understands that he died in his own bed because he repeatedly took preventive action against any possible attempts on his own life within his leadership that could in any way even be suspected. One reason why Putin’s government banned the British comedy The Death Of Stalin in 2018 was because it revealed publicly in a very funny way that there were people in the leadership of the Russian Communist Party who were in terror of Stalin and wanted him dead for there own survival. There is a lot of evidence that this was in fact true and the story line is based on reality.

Putin also had to get rid of International Memorial, a nongovernmental Russian organization of national memory and Russia’s oldest and most prominent civil society organization, in the words of Putin’s legal system of the need to protect “the right of citizens to access reliable information” and prevent the “creation of a false image of the USSR.” Memorial had opened up some of the actual archival history of Stalin and his terror to public view in Russia. For Putin this was very close to home since he is himself a follower of Stalin.

Orban while not in such a complex situation as Putin with his ideological legacy, is largely seen within NATO and the EU as a Russian Trojan horse more and more. The polarization that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has created has a fall out effect on Orban in a growing manner. Orban is now a dangerous man who must be removed or the consequences for the Hungarian people will likely be huge.

I just received a pdf version of an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, with some interesting reading on the political situation in Hungary, but can’t attach it here, so for subscribers only https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/hungary-viktor-orban-opposition.html

edit:
“BUDAPEST — On Tuesday, the day that the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and
Slovenia traveled to Kyiv to show solidarity with a besieged Ukraine, Viktor Orban, the prime
minister of nearby Hungary, trumpeted his neutrality at a sprawling rally in Budapest.
“We cannot get between the Ukrainian anvil and the Russian hammer,” he said. He accused the
Hungarian opposition of trying to drag Hungary to war, and vowed to send neither troops nor
weapons to the battleground.
State-aligned media — which, in Hungary, is almost all media — had been blasting out Kremlin
talking points for weeks, and it was easy to find people in the crowd who echoed them. An older man
in a traditional black Bocskai jacket described Russia’s invasion as “just” and Volodymyr Zelensky as
“scum” before blaming George Soros and the Freemasons for the war. A middle-aged woman
expressed sympathy for Ukrainian refugees, but accused Ukraine of provoking Russia by oppressing
Russian and Hungarian speakers. “You don’t wake a sleeping lion,” she said.
Hungary’s opposition — which appears, for the first time in over a decade, to have a shot at ousting
the authoritarian Orban — held a rally in Budapest on the same day, on the opposite side of the
Danube.
I’d met the opposition candidate for prime minister, Peter Marki-Zay, the mayor of the southern
Hungarian town of Hodmezovasarhely, the day before, as he worked on his speech. One of his central
points, he said, was that Hungary must decide between two worlds: Vladimir Putin’s Russia or the
liberal West. “Putin and Orban belong to this autocratic, repressive, poor and corrupt world,” Marki-
Zay told me. “And we have to choose Europe, West, NATO, democracy, rule of law, freedom of the
press, a very different world. The free world.

Recently, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama made a number of highly optimistic predictions
about how Russia’s war on Ukraine would play out. Russia, he wrote on March 10, faced outright
defeat, and Putin wouldn’t survive it. Further, he wrote, “the invasion has already done huge damage
to populists all over the world, who, prior to the attack, uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin,”
including Donald Trump and Orban. The Hungarian election on April 3 will be an early test of this
theory.
Just as Israelis from across the political spectrum united to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu,
Hungarians of many different ideological persuasions are working together to defeat Orban, a hero to
many American conservatives for his relentless culture-warring.
Hoping to neutralize Orban’s demagogy against urban elites, the Hungarian opposition has united
behind Marki-Zay, a 49-year-old Catholic father of seven and a relative political outsider.
Marki-Zay, who lived in Indiana from 2006 to 2009, often sounds like an old-school Republican. He
favors lower taxes and a decentralized government. “We want to give opportunity and not welfare
checks to people,” he told me.
He believes in Catholic teachings on gay marriage, abortion and divorce, but doesn’t think they
should be law. “We cannot force our views on the rest of the society,” he said. “One big difference
between Western societies and certain Islamist states is that in Western society church doesn’t rule
everyday life.” Some on the left might blanch at the gratuitous invocation of Islam, but part of Marki-
Zay’s skill is using conservative language to make case for liberalism.
In the coming election, Marki-Zay is an underdog, but the fact that he’s even in the running is a
remarkable development in a country with a system as tilted as Hungary’s. Hungarian electoral
districts are highly gerrymandered in favor of Orban’s party, Fidesz. Gergely Karacsony, the leftleaning
mayor of Budapest and a political scientist, said the anti-Orban forces would probably need to
win the popular vote by three or four percentage points to achieve a parliamentary majority. (By
contrast, in the last election Fidesz was able to win a two-thirds supermajority with 49 percent of the
vote.) The opposition has had to contend with a near blackout in the mainstream media; Marki-Zay
said he hasn’t been asked to appear on television since 2019, while Orban has unleashed a barrage of
propaganda against him.
Fidesz, he said, has convinced its base that the opposition “will take away their pensions, will cancel
the minimum wage,” will send their children to fight in Ukraine and will “allow sex change operations
without the consent of parents” for kindergartners. These voters, said Marki-Zay, “are just frightened.
They hate. I meet such people every day during this campaign. People who are just shouting
profanities. You can feel the hatred, and you can see in their eyes how fearful they are of Orban losing
the election.”
But plenty of voters are still reachable via social media and door-to-door canvassing. Marki-Zay puts
his chances at about 50 percent, and while other analysts I spoke to thought his odds were lower, no
one wrote him off. A big question is whether the crisis in Ukraine will make voters prioritize stability,
or turn Orban’s relationship with Putin into a liability. In a recent Euronews poll, 60 percent of
respondents said Hungary has gotten too close to Russia and Putin, but that doesn’t mean the issue
will determine their vote.
Even if Orban wins another term, Peter Kreko, director of the Political Capital Institute, a Budapestbased
think tank, thinks his dream of creating a right-wing nationalist bloc in Europe is dead. The war
in Ukraine has driven a wedge between Orban and the nationalist government in Poland, which
favors an aggressive response to Russia.
And a history of pro-Putin sentiment has suddenly become embarrassing for some of Orban’s
European allies. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally — who received a
nearly $12 million loan from a Hungarian bank tied to Orban — has been put on the defensive over
campaign fliers showing her shaking Putin’s hand. Matteo Salvini, the head of Italy’s right-wing
League party, was humiliated during a visit to Przemysl, a Polish town near the Ukrainian border,
when the mayor confronted him with a pro-Putin T-shirt Salvini once wore in Moscow’s Red Square.
There was supposed to be a Hungarian version of America’s Conservative Political Action Conference
this month, but it has been postponed until May. In Budapest, many speculated that American
Republicans weren’t as keen as they once were to be seen with Orban. “Right now, I think because
Orban has so much aligned himself with Russia, I think it’s detrimental to his international image as
well,” said Kreko. “And he might win one more round, but I think he just will not be able to fulfill all his
authoritarian dreams.”
At the opposition rally, which drew tens of thousands of people, a band played a Hungarian version of
Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power,” and Smith, who performed in Budapest last year, sent a video
greeting. Ukrainian flags dotted the crowd.
Bogdan Klich, the minority leader in Poland’s Senate, watched from backstage. He hoped that a
Marki-Zay victory would be a blow to anti-democratic forces in his own country. “There is a chance
that illiberal democracy, that was presented and unfortunately implemented by Viktor Orban here,
will be replaced by traditional European and Atlantic values,” he said. “I mean the rule of law, the
respect for human rights and civil liberties, independence of judiciary, etc. This is what we need here
in Hungary, and in Poland.”
Orban’s rise to power marked the beginning of the authoritarian populist era. If he somehow falls, it
might mark the beginning of the end of it.

OT – UN just published its Covid related World Happiness Report.
It has HU in the 51st place.
Scroll in the bar-graph to see the full list. The six-factor graph shows a few things too.

Happiness, benevolence, and trust during COVID-19 and beyond | The World Happiness Report