Where is Hungary Heading?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a nationwide revolt against the Soviet-imposed government of the Hungarian People’s Republic, lasted from Oct. 23 until Nov. 10, when it was crushed by Soviet tanks.

At least 30,000 people were killed and some 200,000 others fled to the west, with more than 37,000 eventually coming to Canada.

Imre Nagy had been appointed prime minister during this brief window of freedom and announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Soviet-run Warsaw Pact.

With the return of Soviet troops and the re-introduction of Communist rule, Nagy was tried, executed, and buried in an unmarked grave.

Even so, the Hungarians were able to define their own more economically liberal brand of Communism. This so-called “Goulash Communism,” instituted in 1968, was formally known as the New Economic Mechanism. When I was in Hungary in 1977, it felt much freer than neighbouring Communist states.

Still, Hungarians longed for a multi-party system, rather than their Soviet-style state. In October 1989, the Communist Party convened its last congress, and the country’s parliament transformed Hungary into a non-Communist republic.

It guaranteed human and civil rights, and created an institutional structure that ensured separation of powers among the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government.

On March 25, 1990, the first free parliamentary elections in Eastern Europe took place in Hungary. The country seemed to have become a liberal democracy and had joined both NATO and the European Union by 2004.

But things have in recent years taken a different turn, with the rise of Victor Orban and his Federation of Young Democrats–Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fidesz), a nationalist party that has dominated Hungarian politics on the national and local level since its landslide victory in the 2010 national election. In 2014, it took 44.87 per cent of the vote, winning 133 of 199 seats.

Orban first made his name in Hungary when, as a young lawyer and activist, he spoke at an immense rally in 1989 celebrating the reburial of Imre Nagy. He had helped found his party a year earlier, initially as a youth-oriented liberal anti-communist group.

But under Orban’s guidance, it began to move to the right. The Orban who was elected prime minister in 2010 and re-elected in 2014 has become a political and economic conservative nationalist who promises to restore Hungarian values.

Only on the basis of national, Christian and European traditions “can a strong and successful Hungary be built,” declared the prime minister in March 2014.

The European refugee crisis of 2015-2016 has brought Orban’s views regarding Hungarian sovereignty into sharp focus. He is a fierce opponent of the EU’s plan to share migrants across the 28-nation bloc under a mandatory quota system.

He has described the arrival of asylum seekers in Europe as “a poison,” saying his country did not want or need them.

“This is why there is no need for a common European migration policy: whoever needs migrants can take them, but don’t force them on us,” Orban stated last July. The populist leader added that “every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk.”

Orban in 2015 set up a border fence to block the path of asylum seekers streaming into Europe. Along with Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary is suing the EU to avoid taking in the 1,294 migrants the bloc says it must resettle.

In October, he held a referendum in which 98 per cent of participants voted against the admission of refugees to the country. Ahead of the vote, the government warned that immigrant communities had turned major cities across Europe into "no-go zones.”

But more than half of the electorate stayed at home, rendering the process constitutionally null and void. Undaunted, Orban still hopes to lead a “cultural counter-revolution” in Europe.

With political freedom has come a renewed sense of Hungarian nationhood, and Orban has tapped into this mood. He reminds Hungarians of their once-great stature within Europe.

“Our responsibility is to prevent Brussels from Sovietizing,” Orban told a crowd at the 60th anniversary commemoration of the revolution in October. It is clear that the great majority of Hungarians don’t want to take orders from Brussels any more than they were willing to be ruled from Moscow. Might they even follow Britain out of the European Union?