Hungarian Politics Moves Further to the Right

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

It’s been a quarter century since the fall of the Communist regimes in eastern Europe, and the emergence of post-Communist political cultures.

In Hungary, the post-1989 period has given rise to a multi-party system, with ideological parties on the left, centre, and right.

It is interesting to note, however, that very different types of conservative parties evolved, divided in part on the issues of national identity.

Gergely Egedy, an historian and political scientist who teaches at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, has observed that the issue of nationhood has become central to Hungarian politics.

As he puts it, “Which has priority over the other, the Hungarian state or the Hungarian nation?” This is no idle question, because some one-third of Hungarians live outside the country, in neighbouring Romania, Serbia and Slovakia.

After 1989, Egedy writes, two variants of Hungarian political conservatism emerged: the “patrician” and the “plebeian-populist” or “mobilizing” varieties. The former is very sceptical regarding mass democracy, while the latter distrusts cosmopolitan liberal elites. Both types were a response to the depredations of decades of Communism.

The patrician conservatives coalesced around the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). Its leader, Jozsef Antall, served as Hungary’s first post-Communist prime minister, from May 1990 until his death in December 1993.

The MDF formed a centre right coalition government with the Independent Smallholders’ Party (FKGP) and the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) in 1990 to command a 60 per cent majority in parliament.

The government accepted the legal-civic concept of the nation and rejected the view that it is based solely on ethnic and cultural factors. “Membership in the Hungarian Democratic Forum is open only for those who are committed both to the nation and to the rule of law,” Antall stressed.

He made it clear that, while concerned with the fate of fellow Hungarians living beyond the borders, the MDF did not intend to follow an “irredentist” policy of trying to incorporate these areas, and that it had no territorial claims against its neighbours.

However, after the landslide victory of the Socialist Party in 1994 and the crushing defeat of the MDF, a new variant of political conservatism crystallised in Hungary. The Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz), under the leadership of Viktor Orban, gradually became the most powerful party on the right. (The MDF no longer even exists.)

In 1998 the party took over the government, but the Hungarian version of “plebeian conservatism” became fully formed only after its electoral defeat in 2002.

During the next eight years, spent in opposition, Fidesz consciously downplayed the significance of parliamentary politics and presented “the nation” as the alternative to the legitimacy residing in parliament.

As a consequence, Fidesz would be a more vocal advocate of minority rights for ethnic Hungarians abroad than previous governments.

Orban was returned to power in 2010, as Fidesz won 227 seats, an absolute majority, and, together with its ally the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP), which won 36, two-thirds of the 386 seats in parliament.

In the April 6, 2014 election, Fidesz won 117 seats and its coalition partner KDNP 16, in a parliament which now consists of 199 members. An even more right-wing party, Jobbik, took 23.

As an ethnic nationalist, Orban’s policy toward the European Union has not been one of unconditional commitment, in contrast to the approach of patrician conservatives.

He is something of a “Euroskeptic” and dislikes the fact that his domestic opponents have been warning the EU about perceived threats to democracy, freedom of the press, the rule of law and fundamental rights in Hungary.

Orban admires Russian president Vladimir Putin and last August remarked that the sanctions policy pursued by the West “causes more harm to us than to Russia. In politics, this is called shooting oneself in the foot.”

In a speech this past Sept. 23, U.S. President Barack Obama included Hungary in a list of countries where “endless regulations overt intimidation increasingly target civil society.”

Hungary was for centuries a country that, as part rulers of the Habsburg Empire, lorded it over many subject peoples, and clearly some of that attitude remains part of its political DNA.