By LILI BAYER
In the weeks ahead of Hungary’s parliamentary election on Sunday, postboxes across the country delivered some welcome news — courtesy of the prime minister. One letter informed households that due to a one-time action by the government, their next gas bill would be reduced by roughly €38. Another, delivered to each of the country’s more than 2 million pensioners, contained about €32 in gift vouchers. Much has been written about the assaults on press freedom and civil society by Central European governments in Budapest and Warsaw. Far less attention has been paid to a fact their critics prefer to elide: They keep winning elections.
Orbán’s election season giveaways — announced last month on his Facebook page — are part of a pattern of spending that helps explain the prime minister’s enduring popularity. Polls predict his ruling Fidesz party will rake in roughly 50 percent of the vote, enough to ensure him a comfortable parliamentary majority and another four years in power.
“The transition [to capitalism and democracy] in Central and Eastern Europe has not been a roaring success” — Péter Ákos Bod, former conservative minister
The measures also fit a governing style that some say harkens back to an earlier era — one that predates the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Like the Law and Justice party in Poland, Orbán has built his politics on a foundation of conservative nationalism rhetorically opposed to the country’s former communist rulers. But when it comes to the practicalities of governing and securing support, both Orbán and his Polish counterparts have deployed an approach that — in its paternalism, heavy-handedness, obsession with external enemies and even class-based rhetoric — is reminiscent of their despised predecessors.
“The lack of genuine concern for the interests of the nation, monopoly of the media for successful brainwashing, and party loyalty as the prerequisite for filling jobs” are among the characteristics Orbán shares with Hungary’s former communist regime, said Géza Jeszenszky, a former conservative foreign minister.
Since returning to office in 2010 after a long spell in opposition, Orbán has rolled out a series of benefits: a public works job program, pension hikes, utility bill cuts, a minimum wage increase and cash gifts for retirees.
The government’s family program, which gives financial incentives for couples to have more children and buy homes, is especially popular. “[Voters] know if it’s there, then their lives will be easier — if it’s not, it will be harder,” said Katalin Novák, minister of state for family, youth, and international affairs, speaking on the sidelines of a Fidesz political gathering in the town of Budakeszi outside of Budapest.
A carnival in Germany, featuring floats of Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński holding communist symbols | Lukas Schulze/Getty Images
These benefits are, for the most part, not aimed at Hungary’s poorest, who continue to struggle to make ends meet, but are rather targeted at a large lower-middle class that feels it has not benefited from the transition to capitalism and democracy.
“The transition in Central and Eastern Europe has not been a roaring success,” said Péter Ákos Bod, a former conservative minister and central bank head who teaches economics at Budapest’s Corvinus University. Among the Hungarian lower-middle class there is an “attitude that we need a father-like figure, we need some sort of material security, and no competition and no exposure to risk,” Bod said.
When it comes to political rhetoric, added Bod, Orbán sometimes slips into the old Marxist mantras he learned in school — calling for a “labor-based society” and the reindustrialization of Hungary and warning of the dangers of “speculation.”
The prime minister is also no fan of foreign control of Hungarian business. Under Orbán, the government has sought to bring key sectors under local control. “Certain things have to remain in national ownership,” he said in a December television interview. “Even at the outset I wasn’t selling a pig in a poke when I declared that at least 50 percent of Hungary’s banking system must be owned by Hungarians — and we’ve managed to achieve that state of affairs.”
“Another area was the energy sector,” he said, adding that, “I am personally convinced that another element of national sovereignty is that most of a country’s media systems should be in national hands. And, well, I don’t want to conceal the fact that I would like to achieve a bit more than that.”
Western enemies
Then there’s his invocation of Western meddling and the danger of international finance. His government has run publicity campaigns against Brussels and the U.N. and railed against the U.S. Embassy in Budapest for its support of free media in Hungary.
Orbán’s popularity is the result in part of his boldness in appealing to “the long dormant anti-Western resentment, an essential part of Hungarian and East European politics since the defeat of the 1848 liberal revolutions,” said Gáspár M. Tamás, a philosopher and visiting professor at the Budapest-based Central European University.
“If migrants come in, it won’t be Hungary anymore” — Elderly Fidesz supporter at a pro-Orbán march
Fidesz’s election campaign has centered largely around thinly disguised anti-Semitic attacks on Hungarian-born financier George Soros and warnings of incoming migrants. Orbán has been one of the most vocal opponents of an EU refugee redistribution scheme he paints as an imposition designed by a malignant Brussels.
“However absurd it seems, the situation is that now the danger is threatening us from the West,” Orbán said in his annual state of the union speech in February. “This danger to us comes from politicians in Brussels, Berlin and Paris,” he said.
It’s a message that seems to resonate among the Fidesz electorate. When top government officials hold local town halls, hundreds of mostly pension-age supporters cram into standing room-only rooms to listen to them speak.
“This election will be decisive, in terms of the Brussels lobby and Hungarian national interest,” said one Fidesz supporter in the town of Mosonmagyaróvár, near the Austrian border, on a recent evening following a campaign town hall.
Orbán’s Fidesz party has campaigned heavily on warnings about incoming migrants | Matt Cardy/Getty Images
“The pressure is huge” from abroad, he said, referring to the European Union’s policy demands. Like many Fidesz voters interviewed for this article, he spoke on condition of anonymity due to a widespread dislike of the Western press among government supporters.
“If migrants come in, it won’t be Hungary anymore,” said another elderly Fidesz supporter during a massive pro-Orbán march in Budapest earlier this month, his eyes filling with tears as he explained that keeping the country as it is now will be the most important issue this election.
Freedom for stability
As with Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump, part of Orbán’s appeal among older voters is the promise of a return to the golden age of their youth, when life felt simple and full of promise. The difference is that in Hungary, the good old days took place behind the Iron Curtain.
Many of the prime minister’s critics compare Orbán to János Kádár, the communist leader who ruled Hungary from the aftermath of the failed 1956 revolution until 1988.
On the surface, the two men could not be more different. Kádár, born in 1912 in what is now Croatia, was an early member of the communist movement and spent time in prison both under Hungary’s fascist regime and later during Hungary’s own Stalinist purges.
A member of the revolutionary government in 1956, he quickly changed sides and took power once Soviet tanks put down the revolt. But over time his decades-long rule became associated with economic reforms and even some small freedoms.
His approach — which he famously summarized as “those who are not against us are with us”— was unique in the communist bloc. The leader allowed Hungarians to enjoy modest prosperity, stability and freedoms in the 1970s and ‘80s that their Polish and Czechoslovak counterparts did not have, and in return very few Hungarians actively opposed the regime.
“[Orbán] is almost like a god for those who believe him — who believe in him” — Géza Jeszenszky, former conservative foreign minister
Orbán, by contrast, was born in the 1960s, and grew up in the stability and modest prosperity of the Kádár era. He began his career as an anti-communist, co-founding Fidesz in university and famously calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. In the decades that followed, Orbán would undergo a transformation from a champion of liberal values to a strident nationalist admired by far-right politicians across the Continent.
While most enthusiastic Orbán supporters describe themselves as right-wing nationalists and shake their heads in disapproval at the mention of the old regime, the prime minister’s critics say that he is copying from Kádár’s playbook. Both leaders, they say, offered Hungarians a similar social contract: modest prosperity and stability in return for giving up some freedoms and refraining from actively opposing the government.
Under Kádár, “there were no foreigners here, there was safety, the living standard was not too high but life was tolerable unless you wanted to tell the truth, but who cares about truth? said Bod, the former central bank head.
For Orbán, it seems to be working. As he addressed a massive crowd in front of parliament on the March 15 anniversary of Hungary’s 1848 uprising against Habsburg rule, he was greeted with chants of “Viktor, Viktor!”
“He is almost like a god for those who believe him — who believe in him,” said Jeszenszky, the former conservative foreign minister.
Polish pattern
In Poland, where the government faces a test of its popularity in municipal elections later this year, the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) has deployed a similar approach.
Like Fidesz, PiS has capitalized on the frustration with the post-communist transition — uneven economic advancement and a failure, so far, to catch up with the West. “Big changes provoke tectonic earthquakes,” said Adam Michnik, a former dissident and current editor-in-chief of Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. “Aspirations rise faster than changes.”
In Poland, PiS voters tend to come from more rural backgrounds | Janek Skarzynski/AFP via Getty Images
Under the leadership of the head of PiS, Jarosław Kaczyński, the authorities in Warsaw have embarked upon a large-scale distribution of financial benefits: The government has lowered the pension age, introduced child benefits and raised the minimum wage.
“PiS inherited from the liberals a great economy, which [the previous Civic Platform government] feared to overburden by social redistribution,” said Konstanty Gebert, a Polish journalist and early member of the trade union Solidarity. “PiS said, ‘We want to share the national wealth with you, which our opponents did not want to.’”
As in Hungary, political support for the government correlates in part with socio-economic and regional divisions: PiS voters tend to be less educated and more rural than supporters of other parties. Pollster Kantar found that 50 percent of PiS supporters live in villages and 19 percent in cities with a population larger than 100,000. Just 6 percent reside in cities of over 500,000. For the rival Civic Platform party, 35 percent of voters live in these large cities.
The question for both Hungary’s Orbán and Poland’s Kaczyński is whether their strategy will work over the long run.
PiS’s aim is “to reach out to voters who neither actively supported nor opposed the communist regime,” said Gebert, adding that the government’s message is that it’s good to be part of a silent majority that doesn’t engage in political dissent.
Critics have also accused PiS and Fidesz of appealing to anti-Semitic tropes and stoking potentially harmful nationalist sentiment. Echoing Donald Trump’s “America First” slogan, “Make Poland Great Again” and “For Us Hungary Comes First” have become recurrent messages in the region.
A risky model
The question for both Hungary’s Orbán and Poland’s Kaczyński is whether their strategy will work over the long run.
Both governments are heavily dependent on EU funds and continued economic growth, which allow them to keep unemployment low and spend money on popular benefits. In Hungary, where Fidesz faces mounting accusations of corruption, the EU’s anti-fraud agency has run multiple investigations into misuse of the bloc’s funding by the prime minister’s allies — as well as a company formerly co-owned by his own son-in-law.
Maintaining the flow of EU funds while maintaining both his anti-Brussels stance and patronage network at home will be among Orbán’s chief challenges if he wins another term on Sunday. He continues to enjoy the support of the pan-continental European People’s Party grouping, but some within the center-right alliance and across European capitals are beginning to call for future funding to be contingent upon rule of law criteria.
Orbán and Kaczyński meet at an economic forum in 2016 | Darek Delmanowicz/EPA
While Orbán has made the election about migration, opposition politicians are trying to refocus the discussion on government corruption. And there are indications that the approach can be effective: In a surprise development, an independent conservative, running on an anti-corruption platform, defeated a Fidesz candidate in February in a mayoral by-election in one of the party’s strongholds.
Orbán knows that if he wants to stay in power in the long run — and avoid the possibility of prosecution for corruption — his greatest challenge could come from Hungary’s young, born after the Kádár era. Orbán’s most enthusiastic supporters are pensioners living outside of Budapest. Some of his most active critics are teenagers.
Recently, the prime minister has broadened his message to include the younger generations. “Young people, perhaps you feel as if the whole world is yours, and as if you could take on all comers,” Orbán said in his speech on March 15. “But in your lives, too, there will come a moment when you realize that one needs a place, a language, a home where one is among one’s own, and where one can live one’s life in safety, surrounded by the goodwill of others … The homeland needs you; come and fight with us.”
Not all young people are convinced. “We don’t feel at all like the Orbán government cares about the tragic state of our Hungarian future prospects,” said Viktor Gyetvai, a 20-year-old student movement leader. “Whenever we try to engage in dialogue with him … they just turn their backs on us and start campaigns to discredit us.”
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