There is no personality cult around Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, who has been prime minister since 2010. Orbán has understood that authoritarian populism must never evoke images familiar from twentieth-century dictatorships: no violence in the streets, no knocks on doors by the secret police late at night, no forcing citizens to profess political loyalty in public. Instead, power is secured through wide-ranging control of the judiciary and the media; behind much talk of protecting hard-pressed families from multinational corporations, there is crony capitalism, in which one has to be on the right side politically to get ahead economically. [...]
Already in 2009 Orbán had announced that the country was in need of a “central political forcefield” that would dominate politics for fifteen to twenty years. The major check on power in the two decades after 1990 had been the constitutional court. After 2010, Fidesz first packed it and then took away most of its powers. From his defeat eight years earlier Orbán had drawn the lesson that his government’s achievements had not been communicated “efficiently enough.” Accordingly, Fidesz now took over the public and most of the private media. The government also started a campaign against foreign banks and supermarkets, levying special taxes on them. This economic nationalism distracted from the fact that Hungary today has both the highest value-added tax in the EU and the lowest corporate tax—hardly policy choices one would associate with “plebeian values.” [...]
Orbán’s strategy of presenting himself as the last protector of a Europe in which Christianity and the nation-state are sacred succeeded both domestically and internationally. At home, he outflanked Jobbik on the right. In the EU, Orbán managed to turn a conflict that should have been about institutions—could the EU tolerate the abolition of the rule of law in a member country?—into one about ideals: his “Christian national identity” versus what he derided as “liberal babble” from Brussels. Henceforth, critics of his attacks on the basic rules of liberal democratic governance were regularly dismissed as just having different, and subjective, values. [...]
At home, Fidesz has been extremely careful to avoid anything that could look like serious human rights violations. When tens of thousands demonstrated in the spring of 2017 against the threatened closure of the Central European University (founded and endowed by Soros), the police were restrained. Free speech is not suppressed in Hungary, at least not openly; bloggers are free to criticize the government, and all kinds of debates can be staged in Budapest coffeehouses. The government seems to use other means to control speech. In 2015, Hungary’s largest left-leaning newspaper was bought by a dubious Austrian investor and, a year later, abruptly closed down, supposedly for financial reasons.
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