Defending Hungary

The Washington Diplomat June 2015 Defending Hungary Hungary’s New Envoy Tries to Set Record Straight About Her Boss by Larry Luxner For several years, Hungary’s relationship with the United States has been in a free fall — spurred on by mini-crises like the State Department’s denial of visas to six Hungarian officials accused of corruption, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s 2014 vow to build an “illiberal state” à la China and Turkey, his angry opposition to European sanctions against Russia and a subsequent outburst by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who called Orbán a “neofascist dictator.” Photo: Lawrence Ruggeri of ruggeriphoto.com Ambassador Réka Szemerkényi And conservative Orbán seems downright tame compared to Hungary’s extreme-right Jobbik party, which recently called for the country’s 120,000 Jews to be registered because they “pose a national security risk.” In mid-April, Jobbik won its first local by-election, narrowly defeating Orbán’s center-right Fidesz in the western district of Tapolca — and further cementing Jobbik’s position as the third-largest party in the Hungarian parliament. In the midst of all this bad blood, two women hope to reverse the bilateral decline and put U.S.- Hungarian relations back on track: Réka Szemerkényi, Hungary’s new envoy in Washington, and her counterpart in Budapest, U.S. Ambassador Colleen Bell. “There’s a nice symbolism in this,” Szemerkényi said during a lengthy interview at her Washington residence. “She’s a serious woman with a business background and has four children. I have a background in security policy, and I also have four children. And we have lots of common friends in Washington.” But their backgrounds aren’t that similar: Bell, an Obama campaign bundler, was a producer for the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Szemerkényi is a European defense and energy expert who has worked as national security advisor to the prime minister in addition to stints at the World Bank, think tanks, NGOs and Hungary’s main oil and gas company. She speaks impeccable English and is the first woman ever to represent Hungary as ambassador here. Upon presenting her credentials in February to President Obama, she became the newest of 28 female ambassadors in town. She’s also one of a new crop of Hungarian women representing their landlocked, Indiana-size nation overseas, in diplomatic outposts such as Athens, Geneva, Lisbon, Madrid, New York and Stockholm. “This is an important period for our two countries,” said Szemerkényi, a veteran Fidesz supporter and longtime advisor to the prime minister’s office on foreign and security policy. “I’ve been working on this relationship for many years.” Yet not everyone is thrilled with her appointment. “No ambassador can improve relations between the U.S. and Hungary as long as Viktor Orbán is the prime minister. Not even a mother of four,” wrote political pundit Eva Balogh, whose Hungarian Spectrum blog is deeply critical of Orbán. “Szemerkényi, although she might be well- qualified for the job, is known to blindly follow the party line. I’m sure that the idea of having the clone of Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian Embassy in Washington doesn’t warm the cockles of anyone’s heart in the U.S. capital.” The selection of Szemerkényi’s counterpart, Colleen Bell, as U.S. envoy to Hungary also ruffled more than a few feathers. Bell, a TV producer and philanthropist who raised at least $500,000 for President Obama’s re- election campaign, was branded as “totally unqualified” by McCain to represent Washington’s interests in Budapest. “I am not against political appointees,” the Republican from Arizona told fellow lawmakers prior to Bell’s confirmation vote. “I understand how the game is played, but here we are, a nation on the verge of ceding its sovereignty to a neofascist dictator getting in bed with Vladimir Putin, and we’re going to send the producer of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ as the ambassador. I urge my colleagues to put a stop to this foolishness.” His colleagues didn’t listen, and the Senate confirmed Bell by a vote of 52-42. The two newly minted ambassadors had a four-week overlap in Budapest before Szemerkényi began her posting here in February. “We met at the very beginning of her mission in Hungary, and we immediately became very good friends. We have a professional understanding and a personal touch,” said Szemerkényi, who during our interview was joined by her 6-year-old daughter, also named Réka (the ambassador’s other children are ages 11, 12 and 14). “We’re working in the same direction, to improve the Hungarian-American relationship. That’s one of the most important characteristics of this new chapter in bilateral relations. “As a result of these negative spirals, many of the decisions were either not understood or interpreted in a negative light,” she insisted. “This ‘Hungary bashing’ in the international media has created an image that the U.S. does not understand what’s going on. Critical tones are based on these impressions. But if you go around the countryside, the trust in democracy is very strong, and we’re very proud of that. People don’t want to go back to pre-1990 days.” Orbán himself knows those dark days well. In 1989, he gave a rousing speech in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square demanding free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, catapulting him to national stardom. Just three years later, he became the leader of Fidesz, eventually transforming it into a political powerhouse. Riding a wave of popularity, Orbán secured a two-thirds majority for his party in parliament in 2010 and is now on his third term as prime minister. He’s also presided over modest economic growth in recent years and major structural reforms in an effort to overcome decades of economic mismanagement. But the prime minister grew disillusioned with Western economic prescriptions following the 2008 global recession, which hit Hungary hard, and said his country would forge its own economic path. The result has been a mixed bag of what Orbán describes as much-needed reforms, but what critics in the European Union and United States call worrying signs of regression. The prime minister used his party’s supermajority in parliament to rewrite the constitution and push through laws that circumvent the courts and remove checks and balances. Orbán defended the move, saying that Hungary’s hybrid electoral system was one of the most complicated in Europe, an unwieldy relic of communism that politicians of all stripes had wanted to overhaul. He’s been called a power-hungry strongman who muzzles the media, stifles dissent, cracks down on NGOs and uses government purse strings to weaken opposition parties. Yet the type of media censorship and restrictions on protesters seen in Russia are largely absent from Hungary. He’s embraced Putin as a key ally, in part out of necessity given Hungary’s complete reliance on Russia for natural gas. Orbán has also railed against EU bureaucrats but accepted their money to boost Hungary’s competitiveness. Szemerkényi says she is determined to present a more nuanced picture of her boss than the black-and-white portrayal he often receives in U.S. media, explaining the roots of complicated policies that have alarmed Brussels and Washington. Szemerkényi, whose home is decorated with vintage black-and-white photos of the 1956 Soviet invasion that crushed Hungary’s democratic dreams, grew up under communist rule. Yet by the 1980s, she said, the authorities — wary of provoking another violent revolt — had instituted a softer, Hungarian-style “goulash communism” that gave people a modest measure of freedom and basically ignored those who weren’t politically active. “We listened to Radio Free Europe all the time. Only three or four people in our class at school cared about politics. The other 30 were indifferent,” she recalled. “The party had a subtle, unspoken deal that if you didn’t go to demonstrations or give out pamphlets, they wouldn’t bother you. I think that for a large and significant segment of society, that was a comfortable life since they never confronted the regime.” In fact, Hungarians enjoyed the highest living standards of any Soviet satellite in Eastern Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the U.S.S.R. began self-destructing the following year, those living standards began falling rapidly, which perhaps accounts for why some Hungarians may not be as enamored of the transition to EU-style democracy as their counterparts in Poland and elsewhere were. In this post-communist haze, Hungary’s traditional, male-dominated political hierarchy survived. “When I went to the Ministry of Defense in 1990 after the first free elections, I was one of 10 civilians ever to set foot there. I was also the only woman in this group, and the youngest,” recalled Szemerkényi, who later became involved in the NATO enlargement while at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. Within a few years of communism’s collapse, newly elected democratic governments quickly instituted political and economic reforms in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland — but not in Hungary. “For a fundamental change to take place, most of the major fields of reform were linked to a two-thirds majority in parliament,” said the ambassador. “That was seen as practically unachievable for over three elections after 1990.” That rule, she said, was a clever legacy of Hungary’s communists, who knew they couldn’t avoid free elections but still hoped to remain in parliament by requiring at least two-thirds of Hungarian lawmakers to change the constitution.

Load more