1 TYRANNY AND HOPE REPORT OF THE HUNGARIAN EUROPE SOCIETY TO THE INVITATION OF THE V21 GROUP AUTHORS: Judit Bayer, Petra Bárd, Kálmán Dezséri, Jürgen Dieringer, István Hegedűs (editor), Marcell Lőrincz, Kata Nagy, Dóra Ónody-Molnár, György Petőcz, Dóra Piroska, András Radnóti, Zselyke Tófalvi, Erik Uszkiewicz, Zsuzsanna Végh and others Budapest, September 2019 Table of contents Political system, rule of law, media ................................................................................................4 Economy, euro, NER…………………………………........................................................................9 Old and new policy challenges ..........................................................................................................11 New challenges..................................................................................................................................14 Digital society………….....................................................................................................................14 Migration policy..................................................................................................................................15 Climate change....................................................................................................................................17 Budapest at the time of centralisation and growing democratic deficit………….........................17 Minorities and discrimination….........................................................................................................19 Hungarian national minorities in the captivity of NER......................................................................21 Hungarian foreign policy in the European Union……………........................................................22 Searching for solution.........................................................................................................................25 3 Tyranny and Hope As soon as the Orbán government came to power in 2010, with a two-thirds majority in parliament, calling it a “revolution at the ballots”, it immediately sprang to the attack on two fronts. It began and continues to ruthlessly dismantle the constitutional system of liberal democracy while its national sovereigntist, “freedom fight” rhetoric questioned and undermined the essence of Hungary's membership in the European Union. Since then, state/central will has penetrated into numerous areas of politics, economics, education, culture and science, and even of everyday life, meanwhile insulting and dismantling political opposition, civil organisations, trade unions, intellectuals, journalists, teachers, students and average citizens. Creating permanently enemies and generating a state of emergency, persistent tension and fear, the Orbán regime has exacerbated the already existing political polarisation between citizen and citizen. On the international stage, the prime minister embarked on turbulent “geopolitical” games and adventures, breaking away from the tradition of Western orientation that has been taken for granted since the regime-change and introduced “Eastern opening” disregarding any people-friendly considerations. Although the regime under construction does not have a confident theoretical doctrine from a political and philosophical point of view, it nevertheless provides its supporters and voters with sufficient ideological ground to define themselves in relation to their domestic and international opponents. From the aspect of political science and history, the authoritarian features of the new system are clear, however, we cannot speak of an open dictatorship – nor of a liberal democracy. In many aspects the Orbán era (such as its increasingly radicalised politics of memory and cultural policy) resembles the interwar period, while its propaganda campaigns show even the effects of the worst period of the 1950-ies (e.g. Peace March reminds of the former fight for peace as well as the conspiracy theories proclaiming George Soros as the main enemy). The result is, after all, a new, twenty-first century hybrid political regime that does not imprison its enemies, but rather lets them exit the country or even forces them to move abroad. Today, Fidesz is one of the globally identified nationalist-populist-nativist-right-wing political groupings, and the international media usually mentions its party leader together with authoritarian politicians like himself: Putin, Erdoğan, Trump, Marine Le Pen and of course his friend Salvini. Over the last eight years, the European Parliament has, in an unprecedented manner, condemned a government of a member state of the European Union in a number of resolutions, including the dismantling of the rule of law, crude transformation of the electoral system, violations of fundamental human and minority rights, ruthless use of business methods in order to constrain media freedom and pluralism, corrupt spending of public funds (including EU transfers), harsh persecution of NGOs, measures to oppress university and academic freedoms, and in September 2018 it finally moved on to initiating the proceedings under Article 7 of the Treaty on the European Union. The rapid and decisive non-action taken by the EU institutions and the member states against the Hungarian government was caused not only by disputes over legal competences, but also by a lack of political will – most notably inside the cente-right European political family, the European People’s Party. Although the membership of Fidesz was suspended in March 2019, following a series of scandals and the violation of minimum party loyalty, Fidesz members of the European Parliament were allowed to re-join the EPP political group – the problem-solving rupture has been prolonged. The Hungarian government campaigns to this day describe the criticism 4 coming from “Brussels”, Paris or Stockholm as an organised action by left-liberal political elites – although since 2015 they have gradually switched to an even more simplistic dichotomy; envisioning a global conflict between forces supporting and rejecting migration. Still, the Orbán system got deeply isolated within the European Union: with the exception of neighbouring countries and Polish leaders, political meetings at the highest level are only held on ceremonial occasions in Budapest. The strategy of the Hungarian prime minister was openly relying on a desired rebellion of nations and their citizens hoping for a decisive breakthrough of populist and anti-European groups. Since this turn did not happen, the significance of Viktor Orbán's “troublemaking” attitude on the European political scene has fallen remarkably after the European elections in May 2019. The European public sphere is no longer dominated by the issue of migration – there is a hope that rational political debates may resurface again. In Hungary, almost no change is perceptible: Fidesz uses the migration issue as a trump card even in the October 2019 municipal election campaign. In acute historical times, a policy-based critical evaluation of government performance is not enough - the Hungarian situation is evidently much worse than that. The anti-liberal ethos of the political rulers and their ultimate centralising endeavours pervade almost every field of community arenas and the open spheres of the society. There is a narrow-minded engineering approach, coupled with an uproar against intellectuals dealing with human studies and social scientists – based on an outdated concept of a work-based society. The prime minister's private hobbies: building stadium and small train railroad became the symbols of economic voluntarism of the era. As a result of its continued provincialisation, the country is increasingly being left out of the discussions concerning new global issues and from the search for common transnational and supranational political/policy solutions. Political system, rule of law, media When evaluating and categorising the Orbán regime – or looking for the place of Fidesz within the Hungarian party system – we should rather think in terms of a dynamic process. Looking at the party's thirty-year long history, we can observe an interesting mix of pragmatic decisions and calculations, ideological-voluntarist mission zeal as well as adaptability to a changing world – even drifting with events. The tendency, however, is clear: after two or three decades, the former liberal, alternative, radical organisation has become an authoritarian, hard-right party, even incorporating far-right ideas, with the current dominant name: a populist political party. This developmental path characterises the political system that has been built since 2010 just as much as the purely power- technical and money-making manoeuvres. The ruthless separation of friends and enemies, the offensive “pressing”, the application of the rules of military life and the football world in general, the effort to dominate the political moment and the politics of strength, the undermining of constitutional boundaries and the primacy of national thought were already detectable since the ideological turn-about in 1993-94 and even more so in the everyday life of the Orbán government as well as in its external communication between 1998 and 2002. The Hungarian party system (similarly to many other Central European systems) differs from traditional Western European party systems in that the traditional cleavages in the sense of Lipset-Rokkan never reflected the Hungarian social reality. Due to different historical backgrounds,