Jan-Werner Mueller_The Hungarian Tragedy

P O L I T I C S A B R O A D

The Hungarian Tragedy

JAN -WERN E R MÜ L L E R

A nationalist conservative revolution hastriumphed in Budapest; its leaders are busydismantling constitutionalism and the rule oflaw. How could this have happened? And canthe Western Left do anything about it? There was a time when Hungary seemed

the best hope for a liberal postcommunism.The country had produced some of the leadingdissidents of the region in the 1970s and1980s (such as ex-Marxist philosopher JánosKis); civil society had developed rapidly evenbefore the official end of state socialism in1989. After the revolt of 1956 (which theSoviet Union brutally suppressed), theHungarian government had slowly liberalized,introducing “goulash communism” andinverting the old totalitarian maxim to read:“who is not against us, is with us.” To be sure,state socialism was discredited—but not idealsof social justice. The transition from state socialism was not

only gradual—it was to a significant degreeinitiated by the old regime. Even the oldStalinist constitution remained nominallyintact, amended beyond recognition throughcarefully crafted compromises. Fundamentalchanges were made, but it was, in the wordsof the political scientist Andrew Arato, verymuch a revolution against The Revolution—that is to say, against the idea of revolution asa violent rupture with the past. For some time,it even seemed as if the mild-mannered Kismight be the first postcommunist primeminister. He was beaten by a ChristianDemocrat, but, typically, one who had beentrained as a historian and who in a differentworld probably would have been a universityprofessor. As in other Central and EastEuropean countries, it was the hour of theintellectuals.Hardly anyone could have imagined, then,

that twenty years later Hungary might be thefirst postcommunist country west of Minsk—and the first member state of the EuropeanUnion—to slide back into authoritarianism. InApril 2010, the conservative-nationalist FideszParty won more than two-thirds of parlia-mentary seats, replacing a socialistgovernment that had been in power for eightyears. Under the leadership of the highlycharismatic Viktor Orbán, the party has begunsystematically to remove checks and balances,to undermine the rule of law and effectivelycurtail the media. A new constitution this yearis to top off a process that the Economist hascalled “Putinization.” How could this have happened, after two

decades of what seemed like fairly stabledemocratic rule? The immediate answer is thatthe Socialists not only led the country to thebrink of financial disaster in 2009, but that theparty was also morally discredited in a waythat has few parallels in Europe. The primeminister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, admitted in asecret speech to a party meeting in 2006 thathe had been lying to the electorate about thedire financial situation of the country, that noEuropean country had “done anything asboneheaded” as Hungary, and that it was timeto tell citizens that their belts needed to betightened—even if at the risk of losing thenext election. Like all secret speeches,Gyurcsány’s remarks—littered with obscen-ities, to boot—became public. They provokedhuge and violent demonstrations against thegovernment, even if in retrospect they looklike an admirable attempt at honesty (at leastwithin his own party). Rather than resigning,the prime minister held on, implementing anausterity program, only effectively to handover power to a “government of experts” (infact, technocrats who were Socialists or allclosely associated with the Socialists) in early2009, after the country had to be bailed out byother European Union members. The experts

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then pursued an even harsher economicpolicy. More problematic still was what is widely

perceived as years of Socialist corruption andclientelism. In the very same years, Socialistpoliticians were seen as mainly advancing theinterests of major multinational corporations—and working hand in hand with neoliberalBrussels bureaucrats. Entry to the EuropeanUnion in 2004 under Socialist auspices waswidely perceived as having destroyed manylocal businesses. Gyurcsány himself is amillionaire who made his fortune in businessbefore entering politics (or by mixingbusiness and politics all along, as criticscharge).This disastrous combination—a left-wing

party doing capitalism’s bidding, while appar-ently helping party leaders enrich them-selves—was not exclusive to the Socialists.The Free Democrats—once the party of thedissidents, which had nominated Kis forprime minister—governed with the Socialistsuntil 2008 and were tarred with the samebrush: capitalism and corruption. As one of itsleaders later admitted, “We had to pay theprice of capitalism to put an end to the dicta-torship. At first we were saying that it was aprice that had to be paid, and then it was, alas,love for it.”Intellectuals like the writer István Eörsi,

who thought that their ideals had found areliable advocate in what—to be sure—wasalways a minority party, turned their backs indisgust. Others never forgave the FreeDemocrats for forming a coalition with theSocialists, the successor party to theCommunists who had persecuted the dissi-dents. The Free Democrats dissolved beforethe 2010 election; a new party—called“Politics can be different,” mixing a green anda liberal agenda—appealed to those who hadonce voted for them. But it was also suspectedof being amateurish and too idealistic. To besure, politics could be different, but in a waydirectly opposed to liberalism—both in theclassical European and the contemporaryAmerican sense.

Politics Can Be Different All this explains why the Left imploded inlast year’s elections. But it does not explainPutinization. For this we need to ask whatFidesz is and what makes it different fromother conservative nationalist forces in Centraland Eastern Europe. And we need to ask whoViktor Orbán is.It’s here that the Hungarian story has a

truly tragic twist. For Orbán was once a fieryyoung liberal (though more in the Europeansense, shading into libertarianism). He had co-founded the Fidesz movement in the late1980s—with Fidesz standing for “Alliance ofYoung Democrats.” When the founders said“young,” they meant it: nobody over thirty-five was to be a party member. Orbán hadstudied in the dissidents’ “invisible college”;he first made a name for himself nationallywhen he appeared at the public reburial ofImre Nagy—the Socialist prime minister inpower in October–November 1956, laterexecuted—long-haired and looking ratherByronesque, called for the withdrawal of theRussians. One can debate how daring such acall was in the summer of 1989. But itcertainly was a bravura performance.Yet, this budding politician got nowhere

with a liberal agenda. So Orbán changedcourse and reinvented Fidesz as a nationalist,morally conservative, and religious party. Heresented being treated as a student movementleader by the established liberals in the FreeDemocratic Alliance. And he also seems tohave concluded that in Hungary only controlof all the levers of state power can yieldlasting political success. Many of his formerallies left and joined the Free Democrats,while Fidesz withdrew from the LiberalInternational. Orbán appeared to be vindi-cated in 1998 when Fidesz replaced a Socialistgovernment (which had done more for marke-tization and privatization than the nominallyright-wing parties). It came as a shock to theFidesz leader when his party was defeated in2002 and the Socialists took over once again.Orbán explained that “the nation” could notbe in opposition and formed “civiccommittees” that were to mobilize civil societyagainst the state. In a twisted way, he seemedto be using a dissident strategy in what hadbecome a fairly stable liberal democracy.




Equating Fidesz with the nation as suchforeshadowed what Orbán has been doingsince his election victory last year: a “nationalrevolution” in the name of “national values,”namely “work, home, family, health, andorder.” The election, according to the Fideszleader, had signaled the formation of a“national center” and given a mandate for a“system of national cooperation.”All the nation-talk reveals a profoundly

problematic characteristic of Hungarianpolitical culture: a deep-seated nationalismand a feeling of resentment and victimizationthat goes back at least to the post–First WorldWar Treaty of Trianon and the huge losses ofterritory imposed by the Allies in 1920.Arguably, there has never been anything likea public “coming-to-terms with the past” thatwould allow Hungarians to accept their much-diminished political role in Europe. Instead,nationalism reaches deep into the supposedlybourgeois moderate center. In fact, it partlydefines that center; when I lived in Hungarytoward the end of the last decade, I was struckby the many bumper stickers that depicted theshape of Hungary in the borders of 1918.People would explain that this was not a callto annex Croatia and parts of Romania, butmerely a sign of pride in what a great countryHungary had once been. In a spa in Sopron,close to the Austrian border, a very wealthy-looking family man would take everythingoff—except a silver chain around his neckwith a medallion in the shape of GreaterHungary. He explained to this ignorantforeigner that he was the star in a widelypopular nationalist rock opera about the greatHungarian past. But this rather abstract and nostalgia-

driven nationalism also has an ugly face: thatof Jobbik, an extreme right-wing, anti-Romaand anti-Semitic party that placed third in the2010 elections, just after the Socialists. Jobbikhas a paramilitary unit, the Hungarian Guard,which has been officially banned but keepsreappearing in new guises. I often saw youngpeople dressed in the Guard’s tell-tale blackshirts (yes, black shirts) and with knives ontheir belts that supposedly are ancientHungarian symbols—nationalism as a life-style. Fidesz is officially committed to destroying

the extreme Right—after all, it’s in the party’sown electoral interest. But in many ways theseemingly respectable nationalism that Fideszrepresents keeps legitimating the beliefs ofJobbik supporters. One of the first thingsOrbán did in power was to establish a Trianonmemorial day; he also created a new kind ofcitizenship for ethnic Hungarians living inneighboring states, thereby stoking conflictwith Slovakia in particular. In fact, he startednothing less than a comprehensiveKulturkampf, arguing that Fidesz had amandate to reshape the political systemaccording to the true values of the “nationalcenter” (and, to use a distinction prominent onthe Hungarian Right, the “well-rooted”Hungarians, as opposed to the “foreign-hearted”). All public buildings were supposedto display a declaration of the “nationalvalues”; and these values—and an explicitendorsement of Hungary as a Christiannation—are to be at the heart of the newconstitution.This kind of rhetoric is, of course, a staple

of populism: declare yourself the spokesper-son of the people’s true voice or the faithfulexecutor of the national will and claim thatthereby you are the real democrat, as opposedto unelected bodies like courts and snootyurban elites of liberal journalists. Fidesz hasbeen governing accordingly: it has tried toweaken all independent bodies charged withoversight of the government, curtailing thepowers of the constitutional court (which hadbeen closely modeled on the West German ex-ample). It also installed a man widely seen asa puppet figure, a onetime Olympic fencingchampion, as president, replacing a formerconstitutional court judge who had once beensupported by Fidesz but fallen out of favor,not least because he refused to display thedeclaration of the national revolution in thepresidential palace. Most notably, the govern-ment passed a draconian media law, whichthe Organization for Security and Co-opera-tion in Europe has criticized as comparable towhat we know from totalitarian regimes. Is there a model for all this? Orbán has

never mentioned Putin. But he openly admiresSilvio Berlusconi. And maybe if Berlusconihad a two-thirds majority in the Italian legis-lature, some of his policies would be similar.




Or would they? There is another twist in thestory here: Orbán keeps portraying theSocialists as the party of multinational corpo-rations and Fidesz as the defender of ordinaryfolk from the forces of globalization. Even themost casual visitor to Budapest will under-stand why this plays well: in terms of brandnames, the city feels like an economic colonyof Germany and Austria—most of the majorshops, from drugstores to supermarkets, arethe same as in Berlin or Vienna. And Orbán’seconomic nationalism is not just rhetoric: hehas put a levy on banks and is trying toreverse the privatization of pension schemes(again, initially introduced by the Socialists).The government officially has declared thatthe state should come before the market, andOrbán has talked about an as yet undefinedform of “plebeian democracy.”

A Different Kind of Populism

Fidesz, then, is pursuing its own nationalist“primacy of politics.” But what is emerging inHungary is not fascism, as some in theWestern media have been too quick toconclude (a German paper—a conservativeone, no less—called present-day Hungary aFührerstaat). It’s the work of an immenselyskilled, immensely power hungry politicianwho does not want to lose power again and iseffectively building a one-party state.Tragically and paradoxically, Fidesz at themoment is polarizing—but without anyopposite pole; the opposition remainsdysfunctional and disunited, suffering anotherdisastrous defeat in the local elections thispast fall. Left-wing intellectuals, meanwhile,are protesting, to be sure, but seem to be inshock that all this could be happening (andthat so many of their fellow citizens can be soeasily swayed by a strong leader promising torestore the nation’s grandeur). Of course, the political analysis of Hungary

is not exhausted by Orbánology. It is crucial tounderstand the nature of Fidesz’s populism,and why it appeals to so many. Its ideology(and political strategy) is fundamentallydifferent from two other versions of populismthat have gained strength in Europe recently:the Berlusconi variety, on the one hand, andwhat I would call pseudo-liberal populism

shading into racism, on the other. Berlusconiwants Italian citizens to be passive consumers,spectators of politics (or even better, of histelevision shows). Pseudo-liberal populistslike the Dutch politician Geert Wilders wantto stoke fear and resentment vis-à-visMuslims in the name of freedom, ostensiblyidentifying with Israel and making a pointthat they are not nationalists. Orbán is different: he wants citizens to hold

the right national values, but also to beengaged in politics; he wants them to conformto an ideal of what the Germans callBürgerlichkeit—that is, an ideal of hard work,family values, and civic engagement. Fideszappeals to a middle class that feels threatenedby the economic situation, a middle class thatideally wants to be like German Bürger, orproper polgári, in the Hungarian phrase, whichmeans different from the Roma and otherswho supposedly live off welfare, but alsoproudly standing up to foreign capital. WhenHungary assumed the (automatically rotating)EU presidency this January, its program wasprecisely focused on values that WesternEurope has supposedly forgotten, especiallythe moral worth of the nation. And how has the EU responded to this

authoritarian-nationalist-bourgeois vision thatis supposed to protect the Hungarian nationfrom foreign capitalists (and the “foreign-hearted” within Hungary’s own borders)?After all, the Union was supposed to “lock”post-authoritarian countries—first Greece,Spain, and Portugal in the 1980s, later thepostcommunist states—into democraticcommitments and protect rights with suprana-tional institutions like the European Court ofJustice. Alas, European governments have been

too preoccupied with the fate of the euro andtheir own economic woes to pay much atten-tion to small neighbors about which manyEuropeans know next to nothing. When theWestern European press finally started mak-ing noises in connection with the new medialaw, some left-wing politicians—includingthe foreign minister of Luxembourg and theleader of the Socialists in the European Par-liament—asked loudly whether Hungary wassuited to preside over the EU. Brussels itselfbegan to scrutinize the media law, and it now




seems sure that Hungary will amend it in re-sponse to criticisms from the EU. Still, it hasbecome painfully obvious that the Union hasmany instruments and incentives to get coun-tries outside its borders to adopt liberaldemocracy but precious few for changing thebehavior of governments on the inside. In thewake of the failed EU Constitution, the focushas all been on respecting national differ-ences, emphasizing Europe’s internal politi-cal diversity, and avoiding tough commonEuropean political standards. Tellingly, thelatest European treaty—the quasi-constitu-tion—has a provision for a member state toleave voluntarily, but no mechanisms forejecting a country that has ceased to be dem-ocratic. True, there is the possibility of with-drawing voting rights from states that haveviolated the EU’s “fundamental values,” butno leading politician has even mentionedthat possibility yet.

What Can Be Done?

What, then, can outsiders do? For one thing,concerned European citizens should make itclear that they regard the supposed “internalaffairs” of another member state as theirbusiness, too. They should remember thattheirs is not primarily an economic but apolitical union. It would leave a disastrousimpression if the EU finally took some action,but only under pressure from the banks thathave been complaining to Brussels aboutOrbán’s “crisis taxes.”In practice, this means politicians and intel-

lectuals must keep up the pressure via theinternational press and citizen demonstrations(as happened when protests against the medialaw outside the Budapest Parliament wereparalleled by smaller gatherings in Vienna andBerlin). They can also support the initiatives ofprominent Hungarians, such as the petitionaddressed to artists and intellectuals by theconductor Ádám Fischer and the pianistAndrás Schiff, who also wrote an impassionedletter to the Washington Post. Above all, it meansWestern governments confronting Orbándirectly on his record and, if he keeps defyinghis critics, boycotting the prestigious eventsthat the country holding the EU presidencyusually puts on. Withdrawing voting rights

should become a credible threat, too. But it also means finding the right tone

and, more important still, the right theoreticallanguage to make the case to Hungarians. Asthe leftist philosopher G. M. Tamás, once aleading dissident alongside Kis, has pointedout, it will do no good if Westerners simplylecture his compatriots with liberal democraticpieties and pull out the handbook on “transi-tology" once more. In the eyes of many Hungarians, what

unfolded in the twenty years since statesocialism was liberal democracy—and it hasfailed. In other words, the perception is thatPutinization, a combination of somewhatauthoritarian politics and state-supervisedeconomics, is the only model that will ulti-mately work for ordinary people. In fact, someleading Hungarian intellectuals seem now tohave all but accepted the notion that thecountry was never really democratic andmight never get rid of the legacies offeudalism, self-pitying nationalism, and pater-nalistic state socialism. Some time ago, Tamásregretted that the seeming triumph of thedissidents’ human-rights-centered liberalismin the early 1990s went hand in hand withinattention to the plight of the victims of post-communism and thus sowed the seeds of itsown destruction. As he put it in 2009: “We,the froth at the top of it, were celebrating thetriumph of freedom and openness andplurality and fantasy and pleasure and all that.That was frivolous, and I am deeplyashamed.” That sense of the discrediting of thehighest liberal ideals—that it’s all just capi-talism, in its worst, corruption-ridden form toboot—is the final element of the Hungariantragedy. To be sure, it is far too early for resignation,

understandable as that might be in the face ofwidespread cronyism on both sides of thepolitical spectrum and the seeming passivityof citizens witnessing Fidesz’s dismantling ofthe rule of law. But a form of social liberalism(a term that primarily makes sense in theEuropean context, where “liberalism” andsocial democracy have long been divorced)might yet be invented specifically for post-communist contexts. It would be a liberalismof fear, perhaps, that takes seriously theanxiety of people who feel they have been


Learning from the French Left: Lessons of the Pension Reform Battle

JEAN - CHR I S T I AN V I N E L

“Check your Rolex. It’s time for a rebellion.”In the fall of 2010, protesters against thereform of the French pension system lackedneither catchy slogans nor energy. For morethan a month, unionists and a variety of leftactivists organized strikes and demonstrationsthat brought up to three million protestersonto the streets and disrupted public trans-portation and schools. Strikes and blockadesin oil refineries created a serious gas shortage.Opinion polls showed that a majority of thepopulation supported the movement. At thedemonstrations, the phrase “Rêve générale”—apun on the French words for “dream” and“strike”—was ubiquitous on signs andstickers. The protests were also a merry affair,with the usual dose of balloons, food, andmusic that symbolize people’s determination. One did not need to march all the way to

the Place de la République in Paris to sensethe collective optimism that ran through theprotests. Fueling the movement was the ideathat the government’s proposal to roll back theretirement age from sixty to sixty-two,allegedly to save it from financial collapse,was fundamentally unfair. In France, the rightto retire at sixty is a fairly recent victory—itwas enacted in 1981 by François Mitterrand’sleft-wing government—but it quickly becameestablished as a social right. Although in theUnited States there were legal battles to

abolish mandatory retirement, many in Francesee retirement in a positive way. To some, it isthe complement of the eight-hour day: it offersworkers a kind of emancipation from wagework. For others, it produces solidaritybetween the generations. At a time when theLeft is mostly a defensive movement, the rightto retire at sixty is an important symbol of itspast ability to craft social norms and to imposethem upon the capitalist order. MockingNicolas Sarkozy’s campaign slogan in favor ofthe work ethic—“work more to earn more”—protesters brandished signs proclaiming theyshould “work more to die before they retire.”In response, Sarkozy and his allies on the

Right made a simple case: as people livelonger, the pension system will come underincreasing financial strain unless both theretirement age and the number of years oneneeds to be a net contributor to the systemevolve. Common sense, not politics, theyargued, drove the change.But protesters rejected this logic. They

argued that the reform would only be atemporary fix; it would protect the systemonly through 2018, and a new review will beheld in 2013—after the next presidentialelection—to propose yet another plan.Moreover, they maintained, the reform isgrossly unfair to women, who often stopworking to raise children and are at a disad-vantage when it comes to validating forty-one-and-a-half years of net contributions. Itwas equally unfair to workers who enter the



robbed of their past, their international status,and, not least, their livelihoods; a liberalismthat explains the long-term benefits of the ruleof law beyond the economic advantages ofgetting into the EU. But in a sense the chal-lenge of formulating an attractive, popular, butnot populist, liberalism is not that different inthe East and West. This is another reason why

Western intellectuals should not ignore afaraway country where liberal democracymight yet recover.

Jan-Werner Müller teaches in the politics department,Princeton University. His book Contesting Democracy:Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe is forthcomingfrom Yale University Press in summer 2011.


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Jan-Werner Mueller_The Hungarian Tragedy