Viktor Orban | The illiberal democrat

Hungary’s PM, with close ties to Putin, defeats a united Opposition in polls 

As his party, Fidesz, cruised to a two-thirds majority in the parliamentary elections held on April 3, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, 59, even in his moment of triumph, couldn’t resist baiting the (Brussels-headquartered) EU. Flanked by supporters, he remarked: “We have scored a victory so big, that it can be seen even from the Moon, but definitely from Brussels.” Indeed, his victory is certainly not good news for the EU, which has long been at loggerheads with a man who has been described as ‘the Trump before Trump’.

For this election, six Opposition parties — ranging from the far-right Jobbik to the left-leaning Hungarian Socialist Party — had come together under the ‘United for Hungary’ banner, with Peter Marki-Zay as their Prime Ministerial candidate. During the campaign phase, opinion polls had predicted a close contest. When Russia invaded Hungary’s neighbour Ukraine, it seemed like a setback for Mr. Orban, as the Opposition went to town over his business dealings with Vladimir Putin, and indeed, among EU leaders, Mr. Orban has been the most vociferous in opposing gas and energy sanctions against Russia.

While Mr. Orban has gone along with other EU sanctions and condemnations, he has refused to allow arms shipments to Ukraine through Hungarian territory — unlike the liberal Opposition, whose stance has mirrored the EU’s support for military aid to Ukraine. However, Mr. Orban, with some clever political messaging, presented himself as someone who can keep Hungary safe, while painting the Opposition as reckless adventurists who wanted to risk dragging Hungary into war. Mr. Marki-Zay sought to frame the election as a choice between Moscow (Mr. Orban) and the West (United for Hungary). But ultimately, Mr. Orban’s pledge to secure energy security for Hungarian households — which means not rocking the boat too much vis-à-vis Russia — and to ensure peace in Hungary by staying out of the Ukraine mess prevailed among the voters.

With this landslide win, his fourth consecutive victory, Mr. Orban’s domestic position becomes impregnable. It also means he could be looking to aggressively expand the influence of his unique brand of right-wing nationalism — also referred to as ‘Orbanism’ — across Europe. Although typically identified with anti-immigration politics, Orbanism’s real target is liberalism and the ‘unelected’ bureaucracy in Brussels that, in his view, tends to undermine the democratic will of elected national governments. Mr. Orban has explicitly spoken of the need to transform Hungary into an ‘illiberal democracy’, which would differ from a liberal one in three respects: one, instead of liberal democratic values, it will uphold Christian values; two, it will abjure multiculturalism and be anti-immigrant; and three, in the face of bullying by the EU, it will stand up for its nationalist sovereignty. Incidentally, the third aspect came into play recently in Mr. Orban’s statement that Hungary was ready to pay for Russian gas in roubles — in direct defiance of the EU’s official position to the contrary – on the grounds that how a Hungarian company pays for gas is a national matter and the EU has no say in it. At any rate, the political cocktail ‘Christian values’, nationalist rhetoric, and liberal-baiting has served him well in every election since 2010.

But Mr. Orban wasn’t always a conservative populist. When he first co-founded Fidesz (an acronym for Alliance of Young Democrats) in 1988, he was a progressive anti-communist and a liberal. In a speech at Budapest’s Heroes Square in 1989 that launched his political career, he spoke passionately of the need to end the “dictatorship of a single party”. Fidesz, which targeted young progressive liberals, did well in Hungary’s first multi-party elections in 1990, winning 22 seats, and Mr. Orban became an MP. But the liberal progressive space was a crowded one, and the party did badly in the 1994 elections, leading Mr. Orban to introspect.

Post-1994, Mr. Orban turned Fidesz into a conservative nationalist party, feeding on the resentment felt by the working classes and the peasants in the provinces against the educated, liberal elite of Budapest. It paid off in 1998, as he became Hungary’s youngest ever Prime Minister at the age of 35. From 2002 to 2010, he cooled his heels in the Opposition, as the Socialists ran the economy to the ground. By 2010, Mr. Orban had worked out the nitty-gritty of ‘gaming’ electoral democracy. In his pragmatic political strategy, hyper-nationalism held the key, and here Mr. Orban picked on the wounds left by the 1920 Treaty of Tianon that left Hungary with less than one-third of its pre-First World War territory, turning 3 million Hungarians into minorities in neighbouring states.

Mr. Orban played on the enduring sense of national victimhood triggered by this event – orchestrated by bureaucrats sitting far away in Paris — as he whipped up Hungarian national pride against liberal, pro-EU parties, and concurrently, against the EU itself, and his speeches soon became popular among the far right in every European country, including the one that acted on these sentiments to Brexit.