281 - It Could Happen Here: The Rise of Illiberal Democracy

The Hungarian Candidate

            Our Constitution protects us from anti-democratic excursions – until it doesn’t. Or, we remain in the mainstream of democracy until closet autocrats take advantage of an absence of fundamental decency and a near-total want of shame to subvert the permissive clauses of the Constitution and their misinterpretation by a politicized Supreme Court. Additionally, little by little, wannabe fascist dictators nibble away successfully at legal inhibitions until the foundations of a once enduring democratic structure are eroded, and safeguards of freedom vanish. Democracies do sometimes morph into electoral autocracies.

            Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has managed over several decades to transform his once anti-communist, anti-Soviet eastern European, democracy into what he now proudly calls an “illiberal democracy.” He did so cleverly, proceeding step-by-step to reduce the agency of voters and parliament, transferring the levers of state-making more and more to himself as the nation’s all-knowing executive.  What he has done could happen anywhere: illiberalism almost fully succeeded in Poland before Prime Minister Donald Tusk persuaded the electorate to return him and his Civic Platform Party to power in 2023. Slovakia shifted back toward illiberalism and embraced such dangers last year. Two extremist cabinet ministers are trying now to gain autocratic power over the security and financial services and, subsequently, over the Israeli state.

            Hungarians revolted against Soviet rule in 1956, their attempt at freeing themselves from the Communist yoke succumbing to overwhelming Soviet firepower and a brutal crackdown on dissidents. I worked then Hungarian escapees and refugees in hurriedly erected camps in eastern Austria and so at least knew the repression they were fleeing second hand.

            Orban had not yet been born. But, in the 1ate 1980s, when the Soviet Union was spiraling downward and he was a law student in Budapest, the future prime minister established a new political movement – Fidesz, or the Alliance of Young Democrats.  In 1989, in a short speech, he demanded that the Red Army go home.  He was speaking at a reburial ceremony to 250,000 citizens gathered in Budapest’s Hero’s Square to honor Imre Nagy, the leader of the 1956 uprising against Soviet occupation. He wanted an independent Hungarian democracy.

            Subsequently, he spent a year studying liberal political philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford, on a scholarship gifted by George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish émigré financier who gained great wealth in the early 1990s.  Abandoning his nascent academic career, in 1990 Orban led Fidesz in parliamentary elections, the party winning twenty-two seats. He built on this early success and a growing reputation as a liberal campaigner to become prime minister from 1998 to 2002. But by then he had begun to realize that he could gain more votes and cement his national hold on power by becoming less liberal and eschewing much of the beliefs on which he had nurtured Fidesz.

            Especially after defeats at the ballot box in 2002 and 2006, Orban moved distinctly rightward, in an anti-democratic direction, and virulently against Soros, using the latter as convenient target. Orban was determined to stay in charge at any cost, never to lose another election or see his own personal mandate -- and his personal monetary enrichment – be reduced.

            In 2010, Orban regained power and has used one maneuver after another, and the remaking of Hungarian political rules, to strengthen his personal control. He removed potential rivals within Fidesz, tightened his grip on the apparatus of the party, quelled those who tried to uphold democratic rights, and appointed politically infused judges and removed justices who were deemed “disloyal.” 

Orbán describes his mission as ‘breaking with the [liberal] dogmas and ideologies that have been adopted by the West.”  Despite his roots, he now promotes fascism, dictatorship, and almost everything that echoes the Stalinism that Hungarians and the young Orban once fought against.

            Orban redid the Hungarian constitution to give himself absolute power, stopped answering to parliament, clamped down on banks, and gathered higher education and all of the nation’s universities under his governance. He found supporters to purchase independent newspapers and media outlets and, before long, extinguished dissenting voices in the press or on television. He began attacking Soros and, in time, forced the Canadian-led Central European University that Soros had funded as a beacon of independent thought and learning in central Budapest to uproot itself and re-locate in Vienna.

            Orban gathered popular backing for his attacks on refugee migration into Europe.

"We must state,” he said in 2018, “that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed: we do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. We do not want this. We do not want that at all. We do not want to be a diverse country."

            The European Union has for several years struggled to keep Orban’s constitutional backsliding and defiance of EU rules in check.  The EU is also conscious that Hungary (along with Bulgaria and Romania in Europe) is rampantly corrupt, with Orban having enabled many of his colleagues’ capture of the state for profit. The Corruption Perceptions Index ranks Hungary 76^th least corrupt of 180 nations, along with Cuba, Moldova, and China.

            Orban, for these present six months the “secretary” of the EU, has also irritated the rest of Europe and the U.S. by being slavishly pro-Putin. A leading commentator called Orban Putin’s “most useful idiot,” someone who parrots Putin’s talking points against Ukraine. Orban licks Putin’s boots because his country still imports natural gas and petroleum from Russia (but pays more for it than India or China) and relies on Russia for nuclear fuel.  But Orban has also become an unabashed autocrat, having virtually eradicated democracy in Hungary, jailing those who dare to speak against him.  He has refused to help Ukraine in its freedom struggle against the Russian invaders.

            Recently, Orban infuriated Europe’s leadership by traveling almost uninvited and certainly unsanctioned in Europe to Moscow and Beijing, regurgitating Russian propaganda and claiming falsely that Putin’s war machine was unstoppable. He continues to scapegoat Soros. And, after the recent NATO 75^th anniversary celebrations in Washington, Orban flew to Florida to bow before Trump. Clearly, Orban’s move from liberalism to the hardcore right was solemnized at Mar-a-Lago.

            The lessons of Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Itamar Ben-Gvir (and others) in Israel suggests that with initial public acceptance of first one apostasy and then another, and on and on, what happened in Hungary could happen here. The 1920s in Italy and the 1930s in Nazi Germany are ominous forebodings.  We must remain vigilant and take nothing from the mouths of politicians that even slightly deviates from the fully accountable truth.