Budapest: As Hungary won gold medal after gold medal at the Sydney Olympics, overachieving for a nation of just 10 million people, you’d have expected its then young prime minister to be out on the tiles, celebrating with the success of his athletes.
Instead, Viktor Orban insisted on being back at his hotel in time for comedic duo Roy and HG’s nightly review of that day’s events, The Dream, which had become a cult classic. He found it a scream.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban describes himself as a champion of “illiberal democracy”.Credit:Bloomberg
Those who know the longest serving leader within the European Union – and he has many friends among Australia’s conservatives – say he is charismatic and charming, with a dry sense of humour.
It’s at major odds with his hardline public persona. But even his critics often struggle to settle on an exact label for his style. Some of them include populist, nationalist, autocrat, right-wing conservative, authoritarian and even “the most dangerous man in Europe”.
Orban, famously, once declared himself an “illiberal democrat”. Others have dubbed him “The Viktator”.
On Sunday, Hungarians go to the polls to choose between Orban’s right-wing populist Fidesz party — which has been in power since 2010 — and an eclectic coalition of six opposition parties and its candidate for prime minister, provincial conservative mayor Peter Marki-Zay.
The latest polls have put support for Fidesz at 41 per cent, up from 40 per cent earlier this month.
Supporter of the Hungarian Peter Marki-Zay hold and anti-Orban placard during a demonstration in Budapest, Hungary. Credit:Getty
The six-party opposition alliance is at 39 per cent, gaining two points from the previous survey.
Things are tight in anyone’s books. The campaign initially focused on issues such as corruption, the economy and an anti-LGBTI referendum also scheduled for this weekend, the conflict next door has changed the conversation.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has upended Hungary’s election campaign – which even Orban supporters thought was heading in the wrong direction for the Moscow-friendly leader late last year.
Close, Too close? Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, shakes hands with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in 2018 in Moscow.Credit:AP
Orban’s close relationship with President Vladimir Putin has been under renewed scrutiny since the Russian leader decided to attack Ukraine, Hungary’s neighbour.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week called out Orban for not offering stronger support to his embattled country.
“You have to decide for yourself who you are with,” Zelensky said in a pointed message to Orban. But the Hungarian leader replied that his country stands “on the side of peace”.
“If we get drawn into the war, which isn’t our war, we’ll have nothing to gain but everything to lose,” Orbán said told a local television station this week. “We won’t ship weapons, we won’t send soldiers and we won’t allow the transit of weapons across Hungary’s territory into Ukraine.“
Still has a feel for the people: Hungary’s right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban.Credit:AP
He said Hungary was “punching above its weight” when it came to helping, arguing that the country was taking in more Ukrainian refugees – more than 350,000 – and caring for more people relative to its population than any other European country.
“So we’re not a lousy but rather a great nation which is also doing the right thing morally,” Orbán said. “But we can’t help the Ukrainians by getting Hungary blown apart. Turning off the Russian oil and gas taps and bringing the Hungarian economy to a halt isn’t help.“
Over the past decade, Orban has become a poster-boy for conservative and populist leaders the world over. Strains of Orbanism can be found in France’s National Front, in Spain, Italy and Britain’s Conservatives and — even Donald Trump in America.
In 2015, as hundreds of thousands of Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian refugees fled war zones, he built a fence and turned water cannons and tear gas on migrants protesting at the border. In echoes of Australia’s Coalition government he declared at the time: “To defend borders is a national responsibility”.
Andras Bozoki first met Orban more than 30 years ago when he was active in the anti-communist opposition and a founding member of Fidesz, but quit when it began to lurch to the right in 1993. He later became culture minister in a socialist government.
He says one of the main messages of the opposition this time is that a vote for Orbán is a vote for Putin.
“Everyone feels that Orban was Vladimir Putin’s closest friend until the last moment,” Bozoki, now a professor at the Department of Political Science at the Central European University, says.
“Fidesz voters also know that Hungary has come too close to Russia in recent years and it needs to be stopped.”
Hungarian opposition candidate Peter Marki-Zay addresses supporters during celebration the 65th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, in Budapest, Hungary. Russian tanks put down the revolution. Credit:AP
But he doubts, domestically at least, it will be too costly
“I would say that Putin is not important to many of Orban’s voters. They are like a church, they do not vote rationally. They are mesmerised by populist rhetoric.“
Campaigning in Pecs, in southern Hungary, Marki-Zay told voters at a rally that Hungarians have a duty to stick up for Ukraine “because Ukraine is fighting our war”, adding “Hungarians were in the same situation” in 1956 and had waited for help.
“How can someone who considers how to best keep an equal distance from a murderer and a victim be an honest person? How can they call themselves Hungarian and Christian?” Márki-Zay said.
A woman look on as thousands of supporters of Hungary’s right-wing populist prime minister, Viktor Orban, gather in Budapest, Hungary.Credit:AP
He called on his supporters to “make the miracle happen” so that “it won’t be shameful to be Hungarian in Europe”.
Based in Budapest, Boris Kalnoky is a former correspondent and commentator with German daily newspaper Die Welt. He was one dubbed a “black-belt Orban propagandist” by a far-right MP with in Hungarian parliament. Kalnoky, now Head of Media School at the conservative Mathias Corvinus Collegium, remains a strong supporter of Orban.
He concedes the election is a contest, mainly because the opposition has for the first time come together in order to oust Orban.
“Politics here is very polarised,” he says. “Perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe and maybe even the United States.”
“Those who are 25 years old today cannot remember the period without Viktor Orban. The young Hungarians want to be at the head of the country again. But it’s not just the young people, because all the Hungarians…like to complain that everything is so bad… it is a national sport.”
“But those who are dissatisfied – and that means roughly half of the population – still face a difficult question: who else would run the country?”
He says Orban’s strengths lie in the fact that he is an unashamed patriot with political cunning. Despite a life in politics, Kalnoky says, Orban’s instincts remain “not far from ordinary people”.
Orban has limited the overhead costs of the population in a decree since 2013, he says.
“This brought him the election victory in 2014.”
“From here, the population pays less for energy than anywhere else in Europe.”
On the eve of the election he has handed out a “13th month” of pension payments to older Hungarians.
“When he, for example, threw in the idea of bringing back the death penalty, everyone was upset, even though it was nothing more than occupying public discourse.”
He says part of the appeal is that he questions the old ways of European politics and challenges the status quo and puts that nation first.
Orban has said he wants the fertility rate to hit 2.1 children per woman by 2030 (up from 1.5 now) warning with declining birth rates “Western civilisation cannot sustain itself”.
“He has identified that the key to lifting birth rates among the population is to correct the fact that many people find it too expensive to have children,” Kalnoky says. “This is part of his argument for a strong economy.“
Bozoki agrees that Orban is a “clever politician”, but adds that he is shrewd, cynical and an opportunist. He chooses an enemy, picks a fight and divides his opposition – whether that be “woke Western liberals”, the elite of Brussels, Muslim asylum seekers and now LGBTI advocates.
He said Orban’s tactics are not to have a large majority, but to “divide the opposition and claim that it can be dangerous”.
His critics have accused him of undermining the independent judiciary, installing loyalists as heads of “independent” watchdogs and kneecapping NGOs and independent media.
The latest controversy was the government tapping its email database which was assembled for the public to register for the COVID-19 vaccine. In the months since it has used the details to blast out talking points criticising the opposition, justifying Orban’s position on Ukraine and promoting his own re-election bid.
In March, Hungary’s Supreme Court condemned the government for sending campaign messages.
However, the Constitutional Court – viewed by his opponents as having been stacked with Orban allies – annulled the ruling because it had happened in an “extraordinary war situation” in order to inform citizens.
On election eve election officials reported a suspected case of voter fraud to police. Bags full of completed ballots were found at a rubbish dump outside Targu Mures, a city in northwestern Romania, where a large Hungarian minority voted in pre-polling in their neighbour’s elections. The opposition shared images and videos of partially burnt ballots, marked to support opposition parties.
Bozoki says after 12 years of Orban that Hungary is no longer the democratic state which it once could be considered. He says among the biggest issues is the control of the media and the disproportional coverage given to the ruling party.
“You cannot have democracy without the rule of law, and this was what happened in Hungary: the systematic disintegration of the rule of law. The elections can no longer be considered free and fair, the rules of the game are distorted and the state is on the side of the governing party.”
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