Where will "depth" Orbán's "balancing act" lead Hungary?

Reporter | Wang Is from Budapest, Hungary

At the beginning of April, the snow on the Buda Mountains had not yet completely melted, and Hungary ushered in the quadrennial elections.

Once again, the current Prime Minister, Victor Orbán, won the game. His Fidesz managed to win more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament, beating his opponent, Péter Márki-Zay, a candidate from an opposition coalition rallied to defeat Orban.

Over the past few years, Orbán has been called the "Trump of Hungary." But the difference between the two is at least that Trump has only been in power for four years, while Orbán has been in office for 16 years. A few months ago, he overtook Merkel as the longest-serving leader of the EUROPEAN Union. Now, he is about to begin the 17th and fifth term of his prime ministerial career.

At last Sunday's victory anthem, Orbán shouted to supporters: "We've won a huge victory — so big you can see it from the moon." You can certainly see it from Brussels. ”

This was Orbán demonstrating to his EU friends. Like many Central and Eastern European countries, Hungarian politics has long been faced with a choice of "eastward" or "westward": close to Russia or good friends with the European Union. Hungary has embraced the former since Orbán returned to power in 2010, and Orbán has long been seen as Putin's number one ally in the EUROPEAN Union. But since the Ukraine crisis fermented in February, the issue has become more nuanced than ever as western public opinion has changed and refugees have poured in on the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, quietly influencing the election.

Orbanchi people

Those who follow international politics are no strangers to Orban. He is 58 years old but has been active in politics for more than 30 years.

Orban's political life began in June 1989. As one of the founders of the Youth Democratic League, he gave a famous speech in the Heroes' Square in the capital Budapest, demanding free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, which resonated widely and brought him far-reaching political praise.

In 1990, Orbán ran for Hungary's first parliamentary seat in the post-Soviet era. In 1993 he took the helm of the Youth Democratic League and transformed it from a pro-European center-right, classical liberal student organization into a right-wing national conservative party. In 1998, the Youth Democratic League won the parliamentary majority and Orbán became prime minister, the youngest head of government in Europe at the time. Orban's first term ended in 2002. That year he lost the election and became leader of the opposition.

András Bozóki, a professor of political science at Central European University and former Hungarian culture minister, told Interface News that an eight-year career as an opposition has largely changed Orbán. Unable to bear the defeat in those two elections, he was determined to restructure the Youth Democratic League and take back most of the power into his own hands.

He won another election in 2010 and has since been re-elected as Prime Minister. Over the past 12 years, from the European refugee crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic, from domestic legal reforms to cultural wars within the European Union, Orbán has been Hungary's name that cannot be bypassed.

His critics say a series of totalitarian measures since Orban took office have undermined Democracy and Freedom in Hungary, exacerbated corruption and the gap between rich and poor, and isolated it from NATO and the European Union.

In the 2010 parliamentary elections, the ADLR won more than two-thirds of the seats, giving Orbán enough power to amend the constitution. In 2011, he conducted controversial constitutional amendments, including an emphasis on traditional values and nationalism, as well as controversial electoral reforms, which reduced the number of seats in the Hungarian parliament from 386 to 199 – making it institutionally difficult for opposition parties to win a parliamentary majority.

Advocating for traditional Christian values is one of Orbán's core claims, including opposition to the rights of Muslim communities and LGBTs because they are "incompatible with Christian values." During the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, orbán's government installed a huge barbed wire fence on the border between Hungary and Serbia – it has now become a symbol of anti-humanitarian acts from the government.

Orban claimed that "Soros-backed Muslim invaders" would destroy Hungary, the great Christian state. In 2021, he proposed legislation to censor any "LGBT+ positive content" in movies, books or public advertisements, and severely limit sex education in schools, prohibiting any information deemed to "encourage gender change or homosexuality." But it's hard to say what his real position is — one of his party friends risked arrest at the risk of being arrested during the CORONAVIRUS lockdown at a gay sex party in Brussels, causing an uproar.

But Orban's supporters say Orban's Hungary is becoming a great country. The pride of the Hungarian nation has been restored, christian values representing European values have been promoted, Hungary's domestic economy has risen steadily, and it has gained an unprecedented voice within the European Union.

Politico's article argues that Orbán's political philosophy "echoes the resentments of the former peasantry and the working class", advocating "uncompromising defense of state sovereignty and transparent distrust of The institutions of European rule". He has publicly stated that "we don't want our own skin color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with other people... We don't want to be a diverse country. His international allies include Kaczynski in Poland, Salvini in Italy, Le Pen in France, and Trump in the United States. Bannon, a former close friend of Trump, once referred to Orban as "the Trump before Trump." Observers argue that Orbán is trying to make Hungary "the ideological center of the international conservative movement."

Elections changed by the Crisis in Ukraine

"A month and a half ago, the orbán campaign was a completely different tone." Scholar András Bozóki told Interface News.

Hungary's general election has long set a date for April 3, 2022, and the campaign has been running since the beginning of the year. But an international event at the end of February largely changed the focus of the election — Russia launched a special military operation against Ukraine. Orbán's complex relationship with Putin unexpectedly became a hot topic in hungary's election.

Since Mr. Orbán returned to prime ministership in 2010, he has met with Mr. Putin 11 times — most recently at the Feb. 1 summit on energy import negotiations, and Mr. Orbán was the first EU leader to meet with Mr. Putin since the Ukraine crisis has fermented. He has long been seen as Putin's number one ally within the European Union.

This alliance has both an ideological basis and considerations of economic interests. On the one hand, On the one hand, On cultural issues such as opposing US hegemony, promoting nationalism, and opposing sexual minority rights, Orbán is highly consistent with Putin. Hungary, on the other hand, is highly dependent on Russia's energy resources, which sell oil and gas to its predecessors at very low prices.

One of the most prominent economic policies of Orbán's tenure was the so-called "rezsicsökkentés"—the government's plan to reduce public spending and control administrative and living costs, one of which was to rely on Orbán's close ties with Putin to buy cheap Russian gas in large quantities. Orbán claims that it was this measure that protected the Hungarian people from the EU's austerity policies. The move was greatly welcomed by voters.

In an interview with Politico, Orbán said his relationship with Putin was a "necessary pragmatism." "I do not represent my point of view, but the interests of the Hungarian nation," he said. We must establish a good balanced relationship with the Russians. Putin is a person you can work with. ”

But this position was challenged after the Ukraine crisis erupted in full swing. Pressure from the European Union, NATO and Hungary forced Orbán to rethink his relationship with Putin and his position on Ukraine.

András Bozóki told Interface News that since march, Orbán dramatically changed the tone of the campaign, portraying the Hungarian election as a choice between peace/stability and war/chaos. He wants to temporarily distance himself from ties with Putin and instead see himself as the leader who has kept Hungary away from war.

The opposition has called on Hungary to support Ukraine and act in unison with the European Union and the military alliance NATO. But Orbán's team and its affiliated media have repeatedly stressed to the public that the opposition wants to drag Hungary into a conflict between Russia and Ukraine – a conflict between two Slavic states that Hungary should be wise enough to defend.

What's more, there is also an unpleasant history between Ukraine and Hungary. Hungary and Ukraine share more than 100 kilometers of borders. Given Ukraine's history of suppressing the Huns in its westernmost region of Karpatalia, Hungarian nationalists were reluctant to support Ukrainian resistance. Since 2017, Hungarian-Ukrainian relations have deteriorated rapidly due to the status of the Huns in Ukraine. At that time, Ukraine passed a bill on education, making Ukrainian the only language of education in public schools. Orbán said it undermined the use of The Hungarian language, fiercely criticized it and threatened to block Ukraine's further integration into the European Union and NATO until it was modified or abolished.

In a patriotic march in mid-March, thousands of Orbán voters and ADLR members demonstrated in Budapest under the banner of "No War" posters. At the last rally before the election, Orbán shouted to voters that supplying Ukraine with weapons would make Hungary a military target, and that sanctions on Russian energy imports would cripple Hungary's economy.

András Bozóki points out that this position has its contradictions. Domestically, Orbán's message to the public was that Hungary should remain neutral and not biased toward Washington or Moscow, while maintaining close economic ties with Russia, including continuing to import Russian gas and oil on preferential terms. But internationally, Orbán actually supports most of the EU's decision to sanction Russia. Budapest, for example, allows NATO to deploy troops in western Hungary and has no objection to the EU providing 500 million euros in arms and other aid to Ukrainian troops.

Internationally, this position has provoked some reaction. In the "V4 group" (Visegrad group) of Central and Eastern European countries, Hungary's approach has provoked the anger of former allies such as Poland. Ukrainian President Zelenskiy also criticized Orbán by name because it did not allow weapons to cross the Hungarian-Ukrainian border directly. It is worth noting that at the same time, the Russian government has also included Hungary in its list of "unfriendly countries".

Inside the country, polls ahead of the election found that Hungarians were deeply divided on how to evaluate Orbán's foreign policy. According to a poll conducted by the Publicus Institute between March 7 and March 11, 64 percent of Hungarians believe that Moscow's actions against Ukraine are more "aggressive" than "defensive." 91 percent of opposition voters believe Moscow is the aggressor, compared to just 44 percent of the ADD voters. Another study conducted by pollster Medián found that 43 percent of ADLD voters believe Russia's actions in Ukraine are just.

Judging from the election results, Orban's "balancing act" seems to have worked.

The future of Hungary

In Last Sunday's vote, Orbán won a landslide victory, winning 54 percent of the vote, a much bigger margin than the pre-election polls had predicted.

European News' analysis of the election results says, on the one hand, hungary's urban-rural divide looks as big as it once did. In Budapest, the opposition coalition won the largest share of the vote. Elsewhere, the ADLD dominates. On the other hand, it may confirm a more common phenomenon in international politics – when a major crisis occurs, voters tend to support incumbent political leaders.

The forces that wanted to defeat Orban also embarked on an unprecedented campaign: six opposition parties banded together to launch a common candidate: Marki-Zai, the 49-year-old mayor of the town.

Marki-Zai is a father of seven, a devout Christian, and equally strongly conservative. He even voted for the Youth Democratic League in 2010, but he later became disappointed with the party. He defeated candidates from the Youth Democratic League in municipal elections in a small town in southeastern Hungary, which had previously been considered a stronghold of the Youth Democratic League.

Unlike Orbán, in that question of "east" or "west," his choice was to embrace the EU rather than Russia. In an interview with Politico before the election, Marki-Zai said the vote was cast not just for him, but for Europe, because "Hungary's future lies in the EU."

However, András Bozóki also pointed out that Orbán does not want to really leave the European Union, and "eurosceptic" is only a strategy for him to attract voters. The role he wants is to be a "special member" within the EU. He is well aware that membership – with a veto power over internal EU decisions and seamless access to the EU's single market – is one of Hungary's most important diplomatic assets.

The opposition has also questioned the election results, including possible fraud and media manipulation during the election process. For example, since public media in Hungary is now largely controlled by the ruling Youth Democratic League, Marki-Zai made only one appearance on the biggest public television station before the election, while Orbán appeared almost daily. Another example was the discovery of burned and discarded ballot boxes in a region of Romania with a large Hungarian population before the election, and the mailing of ballot papers overseas was suspected of fraud.

Perhaps the most criticized by the opposition is the system of allocating seats after Orban's constitutional amendments. The ADF received less than 50 percent of the vote in the last general election, but it could get an absolute majority of two-thirds in Parliament. The reason for this is Hungary's complex electoral system: the country is divided into 106 districts, each of which elects a member of parliament, just as the seats of members of the United States Congress are distributed. But the other 93 seats were awarded to political parties according to a unique formula. This formula was designed by Orbán to make the results favorable to the ADF.

"This is a free but not fair election." Sociologist and former Hungarian Education Minister Bálint Magyar told Interface News. He has been a member of the Hungarian Parliament for a long time and is the author of Hungary: The Mafia State of the European Union. Before the election, he and colleagues published a report detailing possible election fraud in this year's vote.

Allegations of election fraud remain to be further investigated. But observers have also criticized the opposition: they have banded together but failed to come up with effective alternatives. The opposition, portrayed by Orbán as a "belligerent", is at risk of dragging Hungary into the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and even sliding into a nuclear war. Apart from unconditional support for NATO, the opposition does not have a clear strategy for dealing with the conflict.

The New York Times interviewed Tibor Tisza, a supporter of the Youth Democratic League, who owns a Taxi Company in Hungary. His views may be somewhat representative among Orban voters: he says he regrets the bloodshed in Ukraine, but he also resents the treatment of Huns in Ukraine. He sympathized with the Ukrainians, but did not want Hungary to be involved in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

"If my neighbor's house is on fire, should I burn my own house?" Tisza said.