Orbanland

Why Viktor Orbán's Hungary Matters

Lasse Skytt

• Publisher: New Europe Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780999541685
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From Europe to America, political landscapes have shifted in recent years in a way summed up in microcosm no better than by the trajectory of one small country, Hungary--whose leader, Viktor Orbán, has gained outsized international notoriety as the bad boy of the European Union for his steadfast alternative to the liberal democracy that has dominated the Western world since 1989.Orbánland is the fascinating story of a Danish journalist who moves to Hungary to gain an insight into the political complexities of this divisive European country. Along the way, he encounters people from all walks of life, and he learns as much about the Hungarians as about himself. In a narrative as absorbing and as it is vital for the lessons it carries as America prepares for its 2020 presidential elections, he asks: Can we get along with those on the other side of the fence? Is it worth even trying? His answers are surprising.By guiding us through a polarized landscape of differing opinions, Lasse Skytt delivers a broader perspective on Viktor Orbán's Hungary, one that suggests possibilities for the future of Europe and America. His journey will leave us questioning our own truths, and, ultimately, which side we are on.

Part I Essays

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“History rarely starts when we think it did, and it never seems to end when we think it should.”

—Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America

Chapter One Arrivals in Europe

The Memory Wars

One of the first people I met upon my arrival in Debrecen was a local real estate agent named József. He helped me and my wife to find a place to stay. It took weeks to find something that matched our “Western expectations,” privileged and imperialistic as it may sound. Afterward, when József noticed the look on my face, puzzled and perplexed as I was trying to make some sense of my first impression of rural Hungary, he said something that I have heard many times since: “Culture, history, family, our way of living, our traditions—all this means everything to us.” By “us” he meant Hungarians, and by “everything” he meant everything.

I took note of that fact and accepted the clear differences between Hungary and Denmark. Not that people in Western countries don’t consider family and tradition important. People in Central and Eastern Europe are just more actively, often religiously, upholding such values. Fair enough, we cannot all be the same, I thought to myself and remained a little suspicious about this “old-fashioned lifestyle” in eastern Hungary. Until a couple of years later, when I realized that in fact something might be rotten in Denmark; or, rather, in Western society as a whole. I came across Utopia for Realists by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, a self-critical book on Western society and its lack of a grand narrative. Reading it finally made me understand that Hungarians do have a reasonable point when they vote for a politician like Viktor Orbán and defend Christian family values and conservative traditions. Bregman writes about Western society that radical ideas about a different world have become almost literally unthinkable: “The expectations of what we as a society can achieve have been dramatically eroded, leaving us with the cold, hard truth that without utopia, all that remains is a technocracy. Driving it all is a force sometimes called liberalism, an ideology that has been all but hollowed out. What’s important now is to “just be yourself” and “do your thing.” Freedom may be our highest ideal, but ours has become an empty freedom.”¹

Bregman’s book made me realize that in Western societies, we are well past the era of the big collectives. The grand narratives. Memberships of churches and labor unions are in decline, fragmented friendships on social media outmatch the traditional family as young people’s common ground. Change is the only constant. All we care about is resolving problems so we can enjoy life, and our politicians today are public management consultants more than they are inspiring thinkers. The old truths are falling apart—religion, family structures, and political ideologies—and what do we have left?

Back in Hungary, things certainly look different. Many of the Hungarians I have met through the years do not understand why their conservative political culture is condemned with such hostility by the Western world, especially by the Western media. They are surprised to discover that foreign observers are often patronizing what Hungarians perceive as their “old-fashioned” way of living. Well, guilty as charged.

As I gradually became more aware of this schism and reflected upon it, I wanted to understand the deeper reasons behind this apparent mismatch between, on the one hand, how Hungarians viewed themselves, and, on the other hand, how Westerners looked at them. I found some answers with the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev. In his book After Europe, he argues that there exist two types of Europeans: Those who have experienced oppressive regimes that have fallen apart from within, and those who have not.² Thirty years ago, Eastern Europeans were first-hand witnesses to the collapse of communism. In Western Europe, people saw it from the outside without understanding that the fall of communism was not just a liberation from oppression for the Eastern Europeans; it was also the traumatic feeling of experiencing their whole world coming to an end.

The German political scientist Christian Welzel has studied what existential pressure does to people. In his book Freedom Rising, he states that in places where the existential pressure has been fading for many decades, such as in Denmark or Western Europe, people are more open-minded. They prioritize freedom over security, autonomy over authority, diversity over uniformity, and creativity over discipline.³ By the same token, persistent existential pressures, as experienced more recently in Hungary and Eastern Europe, keep people’s minds closed, in which case they emphasize the opposite priorities: Security over freedom, authority over autonomy, uniformity over diversity and discipline over creativity. Relatively recent events in Hungary, such as the Soviet oppression and the political and economic disappointments and turmoil since the 1990s—combined with Hungarians’ tendency to often articulate their hardships over these events—can explain the fact that many Hungarians show discrimination and hostility against out-groups.

By the start of the 1990s, most people expected Hungary to catch up rapidly to Western living standards. After all, Hungary had been one of the least oppressed countries in the Eastern Bloc, at least since the 1960s, with its pseudodemocratic Goulash communism under János Kádár’s leadership. Despite that—or possibly because of that—during the transition to capitalism, Hungary soon came to suffer from unregulated liberalism. In an attempt to boost competitiveness and reduce the country’s crushing debt, the country hurried to privatize state-owned companies, which also seemed like a way to adopt capitalism and attract foreign investment. In almost no time, Hungary not only became liberalized—it became more liberalized than most “old capitalist” countries in the West.

Almost overnight, members of the former communist party re-emerged as free-market liberals with a global and elitist worldview of mainstream EU politics. They remained in powerful positions throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium. At the same time, economic inequality increased between the richer residents of Budapest and the population in much of the countryside, where unemployment was higher. Over the years following the transition from communism, a growing disappointment with the highly anticipated liberal democracy was entrenched all around Hungary: In 2009, just a few months before Viktor Orbán took power, a poll showed that 72 percent of Hungarians felt they had been better off under communism.⁴ Evidently, the experience most Hungarians had of liberalism was that it was deeply unsatisfying.

According to the Hungarian-British sociologist Frank Furedi, the political response from Viktor Orbán was clear and understandable, yet controversial: “Since Fidesz emerged as the dominant right-wing party in the late 1990s, Orbán consciously built up an image of the “great Hungarian past” out of second-hand fragments of pre-1944 ideology, while there was little that left-wingers and liberals could set against the emotionally powerful, history-based nationalist agitation.”⁵

This idea appealed to millions of Hungarians—hence the aforementioned lack of a grand narrative among liberals—and it also explains, in some respect, the clash of civilizations between the East and the West that we have seen grow larger over the past decade. In the West, 1945 was and still is regarded as the “Year Zero” of European progress. The liberal EU narrative celebrates the post-1945 achievements, while everything that happened before that year is looked upon with great skepticism and fear. In the East, historic events are more recent. Postcommunist countries, including Hungary, did not experience this post-1945 progress, so after the fall of communism in 1989, they had to decide: Which way to go? “Go West!” sang the Pet Shop Boys in 1992. However, the disappointing experiments with Western liberalism up through the 1990s eventually paved the way for Viktor Orbán’s conservative—some would say controversial—political alternative, inspired by “the great Hungarian past.”

While Western society has grown more and more “historyless” into the twenty-first century, in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary the past continues to play a significant role, meaning that most people spend a lot of time dwelling on their nation’s bygone days. However, not all Hungarians agree on the government’s interpretation of history. For instance, there have been constant disputes regarding the Orbán government’s erection of the “Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation” in Budapest’s Liberty Square. Critics of the 2014-built monument complain that it points the finger only at Germany for the horrors afflicted on the nation during the war—and that it neglects the fact that Hungarian collaborators also had a responsibility for the war crimes of that era, not least Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross Party. Inside the Great Synagogue on Dohány Street in Budapest, I once met an angry rabbi who was outraged by what he called “Orbán’s falsification of history,” referring to the disputed monument. In front of the memorial on Liberty Square, hundreds of handwritten notes and other artefacts can be seen criticizing the disregarding of Hungary’s own role in the Holocaust. Other memory wars in Hungary include the legacy of the communist dictatorship, the meaning of Trianon (i.e.,, the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which formally ended World War I and under which Hungary lost much of its territory); and the question of how the 1956 Revolution should be remembered.

Initially, I was somewhat surprised by the intense, constant presence of Hungarian history in most political debates. But I soon learned that this had a lot to do with communism: For more than forty years, Hungarians had been discouraged and often even barred from publicly discussing or reflecting on their past. Therefore, after communism, they had a desire to recover the historical traditions associated with the identity of being Hungarian. Most Hungarians I have encountered over the years—on both sides of the political spectrum—have expressed the belief that there is something distinct about their way of life. Many of them take the view that it is worth preserving their heritage and keeping it very much alive.

The Hungarian Austrian writer Paul Lendvai sums it up like this: “Fears of a slow death for a small nation, and the loneliness of a people with a language unique across the Carpathian Basin, have remained the decisive factors in Hungarian history.”⁶ The list of Hungary’s catastrophes is long: The devastation of a country left in the lurch by the Occident during the Mongol invasion in 1241. The defeat in Mohács in 1526 that resulted in a century-and-a-half of Turkish occupation. The crushing of the struggle for independence in 1848–49 by the combined forces of Austria and Russia. The destruction of historical Hungary with a diktat of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. Then the four decades of communism after the World War II and the bloody suppression of the October Uprising in 1956. Lendvai continues: “Taken together, these misfortunes have exacerbated the national sense of abandonment. In spite of the centuries of foreign rule, however, the Hungarians have been able to preserve their national identity. It is their passionate love of their motherland that has always given them the strength to survive and to overcome all calamities, trapped, as they believe they are, between the Germans and the Slavs, without any kith or kin and separated by the ‘Chinese Wall’ of their language.”

To many of Viktor Orbán’s critics in the West, his focus on the nation’s history and identity might sound like “the politics of nostalgia,” but it is hard to deny the fact that such sentiments provide a cultural terrain where traditional values are seen to possess meaning. A meaning that is sometimes hard to find for disillusioned, individualistic Westerners without a grand narrative to live by.

Migration Broke the Camel’s Back

All of these justifications for the different values between Western Europe and Eastern Europe are quite theoretical. After all, history, identity, and culture are rather abstract concepts, and they can be interpreted very differently, even within societies. And so it was not Orbán’s politics of nostalgia, but something far more practical and visible that would come to illustrate the real differences between the East and the West. Something everyone could see with their own eyes: Migration. Hungary was one of the first countries in Europe to experience the palpably increasing inflow of migrants and refugees during the 2010s. Well, small islands like Lampedusa in Italy and Lesbos in Greece for many years had functioned as “unofficial arrival centers” for migrants coming to Europe from the Middle East or Africa. But as the so-called Balkan Route gradually took form around 2013–2014, Hungary was on the forefront as the outermost Schengen country in Europe—belonging, that is, to the Schengen Area, comprising (as of this writing) twenty-six European Union and other states forming a mostly single jurisdiction for international travel without border checks.

In the fall of 2013, I remember going to the Office of Immigration and Nationality, situated a few miles northeast of Debrecen’s city center. As an EU citizen working in Hungary, I had to register there. The process took only half an hour, and afterward, before biking back to the city center, I discovered that right next to the Office of Immigration was the Refugee Camp of Debrecen, the largest in Hungary at the time. From the main road, Sámsoni Street, I could observe hundreds of men, women, and children residing in the former military barracks that served as the refugee camp. In front of the light-blue shelters was a wall, no more than six feet tall, and above it I noticed surveillance cameras pointing down toward the concrete ground of the site.

Earlier in 2013, I later found out, there had been an incident in the Debrecen camp when a fight broke out between migrant groups. At least one hundred policemen had to be called to the scene. Already back then, in the summer of 2013, the camp was terribly overcrowded, and according to local media, some of the people in the camp did not have a bed to sleep on. It turned out that things were about to get worse.

A year later, in mid-2014, when I returned from abroad, more and more migrants and refugees kept arriving in Debrecen. The numbers were growing fast. On a few occasions I saw crowds of apparently foreign people (judging from their skin color and the languages they spoke) gathered on the streets and main squares of the city, sometimes by the hundreds. The gate of the refugee camp was open, so most of the people were allowed to leave the camp. Presumably because of the lack of beds in Hungary’s largest camp, many migrants and refugees decided to take shelter on the streets of Debrecen.

However, I also observed that most of the local Hungarians barely took notice of the migrants’ presence in the city center, for some reason, even though they were almost impossible to ignore. The Hungarians ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Welcome to Orbánland
• Author’s Note
• Part I: Essays
• Part II: Features
• Part III: Conversations
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author