At home: Zoltán Balog, former minister, may be bishop

The 2019 Summer Synod of the Hungarian Reformed Church in Hungary gave a telling sign that Zoltán Balog, who had left his ministerial post in 2018 and was increasingly moving away from active politicking, was waiting with open arms for one of the posts. tallest in the church. An earlier provision of the synod stated that a bishop can only be one who “has at least 10 years of continuous and independent pastoral service.” With a small but not insignificant earlier erasure – the deletion of the word “continuous” – the church’s top decision makers gave Balog, who kept his mantle at an angle for nearly a decade (without serving a pastor during his career politics) a worthy return.

After his ministry, Balog, who resigned from his parliamentary term and later the head of the Hungarian Civic Cooperation Association, which also organizes Viktor Orbán’s annual evaluators, was treated as an obvious fact in Reformed church circles that he could succeed István Bogárdi Szabó. Even setbacks and divorce at a young age should not be an obstacle to this. He had previously stated this in the HVG portrait that he had already repented enough to listen to his heart as a young pastor at the time and took his girlfriend to an altar without the permission of the bishop, whom he later divorced. By the way, the Hungarian Reformed still have their bishop remarried, where the divorce of the pastors is a disciplinary offense (although the assessment of this varies from one church district to another) if it is for reasons attributable to them. Regarding the latter, Balog had previously said only that he had voluntarily stayed away from the pulpit for two years as a self-imposed penance and cleansing.

As a minister, Balog also felt that he was still primarily a pastor. From the outside, however, not much was seen, for example, so he testified at the time of his ministerial entry that the government was pretending to be a conscience.

Balog became the spiritual leader of Viktor Orbán in 1998 as an ecclesiastical adviser to the prime minister, in 2006 as a member of parliament for Fidesz, and in 2012 as leader of the Ministry of Humanities under the words of the Bible, when the Index in 2016 – he asked about the rapid and spectacular enrichment of the oligarchs, their urinary way of life. (Saying: “Why do you look for the splinter in your neighbor’s eyes without noticing the beam inside you?”) However, it was important to point out that “this government is specifically characterized by Puritanism.”

If someone, Balog, as a descendant of a herding family in a mining town in Borsod county, who himself had been in the service of the Lord at an early age, would have had a “golden cap” to speak out on moral issues. It did not. He was also left speechless during anti-refugee campaigns based on xenophobia. More specifically, in Germany, in the place of his youth studies, he dared to affirm that “not all migrants are terrorists or rapists”, which, according to an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he would have liked to have written on posters anti-refugee. However, when he faced his statement at home, he already said, “a matter of campaign technique”, that to realize the danger and fear, the messages must be simplified.

Pastoral profession here or there, Balog has previously spoken that the commandment of Jesus, which includes love for the enemy, is alien to life, since “everyone can only be loved in principle.” So, he said, as he said, he is targeting the world’s most threatened minority, Christianity. But not for all Christians. For example, he voluntarily helped revoke the ecclesiastical status of the Christian congregation led by Gábor Iványi. Then, just when he was supposed to defend Protestants as the head of government for the 2017 series of events on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the denomination also distributed a cocktail to Lutherans. He defended Zsolt Bayer, who classified Pope Francis as an insane old man, saying that Martin Luther (the founder of the Lutheran Church) said something harsher about popes. His statement was requested by evangelicals who had repeatedly stood up to the government, saying that the minister’s statement reflected an approach that had been going on for centuries.

The fact that “the hand of every saint is bent toward him” can only be said in part about Balog’s ministerial action. Although his church received state subsidies orders of magnitude higher than the proportion of members of the denomination, and the government also entered into new concession agreements, these were “achievements” attributable to the personal decision of Viktor Orbán, who professed to be reformed, more than to the pressure power of Balog. And while his ministerial reign called the proclamation of Good Friday a public holiday one of his proudest achievements, even this measure, which in fact has a very secular purpose (to extend the Holy Week holidays), cannot be clearly linked to she.

However, it is also a fact that as a minister, and this can be written in his favor, he did not get rich from politics. He was not characterized by urination, a luxurious life, he did not have confused business. On the other hand, he overlooked that the EU funds intended to help and put the gypsies to work had been shamefully handed over by the Flórián Farkas, for whom he had done a lot since he was young, and then the money returned by them was I would reimburse in taxpayer florins. (After his ministry, he took over Fark’s Roma affairs for a short time, but we couldn’t trace his substantive work in this capacity.)

Regarding his professional performance, he has not failed in terms of his own ministerial portfolio. While he emphasized the humanization of governance, specifically at his request, the Ministry of Resources was renamed “nationally human”, it easily helped to declare viable for people with disabilities, measurable neglect of health care in human lives and the centralization of education. The latter, quite cynically, tried to banalize “exaggerating the bike.” And he couldn’t convince Orban that the human mammoth’s wallet, which had been created by merging different sectors, should be cut (he left the velvet chair when he changed government last year).

He gave his name to making government loyalty the primary aspect of resource allocation in public financing of culture. He awarded ministerial recognition to the leader of his far-right cult band, the Carpathian Ensemble, and awarded the highest state award to journalists, the Dance Prize, to Ferenc Szaniszló, who voiced his views on xenophobia. The Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA) gave its blessing to become omnipotent with the hypocritical explanation that “we gave it to the artists to decide for themselves.” To which only the subsequent incorporation is desired, in June of this year, as a former minister, he promised to be a delegate to the MMA Supervisory Board. He also became a member of the committee that decided to award the Kossuth and Széchenyi awards. Thus, on the ten-member board, Balog is today the only judge who is neither a scientist nor an artist, nor does he own any of the awards. It is not yet known whether he would hold this position as bishop. Nor would he return to his recent tenure, in the spirit of which he now works to serve Viktor Orbán’s non-Christian system as a roving ambassador for “critical social issues.”