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Vote for the 7 best items from the last 7 years!
- Police laziness criticizing the government on Facebook “is probably not conscious political action.”
- The international repercussions of the Enabling Law are more damaging to Fidesz, despite building the narrative “attacking Hungary.”
- Fidesz won the first phase of crisis management, but a serious economic and social crisis can still await the country.
- The government will have to face a situation that it has never encountered before: massive unemployment, economic recession, debt.
- Such shocks can lead to a radical change in power relations.
- There is no external and institutional limitation on the power of the government or the head of government. It wasn’t even before the Authorization Law.
- The opposition is doing well to think about what will happen if Viktor Orbán announces early elections in August.
- We spoke with the political scientist Gábor Török about the most important internal political events in recent weeks.
The purpose of the empowerment law is not actually to eliminate or restrict Hungarian democracy, but in fact to be a political trap that the opposition has entered, political scientist Gábor Török warned in early April. The package also included raising the penalty for spreading the horror, which many considered more of a kind of psychological pressure, intimidation, and probably never being used by anyone. However, on Monday and Tuesday they applied it: within 24 hours, the police acted in two cases on suspicion of spreading the horror. He slapped the authors of completely harmless Facebook posts. Could it be that on the eve of the European Parliament debate on the Hungarian Authorization Law, when the Hungarian Prime Minister instructs police chiefs on a daily basis, two of these cases would start accidentally?
Gábor Török’s personal experience shows that the Prime Minister’s interest “extends to everything that happens in the country, including surprising things.” Meanwhile, not everything that comes to light is based on the initiative of their intentions and ideas. “According to the Turks, these matters are” harmful to the government “and not beneficial to the government. We cannot know exactly what motivated them. the police actions, but the political scientist does not consider probable that “A centrally conceived element of conscious political action” Could be.
The circumstances under which the Enabling Law was passed also demonstrated that even a larger-scale political maneuver is often formed by chance.
“I also don’t imagine that I had the master plan in the first moment. At first, something came out of the rush, the ideas, the legal work, negotiations began with the opposition and there was a point where this political logic appeared in the process. ” There was a time when someone realized that this was the opportunity, that the opposition could be rotated, that political profit could be made and, from then on, that logic prevailed.
Let me give you another example that not all events are based on a great genius master plan. If we think about what the story is in the 24-48 hours when the question arose as to whether schools should be closed, perhaps only the most blinded Orbán believers, who see mistakes as the result of conscious political thought, can claim it. that the prime minister deliberately put it in his interview in the morning and then announced otherwise in the evening. “
Fidesz has a very defined and permanent system of criteria that they always want to impose, that is the logic of political governance. In Orbán, this thought is “the most conscious, the most professional, the most cynical” of all the actors, but even so it is often contingent. Not all sequences of events are based on imaginary intentions.
According to Turk, there is still no consensus in evaluating the Enabling Law today: many believe that his interpretation that the opposition ran into Orbán’s trap is wrong, but that he “has made the only possible and then profitable position on the affair”.
If we still interpret the law as a trap, would the opposition have had the opportunity to avoid it? According to the Turks, the opposition has gotten into this situation or has been partially squeezed. Three groups have played a role here: on the one hand, the government that has consciously dug this trap, on the other hand, opposition opinion leaders, public speakers, fund presidents and, finally, the opposition politicians themselves. The decision was formed in this triangle. There was very strong pressure on the opposition side not to vote. But it cannot be said that the opposition had followed blindly, they had politicians who understood this logic and argued that the easiest way would be for the opposition to try to enter the government’s crisis management and vote for the proposal. But they felt so much pressure from their own intellectuals, opinion makers, and supporters that they believed that facing it would be a greater danger in the long run than the obvious loss to them, that Fidesz would build a narrative of “opposition unable to unite in crisis” .
“At the time, I put it this way, it was a classic match between cynics and hysterics, which cynics generally always win. When I call the hysterical opposition, I tend to think of the hysterical atmosphere that forced even those who think logically, those who understand political logic, to align.“
In recent days, the law has been dealt with primarily abroad, with an unprecedented density and concentration of criticism for Viktor Orbán and his government. In just one week, the President of the European Commission, the German Minister for Foreign Affairs and the President of the European People’s Party have also strongly criticized the law. Then came the debate in the European Parliament, preceded by another spectacular diplomatic fight with Fidesz with EU politicians. And the experience of the last ten years is that Fidesz has always been able to politically benefit from these conflicts. As was the case with the media law, the constitution or the Sargentini report: there was a spectacular debate in the EU and then everyone fell asleep, Orbán and his press were able to build on the story of “attacked the country” at home.
According to Turkey, in the case of the Authorization Law, “the trap was done in the country” and it worked within the internal political framework, its international impact is no longer favorable to Fidesz. “It is true that the narrative of ‘attacking poor Hungary’ could continue to develop, but for Fidesz the international environment that seems to be developing is far from desirable, since the defense and the image and international character of Fidesz and Viktor Orbán are strongly destroy. “
“Let’s also add that in a crisis, external news affects voters’ thinking differently. When the sense of security is stirred, they don’t like to hear news that the country’s international perception is deteriorating, that the country is under attack … “
Even the first phase of the crisis is not over, it is definitely too early to announce a political winner. It is already common to find that in the first period of a crisis, voter confidence in governments tends to strengthen, people “group under one banner”, but in the later stages of the crisis the situation can change radically and quickly.
“If the results were announced now, Fidesz clearly won the first phase of crisis management in political terms, which means it is difficult to express in votes or in support of the voters. There are countries where it can be: if we look at the data Germans or Dutch, there is very significant additional support from those in government. In Hungary, this could not be expected from Fidesz from a very high level. “
But the big question is how long will the narratives built by Fidesz last if there is a protracted economic and social crisis after the health crisis. “Viktor Orbán realized that after a long and difficult period, rewriting the scenarios, he has to gain an advantage in these first weeks, build a narrative that can later act as a rescue or minimization of losses. If we look at it from here, Fidesz was able to meet these political objectives. The empowerment law played a huge role in this, and the opposition’s decision to play the Fidesz game, and the current series of international events can help a little, can help. ”
The Prime Minister, of course, does not entrust the 2022 elections to all kinds of cleverly constructed narratives. Under the guise of crisis management, a series of measures are required to weaken opposition parties and local governments.
“We also remember Viktor Orbán’s leaked phrase that he should kill the opponent when you have the chance. This happens. The most ruthless, the most conscious, if you will, in the most cynical way, even in times of crisis management, this political logic works. “
Then, voters pay attention to something else, they don’t perceive withdrawals to local governments or even their parties as a threat, so Orbán is now trying to take away from the opposition all the additional resources, additional credits, that he obtained in last October. If the elections were now or in three months, they would certainly be of great benefit to Fidesz, but 2022 is still a long way off. Very difficult months could come, which could cause much more damage to Fidesz than the damage now suffered by the municipalities led by the opposition.
In addition, Orbán causes damage not only to the opposition, but also to the municipalities of Fidesz, despite trying to make a difference with all kinds of tricks. “Both Székesfehérvár and Debrecen are suffering billions of dollars of damage from government decisions, so the tension between the local government sphere and central decision-making is also strengthening within Fidesz. I used to think that once luck changes, when the balls no longer bounce off the goalpost but start to come out, the first visible conflicts within Fidesz could develop somewhere here. “
The controversy over the Enabling Law and the recently released Freedom House report can be summed up in one simple question: can Hungary still be called a democracy? Or suppose the opposite: can Viktor Orbán be defeated in the elections?
“It wasn’t even beatable, but last October the opposition was able to cause a very significant electoral disappointment to the prime minister.” Similar events could have taken place in 2014 or 18 if the opposition were not so powerless and short-sighted and not far from knowing the political logic. “
According to the Turks, since 2010, the system of political institutions has clearly transformed and moved towards the exercise of individual power, yet the system still has the potential for political change. Even today, we cannot say that there is no chance of Fidesz’s defeat or electoral decline. But we also don’t know what Orbán will do in a situation where there is already a real possibility that power will be lost.
“I have always interpreted the activities of the government and the head of government as the main objective for him to acquire and retain political power, and as a means to do so, he enforces the political logic of power everywhere in governance. He subordinates all his decisions to this. “
This is clear even in a crisis situation: political issues have not been relegated to the background, but they are at least as important in government decisions as professional issues, which otherwise seem more important at the time.
“We can assume that this logic will not fundamentally change and that the head of government will do everything possible to guarantee that there is no change of government. The only question is what “will do everything”. What we have seen so far does not mean that the government would cross borders that would make it impossible to change the government. “
But until now, Fidesz has never been in a situation where there has been a real possibility that power will be lost. In 2012 and 15, we saw brief periods when the opposition got very close to the government and Fidesz’s support fell dramatically, but since then there has not been a single time when “one can seriously believe it, or more importantly: fear it. ” that there may be a change in the main power. “A serious economic and social crisis, and now we may be facing a crisis of this type, can make a change of power a realistic option.
“For Fidesz, not because of the Authorization Law! – For a long time now, you have had all the means to write in the Hungarian constitution what you want, to change the electoral law as you wish or to change the constitutional system more deeply. I would like to believe that this has a limit, an internal limit. But it is important to see that there is no external limit, there is no institutional limit ”.
“I always say in these debates on democracy and dictatorship that I do not believe there has been a border crossing. Even if the direction of the changes in the way of exercising power is clear, they have not reached the border crossing. Then I can express my hopes: I am confident that this will not happen in the future either. “
Therefore, Gábor Török considers it a realistic possibility that in 2022 or even earlier the conditions of power will change significantly. That’s why he put it up in an interview in January so you can imagine that in three years, Viktor Orbán will no longer be a key player in Hungarian politics. In late March, the political scientist raised another possibility, which also caused minor storms:
It is an early choice.
“Obviously, I don’t think the prime minister is planning this, but I am simply saying that, after relatively successful crisis management after the health epidemic, the prime minister begins to think about how to stay successful until 2022, there are many arguments. To think, but it is a shame that parliamentary elections are still so far away. After all, we are facing events that Fidesz has not had to face since 2010: significant unemployment, an increase in international financial exposure and the emergence of demands not satisfied from top to bottom. In this situation, they may think that there is an opportunity: an early decision can be made before the difficult economic and social steps. Obviously, this can also have a series of difficulties. We do not know how voters react. Obviously, it is also true that this has never been the case in Hungary, which is also against it. But if we look at the arg uments and possibilities on a checkered paper, there are so many arguments for early choice from Fidesz’s point of view, which makes it realistic for us to think about this, we consider it. “
It would be especially important for opposition parties to also think about what they are doing when “Viktor Orbán announces one August afternoon that after a successful management of the health crisis, before the difficult economic steps, because he is so democratic, he is asking the electorate to take the difficult steps. You could say that was not the case in 18, so people did not know what was coming and, as a born democrat, they do nothing without authority, so the majority of the government dissolves parliament and in 90 days it is an election. In such a case, the opposition would find itself in a very difficult situation, which is an additional argument to consider the possibility. If that doesn’t happen, you can tell how stupid I was. But speaking with government decision makers and people close to the government, I also see that there are many of them who think that this could be the best political solution. It may not happen, but I’m sure it will be considered. “
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