Miklos Haraszti is wrong about Viktor Orbán. Reading his sharply-worded essay, you might have wondered how any Hungarian in their right mind could vote for someone so obviously opportunistic, nepotistic and illiberal. You certainly would not have known that this is precisely what just under half the electorate in Hungary did in the general election last month.
As observed by Roger Scruton in his earlier analysis, this is how close Orbán and the parties in his centre-right government came to making history in this region; simply by being re-elected. But understanding the reasons for their defeat is more than a matter of tracking trends common to the countries of the old Eastern bloc. It is also about swimming in the political currents some of them invigorating, others more dangerous now swirling around Europe as a whole.
Too velvet a revolution
To start in Hungary, however, where the essence of Harasztis case seems to be that first in opposition, then during the last four years as prime minister the abrasive young Orbán has torn up the terms of the contract that freed the country from communism in the first place. This is a popular perception among those who, like Haraszti, during the 1980s were courageous (though, in truth, little persecuted) dissidents and who went on to play leading roles in the round-table talks with the authorities that led to the introduction of multi-party democracy.
The problem with the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 is that they were not revolutions at all. Certainly it was a great achievement to avoid (with the exception of Romania) blood in the streets. But compromise was bought at a price: namely an enticingly soft landing for the old communists, who were expected merely to drop out of politics for a few years and pursue far more lucrative careers in business before resuming where they had left off only now rebranded as socialists or social democrats. This has been the pattern everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. It is nowhere better illustrated than in the CV of Hungarys new prime minister, Peter Medgyessy, who served as deputy premier in the communists final administration before going on to become a banker much in demand among Western finance houses. However, he periodically returns to the political arena when his former colleagues and comrades ask him.
How much does this matter? For liberals such as Haraszti, the fact that the ex-communists now lose elections as well as win them is proof of their commitment to the new rules of the game. But to me this does not fully account for the way in which his party, the Alliance of Free Democrats, strove so hard during the crucial early years of the transition in Hungary to exonerate their former tormentors and to defend them against the demands of the Right for a period of political quarantine.
Two further explanations are needed. The first is based on simple arithmetic. As with classical liberal parties everywhere in Europe, the appeal of the Free Democrats looks to be limited to between five and ten per cent of the electorate. Unable to come to power by themselves, they have opted to throw in their lot with the old communists, now known as the Socialist Party. They have twice been handsomely rewarded for providing them with a veneer of respectability: from 1994-98 and again in the wake of the election in April (in this instance, receiving no less than five ministries in the new coalition government, or practically one portfolio for every 60,000 votes).
But why the Left rather than the Right? The latter has also won two elections in Hungary, in 1990 and 1998, and as Harasztis personal reminiscence shows there was a time not all that long ago when Orbán and his fellow student firebrands, who in the late 1980s founded the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz), were much admired by the older generation of dissidents.
1968 and all that
But there was also a time some twenty years earlier when those same dissidents had themselves been students and no less hot-headed ones at that. It should not be forgotten that 1968 had almost as much impact on those countries behind the Iron Curtain as on the western half of the continent. From Prague to Paris, the anti-establishment message was certainly similar. If the communist authorities cracked down harder on protesters than their capitalist counterparts, that was not just because they were more ruthless (which they were) or because they feared the West wanted to open a new front in the Cold War. On the contrary, what they really feared from their homegrown critics was not Radio Free Europe style subversion, but being exposed for the conformist timeservers they had become, as opposed to the zealous ideologues they had ceased to be; in other words, for swerving from the path of true Marxism.
Haraszti knows this better than anyone, having (like another of todays prominent Free Democrats the current mayor of Budapest) gone through a Maoist phase during this period and suffered his first bout of political harassment for establishing a Vietnam Solidarity Committee. Sartre, Ginsberg and Habermas apart, to such activists the West looked little better than the East. And, as Scruton points out, in the form of such local philosophical gurus as Gyorgy Lukacs a former Stalinist then posing as a humanist they thought they had the means to save us as well as themselves.
Which is why it is so odd to find Haraszti coming across nowadays as a champion of consensus and stability while also exhorting Hungary to become a Western nation (as though over the last thousand years it has ever been anything else). It would be tempting to explain this change in outlook as a typical case of yesterdays radical turned todays reactionary. Only conservative seems to be the worst term in his charge-sheet against Orbán, and it is plain he still revels in being thought progressive.
There is in fact no contradiction here, for the simple reason that to a large extent the values of 1968 are the new consensus. It has become a cliché to observe that many of the front-rank political players in Europe Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder, Joschka Fischer, Javier Solana are either in spirit or deed soixante-huitards. Less often observed is how this also holds for what used to be called the Other Europe. Take, for example, Czech President Vaclav Havel, the influential Polish publicist Adam Michnik and Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic (a fervent disciple of the Frankfurt School).
Experts in what has perhaps prematurely been termed post-communism are fond of saying that the countries caught in this phase will not catch up with the West until they have developed a strong middle class. It is not made clear how they are supposed to do this when for many of those in charge of their destinies both inside and outside the region the main aim is just as in 1968 to épater les bourgeoisie.
A football fanatic from the provinces who used to dress entirely in denim, Viktor Orbán may be an unlikely candidate for the role of saviour of middle Hungary. But this is what he and Fidesz have become and why they are despised by sections of the intelligentsia who see in the Transition an opportunity to relaunch the social experiment they had tried to ignite decades earlier. The irony is, of course, that the then opponents of these eternal rebels the communists are today their allies. The latter may not approve of their newfound friends radical agenda now any more than they did then. But if a handful of ministries (usually culture and education) and top positions in the media are the price they have to pay for being legitimised abroad so that they can carry on using their old networks to steal with impunity at home, it is an offer they can hardly refuse.
A new Hungarian uprising?
This brings us back to the recent election, which saw Orbán demonised by the Free Democrats as a dangerous populist and nationalist (tags also used increasingly inside the EU to marginalise those said to be beyond the pale of civilised politics). To underline these concerns, Daniel Cohn-Bendit who in 1968 led from the barricades but is nowadays a respectable MEP himself descended on Budapest, where he displayed his newfound attachment to the political centre-ground by schmoozing with a hastily-created satellite of the Socialists called the Centre Party.
It is hard, though, to depict your opponent as an extremist when he has the support of half the electorate. So millions of Hungarians were condemned together, for daring to take democracy seriously by holding a series of rallies the largest seen in the country since 1989. Dragging politics into the street was dismissed by superior commentators, who in the same breath applauded the mass demonstrations against Le Pen and Berlusconi that were being held a few hundred miles away. To raise the tone of the debate, the Socialists and Free Democrats showed the kind of élite-oriented politics they prefer by organising a discussion for intellectuals in Budapests premier cafe their followers standing in the rain outside. Perhaps they were simply observing Lenins dictum: better fewer but better.
Nor is there anything extreme about Orbáns policies. During the first eight years of what Haraszti refers to as Hungarys exemplary Handshake Transition, living standards for most people plummeted as the old communist nomenklatura hid behind imported neo-liberal economic dogma to indulge in an orgy of asset-stripping. Organised crime flourished and the rule of law though often invoked went largely ignored. Ordinary Hungarians, who hoped to find solace among these difficulties by at least reconnecting with those parts of their countrys proud past suppressed by the communists, found themselves labelled as proto-fascists and advised to pin their hopes instead on the patronising platitudes embodied in the open society and on the banal big-happy-family slogans spread by the EU (which has yet to make good on its rhetoric by actually admitting a single new member to the East).
The Fidesz-led government of the last four years has tried to reverse this period of decline and increasing despair through measures that combine basic values with modern methods for promoting them: tax breaks for families; student- and home-loan programmes; large-scale publicprivate investment projects. Along with a clampdown on the Mafia and encouragement for a reborn sense of national pride, these are the policies that led to the parties behind Orbán coming within a few tens of thousands of votes of winning the election in April.
The same policies have also created plenty of enemies. These range from liberal intellectuals, such as Haraszti, to old communist apparatchiks such as the leader of the Socialist Party, from big business interests (inside and outside Hungary) disturbed by Orbáns attempts to regulate them, to bureaucrats in Brussels, who are appalled by the presumptuousness contained within his comment that There is life outside the EU.
This is quite a line-up. But Orbán faced far more intimidating forces when in 1989, at a groundbreaking official event held to honour the memory of Imre Nagy (the leader of the 1956 uprising who was later executed by the communists), he made a speech in which he called for Soviet troops to leave Hungary. Today, moreover, Europe is filled with voters clearly dissatisfied by an intellectual and political consensus that deliberately mistakes any kind of authority for authoritarianism.
In Hungary in recent weeks, such views have often been voiced at public gatherings, which in terms of scale and atmosphere have evoked memories of 1989. Whether the promise of that year can ever be fulfilled without first confronting the legacy of 1968 is a question Hungarians, in common with their neighbours and indeed with Europeans across the continent, can no longer avoid.
