The Plight of Hungary

My last blog post entitled Missing the Boat was written the night after I returned to Brussels. Monday morning, back in the office, I witnessed my office in crisis mode. On every major media source in Hungary, Kinga was being called a traitor to the nation.

I alluded in my previous post to the turbulent political situation in Hungary; that situation defined our week in the office. In order to understand the political atmosphere in Hungary a brief informal history lesson is required.

A brief history lesson

After the iron curtain fell, the first democratically elected president of Hungary was a political prisoner of the soviets, a JRR Tolkien scholar, a socialist and Kinga's father. His bipartisan government was wildly popular and is favorably remembered to this day. Unfortunately for the socialists however, the economic prosperity which was presumptively assumed with the introduction of capitalism did not manifest. The Hungarian people elected a more conservative government which began to redirect all funds away from Budapest into the country side, not a wise move if the wealthy voting public all live in Budapest. The conservatives were replaced by a socialist group in 2002. Kinga served as secretary of state under this socialist government in 2006. This government was in power during the lead up to the financial crisis which began two years after the socialists were elected for a second term. In September 2006 Prime Minster Ferenc Gyurscany stood before the parliament and said “last term we failed the people, we were corrupt and inefficient and we lied to the people of Hungary. This time we will rectify our mistakes!” The conservatives got a video of this speech , removed the section where he said “this time we will rectify our mistakes” and released it to the public. People were outraged and there were violent protests in the streets.

With the next election the Fidez conservative party experienced a land slide victory together with their ultra conservative partners, the Jobik party...a land slide of 3/4s majority. With this majority they had the constitutional authority to rewrite the constitution , which they have done...three separate times in five years. Thus endith the Brief Historical Lesson.

In response to the threats to democracy facing Hungary, Mrs Goncz and two other socialist Hungarian MEPs drafted an parliamentary opinion stating that the state of affairs within Hungary was so dire that EU sanctions should be put into action to force Hungary to fall into line. In their report they focused on three separate policies the conservatives had enacted. The first was that the Hungarian supreme court had been under the jurisdiction of the national government. They also appointed five new judges to the bench, and you can guess the political leanings of these new judges. Secondly they introduced a citizenship policy which allows for anyone of Hungarian decent, living in “Big Hungary,” the territories formally held by the Hungarian empire, to vote in Hungarian elections. Without paying taxes...or living in the areas effected by the election...they get to decide who the political leaders are. If you are living abroad and still care to vote in your ethnic homeland's elections, how do you think you would vote? You would vote nationalist , which in Hungary equates conservative. Third and finally, the government extended the post for the person in charge of the media from five years to nine. If by some miracle the ruling party were to fall out of power, the appointed media official would be able to paint the work of the socialists in a negative light for four years.

The Socialist MEPs decision to criticize the above listed activities prompted the Hungarian media, which toes the party line, to describe Mrs. Goncz and her colleagues as traitors of the state and to publicly demand that every member of the Socialist Hungarian delegation be replaced in the upcoming election. While this does not effect Mrs. Goncz in terms of he next election (she isnt running) it is personally embarrassing and painful for her family considering they are all active politically.

My experience this week in the office of having to research all of this information regarding the state of Hungarian politics, which as I indicated previously I had come to believe was somewhat stable, has been hugely beneficial to my understanding of our course. We have been examining the rise of Nazism and the Stazi infrastructure across both our readings and our travels as a class, but witnessing the early signs of a similar style of government come in to power in Hungary has been terribly alarming and informative. Alarming in large part because I realize that much like the Nazi party, the Hungarians have democratically elected their government which is ultra-nationalist, antisemitic and unconcerned with their image abroad.