Hungarian conundrum: Old-style dictator or modern democrat?

SO is the EU to be led by an old-style dictator for the next six months?

This is the question being asked about the prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orban.

He laughs off being compared to the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin by saying he has been called worse — Hitler for instance.

When he is accused of not being a democrat he reminds us that he was brave enough in 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the reburial of those killed in the Hungarian uprising of 1956 to call for free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

“We have shed a lot of blood for freedom, gave our lives for democracy”, he reminded European Commission President Barroso in Budapest last week.

A lawyer by training who spent six months in Oxford on a George Soros scholarship writing a thesis on British liberal politics, he helped turn the radical youth organisation, Fidez, into the right wing party of the same name.

This is his second time in government as prime minister — he led the country for four years from 1989 to 2002 when he made sweeping reforms, lowering taxes, raising social welfare payments and centralising power.

His reducing plenary sessions in parliament to just a few days every third week depriving the opposition of the right to question the government, and his boycotting parliament for a full 10 months do not suggest a man committed to democracy.

After this and following corruption scandals involving some of his ministers and those of his coalition partner, he failed to be re-elected twice and spent the next eight years in the political wilderness.

But last April he won a spectacular and almost unprecedented two thirds majority of seats in the Parliament.

Now back in power he has resumed where he left off eight years ago, taking full advantage of his unassailable majority and making it clear that it’s a case of “winner takes all”.

He has pushed through a raft of new legislation over the past few months including the media law that will prove to be his Achilles heel during this six month presidency. It is designed to allow the government-appointed body take issue with any journalist over almost anything. Some of his ministers defended it saying that they knew they were taking risks with the right of freedom of speech and the media, but it was the only way to get rid of the communists who control the media. It has to be said that the media is split between those that support the previous Socialist party government and the current Fidez one.

Hungary’s president Pal Schmitt explained that the first right was human dignity and all other rights, including a free media, must come second. He, like the other members of Fidez, were unable to define “human dignity”.

The Communications minister tacitly acknowledged that the law was not very democratic, when he said: “You cannot compare a democracy here in Hungary with the older democracies of western Europe”.

It’s the kind of thing dictators of impoverished African countries say to justify their refusal to hold elections or unorthodox methods.

There is little doubt that corruption in public life is rife. The power grab seen throughout eastern Europe of public property and utilities after the fall of the USSR appears to continue under new guises.

All this was known when the EU admitted Hungary and other former communist states to the Union seven years ago.

Their failure to develop into mature democracies with a healthy civil society is coming home to roost. For the next six months the balance the presidency should give to the EU will be missing as Viktor Orban’s weaknesses are taken advantage of by the big member states, the MEPs and the Commission.