Illiberal wind blows Orbán no good

In recent weeks Hungary has found itself part of the news agenda all over Europe, and across the Atlantic too. The good news is that despite a predicted economic growth rate of 2.3%, the country is now expected to post results in excess of 3%. National Economy Minister Mihály Varga credited the revised forecast to higher-than-expected external demand for Hungarian goods, and this itself comes on the back of a GDP rise of almost 4% in just the last six months. But this wasn’t the news that spread across a continent and an ocean.  At loggerheads with his partners in the EU and the West on several occasions since he returned to office in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán raised the stakes further by effectively dissociating Hungary with liberal democracy. Using a visit to a summer camp in Băile Tușnad (Tusnádfürdő), Romania, in July to speak in front of a Hungarian minority audience, one word in particular from the address stood out – illiberal.
To condense the entire speech into a sentence is no easy task but essentially Mr. Orbán stated that liberal democracy, the normality among European, Western nations, had failed to adapt to the post-financial crisis landscape. Hungary, he said, was changing in an attempt to remain competitive, and that the liberal democratic method of state organisation was no longer the blueprint.
“The Hungarian nation,” he said, “is not a simple sum of individuals but a community that needs to be organised, strengthened and developed; in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, as freedom, etc… it does not make this ideology a central element of state organisation but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead.”
The 2010 and 2014 election victories, in which his Fidesz party won back-to-back two-thirds majority landslides, confirmed that Hungarians “expect a different way of state organisation”.
The suggestion that liberal democracy is no longer the framework that Hungary would work within was met with widespread dismay, and many commentators have taken a hard line against the prime minister. Charles Gati, writing in The American Interest, remarked that he had been “embarrassed” by the speech, and that it had “affirmed what many Hungary-watchers have known since 2000-2001, or at least since Orbán’s second term that started in 2010 and his third term that started this year: that he is no democrat and he is neither a good friend nor a good ally of the West, including the United States”.
Along with his pronouncement that liberal democracy was in a terminal decline, Mr. Orbán touched on a number of reasons why it has failed Hungary. The “twenty-year experiment,” he continued, “had questioned national interests, denied the Hungarian diaspora was part of the Hungarian nation and failed to protect national wealth.” Possibly the most damning indictment, however, was that the liberal democratic method had failed to protect the state from indebtedness.
Asserting that China and Russia are the states on which he wishes to model Hungary caused further furor. In his opinion the liberal system is no longer competitive, and any state that wants to remain or indeed return to competitiveness must reorganise along illiberal lines. The prime minister has since qualified his remarks, saying that Hungary “cannot borrow from Chinese, Russian, Japanese or South Korean models, but, at the same time, it cannot join a Western European track which is clearly losing its reserves, and perhaps it has already depleted them”.
But despite the move to illiberal democracy meaning Hungary would have to “dispense with European dogmas”, he also suggested that the illiberal Hungarian state could remain part of the European Union and that “just because something is illiberal, doesn’t mean it can’t be democratic”.
Viktor Orbán can claim the prize for making “illiberal” a mainstream term but he wasn’t the first person to put the word in the same sentence as Hungary. In 2012 Jaques Rupnik, a leading expert on Central and Eastern Europe, wrote a journal article titled “Hungary’s illiberal turn: How things went wrong”. Published in the Journal of Democracy, Rupnik’s essay paints a bleak picture of a country teetering on the edge of authoritarianism, while Europe is busy putting out the fires of the euro currency crisis. The conclusion of the essay makes for interesting and controversial reading:
“Hungary’s illiberal turn comes at a time when Europe itself is facing a major financial and economic crisis with far-reaching implications for the quality of democratic rule throughout the continent. The crisis is challenging democracy from both a technocratic and populist direction. In Greece and Italy elected but insolvent governments have already ceded vast policy powers to unelected experts. At the same time, European societies under stress are witnessing the resurgence of populist, anti-immigrant and anti-European forces. It is in this context that the EU – preoccupied with efforts to rescue the common currency – finds itself forced to wrestle the Hungarian question. Is Orbán merely a symptom of this crisis in its populist dimension, or is he part of a large-scale drift towards authoritarianism?”