On election night in Budapest yesterday, I was soundly crushed in an underground carriage, crammed in with Tisza supporters raucously celebrating their victory and the downfall of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It was as if they had stormed the Bastille, rather than scribbled an ‘x’ on a form.
I’ve been in Budapest for every election since the first post-Communist vote in 1990. I’ve never seen elation like this here, or indeed in any other election anywhere else. Most of the Tisza fans out partying were clearly first-time voters or in their mid-twenties, so for them, Orbán has always been part of the firmament. They undoubtedly have high hopes for the new prime minister Péter Magyar.
I’ve also never seen an election here (or anywhere else) with so much vitriol and so many absurd claims (e.g. ‘Viktor Orbán breeds zebras with your taxes’). Hungarians are pioneers and virtuosos in eye-gouging, mud-slinging campaigning. You clear your throat by calling your opponents ‘traitors’ (árulok) or the more specific ‘traitors to the homeland’ (hazaárulok) – but that’s the equivalent of saying good morning – before working up to the carefully prepared juicier abuse.
Everyone apparently was working for a foreign intelligence agency (I was rather offended I wasn’t approached by anyone. Come on, I went to Cambridge). Then there were the foreign intelligence agencies themselves. The Russian GRU was allegedly roaming Budapest. But as we saw in Salisbury, the GRU isn’t even capable of killing a pensioner with a deadly, wipe-out-a-town, top-secret nerve agent.
This election is the end of an era. Probably not for Orbán
Like most people here, I’m just delighted that the election and its outlandish nonsense are over. It’s true that living under a conservative Christian Democrat government has been hellish. Intolerable amounts of folk dancing; so many readings from the Bible that I’ve been tempted to get in touch with His Satanic Majesty to sign up. And just when you think it’s over and safe, more folk dancing.
But what do the jubilant Tisza voters expect from the new prime minister, Péter Magyar? He has run a brilliant campaign. Less folk dancing. He’s photogenic and in great shape. Full movie idol stuff. He gives good sound bite. Most interesting of all, apart from his stated aim of bending over for Brussels, there’s not much difference between him and the hammered Fidesz party.
Like Orbán, Magyar’s faced with a troubling reality consisting of two very tricky problems: a slumping economy and an almost total dependence on Russian energy. You can’t press conference that away. Magyar is a true politician, which means you can’t trust him an inch – so I’m curious to see how contact with important decisions will evolve him. I suspect the cheering masses won’t be cheering in a year or two, but Magyar is clever and a lack of principles gives him enormous flexibility. Maybe he’ll come up with something.
This election is the end of an era. Probably not for Orbán. Again, I’m curious to see which direction he goes in; I can’t see him spending more time with his family or taking up golf.
It’s hard to figure out what really damaged his campaign. The defeat was savage. For the young, Orbán has the disadvantage of being an old fart. For those at the bottom of the pile, seeing his chums living in luxury might have been the factor. The Fidesz campaign had a number of unforced errors, notably restrictions on a gay pride event and the MP János Lázár suggesting that the Roma community is only fit for cleaning toilets.
Will Orbán lounge in parliament and snipe, or will he head off to Brussels to continue his feud face-to-face with the EU? Or will he actually take up golf? For some reason the words of Obi Wan Kenobi come to mind: ‘If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.’ As does Arnold Schwarzenegger’s: ‘I’ll be back’.
The truly significant result of this election is that Hungary is now a two-party state. Or maybe not even that. What hardly anyone has noticed in the hubbub of the wild west mass brawl between Fidesz and Tisza is that the MSZP, the successor party to the Communist party, didn’t even field candidates, and its escape pod, the Democratic Coalition party (DK) has failed to gain any seats. The last taint of the old Marxist-Leninism has evaporated from the scene. There was a Workers’ party candidate in the constituency Magyar won, but he didn’t get any love. The Hungarian ‘Left’ had more in common with Cosa Nostra than Clement Attlee, but for the moment they’re gone. Along with the Greens.
The Che Guevaras of the Western universities, think tanks and pundit vehicles who are now hoopla and doing cartwheels about Orbán’s departure from power don’t seem to have noticed that the Hungarian parliament is now entirely composed of Tisza, Fidesz and a very minor hard-right party Mi Hazánk. All of them are right-wing parties to some extent (depending on whom you believe). That’s interesting. There’s no Left left.
