GWYNNE DYER RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin may not be able to save himself, but he may already have saved another despot, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (pictured).
There is an election in Hungary next Sunday, and it looks like Orbán may actually win it. A month ago he was trailing the opposition badly, but then Russia invaded Ukraine.
Hungary is one of the new-model ‘soft’ dictatorships that look like democracies to the average passer-by. After all, there are no secret police, you can criticise the government publicly, and they actually count all the votes in the elections. Sometimes they find a few extra votes as well, but Orbán really has won three more or less fair elections in a row.
Yet he actually is a dictator (‘The Viktator’, some people call him) despite the free elections. They donot need to be rigged in advance, because Orbán controls almost all the media that thevoters get their information from. And he doesnot even need to win a majority of the votes, because the election districts are gerrymandered in his favour.
He eliminated the ‘liberal’ media by making them unprofitable (no government advertising, expensive lawsuits, etc.), and then getting rich friends to buy them up at bargain prices and sing his praises in them. Over 90% of the Hungarian media are pro-Orbán, although there is no formal censorship.
Orbán’s greatest success was extending citizenship to over a million ethnic Hungarians who live as minorities in surrounding countries – and also giving them access to generous Hungarian social benefits. They may never have been to Hungary, but they make up one-tenth of the electorate, they take the money — and 95% of them vote for Fidesz.
In the media, there is a ceaseless torrent of hate propaganda against minorities (Jews, Roma, and gays) and especially immigrants. For a dozen years the country has been told that Fidesz is their only defence against an Islamised Hungary where real Hungarians would be an oppressed minority, although no sane Muslim would ever voluntarily choose to live there.
A depressingly large number of Hungarians, mostly older, poorly educated or rural, believed the whole package, but Orbán’s victories also depended on the fact that the opposition parties were chronically at war with one another. This time he was in serious trouble, because all six of them had managed to come together and back the same candidate.
- Chamisa under fire over US$120K donation
- Mavhunga puts DeMbare into Chibuku quarterfinals
- Pension funds bet on Cabora Bassa oilfields
- Councils defy govt fire tender directive
Keep Reading
They couldnot agree on much else, so the challenger they chose was a rather colourless centre-right politician called Péter Márki-Zay. Nevertheless, enough people were fed up with the cronyism and the lies that by a month ago Fidesz and the opposition alliance were running neck-and-neck. And then Russia invaded Ukraine.
That should have been a disaster for Orbán, who rivals Donald Trump in his fanboy adulation of Putin. He even had to slam into reverse gear and let 450000 Ukrainian refugees into the country. That is only a fifth as many as Poland has taken, but it is 30 times as many as the United Kingdom has accepted so he’s safely in the middle of the European pack.
He was just as quick in switching his foreign policy narrative. Instead of holding off the Muslim hordes, now he was keeping Hungary out of the war in Ukraine.
“The opposition has lost its mind,” he said in rally on March 15.
“They would walk into a cruel, bloody and protracted war and they want to send Hungarian troops and guns to the front-line. We can’t let this happen. Not a single Hungarian can get caught between the Ukrainian anvil and the Russian hammer.”
It is all nonsense, of course. The opposition coalition never said any such thing, and Hungary is a member of the NATO alliance, which constantly declares that under no circumstances will it get directly involved in the war in Ukraine. Hungary couldnot send troops into Ukraine even if it wanted to.
But it worked. By mid-March Fidesz was leading the opposition alliance by a clear 8%, although more recent polls have shown Orbán’s lead narrowing. For a people with a reputation for being clever, even cunning – ‘the only people who can go into a revolving door behind you, and come out of it in front of you’ — Hungarians are embarrassingly naive.
- Dyer is a London-based independent journalist. His new book is titled The Shortest History of War
