The new prime minister has been governing the country for nearly half a year and is spreading optimism all around him. From Respekt.
“I’m curious to see what he’ll be like now that he’s prime minister,” says 50-year-old Ferenc Vegh, explaining why he’s standing on the town square in Veszprem, a few kilometers from Lake Balaton, on this beautiful September afternoon, beneath a stage that’s still empty. In half an hour, Peter Magyar – the Hungarian prime minister who defeated the “unbeatable” Viktor Orban – is scheduled to arrive. Curiosity is understandable, and Mr. Vegh is by no means the only one with that question on his mind. Magyar has been ruling the country for nearly half a year; he is no longer a challenger or a critic – he is the holder of nearly absolute power – and he will now appear in this role for the first time at a public meeting.
During his two-year rise to power – a time when Magyar tirelessly traveled across Hungary, convincing his fellow citizens that he offered a better future than the bloated Fidesz party-state apparatus, which was aiming for its fifth consecutive election victory and 20 uninterrupted years at the helm – he was a somber man. On social media – whether he was flying in a helicopter, paddling on the Danube, or riding in a rickety horse-drawn carriage – he gave a thumbs-up and smiled. But on stage, he was rarely cheerful, and he did not pander to the crowds, who were entirely on his side. With a serious expression on his face, he gave a speech or waved a huge Hungarian flag with determination. To those unfamiliar with Hungarian politics and its language – full of pathos, poetry, mass rallies, and hour-long speeches – it might have seemed comical.
Skeptics say the new prime minister is a populist. He himself doesn’t shy away from that label. And like a true populist (or simply a shrewd politician), he announced in late August that he “misses meeting with people” and that he is once again setting out on his tour of the country. He chose Veszprem – a symbolic city in Hungarian history – as his first stop, where Ferenc Vegh, along with several hundred supporters and onlookers, is now waiting for him in the sunshine.
Suddenly, the crowd begins to stir and people turn around. So one thing hasn’t changed: Magyar still makes his way through the crowd to the podium, greeting people, accompanied only by two security guards with worried expressions. Then a man – unshaven but in good spirits – steps onto the stage. The gloom is gone, replaced by humor. Even his opening apology to the crowd – that the “regime change” he had promised before the election isn’t happening as quickly as they’d hoped – isn’t delivered with complete seriousness.
After just over an hour or so of speaking – about negotiations with the EU, about everything the government has already done, about what it still plans to do, as well as about how every day he comes across instances of the former regime wasting money, and about the fact that “step by step, brick by brick,” they must work together to build a Hungary that “pulls in the same direction” – Magyar says his goodbyes, the crowd gives him a brief round of applause, and everyone heads home. I catch up with Mr. Vegh and ask him what he thinks of the spectacle. He pauses to think and says, “It was actually good, wasn’t it?”
Good and Bad Signs
“Actually good” is the prevailing sentiment among the Hungarian public regarding the new prime minister. In April, Magyar’s Tisza Party won the election with 52 percent of the vote, thereby securing a comfortable constitutional majority. Two months later, it was polling at nearly 70 percent support, as some Fidesz voters and people who hadn’t voted in the election jumped on its winning bandwagon. That fever has since subsided, but even today, Tisza would still win more votes than it did in the spring election.
Magyar’s government has not caused any scandals so far and has been successful in fulfilling some of its promises, both symbolic and substantively important. It reached an agreement to unfreeze EU funds that the European Commission had withheld from Hungary due to Orban’s efforts to undermine the rule of law. The new cabinet has put an end to Orban’s propaganda on state television and radio (without replacing it with its own propaganda). It has ended its subservient policy toward Russia and, in early September, expelled 10 Russian diplomats – most likely spies (the Russians retaliated last week).
Magyar’s government has also smoothed over relations with Ukraine: they aren’t particularly friendly, but compared to how the Czech or Slovak governments – or the Polish opposition – talk about Ukraine, Magyar is a pro-Ukrainian politician. Conditions for teachers are improving. During the campaign, Tisza’s leader promised officials of the then-ruling Fidesz party “handcuffs and prison bars” for alleged corruption. The prosecutor’s office and the newly established agency for the recovery of state property have already gone after the first, so far only minor, offenders. True to its commitments, the government removed the president elected by Fidesz – lawyer and judge Tamas Sulyok, whom Fidesz had previously appointed as president of the Constitutional Court – and replaced him with lawyer and judge Andras Baka, whom Fidesz had ousted from his position as president of the Supreme Court years ago.
“It’s still too early to tell whether Tisza will be able to rein itself in, or whether it will focus primarily on its own political gain and bend the rules to achieve it,” says Gabor Torok, one of Hungary’s best-known political scientists. According to him, the key factor will be whether Tisza changes the current electoral system, which does not reflect the will of the voters and produces absurdly large majorities. In the past, Fidesz benefited from this (having, after all, devised and tailored it specifically for itself); now, however, Tisza could benefit from it instead. Akos Hadhazy, a former member of parliament and one of the leading figures in the anti-Fidesz resistance, feels the same way. “They were still talking about it after the elections, but suddenly it’s no longer a priority. That doesn’t seem like a good sign,” he notes.
Hadhazy considers even more dangerous a controversial constitutional amendment that Tisza passed immediately after the elections, limiting who can hold political office in Hungary. Under the new rules, members of parliament may serve for only 12 years or three terms, after which they are barred from running for office. In this way, Tisza has sidelined a significant portion of the Fidesz elite as well as a number of opposition politicians for the foreseeable future. Magyar argues that for a successful “regime change,” it is necessary to decisively break with both the former ruling elite and the old opposition.
Several politicians consider this an unconstitutional and illegitimate way to eliminate political opponents. But there is no one to rule on its constitutionality: years ago, Fidesz stripped Constitutional Court judges of the power to review amendments to the constitution itself.
Magyar and his party have already been given the opportunity to fill several key positions of power. Tisza’s nominees have taken six seats on the Constitutional Court, hold all the positions on the media councils, and head the aforementioned Office for the Recovery of Assets, whose purpose is to uncover corruption from the past 16 years and which is empowered to confiscate criminally acquired assets. “For the most part, these are people who were critical of Fidesz in the past. They were opponents of the government. But you can’t say they were Tisza’s people,” says Torok, describing the new arrivals. “Tisza doesn’t have any ‘people of its own’; it’s been too short a time for that. Rather, they are experts who, in some respects, think similarly to the government. But in other respects, they think differently, which will become clear over time.”
The President Has His Own Ideas
Magyar has made a few missteps. Andras Baka was not his first choice for president. He wanted Judit Polgar, the greatest female chess player in history, for the position; he even announced this to the public – but he didn’t ask Polgar herself first. She turned down the offer. The popular 50-year-old chess master would have been a surprising symbol of the dawn of a new era in politics. On his second attempt, Magyar chose Baka, a respected lawyer in his 70s. If there is such a thing as a prototypical Hungarian president, then he embodies these characteristics exactly.
On the other hand, the government faced a rather dramatic crisis in August, when drought and low water levels in the Danube threatened to force the shutdown of Hungary’s only nuclear power plant, located in the city of Paks. The plant uses water from the Danube to cool its reactors. In the end, this emergency measure – which would have plunged the country into an energy crisis, since the plant supplies half of Hungary’s electricity consumption – was not necessary.
Most people viewed the prime minister’s handling of the situation – the way he spoke about it and the solution he chose (a temporary embankment was built in the river to allow more water to flow through the power plant’s canal) – in a positive light. Apparently, this was true even in Paks itself, a riverside town in central Hungary that has traditionally been a Fidesz stronghold. When I asked residents of the town in August, right in the midst of the hottest spell, none of the six people I spoke with criticized Magyar. “He’s not to blame for the drought, and he didn’t build the power plant like this – he’s doing what he can,” one of the Paks residents told me.
The election of the chief prosecutor is a seemingly distant and complicated matter that may reveal something about Magyar’s governance and could reach the broader public. The president nominates the candidate, and Baka submitted Zoltan Szathmary’s name to parliament. Surprisingly, even government lawmakers rejected him. Officially, this was due to suspicions that his brother was a Fidesz supporter in the secret service, but it is more likely a matter of intrigue and a power struggle within the prosecutor’s office itself. Baka was surprised, but he has stood by his choice. Incidentally, Baka himself became chief justice of the Supreme Court years ago after lawmakers rejected him twice; it wasn’t until the third time that then-President Laszlo Solyom (unsurprisingly, a lawyer and former Constitutional Court justice) pushed through his appointment.
Now we’ll see just how strong a president Magyar has chosen. Or, even more interestingly, how he’ll handle it when someone from whom he can expect, if not loyalty, then at least cooperation, stands up to him.
Ready? Yes!
“They’re getting rid of our people from government offices and state-owned companies, and they’ll pay the price for that eventually, because while they may have been affiliated with our party, they’re experts,” says a Fidesz official from Budapest. He speaks on condition of anonymity because strict discipline still prevails within Fidesz, now in the opposition, and any public statements are reserved solely for the party leadership. Or for disgruntled rebels who aren’t afraid to take risks. (Magyar introduced the same rules in his own party, Tisza.)
“Our party is reeling right now; a lot of people have lost their positions and jobs. It will take a while for us to get back on our feet. But I expect people will realize that Magyar governs worse than we do. Economic difficulties are coming. We need to be prepared,” adds this anonymous opposition source.
This is now the official Fidesz line, as announced by Orban – no longer prime minister or a member of parliament, but still the party leader – and his chief political strategist and namesake, Balazs Orban: Magyar’s government will bring about economic turmoil and collapse under the pressure of security threats in the coming years. Then Fidesz will return to power, having weathered its time in opposition as a large and organized political community with ample resources. However, a heated debate is underway within the party; mid-level party officials, in particular, are accusing the leadership (who are generally a generation older) of bringing about the election defeat through their own incompetence and corruption – and of being unable to admit it.
With the exception of certain agencies deemed by the new government to have been too thoroughly tainted by Fidesz – such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the state media – there have been no mass firings. This is partly because Tisza truly lacks a pool of “its own people.” So far, as the respected economic weekly HVG notes in an editorial, the new government has shown no economic amateurism, and some ministers are clearly competent. Magyar is benefiting from the fact that inflation has dropped significantly. However, the decline had already begun in the winter, and that is not due to his administration. As for a less significant but nonetheless visible issue – the forint exchange rate – the new cabinet has had some influence, and the currency has strengthened since it took office.
Magyar, now relaxed and firmly holding the reins of power, has good reason for his cheerful mood and jokes as he tours the country’s political stages. At least for now.
Tomas Brolik is deputy editor-in-chief of Respekt, the leading Czech newsweekly where this article originally appeared. Republished by permission. Translated by Jeremy Druker.
