NOTE: This is the third of several articles I am writing to promote my fundraiser to cover the Hungarian election starting next month. To find out more about the fundraiser and how you can help, click here.
With the next articles I’m writing on the Hungarian election, I’m going to focus on specific parties and personalities and their political platforms, and there’s no better place to start than with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán himself and his Fidesz party.
The current Hungarian government is technically a coalition, as Fidesz governs with the KDNP (Christian Democratic People’s Party). However, the KDNP isn’t truly an independent party and is treated as an extension of Fidesz for all intents and purposes, similar to the relationship between the CDU and CSU in Germany or the Liberals and Nationals in Australia.
Fidesz was originally founded in 1988 as the Alliance of Young Democrats (“Fidesz” is the Hungarian-language contraction of that name) to protest the Hungarian communist government. A student movement, it and Orbán rose to fame in 1989 when he gave a speech commemorating the reburial of Imre Nagy and other leaders of the 1956 revolution who had been killed trying to overthrow the government. In his speech, Orbán demanded not only that the communist regime hold free elections, but that the Soviets withdraw their forces from Hungary. Fidesz would later win seats in the subsequent post-communist elections.
While Fidesz began as a liberal party—Orbán studied at Oxford under a Soros Foundation scholarship—in the mid-90’s, the party moved to the right, greatly increasing its popularity. In the 1998 elections, Fidesz went from being one of the smallest parties in the National Assembly to the largest, allowing Orbán to become Prime Minister in coalition with two other parties. While his first tenure in government was not nearly as radical as his current stint (due to his weaker position), Orbán did manage to implement some of the concepts of his “illiberal democracy,” such as reintroducing benefits for mothers, joining NATO, and passing a law providing education and health benefits for ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries such as Romania.
Fidesz lost the elections in 2002 due to a series of corruption scandals involving its coalition partners: while it remained the largest party in the National Assembly, the opposition MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party) was able to form a governing coalition with another party. Viktor Orbán’s response was to sit back and wait for the Socialists to trip on their own dicks, then seize the moment.
Orbán’s second wave came in 2006, when incumbent Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány admitted—in a comically profane speech—that the party had outright lied to the voters and that it had introduced zero significant measures during its time in office. In response, protests erupted across Hungary and Fidesz saw its poll numbers skyrocket. The Socialists were further wounded in 2008 when they were forced to beg the IMF for a bailout after Hungary was hit hard by the global financial collapse, and their attempt to sell off vital state infrastructure to foreign interests around the same time was the final nail in their coffin.
In the 2010 elections, Fidesz were swept back into power with a two-thirds majority, which allowed them to modify the constitution without any votes from other parties. Orbán wasted no time, promulgating a new constitution that banned gay marriage, reorganized the electoral system, and lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges (forcing many communist and leftist judges out of their positions). Fidesz has also introduced a flat income tax, purchased shares in corporations to keep them out of foreign hands, and systematically purged leftists from the country’s civil service. And of course, Orbán has also taken a hard line on immigration, building a border wall with Serbia and Croatia to keep Muslim rapists out of Hungary.
At the heart of Orbán’s remodeling of Hungary is what he calls the “illiberal democracy“: a society where the community, not the individual, is the most fundamental and protected unit. This manifests itself in a mix of policies that are both left-wing (nationalizing important industries, giving welfare payments to incentivize women to have children) and right-wing (simplifying the tax code, restricting immigration). Fidesz’s political program is about ensuring the survival of Hungary as a nation above all else, and his methods are now being copied by nationalist governments in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria.
Orbán’s political program also involves attacking the metapolitical structures where the left collates power. In a managerial society, the elected government is just one pillar of power: the bureaucracies, the courts, the universities, and the media are where the bulk of influence lie. Right-wingers in the U.S. don’t understand this, which is why the country continues to lurch leftward even when Republicans score electoral victories. If leftists are the ones educating children, entertaining the public, reporting on the news, and interpreting laws, any nationalist victory is merely a stopgap until the pendulum swings back.
Fidesz has worked to uproot leftist metapolitical structures by attacking them on all fronts. Successive constitutional reforms in Hungary have severely curtailed the power of the courts, stacking them with nationalists or appropriating their powers to other branches of government. The leftist-run state media in Hungary has been restaffed with Fidesz loyalists, while privately-run leftist media organs have been bought out by Orbán allies or run out of business. Finally, Fidesz has sought to shut down Central European University, a Soros-funded hive of degeneracy and Marxism.
Orbán is hardly perfect: he’s engaged in his fair share of corruption, which is evident by all the various scandals erupting involving his associates and friends. While the country has seen massive improvements in quality of life under his tenure (a friend of mine told me that during the Socialists’ rule, downtown Budapest was decaying and falling apart), Hungary’s railways, roads, and other infrastructure lags behind Poland’s despite both countries receiving considerable E.U. development funds.
However, Viktor Orbán is a man with a plan, one of the few leaders in the international right who knows what he’s doing. His actions are designed to not merely improve Hungary as it currently exists, but to ensure that it persists in the future against the forces of illegal Muslim immigration, globalist manipulation, and E.U. encroachment. He and Fidesz are the only ones in Hungarian politics willing to do what is necessary to keep Hungary free.
Read Next: The Hungarian Election: What Are the Issues?
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