This episode provides insight into why Hungary’s Viktor Orban was reelected to a consecutive fourth term with another parliamentary supermajority. Discussed is the role of the unlevel playing field in the leadup to the elections in terms of electoral laws and media domination, as well as how the war in Ukraine benefitted the government. The episode closes with some thoughts on what Orban’s reelection could mean for the European Union.
Guests featured in this Episode
Gábor Tóka, Senior Research Fellow in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest. A sociologist by training, he has published more than 60 articles on electoral behaviour, public opinion, political parties and democratic consolidation in edited volumes, political science and sociology journals. He is also the author of Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and has co-edited The Europeanization of National Polities (Oxford University Press, 2012).
GLOSSARY
What is Fidesz, the Hungarian political party ?
(00:1:20 or p.1. in the transcript)
Fidesz, by name of Federation of Young Democrats–Hungarian Civic Alliance, is a centre-right Hungarian political party. Fidesz (the Federation of Young Democrats) was founded in 1988 as an anticommunist party that promoted the development of a market economy and European integration. Initially, membership was restricted to those age 35 and younger, though this restriction was eliminated in 1993. In 1995 the party appended the name Hungarian Civic Party to its shortened form (altered to Hungarian Civic Alliance in 2003). Fidesz had its first notable success in 1990, when candidates associated with a coalition of which Fidesz was a member won mayoralties in a number of cities. In elections to the National Assembly, Fidesz won 22 seats. In 1997 members of a Christian Democratic group that had dissolved joined Fidesz in the National Assembly, enabling the joint group to form the largest bloc. The following year Fidesz became the single largest party in the National Assembly.
After some eight years of Socialist rule, Fidesz, capitalizing on Hungary’s ongoing economic problems after the country’s economic collapse in 2008, swept back into power in the parliamentary elections of April 2010, winning more than two-thirds of the seats. Fidesz and its junior electoral coalition partner, the Christian Democratic People’s Party, repeated that feat in 2014 and again in 2018 and 2022, with Orbán returning as prime minister each time. Source:
What is The Visegrad Group?
(00:22:12 or p.5 in the transcript)
The Visegrad Group (V4) is an informal regional format of cooperation between the four Central European countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, which are not only linked by neighbourhood and similar geopolitical situation but above all by common history, traditions, culture, and values.
The idea behind the Group was to intensify cooperation in building democratic state structures and free market economies and, in the long term, to participate in the process of European integration. The date of its creation is 15 February 1991, when the Presidents of Poland and Czechoslovakia, Lech Wałęsa and Václav Havel, and Prime Minister of Hungary József Antall signed a joint declaration on the objectives and conditions of cooperation in the Hungarian town of Visegrad.
Since 2004, all V4 countries have been members of the European Union, and the Visegrad Group provides a forum for exchanging experiences and working out common positions on issues relevant to the future of the region and the EU.
In addition to European issues, V4 cooperation focuses primarily on matters concerning Central Europe, exchange of information, and cooperation in culture, science, education and youth exchanges. Priority areas include expanding transport infrastructure and strengthening energy security in the region. Source:
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S.R: Welcome to "Democracy in Question", the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. This is the fifth episode of season four of "Democracy in Question", and I'm pleased to welcome Gabor Toka, who is currently Senior Research Fellow in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest.
Gabor has taught for three decades at the Political Science Department of the Central European University from where he retired a couple of years ago as a Full Professor. His main research interests are democratic institutions and voting behavior. He is author of the book, "Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation”. That's something which is going to occupy us today. He has also co-edited more recently "The Europeanisation of National Polities". We are recording this episode immediately after the conclusion of the national elections in Hungary, which Viktor Orban's Fidesz party won with a landslide victory for the fourth time in 12 years.
The result has been somewhat of a surprise to many, including I think some of the domestic electorate in Hungary especially in Budapest, as this was the first time that six opposition parties joined forces to dismantle Orban’s stranglehold on Hungarian politics. Gabor will help us understand the political and societal dynamics behind these election results. And while Hungarian politics could be seen as somewhat idiosyncratic, these elections do provide, I think, a textbook example of how semi-authoritarian regimes successfully exploit the opportunity structure of democratic politics as we will see.
Gabor will explain to us how such a system underpinned by rigged rules functions. He will also tell us something about the future trajectory of Hungarian politics, which all of us should heed, since Hungary has become in a sense, a paradigmatic case of the illiberal backlash against liberal democracy in the last decade. Gabor, welcome to the podcast, and I look forward to discussing some of these issues with you.
G.T: Thank you. It's great to be with you. And hello, everyone. Good evening. Good morning. Good afternoon.
S.R: Viktor Orban has secured a parliamentary supermajority of two thirds, and despite the fact that for the first time, six main opposition parties put aside all their ideological differences to come together in a united front to defeat him. They formed this kind of tactical coalition because Orban has turned the Hungarian electoral system into a de facto two-party system. Yet, the united opposition received at least half a million fewer votes than its constituent parties did in the previous national elections individually, and Fidesz has received 100,000 more votes than it did in 2018. Moreover, the far-right party, the Our Homeland party, formed by extremists who split off from the former far-right Jobbik party has also defied all expectations by winning seven seats. So, let me ask you, Gabor, to begin with, how surprised were you by these results? Could you have anticipated this as a worst-case scenario?
G.T: I think it could be anticipated as a worst-case scenario. It's more surprising I think to politicians and the lay audience; their expectations were really different, and they didn't really discount enough for how unreliable public opinion polling in this election campaign was. And it was even more unreliable than I myself expected. So that's why I think I didn't quite expect this outcome. I only gave it at 28 or something percent chance in advance.
S.R: So, let's talk a little bit about some of the proximate causes, probably which influenced the outcome, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Could you explain to us a little bit how the war changed the dynamics in the elections because ironically, it was Orban himself who recently complained in public about this being the worst possible timing of the war, as he put it, fearing that it would reduce his chances of reelection. I mean, this is hardly surprising given his long-time friendship with Putin, and he also publicly criticized the Ukrainian president Zelenskyy for interfering in the Hungarian elections by allegedly conspiring with the Hungarian opposition.
On the other hand, however, Orban directed his rhetoric towards the pro-Ukrainian opposition parties whom he has labeled war hawks. And he successfully adopted the posture therefore of a restrained, balanced statesman who can guarantee both peace and prosperity to the Hungarian nation. So, what in your estimate was the role that the war played in the Hungarian electoral results?
G.T: Yeah, so this is a great question and I think you really summarized that very well, the general perception that the war played a major role in this election campaign. And I think Viktor Orban was also right when initially he thought that this is not very good timing for him because the Russian aggression against an independent country that didn't provoke Russia, and that was not a threat to Russia of course, didn't look very good to the Hungarian public, either.
So, the popularity rating of Vladimir Putin dramatically dropped in Hungary. And this is a big problem for Viktor Orban because it isolates him on the international stage, it exposes his entire illiberal project - that he was advertising to the Hungarian public for more or less 12 years by now- in a really, really bad way. It shows the countries that he sought amicable relationships with are not the most respectable partners. So indeed, this was bad news for him.
The big narrative that emerged then during the campaign was, at least domestically, that the opposition, which is too radical, is risking Hungary’s security, and the opposition would send Hungarian soldiers to die in Ukraine in a war with Russia, which didn't sound like a very appealing proposition to the public. Now, you may ask how come that such a nonsense, I mean, could have an impact on the election? I mean, one would expect that completely false allegation of this sort against the reasonable opposition politicians would probably backfire and have a boomerang effect, reduce Viktor Orban’s ratings rather than improve them.
But the general perception in the country, - and I say perception, because I haven't yet seen compelling evidence - is that because of the isolation of about 1/3 of the electorate from opposition messaging by the circumstances that the authoritarian system created in 12 years, this created a fertile ground for such completely false fabrications spreading widely and getting credibility widely among the public. People who were canvassing in provincial towns and even in Budapest were reporting back very consistently for the last couple of weeks that this is a major concern of the electorate. They encounter a lot of people who give credit to this allegation of the government propaganda machine, and this seems to work very much against the opposition.
So yes, there was this kind of impact of the war as a major, probably major short-term factor in this election. So, this is one possible explanation of the outcome. But I think there are probably others, which would emphasize more long-term factors about the nature of this political system. I already alluded to one, which emphasizes the media monopoly that the authoritarian government enjoys, in front of 1/3 of the public who are not active seekers of political information. And those people will really only hear government propaganda 99% of the time when it comes to public affairs information. And this propaganda is by now extremely vile, extremely fantastic, in a sense that it really has no limits in what fabrications it provides. They keep losing libel cases against opposition politicians, but you know, the libel case takes at least months, if not years. By the time you win it, and you get some compensation, which is paid out from public money anyway, you are a damaged political good. And that's how the regime operates on one account.
S.R: Let's pursue exactly this point, Gabor, because the very idea of the united opposition, I think, grew out of the recognition that no single party could mount a successful challenge, given the peculiarity of the electoral system and a political landscape dominated by a hegemonic power bloc for more than a decade, a system which Orban has put into place very carefully. So yes, you point to one aspect of it, which is affecting the electoral results and that is the government monopoly of media. Its ability, therefore, to not only project government propaganda, but also to limit very much the time that the opposition parties could have to convey their messages to voters.
But another aspect that I would like you to comment on, is the gerrymandering. Gerrymandering done after Orban came to power, such that the electoral results, in some sense, are a foregone conclusion. So, the question I would have, after you've explained these facets to us would be to say, is there under these circumstances the possibility of ever winning an election under these conditions? Some of the leading opposition figures have started questioning whether it's worth contesting elections at all, and whether the opposition should not be thinking of boycotting Parliament or future elections. And the question here would be if the rules of the game are rigged so systematically, what can be done at all?
G.T: Yeah, so first, to correct myself a little bit, I should add of course, that there is independent media in the country. So, what I was saying about media monopoly refers to that 1/3 roughly, of the public who are not actively seeking out news portals on the internet because there, of course, you can find lots of very lively and very critical, independent media that are actually doing quite okay. The electoral system is indeed a major factor. And probably I would go back a little further in history, because to understand how the regime came about in the first place, and how it could dismantle a more or less consolidated democracy that existed for 20 years, we have to mention that the electoral system prior to this authoritarian regime was also and already a very majoritarian leaning system.
It wasn't exactly majoritarian, but it was producing distorted representation when the winning party had a big lead, in terms of the popular vote over the other parties. The way Hungary then could operate as a consolidated democracy was that two political blocs emerged and concentrated close to 90% of the total vote in multiple successive elections. Then, - between 2006 and 2008-9, partly because of the great financial crisis, which arrived to Hungary much earlier than to the rest of the world because of local circumstances -, the left-wing bloc really shot itself in the foot politically speaking and disintegrated, it lost half of its support base. And that's how we got to a very imbalanced election result in 2010.
Now with the already existing electoral system, and with the already existing constitutional arrangements, which pre-existed the authoritarian regime, that election produced a two thirds seat majority for Viktor Orban who only had a 52% share of the vote in the election, but he got 68% of the seats in parliament. And with that, because of the Hungarian rules about how you can amend the Constitution, he could replace practically every piece of legislation in the country.
This included the electoral system, which they indeed made even more favorable for the biggest party. And indeed, they introduced a gerrymander in the system. In this current election, the gerrymander wasn't such an important factor because they won in such a big time anyway that the gerrymander would have only needed to have an effect if there is a relatively closely contested election. But this time, that wasn't the case. The opposition made significant progress compared to previous elections. It showed a lot more promise as a challenger to the government in spite of ending up with a smaller share of the popular vote than the opposition did in previous elections.
Nevertheless, it still ended up with a good share of seats. I mean, relatively speaking, they certainly couldn't pull out the best from themselves as a political force. But one aspect of the performance is still remarkable. So, if you take as your benchmark not the total opposition vote of the last election, which was already lower than the total opposition vote in 2014, but if you take just sort of the left wing and centrist parties share of the vote in 2018, then compared to that, the opposition indeed increased its number of votes in this election by about 20%, of what used to be the far-right vote in 2018.
So, this is one way of looking at the results which is probably very disappointing if you are looking for reasons to believe that the opposition could win in the Hungarian election. But it is probably a more optimistic take if you look at what they achieved compared to where they were in 2018.
Now, is it possible to win in this game at all? I think that remains to be seen. In this particular year, I think there was a small chance. Not a very good one but there was a chance, partly because some elements of the circumstances were very unfavorable for Viktor Orban. The pandemic, his mismanagement of the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic, which are very unpopular now in the country, a lot of sleaze and embezzlement related to scandals that already broke through the independent media in the last couple of years, make him look really bad in terms of what is commonly called corruption. But it really is not corruption, it's more like embezzlement of public funds.
So, he is unpopular for those aspects of his performance. His foreign policy is not particularly popular in the country. He is credited, and this is a very important part of the game, that he is credited with not outstanding economic conditions, but far more stable and far more prosperous economic conditions in the country than what existed before 2010.
This prosperity is of course, largely the result of worldwide economic trends and of the inflow of European Union structural funds money, which started arriving and in a big wave in the country in 2009. So, the arrival of European funds to some extent largely coincided with the sort of the regime change. And because of the media domination that the authoritarian regime created, a large part of the public has difficulties in discounting from what they see as relatively prosperous so-so circumstances in the economic domain. So that's how I would characterize why he had difficulties and why he nevertheless had a chance in spite of those difficulties.
There are some institutional features of the authoritarian regime which makes the electoral rules very biased in his favor. There is this enormous propaganda empire created from embezzled public money over the many years. So, there are these pillars of the regime like European funds and the appearance of economic competence.
S.R: So Gabor, let me pick up one of the points which you made, which is about economic prosperity, thanks to the EU and the global conjuncture, having helped Orban's electoral prospects. However, do you think the economic downturn which Europe and Hungary surely will be now facing will be to his detriment? You're going to have a government which has to maybe go in for austerity measures, given the yawning budgetary deficit that Orban's government is facing, rising inflation and the fact that the EU has frozen some of its funds to Hungary.
G.T: It will certainly create a drop in popularity. Whether the opposition will be able to capitalize on that remains to be seen. First, they have to stick together and just get their act together, improve a little bit on their ideological appeal, their programmatic cohesion, they really need to look for new faces, they really have to improve their organization so that they can compete more effectively with this enormous propaganda apparatus.
They are competing on an incredibly uneven playground. So, they really have to do a lot more to win an election than a normal party in a normal democratic election has to. And that is very difficult to achieve in an authoritarian context where opposition supporters may even, you know, be treated unfairly when they're applying for grants, when they want to keep a job in the public sector or even at a university. So, you know, there are all these features of a very peaceful and so far, non-violent authoritarian regime that naturally make the opposition somewhat limping in terms of its appeal.
Now, Orban's ability to manage this social-economic crisis will be a challenge. And he will lose popularity. But, you know, he doesn't have to hold an election for another four years. He has a cohesive party, which now is full of self confidence after this big victory. So, he should be able to manage that. And we don't know how much civil liberties and possibilities for the opposition to organize and to get its act together will exist by the time of the next election. The only thing that we know is that in such an authoritarian system after every election that is won by the authoritarian government, civil liberties suffer, media diversity certainly suffers.
So, the only thing that we know for a fact is that at the time of the next election, the government will have an even bigger media empire. Plus, we didn't mention one factor that, you know, this is an authoritarian system. So, the government was perfectly capable to mobilize 4% or 5% of the GDP in the last few months to spend it on one-off cash payments to the electorate. I mean, most people got something. People with a child below age 18 received their entire income tax payment to the state back in February before the election. And there were several other outflows of public money just in order to win the election. So that will be done on an even bigger scale, presumably next time if the government is challenged in an election by an opposition. So anytime when the next election comes where an election will seem to have some kind of a chance, the country will be in an even more difficult financial situation after the election then after this election.
S.R: So, Gabor, let me turn to my last question, and that is to ask you to comment on the international implications of Orban's landslide victory. Over the last two years, of course he's lost a number of his key European and also other allies. Trump is no longer in power, his friends in the Visegrad Four -Kaczynski in Poland, etc.-, are no longer standing with him. President Zelenskyy of Ukraine has accused Orban of being the Trojan horse of Russia, and Orban himself who has been waging such a large symbolic war against Brussels and against the West and against the EU, now has had to pledge allegiance to the EU and NATO in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So, the question here for me is, how do you think Orban's victory will change the dynamics within the EU as a whole?
G.T: Well, I guess the expectation was that he was sending these messages to all sorts of Western politicians in the last couple of weeks. I mean, Viktor Orban was sending messages, suggesting that after the election, he will go fully with the sanctions and be a good loyal partner of the EU and NATO. I think he lost his chance for a credible turnaround. However, he is going to try that. And there are two more things that he was gonna try. One is to point out that, "Look, I have this big majority in this country, you are never going to have a better government than mine. If there is a change then that probably will include, I mean, even more objectionable characters like this Our Homeland party. So, you better stop messing around with me and accept me as I am. And probably also Western European central right parties should follow my example in terms of policies and ideology and in overall political direction, because this is the road that leads to success."
I think there is some receptivity to this messaging of his not necessarily in Western Europe, but certainly in parts of the EU on the East. So, I think this is gonna be an interesting question for the next couple of weeks that why indeed, from Romania to Poland and Slovenia, most East European politicians seem to be very adamant that the European Union has to continue with its tough sanctions policy against Russia. But there will be ears listening to Orban's argument to the contrary, and it will take some thinking on the part of EU leaders, I mean, of national governments to make up their mind about what they do about Viktor Orban who was returned to power with such a big majority in the country, but who is so lacking in loyalty to basic values and shared political commitments of the Union. So, I would refrain from getting into predictions about that.
S.R: Thank you so much, Gabor, for these insights, both into the proximate and also into some of the really underlying structural causes, mechanisms, dynamics of Hungarian politics, which explain the landslide victory of Viktor Orban's Fidesz party this week. Thank you for being with me today.
G.T: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be with you.
S.R: Let me briefly wrap up some of the main points of today's discussion. Viktor Orban's Fidesz party has won a supermajority, a two-thirds majority in the recent Hungarian elections. The war in Ukraine certainly played into Orban's hands because he successfully instrumentalized it to position himself as the statesman pushing for peace.
Some of the underlying features of Hungarian politics contributed to his victory: structural features like the media monopoly that he has established over the years, which enabled him to send government propaganda to a large part of his electorate, especially in the Hungarian countryside. Gerrymandering of constituencies has certainly contributed to his victory. All of this has led to a free election, but not a particularly fair election because it systematically skewed the electoral field in favor of Orban's Fidesz party.
He has also benefited greatly both from global economic trends, foreign direct investment in Hungary, as well as large amounts of European Union structure funds flowing into the country. He has also used embezzled public money over the years in order to boost his electoral prospects, including to make cash gifts to citizens in an attempt to buy votes for his party.
The pessimistic prospect here is that all of this is going to get probably worse over the next four years of Orban's government being in power. The uneven playing field in electoral politics will be even more skewed in four years time. And at the time of the next election, it will therefore be a much greater uphill battle to unseat a party which has managed to entrench itself in power so systematically over the last 12 years.
This was the fifth episode of season four. Thank you very much for listening. Join us also for the next episode in two weeks’ time, when we will once again discuss the war in Ukraine, focusing on the reasons behind the rise of a vindictive, military expansionist politics in Russia in the last decade. My guest for the next episode will be Stephen Holmes, Professor of Law at New York University. Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed. And of course, let your friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy .