Paul Lendvai
50 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
and a half, two years.... And in the
meantime, we have, by the way, been
doing nothing for the past four years.Wall-to-wall media coverage o what
became known as Gyurcsany’s “lie
speech” fueled a massive and passionate
attack by the opposition, with Orban
leading the charge against what he
called an “illegitimate” government.
In the years that followed, Orban
proved to be a devastatingly eective
opposition leader. In the 2010 elections,
Fidesz won 57 percent o the popular
vote and 263 parliamentary seats. For
the ¿rst time in the history o demo-
cratic Hungary, a political party had
achieved a two-thirds majority in
parliament. In the nearly a decade since,
Orban has used that majority to
transform Hungary’s constitution,
institutions, and society.THE MAFIA STATE
After what he deemed a “revolution at the
ballot box,” Orban did not form a new
government so much as pursue regime
change. During the electoral campaign,
he had said not a single word about
constitutional reform, but in 2011, he
proudly announced the drafting o an
entirely new constitution, called the
Fundamental Law o Hungary. The new
constitution was rushed through parlia-
ment in nine days without any input
from the public, much less a referen-
dum. The main victim o the new
constitution was the judiciary, especially
the Constitutional Court, whose jus-
tices would be selected not as they had
been before, through an all-party
parliamentary committee, but directly
by parliament. With Fidesz holding a
supermajority in parliament, Orbanthe family, in love o the mother coun-
try. This was the ¿rst major step in
Orban’s decades-long transformation
into an autocratic right-wing populist.
There seemed to be no deep ideological
soul-searching involved—just clear-
eyed calculations about what it would
require to win power.
The Socialist–Free Democrat govern-
ment struggled under the weight o an
unpopular package o economic reforms
and a corruption scandal, and in the
elections o 1998, Orban’s party tri-
umphed, and he became prime minister.
For the next four years, the Hungarian
economy performed reasonably well,
and Orban remained extremely popular.
Yet Fidesz, to the surprise o many, lost
the 2002 elections. Partly, the upset
followed from Orban’s failure to clearly
distance the party from extreme right-
wing groups, which openly tracked in
anti-Semitic rhetoric and even celebrated
the Nazi-allied regime that had ruled
Hungary in the 1940s.
Orban’s party spent the next four years
in opposition and failed to win back
power in elections in 2006. But a few
months later, a political bombshell
exploded in Hungary. An audio record-
ing emerged, on which the Socialist
prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, could
be heard delivering an obscenity-laced
tirade to fellow party members to
convince them that some painful eco-
nomic reforms had been unavoidable:
We had almost no other choice
[than the package o cuts] because
we fucked up. Not just a little bit but
totally. No other country in Europe
has committed such stupidities as we
have.... Obviously we have been
lying our heads o for the last one