Paul Lendvai
52 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
quarter o 2019, 100,000 people who did
not have jobs were paid by local or
state authorities about hal the minimum
wage for performing community ser-
vice; the unemployment ¿gures do not
account for them. Another factor in
reducing unemployment is the fact that
since 2015, more than 500,000 Hungar-
ians are estimated to have found employ-
ment abroad, mostly in Austria, Ger-
many, and the United Kingdom. And
despite Orban’s claims to have revived
Hungary’s economy, the economist
Istvan Csillag has shown that without the
funds Hungary receives from the ¤,
which amount to between 2.5 billion
and ¿ve billion euros a year (the equiva-
lent o 2.5 to ¿ve percent o ³²), the
Hungarian economy would collapse. The
irony is that even though his country and
his political survival depend on ¤
funds, Orban delights in thumbing his
nose at Brussels, where handwringing
over his autocratic abuses o power have
not been accompanied by meaningful
eorts to rein him in.“NATION, FAMILY, AND
CHRISTIANITY”
The damage Orban has inÇicted on
Hungary is not limited to its govern-
ment institutions and economy. He has
also degraded the country’s political
culture by infusing it with forms o
xenophobia, racism, and nationalism
that could once be found only on the
margins o society. Orban has long
toyed with such themes, and since the
2015 refugee crisis, they have become
central parts o his political identity.
That year, as waves o refugees began to
arrive from Afghanistan, Syria, and
other conÇict zones, Orban directed his
government to put up more than 100station heard only in Budapest, and a few
culture-focused weeklies, every single
media outlet in the country is now
controlled by people close to the regime.
Another part o Orban’s strategy has
been to create a socioeconomic elite
that prospers from ties to Fidesz. Under
his watch, the process o awarding
government contracts has been corrupted
to an astonishing degree, to the bene¿t
o Fidesz-connected businesses.
Transparency International has reported
that in 2018, about 40 percent o public
procurements in Hungary featured only
one bidder. Balint Magyar, a sociologist
and founding member o the Free
Democrats, has called Orban’s Hungary
“a post-communist ma¿a state, led not
by a party, but by Prime Minister Viktor
Orban’s political-economic clan.” A
sense o impunity has fueled this crony
capitalism, as Fidesz has hollowed out
the law enforcement and judicial bodies
that would normally investigate and
prosecute such misconduct. For example,
at Orban’s direction, parliament allowed
Hungary’s chie prosecutor, a Fidesz
loyalist, to serve beyond his term limit
and then extended his term by nine
years. Moreover, the prosecutor can no
longer be questioned by parliament,
and his successor can be nominated only
by a two-thirds majority.
Orban claims that he has been a good
steward o the Hungarian economy. And
it is true that under his government,
some Hungarians have done very well:
the economist Janos Kornai estimates
that tens o thousands o Hungarians
have enriched themselves by directly or
indirectly exploiting ties to the Orban
regime. Falling unemployment numbers,
hailed by the government, are partly the
result o a sleight o hand: in the ¿rst