The EconomistApril 4th 2020 Europe 29L
ike a bondvillain, Viktor Orban cannot resist revealing his
plans. The Hungarian prime minister has never hidden his de-
sire to entrench himself in power. Before taking office in 2010, he
remarked ominously: “We have only to win once, but then proper-
ly.” True to his word, when handed a big enough majority by Hun-
garian voters, Mr Orban hollowed out the Hungarian state, rewrit-
ing its constitution, purging the country’s courts and nobbling the
media. In 2013 he told an interviewer: “In a crisis, you don’t need
governance by institutions.” Again, he has followed through. A law
enacted on March 30th means Mr Orban can rule by decree—by-
passing parliament—until the coronavirus crisis is over. In films
the villain is thwarted after revealing his hand. But Mr Orban is up
against the European Union, not James Bond, so he succeeds.
No one can say there was no warning. Mr Orban’s career—
which has encompassed everything from anti-Soviet liberalism to
right-wing nationalism via Christian Democracy—has been dedi-
cated to the accumulation and maintenance of power, rather than
the pursuit of principle. Those who knew him well saw what was to
come. In 2009 Jozsef Debreczeni, the author of a critical biography,
warned: “Once he is in possession of a constitutional majority, he
will turn this into an impregnable fortress of power.” A combina-
tion of careful strategy, political cunning and a dash of luck have
made this prediction come true.
To the frustration of those who have spent the past decade try-
ing to stop him via legal means, Mr Orban is more astute than they
think. His “reforms” tend to reach the edge of legal acceptability,
but no further. If Mr Orban ever does hit an obstacle, he surrenders
some gains, while keeping the bulk of them. (The Hungarian
leader even has a name for this legal waltz: the peacock dance.) Op-
position figures, civil-rights monitors and commentators around
the globe have denounced the latest move as a big step towards dic-
tatorship. Yet, so far, the European Commission has pledged only
to examine it. This mealy-mouthed response stems from the fact
that its lawyers see little glaringly wrong with the act as it is com-
posed. On paper, Hungary’s parliament can end the state of emer-
gency if the government oversteps the mark. In practice, this prob-
ably would not happen. Mr Orban’s Fidesz party—over which he
has had near-absolute control for nearly three decades—has two-thirds of the seats in parliament. It is in this gap between legal the-
ory and political reality that Mr Orban thrives.
Luck plays its part in Mr Orban’s success. Hungary is a small
country. For euofficials, the erosion of the rule of law in Poland,
with its 40m citizens, matters far more in practice if not principle.
Mr Orban has consequently been free to attack the eu institutions
that bankroll his country to the tune of up to 6% of gdpin some
years without generating a fatal backlash from Brussels. Hungary
slips down the order of business when leaders are busy with other
things, such as a pandemic. Mr Orban has also been fortunate in
his opponents. In 2006, while Mr Orban sat in opposition, the then
Hungarian prime minister was recorded slating his own govern-
ment. (“Obviously we have been lying our heads off for the past
one-and-a-half, two years.”) A mammoth majority for Mr Orban
followed. Hungary’s opposition parties have failed to coalesce.
When they do manage to rub along, they succeed. Opposition par-
ties won local elections in Budapest last year.
If Mr Orban is lucky in his enemies, he is even luckier in his al-
lies. Fidesz is still a member of the powerful European People’s
Party, a group of centre-right parties across Europe that carves up
top jobs in the eu. The commission’s president, Ursula von der
Leyen, belongs to the same family, as does Angela Merkel. Under
the epp’s umbrella, Mr Orban was treated as an unruly teenager
while rearranging the Hungarian state, rather than a tumour in Eu-
rope’s body politic. (At one summit, the then European Commis-
sion president, Jean-Claude Juncker, joshingly called him “dicta-
tor”.) Fidesz was suspended in 2019, when Mr Orban’s contempt for
the rule of law became too brazen, but the eppgrandees stopped
short of kicking him out. The collapse of centre-right parties in Ita-
ly and France mean Fidesz’s delegation of meps is the joint third-
largest in the group. Political winds are blowing in Mr Orban’s fa-
vour. Bluntly, Mr Orban has not been removed because a majority
of the group were keen to keep him. It was the epp’s dwindling
band of liberals who winced at Mr Orban’s actions. Now they are
outnumbered by a nationalist strand, who broadly agree with Mr
Orban on things like shutting out refugees. The Hungarian leader
is less of an outlier in the eppthan he first appears.No happy ending
The tsunami of international criticism, in which Mr Orban has
been labelled everything from an autocrat to a latter-day Hitler,
will not bother the Hungarian leader or his acolytes. It is a fight
they want to have. In their minds, the coming crisis is another
chance to prove their critics wrong. They put such arguments in
the same bracket as those who criticised Mr Orban’s government
for erecting a fence and beating back—often literally—migrants
and refugees at Hungary’s border during the migration crisis in- Since then, similar hard-nosed policies have been adopted
across the eu(usually minus the beating). Mr Orban does not mind
being called a dictator. As long as he stops short of outright ty-
ranny, he can paint foes as hysterical. He can also point out that
other democracies grant the government extra powers during an
emergency, and pretend his intentions are no different.
Reining in Mr Orban will be hard, but not impossible. “The only
language he understands is power and money,” says Andras Biro-
Nagy of Policy Solutions, a research institute. Brussels has little le-
gal power to stop Mr Orban, but it does have money. Stemming the
flow of eucash to Mr Orban’s government would hurt. So the eu
should do it. And after a decade of ignoring his sins, the eppshould
stop providing a figleaf of legitimacy to the bully of Budapest. 7
Charlemagne The Orban way
How the Hungarian leader gets away with it