22 BriefingHungary The EconomistAugust 31st 2019
2 interests of ordinary people than to those
of the elite. “The corruption is terrible,”
says Mr Vertes. It was bad under the Social-
ists, he adds, but has got worse. In many in-
dustries, “the government decides who
wins or loses.” Since the downfall of Mr
Simicska, the first and most powerful Fi-
desz oligarch, Mr Meszaros, Mr Orban’s old
village chum, has risen to comparable
prominence. In 2010 Mr Meszaros owned
three companies with a total equity of €2m;
by 2016 he owned 125 firms worth €270m.
He is now the second-wealthiest man in
the country, according to an annual rank-
ing published by the website Napi.hu. In an
interview in 2014 Mr Meszaros said he had
never embezzled and had acquired his
wealth through hard work—though he also
thanked “God, luck and Viktor Orban”.
Transparency watchdogs monitor the
rise and fall of Mr Orban’s coterie by chart-
ing who gets the most public contracts. A
new entrant on this year’s list of Hungary’s
wealthiest 100 is Istvan Tiborcz, Mr Orban’s
33-year-old son-in-law. In 2017 an investi-
gation by olaf, the eu’s corruption watch-
dog, recommended that Mr Tiborcz be
prosecuted on the basis that his companies
had rigged bids for tens of millions of euros
in eu-funded municipal-lighting con-
tracts. But olafhas no enforcement pow-
ers, and Hungarian police found no wrong-
doing. Top officials tend to declare modest
assets but lead luxurious lives.
Balint Magyar, a sociologist and former
education minister who is now at the ceu,
argues that the state under Fidesz is essen-
tially a vehicle for capturing the economy
and distributing its revenue streams to al-
lies. Unlike communist parties, which had
real titles of office and rule-governed inter-
nal hierarchies, Fidesz is an ideologically
flexible vehicle that can be reorganised as
the inner circle wants. Mr Magyar calls
Hungary a “mafia state”, run by a clique
whose main creed is loyalty. Kim Schep-
pele, a political scientist at Princeton Uni-
versity, notes the cunning deniability of
the “system of national co-operation”. No
country’s separation of powers is com-
plete. Most of Fidesz’s arrangements can be
found in one country or another. It is the
cumulative effect all in one place that
makes Hungary special.
Mr Orban’s system is the object of study
beyond the academy. When Poland’s Law
and Justice party took power in 2015, it
mimicked Fidesz’s first moves, packing the
country’s constitutional court and lower-
ing the retirement age for judges. In 2017
Moldova’s oligarch-run government
switched the country to a Hungarian-style
mix of single-party districts and propor-
tional representation. Binyamin Netanya-
hu, who has excellent relations with Mr Or-
ban, has rewritten Israel’s constitution to
pack more ministers into his cabinet for
political convenience.What could go wrong for Mr Orban?
Other parties, which have tended to fritter
away their support on squabbles, might
team up against him. For the country’s
mayoral elections this autumn they have
struck a pact to stand aside in favour of the
opposition candidate with the best chance
in each constituency. But the parties’ ideo-
logical differences make this hard, says
Bernadett Szel, the lmpparty’s prime min-
isterial candidate in 2018. Liberal voters
have qualms about tactically backing so-
cialists, let alone the nationalists of Jobbik.
A serious recession or slowdown could
also threaten Fidesz. The economy is ex-
cessively reliant on Germany, especially its
car industry; near-term risks of German re-
cession, and longer-term worries about the
survival of the internal-combustion en-
gine, make that reliance worrying. Hunga-
ry needs to shift from serving as a low-wage
outsourcer to building its own high-value-
added companies. But it ranks lower on
competitiveness indices than other central
European countries that are trying to do
the same, says Mr Vertes of gki.
Other risks come from the eu. It expects
to rejig its multi-year budget to send less
aid to central and eastern Europe, which
are doing well, and more to southern Eu-
rope, which is not. Rule-of-law advocates
in Brussels would also like to build in con-
ditionality, so that if countries move to-
wards autocracy, their funding could be
cut. But since Hungary would get a veto on
this, it is unlikely to become law. Hungary
has also opted out of the new European
Public Prosecutor’s office, which will pros-
ecute corruption on eu-funded projects.
“There are no normal democratic tools
in place anymore,” says Judith Sargentini, a
former Dutch Green mep. In 2018 she wrote
a report on the threat to rule of law in Hun-
gary that led the European Parliament to
launch Article Seven procedures against
the country; in theory these could lead tothe loss of some eu privileges, though
plenty of obstacles could get in the way.
And if the euis a potential problem for
Mr Orban, it is a much greater advantage.
European officials find it embarrassing to
face up to the existence of a quasi-autocra-
cy within the club, and thus have been slow
to punish Hungary for its transgressions.
More practically, the eu’s guarantee of free-
dom of movement makes Hungary easy to
leave. And this is what many of those dis-
satisfied with his rule are doing.Lights out tonight
Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city, is
a conservative town of faded beaux-arts
grandeur close to the border with Romania.
Lili (not her real name) wants to leave it as
soon as she finishes university. To illus-
trate why, she refers to a scandal at the elite
grammar school she attended. In 2018 the
Ady Endre school’s popular head was re-
placed with a primary-school teacher
whose chief qualification seemed to be
that he was a member of Fidesz. Teachers,
parents, students and alumni protested, to
no avail. “We have no voice,” Lili says. She
plans to move to a more liberal town in the
country’s west.
Others hit the border and keep going.
Zsike, a graphic designer from Debrecen,
ended up in the Netherlands: “If you don’t
have important friends or family [in Hun-
gary], you can never get anywhere.” Maria
and her husband went to Austria to keep
their children out of Hungary’s increasing-
ly rote-oriented schools. For Monika, an
English teacher who also ended up in the
Netherlands, the final straw was when the
government went after civil-society orga-
nisations: “That’s like dystopian, I’m
thinking like 1984.”
Other countries in central and eastern
Europe have seen a larger share of their citi-
zens move west since joining the eu. But an
analysis by R. Daniel Kelemen, a political
scientist at Rutgers University, shows that
the number of Hungarians living else-
where in the eu has gone up by 186% since
2010, the biggest percentage increase of
any member state. Those who go tend to be
well educated. When Mr Boda, of the Acad-
emy of Science, is asked how many of his
students are thinking of leaving Hungary
after graduation, he replies: “All of them.”
From the government’s perspective,
this may be fine. The emigration of liberal-
leaning graduates only cements Fidesz’s
power. Hungary’s communists might have
been relieved if a free-thinking law student
named Viktor Orban had gone off to Oxford
and stayed there, ideally on Mr Soros’s
dime. Instead, he came home, helped un-
seat them and replaced them with his own
quasi-autocratic rule. “We thought we had
come out of socialism and now we were go-
ing to be normal,” says Maria. “Instead it’s
still the same old shit.” 7