Europe must decide what’s most important — virtue signaling or realpolitik.
Europe must decide what’s most important — virtue signaling or realpolitik.
W hen elections surprise the overwhelmingly liberal consensus of journalists by swinging to the right, you’d hope they would ask themselves questions about how they got it so wrong.
Not a chance; the precooked analysis of their pre-election commentary simply gets reheated and dished out.
I’ve seen this often in recent years. From Britain’s Brexit referendum, to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, to the crushing defeat of racial preferences in liberal California in 2020, to the strong showings of populist parties in Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Poland, liberal analysts downplay or deplore the results and then move on.
The latest example comes from Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has just won a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament. His Fidesz party won the popular vote 53 percent to 35 percent over a united six-party coalition formed to oust it from power. Another 7 percent of voters opted for a hard-line anti-immigrant extremist party.
As Gladden Pappin, an American academic teaching in Hungary, notes, “What Fidesz has accomplished is not only equivalent to Reagan’s eighteen-point landslide in the 1984 election — rather, it has effectively done that four times in a row.”
When I visited Hungary last month, not a single local pollster was predicting such a result. The Center for Fundamental Rights, a think tank close to Orbán, predicted Fidesz would win between 110 and 120 seats out of 199 possible. It wound up winning 135, with another seat captured by an independent ally.
Opposition pollsters all declared the race within the margin of error. The Publicus poll showed a tied vote, in part due to the impact of Western criticism of Orbán’s handling of Vladimir Putin’s aggression. “Invasion Puts Orban in Tight Spot Ahead of Poll,” was the Financial Times summary the day before the election.
I am no fan of Viktor Orbán. He is clearly not an American conservative who believes in strictly limiting government intervention in the economy. For example, he recently imposed price caps on flour, meat, sugar, and fuel. Hawks argue with his decision to support European Union sanctions on Putin while refusing to allow weapons to transit his country to Ukraine. U.S. companies that favor more legal immigration or a “truce” on social issues would see him as a belligerent culture warrior. As the author of four books on election procedures, I have criticized his government’s tilting of the political playing field. For example, Hungary has the loosest mail-in voting in Europe and doesn’t require photo IDs to obtain those ballots.
But the demonization of the Fidesz government and blind acceptance of the EU talking points condemning his self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy” — a loaded weapon that Orbán handed his opponents in a 2014 speech — has become hysterical and obscures some lessons that his victories should teach us.
Britain’s Tortoise Media summarized the results as follows: “Hungarians reelected the European leader closest to Putin. . . . [It is] a win for reactionary nationalism and political corruption, a serious challenge to the EU, and a poke in the eye for Ukraine’s president, whom Orbán identified in his victory speech as an ‘opponent.’”
Things aren’t that simple. Here are some underreported lessons from the election:
The Opposition
The international media barely raised the hood in examining the opposition candidate. Péter Márki-Zay was the mayor of a small town, professed conservative values, and is the father of seven children. He seemed a perfect vessel to convey the message that it was time to sweep Orbán’s “crony capitalists” out of power and restore Hungary’s good name in the diplomatic corridors of Brussels.
But he proved an untried and awkward candidate. He bragged about the diversity of the six-party umbrella supporting him: “We’ve got everybody from Communists to Fascists in our coalition.” He allowed himself to be linked with Ferenc Gyurcsány, a former Communist Party apparatchik who morphed into Hungary’s socialist prime minister from 2004 to 2009. Gyurcsány was forced to resign after a tape leaked in which he admitted, “We have obviously been lying (to the people) for the last one and a half to two years.” His economic policies left the country in a shambles, yet his advisers remained the chief source of the opposition’s economics program.
That allowed Fidesz to plaster the country with billboards warning that “the boss has a new clone: Mini-Feri,” featuring a picture of Gyurcsány as the Dr. Evil character in the Austin Powers movie, with Márki-Zay is his puppet.
But Gyurcsány and the other opposition party leaders turned on Márki-Zay on Election Night. Not a single one showed up to stand behind him during his concession speech. Gyurcsány told his followers that Márki-Zay hadn’t been the “best captain” for the campaign and noted he’d lost his own race for Parliament in his home region.
For his part, Márki-Zay didn’t give the most politic concession speech. Viktor Orbán may have labeled Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as one of the “opponents” he had to overcome to win, but Márki-Zay used historical analogies to recall that 1990s war criminal Slobodan Milosevic was very popular in Serbia. He then went there and said he thought Hitler would have won a two-thirds majority in 1945 Berlin, even when it was besieged by the Russians.
The Dancing with Dictators
President Zelensky of Ukraine has accused Orbán of dragging his heels in support of Ukraine in light of Hungary’s deep dependence on Russian energy: “You have to decide for yourself who you are with.”
But Zelensky hasn’t spared others. Hours after the polls closed in Hungary, he used a video address to blister the former leaders of Germany and France, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, seemingly blaming them for the deaths of Ukrainian civilians. “I invite Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy to visit Bucha, to see what the policy of 14 years of concessions to Russia has led to. See with your own eyes the tortured and slain Ukrainians.”
On Sunday, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, admitted that Germany “is the main roadblock on (further) sanctions” of Russia.
Where Orbán can be more fairly criticized is on his cozy relations with China. Hungary went overboard in endorsing China’s fanatical approach to Covid and became one of the only European countries to buy its Sinopharm vaccine, which was later shown to be ineffective. Orbán also wants to build a campus of China’s Fudan University in Budapest and has rejected U.S. fears that he is providing an espionage platform for Beijing. Even Orbán sympathizers in Hungary are skeptical of the deal. Rod Dreher, a prominent U.S. social conservative who hails Orbán as a “leader of the West,” calls it “a deal with the devil.”
Election Wasn’t Illegitimate
For only the second time in its history, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe sent a full-scale monitoring mission for an election in an EU country.
The mission found that voters were given distinct choices and that the elections were well run and competitive. But it zinged Hungary’s ruling government for blurring the line between state and party with the government’s own paid advertising on election themes.
Critics claim that coverage of the election campaign was dominated by a pliant media. Tortoise Media claims “80 per cent of (Hungary’s media) is controlled by the state or oligarchs close to Orban.” But opposition figures privately admitted to me that when one measures media influence by the size of its audience rather than the number of outlets, the opposition had plenty of access.
The election may not have been held on a fully level playing field, but opaque campaign-finance laws obscured both pro-Orbán spending and the money for anti-Orbán forces that flowed into the country.
Datapraxis, an Estonian data company used by the anti-Orbán coalition, was run by American liberals, including former aides to Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. They had gotten their start with Catalist, a U.S company begun in 2006 with the help of the Tides Foundation to be the data-collection arm of the progressive movement. Other data firms used by the coalition have been linked to Bernie Sanders aides.
Orbán opponents note that gerrymandering did put them at some disadvantage in the race. But the scale of Orbán’s victory is beyond dispute, and the opposition has to explain why in a high-turnout election it lost by a million votes.
Now that Viktor Orbán is in power for another four years, the major question is how the West will treat the man whom Joe Biden singled out in his 2020 campaign as a “thug.” The European Union’s parliament made its own virtue-signaling clear when the day after it announced a new round of sanctions on Russia last month, it called for immediate financial sanctions against Poland and Hungary for allegedly violating the independence of the judiciary.
Poland and Hungary are clearly the “bad boys of Europe” in the eyes of the European Union. But neither country has an electorate willing to throw out its government and install one that is more to the liking of the EU. So Rodrigo Ballester, a former EU official who now lives in Budapest, says there is an issue that Brussels bureaucrats should debate before they spank Warsaw and Budapest:
The European Parliament’s dogmatic attacks on Poland and Hungary are symptoms of the same mindset that led Europeans to condescend to the rest of the world on climate change and universal values, to close nuclear power plants and cut military expenses, all while the drums of war were rumbling.
Well, Europe is now at war, and Poland and Hungary are on the front line. What should the West’s priorities be?