Living With Corruption: An Examination of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at a conference in Malta. Photo by the European People’s Party.
When you sit at a Hungarian dinner table, there is a period between the main meal and the dessert that is reserved for conversation. This is where the jokes begin.
“What’s the difference between God and Viktor Orbán? God doesn’t think that he’s Orbán.”
“What’s the best way to keep migrants out of Hungary? Print our salaries on the border.”
“How are we going to fix Hungary’s debt crisis? Pretend we don’t speak English.”
In a country with little opportunity for political activism and few venues for published free speech—Hungary’s last independent newspaper Index was just acquired by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party this past summer—private jokes give insight into the prevailing displeasure that the country has with their government. These digs come from a national sentiment of annoyance and exasperation, but they are also borne out of fear.
Populist, dictatorial leadership is alarming under “normal” circumstances, but it is absolutely terrifying in the face of a pandemic. There is no transparency about cases or deaths; there is no certainty that the government’s safety recommendations are actually safe; there is even a dearth of competent medical staff, seeing as most nurses and doctors leave Hungary for higher-quality jobs elsewhere. What remains is the country’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, who sees the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity for political gains, with no regard for the lives lost in the process.
Viktor Orbán’s Early Career
It is important first to note the historical and political factors that contributed to Orbán’s years-long political agenda that has accumulated in the mismanagement of the pandemic. As it is known on the global stage today, Hungary first emerged in 1990 after the fall of the Soviet Union made way for the country’s independence. Post-Soviet politics were dominated by a new Communist Party, and with them came the same corruption
of the old Communist Party. Though Hungary’s older citizens were used to this corruption and were happy to bring back normalcy with the Communist Party, the country’s middle-aged and younger generations dreamed of a truer democracy. Viktor Orbán first amounted to political prominence during this time period. Orbán and his Fidesz Party (the name Fidesz coming from the Hungarian words for “Young Democrats”) created a leadership campaign based around opposing corruption and demanding liberal freedoms like free media and free elections. In Hungary’s second-ever democratic elections, the Fidesz party won a majority. Orbán became the Prime Minister, and to his credit, he made good on many of his promises.
I sat down with Zsolt, a Hungarian economist who asked that only his first name be used, to understand what changed. “When Orbán was first elected,” Zsolt explained, “he was the model of the ideal Westernized leader. He was always a little power-hungry, you could see it even then, but he cared about the country, especially its poor people, since he also grew up poor... My wife's sister only got the loan for her house because of Orbán’s policies that made it easier for young people to get these loans. He wanted the people of this country to finally be freed of Communism’s consequences.”
And then he lost. In 2002, the Communist Party regained its majority and Orbán was no longer Prime Minister. This was largely because, even though Orbán was helping the country, it was the Communist Party that still ran major media sources and was thus able to spread their agenda. “Orbán got his political science education from Oxford, where the liberal, democratic theories they upheld made it seem like doing good for your country was the key to reelection,” Zsolt said. “But 2002 was an awakening for him and the Fidesz Party. And in 2010, they didn’t make the same mistake.”
Indeed, Orbán’s 2010 election was successful not because of any genuine promises to improve Hungary but because of his infamous “hate campaigns”. Rather than targeting actual issues across Hungary, these campaigns were known for creating an invisible enemy. After all, if Orbán created the enemy, he could also control the narrative around it. Notable targets have included George Soros, a Hungarian billionaire whom Orbán paints as a member of the “greedy Jewish elite”, the E.U., which Orbán berates for being too controlling of Hungary’s ambitions, and the so-called dangerous migrants. In fact, Orbán has been cited as the father of the modern populist immigration strategy that involves building fences and walls, an ideology that Donald Trump would plagiarize for his own election. What this manifests is a political climate in which Orbán is both witness and executioner—he creates anxiety through the narratives of these issues within Hungary, and in that same charge, he maintains that only the Fidesz Party can resolve these nonexistent problems.
The Rise of Hungarian Corruption
Though the 2002 election taught Orbán the power of propaganda, he learned corruption all on his own. “Orbán first smelled money between 2008 and 2012,” Zsolt said. “Like I explained earlier, though he grew up poor, he never really had an interest in becoming very rich. This changed when Orbán’s father got a hold of a large share of Hungary’s stone mines—pretty close to a monopoly, actually—and the Orbán family became very wealthy. This was when greed took hold of Orbán, and luckily for him, his election in 2010 coincided with the E.U. suddenly stockpiling Hungary with billions of forints.”
This money was a part of the E.U.’s ongoing stimulus project to Westernize countries affected by Communism—namely, poorer Eastern European countries like Hungary. Rather than build Hungary up, Orbán and his partners-in-crime within the Fidesz Party stole this money to line their own pockets.
But how do you steal billions of forints without being reprimanded by the E.U.? “The name of the game is infrastructure,” Zsolt told me. “Do you see this street we’re sitting on now?” I did. It was Váci Street, one of the most famous streets in central Budapest next to the Danube. It was lined with overpriced restaurants and gift shops, heaven on Earth for a tourist. “Since 2010, the Fidesz Party has picked the stones up only to put the stones back down. They don’t even replace them, just take them off and then put them back. I’ve talked to plenty of craftsmen, but not one of them has been able to explain the reasoning behind that. Or, if you don’t buy that, just look at these stadiums being built on every street corner. And for what? All these stadiums and we haven’t made it to the World Cup since 1986.”
The reason Orbán loves infrastructure so much is because of its ambiguity. It’s easy to steal anywhere from 30% to 40% of the money that the E.U. puts into these projects, simply by marking up the price paid for the materials or inflating the salary of the workers compared to their real wages. To exemplify this, Zsolt spoke about Hungary’s most recent stadium investment in Csepel. The Fidesz party asked the E.U. for 1.5 billion forints to finance its building; after the soccer club went bankrupt, however, they asked for only 400 million forints when selling the stadium, a reflection of its real worth.
The most important component to this, however, is a third party. Because the E.U. makes it illegal for the Hungarian government to use the money themselves, hoping in vain to avoid parliamentary corruption, Orbán must instead do all of this renovation using a third party. And conveniently, Lőrinc Mészáros, Orbán’s childhood best friend, is constantly willing to step in. Though Mészáros was a plumber all his life, he opened up a construction company the year after Orbán's 2010 election. Despite Mészáros’s lack of real experience in construction, Orbán proceeded to give Mészáros and his family the rights to 486 billion forints’ worth of public contracts from 2010 to 2017, with 83% of those projects having been funded by the European Union. In 2018 alone, he received over 245 billion forints of E.U.-sponsored money 93% of his 265 billion forints’ worth of contracts were E.U.-sponsored.
Much of Zsolt’s research has to do with the profit that Mészáros should have received from these projects as opposed to what he actually received. “When large Western European contractors with far more experience than Mészáros create infrastructure projects like this, they can usually expect to make 300 million forints—and again, that’s Western Europe, where wages are about three times higher than in Hungary. However, in the last decade, Mészáros has made an average of 30 billion forints a year through this project. That makes him the richest man in Hungary, and when asked how he makes his wealth, he always thanks three things: God, luck, and Viktor Orbán.”
Even during this year’s pandemic, in the absence of infrastructure projects due to quarantine, Orbán and the Fidesz Party have turned the pandemic into a money-making scheme. This is in the form of ventilators and mask-making machines, both imported from China. Mészáros was once again put in charge of ordering this equipment, and though the Fidesz Party reported the cost of ordering these necessities as 210 million forints, neighboring countries who bought the same equipment from the same seller reported it to cost only 21 million forints. “In fact,” Zsolt explained, “the mask-making machine we got from this seller can only make 480,000 masks per month. The mask-making machines that every other country got for quite literally a tenth of the price can make up to 5 million masks per month. So it’s no wonder that when Mészáros reported his salary this year, despite a huge slash in infrastructure built due to social distancing, his earnings show no decrease from the previous years.”
Potential for Opposition
For years, Orbán manipulated and stole without opposition. That was until October 2019, when Gergely Karácsony did the unthinkable and beat the incumbent Fidesz politician for the Budapest mayoral role. “It wasn’t that opposition didn’t exist. It was just divided,” László Agnes, a member of Karácsony’s staff, explained to me. “Orbán’s strategy… for a long time was to recruit multiple flashy candidates to run against the Fidesz candidate. With this division of opposition, they were never able to get the majority of the votes. This changed with Karácsony, because his entire stance was about being the singular opposition leader, and the liberal citizens of Budapest responded very well to his charisma and determination.”
This left the Fidesz Party with a historic mayoral loss, and as we learned in 2002, Orbán isn’t very fond of losing. “Now it’s a matter of waiting anxiously to see what Orbán’s next move is going to be. He sees that propaganda and false opposition won’t work against Karácsony, so it’s a trial-and-error experiment now.”
It seems, however, that the wait is over. With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Orbán has gained a new political tool to weaponize against Karácsony and his stronghold of Budapest.
Political Agendas in the Age of COVID-19
When COVID-19 first broke out across the globe, Orbán did what many other leaders did and ignored it. It wasn’t until members of the Fidesz Party themselves were scared to send their kids to school that Orbán decided to shut everything down. What they failed to do proactively, however, was testing. “Other than Bulgaria, Hungary is currently the country that tests the least in Europe,” said Patrik Nagy, a doctor I interviewed at Szent Ferenc Hospital overseeing COVID-19 patients. “They test only with plausible cause, after somebody is showing undeniable symptoms. This allows for Orbán to boast about how little cases they have, all the while not preventing any early spread from person to person.” But the math is catching up to this testing strategy. “If you look at the numbers,” Nagy went on, “the C.D.C. tells us that about 0.5% to 1% of all people infected with corona should die of it. In Hungary, however, anywhere from 5% to 50% of infections leads to death. That tells us that we aren’t pinpointing nearly as many cases as we should be.”
And this is where Orbán’s political motivations shine through. When the pandemic first struck, Orbán was quick to declare a state of emergency in April. While it had always been an ongoing joke that Orbán was more dictator than prime minister, this solidified his de facto dictator status as it granted him absolute power over Hungarian law. He used this newfound power to push a lot of his own policy-based agenda, including an end to the legal recognition of trans people, but parliament eventually voted to rescind those powers in June. “It’s not foolproof,” Agnes clarified. “The surgeon general is still allowed to declare a state of emergency whenever she wants, which would once again reinstate Dictator Orbán.”
But beyond grand gestures or power-grabbing, there is also a more discreet political play at hand. Unlike every other neighboring country, Hungary refuses to test regularly in its capital city of Budapest, even for citizens reentering the country from foreign excursions. “There is absolutely a disjunction between the coronavirus treatment in Budapest as opposed to literally anywhere else,” Nagy affirmed. “I recently dealt with a secretary in Budapest who had to beg for a test after her sister tested positive, and even then she had to wait hours at the hospital until they agreed to have her tested.” Nagy went on to contrast this secretary’s experience with experiences that he’s witnessed outside of Budapest. “In the countryside, an emergency vehicle shows up within a couple hours, has you tested, and moves you to a remote location in case you’re positive. Within two days, two tests have been performed on you and you are guaranteed to be totally negative or positive. It’s night and day, and there is absolutely political favoritism at play, even if it means lives lost in the city.”
At the same time, however, Hungary saw its COVID-19 cases rise steadily from June onwards, though Orbán has refused to attribute this to his laid-back testing policy or any of the loose health regulations. “With no testing or tracking to offer data, Orbán gets to decide the cause of these virus spikes,” Zsolt pointed out. “So what he chose, from the beginning of September onwards, was to play his classic anti-foreigner hand.” Indeed, Orbán closed the border completely from September 1st onward, citing tourism and foreign citizens as the reason for the increase in cases. “But throughout all of this, he’s yet to give a reason why we can’t just keep the borders open, but with tests. That’s what Germany is doing with alarming success, and it’s the logical choice. Fidesz has proved time and time again that populism doesn’t ask for the logical choice.”
By shutting down the border, Orbán hurts the entire country economically, though he especially suffocates Budapest. While the countryside cities have always been more reliant on Hungarian tourism as opposed to foreigners, Budapest gets a majority of its income from both European and international visitors alike, an income which has vanished in the midst of these pandemic restrictions.
Yet with this move, Orbán gets to appeal to his populist voters—taking a strong stance as a strong nation with a strong leader—and he also gets to break down the economy of the city that’s given him the most grief. As Budapest suffers financially, its infrastructure and productivity will suffer with it, and come election year, Orbán can point a finger at Karácsony and his incompetence as the driving factor, especially when compared to the Fidesz leaders in the countryside. In addition to these grievances, Mayor Karácsony is also unable to provide economic relief without a parliamentary approval he won’t receive. It is an insidious move and one that will cost both lives and livelihoods, but Orbán has proven that it is perfectly in line with the brand that Fidesz has crafted for itself.
A New Normal
What once was a country on the brink of true democracy is teetering on the verge of populist dictatorship, and as much as Hungarians may laugh about it as a coping mechanism, what is happening in Hungary is no joke. “In the last thirty years, all of these neighboring countries—Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Slovenia—they’re put away at least one minister for corruption. In Hungary? Zero,” Zsolt said. “When Orbán touts this statistic, he aims to paint a picture of a utopian land. What it actually tells us, however, is that this is a country with a lot to hide.”
Though change is not impossible, as Gergely Karácsony’s election proves, it is also not probable. Karácsony is just one man representing one city, after all, and considering all Orbán is doing to extinguish even this fleeting bit of opposition, it feels impossible that resistance can stick. Instead, until Fidesz’s corruption can be brought to justice, what Hungarians may have to accept is Viktor Orbán’s rule as a long-standing reality.
Esther Kardos is a sophomore at Barnard College studying Political Science and History. When she's not debating politics in either English or Hungarian, you can find her perfecting the chai-to-oat-milk ratio.
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