Marton Monus/MTI via AP
Military police officers patrolling central Budapest last week
The global pandemic claimed its first democracy on March 30 when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban won approval from his parliament to rule Hungary indefinitely by decree. Orban’s new powers give him unlimited authority to fight the coronavirus by suspending parliament and all future elections, overriding Hungarian law and imprisoning persons found guilty of the new crimes of “violating a quarantine” and “spreading false information.”
Democratic governments all over the world are undertaking temporary emergency measures to address the pandemic crisis, but none are as sweeping as Hungary’s. Temporarily restricting freedom of movement and prescribing social distancing are reasonable limits on civil liberties aimed at containing the virus. But the Hungarian case demonstrates how the public-health crisis can be used as an excuse to promote authoritarianism far beyond the current emergency.
Viktor Orban has long been Europe’s leading authoritarian entrepreneur, and his new dictatorial powers are the culmination of a decade of increasingly strong-armed rule.
Orban came to power promising to protect Hungarians from external threats. The financial crisis of 2008 had hit Hungary harder than most other European countries. Many people felt that they were no better off than they had been under communism. Hungarians have a deep-seated victim mentality—the product of centuries of outside invasions by Mongols, Turks, Russians, Austrians, Germans, and Soviets. They had little experience with democracy before 1989, and civil society was weak and stunted by a history of outside domination. This set the stage for a political opportunist like Orban to begin to transform Hungary from a leading new democracy in Eastern Europe to the authoritarian country it has become today.
To mobilize support Orban presented himself as the protector of Hungarians from outside threats that he skillfully exaggerated. He manipulated their fear of being victimized. He attacked the European Union as “the new Moscow.” He stirred up public reaction against refugees and migrants by calling them “a threat to Christian civilization.” He campaigned on the familiar slogan, “Make Hungary Great Again,” and he promised Hungarians that he would rescue them from Brussels and bankers and socialist holdovers from the old regime.
Orban boasted that he was building a new form of government. He called it “illiberal democracy”—an Orwellian term that he invented to justify transforming his election into a weapon to attack the democratic institutions that stood in the way of his authoritarian designs. He used his party’s parliamentary supermajority to rewrite the Hungarian Constitution and eliminate its system of checks and balances. He subverted the country’s independent judiciary by packing the courts, limiting their jurisdiction and forcing judges to retire. He took over the independent media through political and financial pressure, targeted regulation and disinformation. He undermined civil society by accusing NGOs of being foreign agents, and hitting them with heavy fines, taxes, and restrictions. He controlled Hungarian universities by cutting their funding and censoring their curricula, and in the case of one of Europe’s leading international graduate institutions, Central European University, he implemented regulations to make it impossible for it to continue to operate in Hungary.
Orban is a soft authoritarian whose power comes not from violence but from repression. He doesn’t torture his opponents. He relentlessly targets them with regulation. The Orban model is different from fascism, but it has sometimes used similar tactics in manipulating populist fears by using racist and anti-Semitic propaganda, like its notorious billboard campaign depicting the philanthropist George Soros, who has long supported democratic reforms in Eastern Europe, as a “foreign manipulator” and attacking him with anti-Semitic dog whistles.
The current public-health crisis is very real, but it is being used as an opportunity to legitimize authoritarianism in Hungary. There is a danger that Orban’s model could go viral. Other European leaders have long criticized Hungary’s movement away from the democratic values of the European Union, of which it has been a member since 2003. But as EU countries struggle to respond to the ravages of the coronavirus they are unlikely to impose sanctions on Hungary. Some might even be attracted by the extreme measures that Orban has imposed on Hungarians. Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist and leading analyst of democracy in Eastern Europe, points out that Orban is “testing to see what the market will take.” Having risen to power by manipulating fear, Orban is aware, as Krastev says, that the public-health crisis “makes people ready to tolerate everything, because when the danger is everywhere, you believe only the government can help you.”
In the U.S., there is skepticism on both the right and the left that the government can be effective in responding to the public-health crisis. The Trump administration has succeeded in indoctrinating its supporters to distrust the “deep state,” and Trump’s opponents of course are deeply distrustful of his administration. Despite Trump’s desire to govern as a dictator in a crisis, this trans-ideological breakdown of trust in government may ironically protect the U.S. from falling prey to Viktor Orban’s viral authoritarianism.
