Orban’s Pandemic Power Grab Reveals the EU’s Wider Frailties

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Viktor Orban was Hungary’s firebrand champion of democracy when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, the liberal student leader who told the Russians to go home. As an authoritarian prime minister three decades later, he just called into question whether his country is a democracy at all.

With the European Union preoccupied with how to fight the novel coronavirus and its economic fallout, Orban enhanced his already formidable power on March 30 by allowing himself to rule by decree indefinitely, ostensibly to tackle the emergency. There were murmurs of outrage in western European capitals, followed by private admission that the EU isn’t capable—or willing—to do anything about its rogue member. “In Brussels, they sit in a bubble and dish out criticism instead of saving lives,” an emboldened Orban told Hungarian state radio on April 3.

If the coronavirus has shown up the EU’s frailties in finding a united response to the crisis, Orban’s ability to thumb his nose at western Europe exposes a weakness that risks longer-lasting damage to the post-Cold War integration project. The EU will ultimately get through the pandemic. It seems it can do little to stop a political malaise that’s been spreading for far longer, with Hungary energizing nationalists in Poland, Italy, and elsewhere.

Orban certainly picked his moment. The EU is recovering from Britain’s departure on Jan. 31 and doesn’t need another big conflict now, according to diplomats in Brussels. Two officials say that few people in European diplomatic circles were surprised by Orban exploiting a crisis to grab more power, but nobody really wants to force the issue. 

Any talk of action such as suspending Hungary’s EU voting rights, or even withholding aid, has gone nowhere because of the need for consensus in EU decision-making. Orban is backstopped by Poland, whose nationalist government has been playing its own game of chicken with the European authorities over a political takeover of the judiciary. Warsaw has provided cover by promising to veto any sanctions on Budapest, and vice versa. The Poles also joined Orban in complaining the EU wasn’t providing enough money to help address Covid-19.

As for the Continent’s indomitable firefighter, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, concern about Hungary is simply not high on her agenda given the pandemic, according to a person in Berlin familiar with her thinking. Member states are at odds over how to pay for the damage from the virus as Italy, in particular, struggles with the effects of a severe outbreak.

Even calls to kick Orban’s Fidesz party out of the biggest bloc in the European Parliament can’t seem to get traction. Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, which wields the most influence in the group, has shown no indication it supports that. Indeed, many of its grandees, including the late Helmut Kohl, who was the West German chancellor when the Berlin Wall fell, admired Orban as an anti-communist freedom fighter. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who succeeded Merkel as CDU leader, declined to sign a letter admonishing Orban.

“Orban is doing what he’s doing because he knows he can get away with it,” says Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at Eurasia, a political risk consulting firm. “The EU, by and large, has not fully understood who they’re dealing with, and that explains why they haven’t mobilized tools to constrain him.”

The Hungarian leader’s stature as a trailblazer among Europe’s nationalists is largely because of his success at legitimizing his “illiberal democracy” at home and abroad. His defining moment was in 2015, when he opposed Merkel’s decree of an EU-wide welcome for refugees from the Syrian war. Orban portrayed himself as the Continent’s border guard, building a fence to shut them out and allowing those stranded in a Budapest railway station to flee to western Europe. 

An ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Orban has inspired populist leaders in France and Italy. He’s also earned lavish praise from Donald Trump, who compared Orban to a twin brother at a White House meeting a year ago. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s governing party, has said his goal is to re-create Budapest at home in Warsaw. 

Orban, 56, is a political chameleon who’s the EU’s longest-serving leader after Merkel. After the student movement morphed into his Fidesz party, he won power as a conservative in 1998. Another stint in opposition from 2002 saw him turn into a divisive populist who attacked the government as being riddled with communists. By the time he became prime minister again, in 2010, his support base had widened, backing him as the man to restore dignity to those Hungarians left behind by the country’s transition to a globalized member of the EU.  

Since then he’s used his two-thirds parliamentary supermajority to railroad through any opposition as he dismantled checks and balances, stacking the courts with loyalists, passing a new constitution, and tinkering with electoral law to boost his unassailability at the ballot box. He built a propaganda machine that includes almost 500 media outlets and cracked down on independent civic groups. He made Hungarian émigré George Soros an enemy of the state.

In truth, the EU has been Orban’s great enabler in many ways. A law graduate who later studied at Oxford University on a Soros scholarship, Orban made sure that even if legislation diverged in spirit from the EU, it was hard to sanction. And while he’s reveled in his role as agitator-in-chief, he’s kept his economy open for business—and, of course, EU aid.

Hungary and Poland receive the most money of all EU members on a net basis. Germany, meanwhile, remains the biggest single investor in Hungary, with investments including a factory being built by BMW. Orban offered tax breaks and even a law to ensure workers would do enough overtime. In turn, he developed a Putin-like circle of rich businessmen who benefited from EU funding.

After years of state control not seen since the days of communism, recent polls suggested the majority of Hungarians were still satisfied with their level of democracy. Then came the onslaught of the coronavirus. “Orban has been consistently ruthless in exploiting opportunity to further centralize power,” says Rahman, who’s worked at the European Commission and U.K. Treasury. “He’s obviously using Covid-19 as context and a pretext.”

Governments including the U.K.’s have triggered emergency legislation to enhance their power to address the pandemic and tighten controls, but they don’t go as far as Orban’s open-ended law. It grants him the right to rule by decree until he agrees the pandemic no longer requires it. Hungary had recorded 733 cases of Covid-19, with 34 deaths, as of April 5.

Within a day, his government filed a raft of legislation to withdraw the power of mayors, classify the details of a $2 billion rail project funded by China, and even expand control over theaters. He backtracked on the mayors after his own lawmakers protested and spooked investors dumped the currency, the forint. Orban denied his new power is a threat to democracy and promised to give it up once the crisis is over. He said it’s nothing more than what a French president has in “peacetime.” 

An EU official says the European Commission is looking into exactly what steps Orban has taken, but it’s not clear what rules, if any, he’s breached because of the unprecedented nature of the crisis. “By killing the virus, we should not kill democracy,” European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said on Friday. “Next to the need to gain immunity against corona, we must strengthen our collective immunity against the virus of absolute power.”

An option may be to look at meting out punishment in the EU’s seven-year budget that’s under discussion, one of the diplomats in Brussels says. Talks on that are on hold after EU leaders failed to reach an agreement the last time they met in person, on Feb. 21. Hungary’s actions should bear “financial consequences” in the budget talks because it was “unacceptable” for member states to exploit the crisis to reduce civil liberties, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on April 3 after a video conference of EU foreign ministers.

For now, though, few in the EU are willing to call Orban out publicly. When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen first commented on March 31, she called on governments not to undermine democracy, though she didn’t mention Hungary by name. Only later did she say she had “concerns” about what was happening in the country of just under 10 million people.

In a joint statement on April 1, a majority of EU governments said they were “deeply concerned about the risk of violations of the principles of rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights arising from the adoption of certain emergency measures.” There was no mention of Orban. In another twist, Hungary signed the statement the next day. It said the values it’s defending are “common to all of us.” —With Patrick Donahue, Marek Strzelecki, and Ewa Krukowska

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