Remembering Hungary’s nationwide protests ten years on

This week, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, Jean Asselborn, proposed the previously unthinkable – expelling Hungary from the European Union for treating asylum seekers “worse than wild animals”. Hungary has got used to such international criticism and brushes it off. The hardline right-wing government of Viktor Orbán has dismissed progressive policies as “liberal babble. This era is now at an end.”

Hungary is not alone in seeing a resurgence in right-wing populism. The Visegrad countries of itself, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have all elected governments expressing similar sentiments and even mature democracies like the UK, France and the USA are affected. But Hungary’s current situation has some very specific circumstances beyond geopolitical trends, dated to exactly ten years ago.

50 years after the anti-communist protests in the country were ruthlessly crushed by the USSR’s Red Army, the commemorations transmogrified into ongoing anti-government demonstrations. This came through a twist worthy of House of Cards, as an audio recording emerged after the Hungarian Socialist Party had won the general election, where the prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, admitted in salty language consistently lying for the two years up to and during the election, with the previous four years of the Socialist Party government having nothing of which to be proud.

After it became clear that neither the prime minister nor his party were prepared to resign after being exposed, on 18th September 2006, 40,000 people staged a protest outside the Hungarian parliament in Budapest. It was the largest such demonstration since 1989 and the fall of Communism, of which it so happened the Hungarian Socialist Party was the legacy party to the Communist rulers.

Protests spread to other cities. In Debrecen, the city mayor, Lajos Kósa, a member of Fidesz (Orban’s party), took an active part in the demonstrations and criticised the (Socialist) mayor of Budapest’s perceived inactivity. In Szeged, the far-right Jobbik movement came to prominence in organising a demonstration. There were rallies even in Romania and Serbia in ethnic Hungarian enclaves in those countries.

This febrile atmosphere continued right up to the 50th anniversary of 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Marches against the government had been taking place every day but on 23rd October, the police resorted to mounted police charges, tear gas and rubber bullets and subsequently the discipline of the crowd descended into a riot. Notably, one set of protestors commandeered an (unarmed) T-34 tank from open-air anniversary celebrations and drove it at police lines (until it ran out of fuel). Even a peaceful Fidesz gathering was met with a harsh police reaction.

A candlelight vigil took place in Budapest on 4th November, the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Hungarian Revolution but the demonstrations petered out in the face of the implacability of the Hungarian Socialist Party to remain in office. As Prime Minister Gyurcsány predicted of any protestors in his speech about lying, “Sooner-or-later they will get bored of it and go home.” It was a temporary victory. Eventually, in 2009, Gyurcsány was forced out by a vote of no-confidence and the Socialist-nominated successor lasted barely a year. In the 2010 elections, the Socialists were annihilated, going from 190 seats to 59 and finishing only a couple of percentage points above the rabble-rousing Jobbik. The big winner though was Fidesz and Viktor Orbán, who through 52% of the vote gained 68% of the seats, thus exceeding the two-thirds supermajority required to change the constitution. Orbán had previously been prime minister between 1998 and 2002 but now he had the opportunity to truly reshape Hungary to his right-wing vision. Moreover, he has to avoid being outflanked by Jobbik, which garnered 20% of the vote in 2014 elections, on his right-wing flank.

Thousands have protested the adoption of the new constitution which, critics argue, removes checks and balances (such as restrictions on the Constitutional Court), allows Fidesz to cement the policies of its time in office, limits certain civil liberties and is avowedly conservative in outlook, discriminating against those who do not share that. But like the Socialist Party, Fidesz sets if face against the activists and promulgated it. Amnesty International believes the document “violates international and European human rights standards.” In 2014, Fidesz comfortably won again, though in winning a plurality rather than a majority, it lost its supermajority in parliamentary seats. Yet it has changed the constitution already and even if a government of a different hue comes after it, that government will have to abide by the rules Fidesz laid down. But at the moment, Orbán is going nowhere and ironically he can thank the Socialists for it.