Election of the Weekend IV: Hungary

Our story begins almost 20 years ago, in 2006, when two ambitious 25 year old Hungarian baby lawyers got married. The bride, Judit Varga, had already joined Fidesz, the main opposition party at the time. Fidesz had emerged from 1980’s student movement as a secular, liberal-to-libertarianish party but in the late 1990’s had reimagined itself as a center-right nationalist party. In 2009, she became a policy advisor to several Fidesz and Fidesz-aligned members of European Parliament. The following year, Fidesz was a able to capture a strong majority of seats on the strength of wide-spread dissatisfaction with the ruling Socialists governance through the financial crisis. Varga was a rising star; she became minister of state for EU relations and was then, in 2019, appointed by Orban to the role of Minister of Justice in 2019, a role she would hold until her resignation (more on that below) in 2024.

Her husband, Peter Magyar, was less interested in politics, but was supportive of Fidesz as well, having joined the party in 2002 according to some sources. He came from a politically connected family; his great uncle had just finished a five year term as Hungary’s president (a largely symbolic position). Shortly after the marriage, he defended anti-government protestors from the 2006 anti-government protests (the Socialist PM, who had just won a squeaker of an election against Fidesz, was clandestinely recorded frankly admitting to lying publicly about a number of important policy issues to get re-elected just months earlier. The release of this tape led to widespread protests and a subsequent crackdown). In the late aughts he worked primarily in International corporate law, advising multinational firms on the Hungarian investments. Shortly after Fidesz won in 2010 and Orban became PM, he was appointed to a role of some significance at the ministry of foreign affairs, and a year later he was made Hungary’s permanent representative at the EU. Throughout the 2010’s, he was widely regarded as a powerful insider within Fidesz leadership.

Magyar and Varga rose through the ranks of Hungary’s ruling party and raised three children together, but their marriage did not last, and in 2023 they were on their way to divorce. Also in 2023, Hungary’s Fidesz-appointed president Katalin Novak decided to grant a presidential pardon to Endre Kónya, who had been the deputy director of a state-run orphanage. Kónya had been convicted of helping to cover up the sexual abuse of children at the orphanage at the hands of his boss, the director of the orphanage. Kónya’s conviction rested on the testimony of abused children, whom he had strongarmed and threatened into recanting their testimony. The conviction hinged on one particular where he had blackmailed one child into recanting his testimony by threatening to relocate his cousin, who had also been at the same orphanage, so another, apparently disfavored facility far from Budapest. At the ime of his pardon, Kónya had already been released to home confinement and had nine months left on his sentence. Novak issued 22 pardons, including Kónya’s on the April 27, 2023, stating that she had been moved to clemency by the words of Pope Francis during a recent papal visit.

The power to pardon in Hungary starts with the president, but it doesn’t end there. For a pardon to take effect, a cabinet minister, typically the Minister of Justice, must sign off on it as well. Varga did so. There are some suggestions that Varga and Novak took steps to keep this pardon out of the public eye, although I don’t have confidence that actually happened. At any rate, no one noticed until February of 2024, when an independent media outlet reported the story, implying that Novak had been unduly influenced by Zoltan Balog, a politically connected Bishop in the Hungarian Reformed Church who had played a role in getting both the child-abusing director and abuse-covering up deputy director into their roles. To a degree that seems almost quaint just a couple years later, this immediately became a major scandal. Varga was widely rumored to be Orban’s top choice to head the party list for EU parliament elections later that year, but within just over a week of the story breaking, Novak and Varga had resigned in disgrace and Orban was talking about a constitutional amendment making child abusers and their enablers ineligible for clemency.

The launching of what would become the campaign that may well end Orban’s and Fidesz’ sixteen year run in Hungary took place just hours after Varga’s election. On his Facebook page, Maygar announced his resignation from any and all public positions in government, and launched a broadside against his now-former party, arguing that they had ceased to believe in much of anything other than their own corrupt self-enrichment. In an ethically dubious but apparently effective move, he released tapes of his wife effectively admitting Fidesz was a self-enriching racket, and their ideological commitments were little more than tools to that end. Days later he was leading large rallies with anti-Fidesz celebrities. Overnight, he went from minor Fidesz power-broker to the most successful and promising opposition politician Hungary had seen since Fidesz had first taken power in 2010. A few months later, he essentially hermit crabbed his way into Tisza, a minor center-right pro-Europe party that had formed officially in 2020, but had been largely inactive since. (Tisza is both a portmanteau of the Hungarian words for ‘respect’ and ‘freedom’ and Hungary’s second largest river; “The Tisza is flooding” has become a popular chant at his rallies.) Just months after the party formed, his hastily thrown together list for the EU parliamentary elections was the second largest party behind Fidesz, winning 30% of the votes to Fidesz’ 45% (down from 53%) and taking 7 of the 21 seats. This was a pretty big upset for such a new, largely unorganized party and political movement, and set aside any doubt about who would lead the opposition against Orban and Fidesz two years later.

So here we are. This election has been reasonably well covered so I won’t dwell on the stakes. The National Assembly has 199 seats, of which Fidesz holds 135 at present. 106 are SMDs, and these have been aggressively gerrymandered to benefit Fidesz, in every election since they took power in 2010. The other 93 seats are nationwide constituency PR. Those seats can’t be gerrymandered but Orban found another way to boost his chances–a law that made acquiring citizenship by ancestry easy to obtain for those of Hungarian ethnicity residing outside of Hungary. These voters, predominantly conservative ethnic Hungarians in residing in Slovakia, Romania, the Vojvodina region of Serbia and the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, have proven to be loyal Fidesz soldiers. Independent polling really does show a substantial Tisza lead, into the low double digits, but the structural advantages Orban and Fidesz haven’t gone away, and perception that lead has been growing has been overstated in the discourse. I see that prediction markets now have Fidesz at 3:1 underdogs, which warms my heart but my head tells Orban at 25 cents on the dollar would be the better bet at the moment. I hope to be wrong.

It’s common for people to get a bit carried away with the alleged symbolic significance of elections, above and beyond the concrete power the allocate, and I try not to fall into that trap. That said, this election seems pretty important for reasons well beyond Hungary. Orban has made Hungary a home for the transnational illberal right, providing various weirdo American rightwingers think-tank sinecures (even when they prove themselves embarrassingly inept at the basics of PR for aspiring authoritarian regimes) and building ties and connections not just with MAGAland but with the global right generally. Scott earlier talked about how there is some reason to believe this all may be backfiring a bit, with respect to the Vance visit in particular; I do think there’s some limit to the politics of international nationalism that Orban has centered at advanced recently. It’s also noteworthy to remember that Fidesz started out as a party vigorously opposed to Russian interference and meddling, and that lasted well beyond 2010. Orban talked a good game about diversifying Hungary’s foreign ties with his “Eastern openings” initiative but if that was ever convincing, last week’s leaked phone call recording of Orban’s obsequious, servile tone towards Putin makes it hard to swallow.

I’m talking myself back into an optimistic stance here, which I think is warranted, if at a somewhat more subdued level than the vibes seem to suggest. We’ll see soon enough.