Hungary’s Orban demonstrates how to dismantle democracy : NPR

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Atop a cobblestone hill overlooking the Danube River and the medieval lanes of Budapest, tour groups surround a changing of the guard ceremony in front of a 13th century baroque castle. Across the square, construction crews rebuild a centuries-old palace complex, and that's where politician Akos Hadhazy guides a tour of his own. “We are at the Buda Castle, and if you're looking for a symbolic place for corruption, power and the waste of public money, this is a beautiful venue for that,” Hadhazy says as a Chinese tour group shuffles by.

Hadhazy, who works as a veterinarian, is an independent member of Hungary's parliament. He routinely gives tours showcasing what he and many critics allege is the corruption of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government.

“The offices for the prime minister and his cabinet used to be down there next to the parliament building,” he continues, pointing to Budapest's other big pointy-towered tourist attraction in the distance, across the river. “But Orban decided he wanted to move here, into a castle. Even Matyas Rakosi, Hungary's most brutal communist dictator, refused to move his office here, but Orban wants to play king, so the national gallery will eventually need to be moved out of the castle to make way for him.”

All this construction, Hadhazy says, motioning to the cranes towering above the hilltop, represents Orban's gifts to cronies in the form of lucrative contracts while ensuring Orban can survey his “kingdom” from above the capital.

Orban, 61, is in his fourth consecutive term as prime minister. In that time, he and his allies have dismantled democratic checks and balances, taken control of the country's media, civil society and universities, and consolidated power in himself and his Fidesz party. The dismantling of Hungary's democracy is a point of fascination for political scientists around the world — including those advising the Trump administration.

But Hadhazy says the Hungarian prime minister is an easy read. “It's not like Orban is a genius politician,” he says. “He received his sheet music from Vladimir Putin, who came into power when oil prices were high, and he channeled that money into oligarchs and in return they bought up Russia's independent media. Orban franchised that model here in Hungary, except he used European Union funds.”

Orban targets the media

The EU began freezing those funds in 2022, but not before Orban and loyal associates took control of much of the country's media.

When the Fidesz party regained power in 2010, “the first target was the media,” explains Hungarian investigative journalist Andras Petho. “Literally the first legislation that they introduced to the parliament was the media law, which, at first, was about redesigning the media regulatory system.”

Petho, who now runs the investigative reporting center Direkt36 in Budapest, says Orban's government was quick to approve any business deal by those close to Orban who wanted to take over media companies. At the same time, Petho says, Orban changed the structure of Hungary's public media outlet, allowing the government to purge the institution of anyone deemed unfriendly to the government.

Petho's former employer Origo, a digital news site, was also sold to a company owned by the son of the then-central bank governor, who, Petho says, eventually turned it into a propaganda site. “The publisher started coming to us with really unusual requests, asking us to remove articles from the website, and when we tried to push back, things escalated pretty quickly.”

Petho says he and many others in Origo's newsroom resigned.

What's left of Hungary's free press can be found in nooks and crannies that dot the capital. In a tiny apartment in central Budapest, a few dozen journalists from what used to be prominent newspapers that were, one-by-one, forced to shut down by Orban's government have formed their own newspaper — Magyar Hang, or Hungarian Voice.

“Nobody was brave enough to print in Hungary, so we have to find a printing company outside the country,” says Csaba Lukacs, managing director of the weekly paper. “Our newspaper is printed in Slovakia in Bratislava, so we have to organize each week the transportation of the paper.”

Hungarian Voice is funded almost entirely through subscriptions, says Lukacs. He says it's the only conservative paper in Hungary that isn't part of the state propaganda apparatus. “We are not receiving advertising even from multinational companies,” he says, “because they are afraid they will be punished by the tax authorities or somebody else, and our journalists are not allowed to go to the government press conferences.”

Lukacs says the government has stripped away press freedom in a step-by-step process over the years.

“We are not yet in Turkey, because the journalists will not be jailed yet,” he says. “We are not in Russia because nobody is falling out from the windows yet. But day by day we are getting closer.”

Pressure on Hungary's universities

“What are the characteristics of a dictatorship,” asks professor Agnes Kende to her students, mostly middle-aged adults at a night class inside a sleek room in Central European University's Budapest campus.

“One person controls power with their family,” offers Éva Turonyi, a retired healthcare assistant.

“Very good,” says Kende, writing the point on the board.

“In a dictatorship, the power is centralized, while in a democracy, it's more fragmented,” says Andrea Kovacs, an assistant at a local construction company.

“Great, centralized power,” echoes Kende.

“In a dictatorship, elections are made irrelevant,” offers one of the only men in the class, Jeno Bak.

“Interesting point,” says Kende. “Let me ask: Does anyone in a dictatorship have the right to vote?”

Bak, in his 60s, shoots up his hand and Kende calls on him. “I had the right to vote, even in the Kadar era,” he says, referring to communist dictator Janos Kadar, who ruled Hungary for 32 years during the Cold War. “It didn't have much of a point because you only could pick from a single option. We acted out the ‘democracy.' “

After the brainstorming session, the class breaks into small groups, where they analyze key speeches delivered by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and other dictators throughout modern history. The class is part of the Socrates Program at Central European University, one of the few programs still offering classes at the institution's Budapest site. CEU was forced to move its degree programs from Budapest to a new campus in Vienna after Orban's government pushed a law through parliament in 2017 that changed rules for foreign universities operating in Hungary.

“In spite of everything,” says CEU Budapest Pro-Rector Laszlo Kontler, “we are determined to continue useful work here with all civil society stakeholders, academic partners that have been accumulated over three decades, and with whom the connections are not completely lost.”

Kontler, a history professor, says Orban's government has not only forced out foreign universities like CEU, but in the 2010s, it took over state universities by appointing chancellors who had a wide scope of authority over the institutions' finances. “So that's one step,” Laszlo says, “if you will, against the academic autonomy of institutions.”

Another step, he says, was, under the direction of Orban, state universities “were privatized in a very particular way” — placed under the direction of boards that were packed with individuals close to Orban's Fidesz party. “They have been promised to be put on a financially more viable footing in exchange for accepting basically control or surveillance by a combination of individuals and forces close to the government,” explains Laszlo.

The institutions that accepted this government control include some of Hungary's oldest and largest universities such as Corvinus University, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, and Semmelweis University.

“There are excellent academics who are doing academically credible work at these universities as well,” Kontler points out, “but still, there are strange things happening, which, if one puts it together, cannot be regarded as anything else than an infringement on academic authority.”

“Trump went further in two months than Orban could in 15 years”

This year, faced with an increasingly unified opposition in parliament that has rallied behind charismatic lawyer and politician Peter Magyar, Orban's attacks on media, civil society and freedom of assembly have gained momentum. On March 15, in a speech commemorating Hungary's 1848 revolution against the Habsburg empire, Orban said, “We are dismantling the financial machine that has used corrupt dollars to buy politicians, judges, journalists, bogus civil society organizations and political activists.”

He called these groups stink bugs who have “survived the winter” and need to be eradicated. “If there is justice, and there is, there is a special place in hell for them,” Orban said.

Political scientist Peter Kreko says Orban is targeting the last bastions of Western democracy in Hungary. “Orban just thinks that the West is unable to survive and the democratic and liberal practices of the West have weakened the West,” he says.

Kreko has mapped out the 15-year process Orban has taken to dismantle Hungary's democracy. Orban began, he says, by weakening Hungary's courts, filling them with loyalists. He then applied pressure on media companies, either turning them into state propaganda or putting them out of business. Then, says Kreko, Orban took control over universities, appointing leaders loyal to him.

Kreko says Orban focused on ridding Hungary of any institution capable of checking his power, and he says he sees similarities to how President Trump is carrying out his second term in office. The difference, says Kreko, is the pace at which Trump is operating. “I think Trump went further in two months than Orban could in 15 years,” observers Kreko. “In the United States, it reminds me of a constitutional coup, where everything happens very rapidly.”

In public speeches, Trump has called Orban “fantastic,” “respected” and said “nobody is a better leader” than the Hungarian prime minister. And while Orban has boasted that his party has shared his strategies with Trump advisers, Kreko doubts the help was very meaningful. He says Hungary serves as more of a conservative fantasyland that MAGA Republicans can aspire to. “So: Hungary as the country where you don't have immigrants, where you don't have woke issues, where gender ideology is not that dominant,” says Kreko, “and where family values are strong. So this is clearly a construction of Hungary that has nothing to do with reality.”

He says that's because Hungary is surrounded by Europe and its open society. Budapest's annual Pride Parade, one of Europe's largest, is now in the Hungarian government's crosshairs. In March, it pushed a new law through parliament that banned any assembly that “promotes homosexuality,” asserting it was needed to “protect children.” On April 14, the parliament voted to amend the country's constitution with similar language.

At a café in Budapest, Pride Parade spokesperson Johanna Majercsik says this new law will likely go further than banning the pride parade. “If the government succeeds in banning such a peaceful protest, that means that in the future they will be able to ban or restrict any other peaceful event, any other peaceful demonstration organized by [other] social groups,” she says.

Many other Hungarians agree. After the public assembly law passed in March, tens of thousands of people halted traffic and bridges in the capital in what have become weekly protests in Budapest. Critics of the law and the new constitutional amendment say Orban is using the LGBTQ+ community as a tool to shut down the right of Hungarian citizens to freely assemble in peaceful protests, particularly at a time when the opposition to Orban's rule is beginning to gain momentum.

But political analysts say Orban, nearing the end of his fourth consecutive term, appears to be, yet again, adapting his step-by-step strategy to hold on to power for as long as he can.

Mate Halmos contributed reporting to this story from Budapest.