FOR ERSTWHILE dissident Viktor Orban, comparison with Vladimir Putin, the man who now leads the country whose grip he helped to break Hungary from, is no doubt the most cutting of insults. And yet it is as irresistible as it accurate. Orban’s tightening hold on Hungary’s political institutions, its courts, media, and central bank, has all the hallmarks of Putin’s entrenching of one-party rule.
And on the streets of Budapest last Monday there were echoes of Moscow as crowds of up to 30,000 chanted “Viktator! Viktator!”
At issue is a combination of a new constitution which has allowed the nationalist ruling Fidesz party to place its own people for nine-year terms at the head of powerful councils overseeing the media, particularly the national broadcaster, the judiciary – the appointment of judges and allocation of cases – and the budget. And new electoral laws should ensure the party’s comfortable, gerrymandered re-election. Key Fidesz policies like fiscal rules requiring a flat rate of personal income tax are now only repealable by a two-thirds super-majority.
The latter and, particularly, new curbs on the independence of the country’s central bank, as well as the takeover of private pension funds and a new tax on banks, have provoked a confrontation with the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund with whom Budapest is in talks about a badly needed financial bailout. Under mounting pressure from financial markets, the government is now backtracking from its initial firm stance to stick to that legislation and has made some concessions to lenders in the hope of starting talks quickly.
Brussels’s talk of conditionality on loans has so far been confined to issues relating to breaches of single market rules. A broader question is raised, however, about whether the growing EU “intrusiveness” in member states on economic issues, caricatured all too often as bullying or diktats, should not also be extended to challenging breaches of the democratic norms which underpin the union, a commitment to which was reinforced in the Lisbon Treaty.
The issue is posed by Hungary’s new laws in the sharpest way since the crisis provoked by Austria’s far-right Freedom Party of Jörg Haider joining a coalition government in 2000 and which resulted in seven months’ diplomatic sanctions. The EU’s Putin must be made aware that the EU is a “community of values”, that his mandate in 2010 does not entitle him to suspend democracy, and that there will be a price to pay.