Hungary: power,punishment and the ‘Christian-national idea’

Militarised borders, machismo and vigilantism

On 15 September 2015, the Hungarian government declared a ‘state of migration emergency’ due to the ‘crisis situation’ at its border with Serbia ‘caused by mass immigration’. ⁴ For Orbán, the worst refugee crisis in Europe since the second world war was not a humanitarian challenge but a Muslim ‘invasion’ that necessitated a military response to close down the migrants’ Balkan land route to the EU. Europeans will not ‘become a minority in our own Continent’, Orbán had declared a few weeks earlier, during his regular Friday morning interview on state radio. He told listeners that ‘we have to make it clear that we can’t allow everyone in, because if we allow everyone in, Europe is finished. If you are rich and attractive to others, you also have to be strong because if not, they will take away what you have worked for and you will be poor, too.’ ⁵

Orbán was offered assistance from international agencies to help with the reception of refugees. But he quickly refused, as this would have meant acknowledging Hungary’s obligations, under both the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Dublin regulations, to provide asylum seekers with a proper registration system and hear their claims in Hungary. Instead, he sought to turn Hungary into a ‘refugee protection free zone’ by building fortifications around the country. Having already spent around €3.2 million on a National Consultation on Immigration and Terrorism ⁶ – sending out questionnaires with loaded questions and erecting billboards across the country with captions like ‘If you come to Hungary you mustn’t take away the work of Hungarians!’ – soldiers, prison labourers and those on workfare were drafted in to erect a 109-mile razor-wire fence at the border with Serbia. The cost was a staggering €98 million, at least three times the €27.5 million budget of the Office of Immigration and Nationality for 2015. ⁷ And along Hungary’s border with Croatia, armoured vehicles (equipped with machine guns) and heavily armed soldiers took up position, prior to its being totally sealed off on 17 October 2015. On the same day that emergency measures were officially introduced, amendments to the Criminal Code and the Asylum Law came into force, making it a crime to enter Hungary through a border fence with up to three years in prison for anyone caught so doing, and with children subject to the same procedures and penalties as adults.

Further legal amendments were to follow, in the Police Act and the Act on National Defence. The army is now authorised to support the police at the border and to use rubber bullets, tear-gas grenades and pyrotechnical devices. A parliamentary resolution backs the use of ‘all available measures to defend Hungary’s borders’ and states that we ‘cannot allow illegal migrants to endanger the jobs and social security of the Hungarian people. We have the right to defend our culture, language, and values.’ ⁸ Naturally, Orbán’s belligerence was to increase after the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November. Legislation was rushed through parliament, paving the way for a legal challenge to the EU scheme to resettle 160,000 refugees across the Schengen area.

What we have now in Hungary, as Amnesty International (AI) has rightly observed, is a highly militarised border operation with an inherent risk of violence, particularly if firearms are used as a method of crowd control at the border (illegal under international law) and the military (which is trained for combat and has a different operational mindset to the police) is used as part of border management. In fact, the risk of state violence identified by AI had already materialised in violent scenes on 16 September, when refugees on the Serbian side of the fence at the border town of Röszke were attacked with tear-gas and water cannon by the riot and anti-terrorist police, injuring at least seven children. This led to angry political exchanges with the Serbian government which issued a statement saying that Hungary had no right to fire into its territory. In addition, the European Federation of Journalists denounced an attack on six journalists and cameramen reporting from the border, including the crew of Radio-Television, Serbia, who were beaten with truncheons at the Horgos border crossing with Serbia. ⁹

There were other risks, too, attached to the Hungarian approach, as pointed out by Human Rights Watch. Those unfortunate enough to be taken to one of two registration centres at Röszke (known as Hangar 1 and Hangar 2), were held in hastily constructed metal pens, denied adequate food, water and medical care and, at least once, were thrown food as though to animals in cages. Caught on video, this manifestly degrading treatment went viral on YouTube. A report by Human Rights Watch laid bare the filth, overcrowding and scale of the inhumanity at Röszke, as well as at another holding centre at Debrecen, close to the Romanian border. ¹⁰

Such violations at the sharp edges of militarised borders now reinforce an aggressive popular culture and embolden fanatical elements, especially since the prime minister is identified with machismo and nationalism. The far-right racists of the electorally successful Movement for Better Hungary (Jobbik) have long been linked to paramilitary squads like the Hungarian Guard, disbanded by the courts in 2007, but since returned in different guises. Researchers at Harvard University have also noted that neo-Nazi groups are running military training camps and preparing for armed conflict and race war. ¹¹ In addition to harassing the Roma, the Outlaw Army (Betyársereg) is now attempting to emulate US Minutemen-style migrant hunts at the border. And in Ásotthalom, a village in Csongrád County close to Serbia, László Toroczkai (who was previously the leader of the far-right 64 Counties Youth Movement but ran for mayor on a Jobbik ticket) delivered on YouTube a warning to would-be border crossers. It concluded with the statement ‘Don’t come here’, ‘Hungary is a bad choice’ and ‘Ásotthalom is the worst’. The Washington Post described the ‘energetic film action score’ that accompanied the video which showed police and paramilitary forces at the ready, as ‘beefy men go on patrol on horseback; others jet down dirt roads on motorbikes. The film ends with a panoramic shot of Toroczkai, standing in front of his refugee-denying A-Team.’ ¹²

Harnessing religion to the punishing state

After the bodies of seventy-one people, including four children, were found on 27 August 2015 in the back of a lorry abandoned on the Austrian motorway close to the Hungarian border, government spokesperson Zoltán Kovács told state TV that ‘the migrants brought the tragedy on themselves’. Commenting shortly after the drowning of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, prime minister Orbán was a tad more compassionate than Kovács. In a lengthy interview with Bild on 12 September, he said that, while as a Christian he was shocked by the photograph of the toddler’s bloated body, he also questioned the adults who ‘put their lives and those of the children at risk’.

Comments such as these epitomise the way Christianity has been hitched to the nativist cause. Fidesz defines itself as a Christian nationalist party but Orbán is clear that the Christianity he espouses is one that despises liberal values, particularly internationalism and compassion for global humanity. As a Christian, Orbán, like the Finnish prime minister Juha Sipila, might consider offering a room or two in one of his many spacious mansions to a family of refugees. And Orbán could certainly afford to do so, as he is known to be immensely rich. But an analysis of Orbán’s speech at Kótcse on 5 September leaves no doubt that the Good Samaritan is the parable that appeals least. ¹³ In effect, Orbán argued that compassion towards non-natives is a form of political correctness. He emphasised, instead, order and responsibility as the foundational values of a patriarchal Christianity, one that starts from the protection of kith and kin and proceeds to love of country and culture. As someone who seems to have recently discovered Calvinism, Orbán’s view of good governance draws on a fundamentalist reading of John Calvin’s The Doctrines of Grace (which dwells on man’s enslavement to sin, the perverseness of human nature and the capacity of a chosen ‘elect’ to overcome ‘total depravity’ and draw close to God). Indeed, Orbán’s definition of Christianity is linked to his metamorphosis, since 2010, into a secular version of a Calvinistic pastor. Known in the Hungarian Reformed Church as a ‘leader of souls’, Orbán interprets his role as part of an elect that rewards the rich and punishes the poor, particularly if they are Muslim and foreign, or Roma and impoverished.

Orbán’s inclination to incorporate religiosity into the wielding of power is no aberration; it is on a continuum with the way he uses religion as an excuse to punish outsider Hungarians, particularly the Roma and the ‘idle poor’. And his support for ‘non-lethal force’ at the border (what AI prefers to call ‘less lethal’ force, since rubber bullets can kill) is in line with his authoritarian ideas on crime and punishment. In April 2014, Orbán suggested that the reintroduction of the death penalty in Hungary (abolished in 1990) might be desirable, though he backtracked when the EU warned that any change to the law would be a violation of EU treaties and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. He has also called for internment camps for immigrants, where they will be forced to work.

Governing through fear of the ‘other’

Since Orbán was re-elected in 2010, political commentators and distinguished historians have warned against a resurgence of fascist ideas, with Orbán locking Hungarians into a ‘wistful toxic relationship with the nineteen thirties’ when fantasies of ‘Jewish conspiracy and national moral decline’ were part of an authoritarian common sense. ¹⁴ In a number of meandering speeches, Orbán has revealed his taste for a good conspiracy theory, particularly if it emphasises cultural decline in the face of the ‘Islamisation of Europe’ and invasion from Africa. These threats to Christian identity are, in Orbán’s words, the result of the ‘liberal babble’ of European elites with their human rights fundamentalism and their delusional belief in the multicultural society. ¹⁵ Only Hungarians, he argues, have the courage to come to the defence of the status quo and preserve the EU’s historic ‘ethnic and cultural composition’.

Eva S. Balogh, a historian who left Hungary as a refugee in 1956, understands Orbán’s mindset well. She edits the Hungarian Spectrum and uses her daily online posts to brilliant effect, deconstructing a number of his key speeches to reveal and contextualise Orbán’s loaded use of concepts such as nation, nationalism and Christianity. Speeches include his seminal July 2014 speech in Băile Tuşnad, Tusnádfürdő, Romania (where he outlined his intention to create an ‘illiberal state’ based on ‘workfare’); his July 2015 speech to university students, also in Băile Tuşnad (where he talked about preserving Hungary for the Hungarians); his musings on the ‘migration’ problem at the Fidesz civic picnic in Kötcse; and his 12 September interview with Bild. Sociologist Mária Vásárhelyi has also studied the vocabulary used by Orbán in his weekly Friday morning interviews on Magyar Rádió which he uses to send the ‘pro-government media a message about what topics should be discussed’, ensuring also that ‘they understand how these topics should be interpreted’. ¹⁶

Balogh is particularly critical of Orbán’s repeated references to the ‘Christian-national idea’, pointing out that the Christian-national identity movement flourished in rightwing circles in the interwar period. It was in fact the dominant state ideology of the Horthy era where the word ‘Christian’ was used to denote someone who was ‘not Jewish’ and to limit Jewish participation in public life. If Jewish influence grew, it was argued, this would result in the moral collapse of the nation. Though Balogh is not convinced that Orbán is any more than a populist refining his propaganda as he goes along, nevertheless, his use of the ‘recurring theme of the Christian and National Idea’, she writes, indicates that ‘wittingly or unwittingly’ he and his supporters ‘sympathize with the ideology of the Hungarian far right of the interwar period, an ideology that bore striking resemblances to fascism and national socialism’. ¹⁷

Regime change and the illiberal state

The list of autocratic laws and reforms aimed at establishing political control of key institutions and eroding all checks and balances, brought in at breakneck speed since Fidesz’s election (as part of a conservative coalition in 2010 and subsequent re-election in 2014), is breathtaking. In addition to rewriting the Constitution, curtailing the powers and competencies of the Constitutional Court (also replacing its judges to ensure a Fidesz-friendly majority) and abolishing key regulatory bodies such as the National Data Protection Ombudsman, it has brought in the Media and Press Acts aimed at regulating media services and mass media. A new detailed system of media content regulation (including internet and ICT-delivered media content) has proved particularly controversial, ¹⁸ as has a proposed amendment to the National Security law to allow state intelligence agents to be stationed inside newsrooms. According to Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele, Hungary’s is now the only parliament in Europe where the speaker has his own ‘parlia-military’ armed guard with the power to search and ‘act’ in private homes. ¹⁹ She argues that the TEK counter-terrorism force, formed in 2010 by government decree with its own command structure and unlimited powers of surveillance, is in danger of becoming the private army of the prime minister. ²⁰ The government also passed a law in 2012 which made street homelessness a criminal act. When the Constitutional Court challenged the decision, Orbán reacted furiously, introducing a modification to the Constitution prohibiting street homelessness. ²¹

Orbán acts within the framework of the law simply by altering Hungary’s Constitution and curtailing the powers of the Constitutional Court. ²² In line with his views on the ‘Christian-national idea’, the reworded Constitution has a new preamble which emphasises ‘family’, ‘nation’, ‘work’ and ‘order’ and stresses the role of Christianity in ‘preserving nationhood’. The 2011 Church Law which removed legal recognition from approximately 200 religious communities (subsequently amended to allow for second-class ‘religious association’ status after international pressure), is the subject of a challenge in the European Court of Human Rights. Orbán favours the Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist traditions amongst his thirty-one certified churches, even appointing a Calvinist minister, Zoltán Balog as his Minister for Human Resources. Despite not being a member of Fidesz, Balog is in charge of education, culture and health, as well as Roma issues. Reformed and Catholic churches have also been granted more control over the running of state schools and the educational curriculum has been revised to focus more on the nationalist and irredentist history of ‘Greater Hungary’. (Orbán, who dwells on Hungary’s loss of two-thirds of its territory at the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, often describes himself as prime minister of all the Hungarians of the ‘Carpathian Basin’.) Key texts from renowned Hungarian Jewish authors, including the Nobel Prize-winning Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertész, have been removed from the school curriculum, while those of anti-Semitic writers from the interwar period, such as Albert Wass and József Nyírö, come highly recommended. To see the kind of intellectuals that Fidesz venerates, one only has to look at a number of prestigious prizes awarded in 2013. The Tancsics prize for journalism, handed over by Zoltán Balog, went to the TV broadcaster Ferenc Szaniszlo, who once described Roma people as ‘apes’, and a Tancsics gong in another category went to the archaeologist Kornal Bakay, known for his anti-Semitic views and for arguing that Jews organised the slave trade in the Middle Ages. Rock musician Janos Petras, whose band Karpatia was beloved by Jobbik supporters and who was known to have marched with the paramilitary-style Hungarian Guard, won the Golden Cross of Merit in the same year. ²³

From World Bank structural adjustment to daylight robbery

But Hungary’s problems are not all of Orbán’s making. For all the former Eastern Bloc countries, the transition from communism to capitalism, from a command economy to a market economy and into an integrated global economy, was brutal. Hungary’s economy was subjected to World Bank and IMF shock treatment. Éva Tessza Udvarhelyi suggests that the structural adjustment programme that took place in Hungary, coupled with deindustrialisation between 1988 and 1995, destroyed more economic assets than did the second world war. It also calculates that between 1989 and 1992 an estimated one-third of all jobs disappeared. ²⁴ Young Hungarians have been emigrating in droves, with 10 per cent of the labour force estimated to be now working abroad. And the draining of Hungary’s young skills base is continuing. According to Hungary’s Central Statistical Office, the number of Hungarians leaving the country to find work elsewhere increased by at least 46 per cent in 2014 – six times the rate in 2010 when Orbán came to power. ²⁵

In fact, as the economist Mark Blyth has shown, post-communist countries have now lost the most active part of their labour force to western Europe. ²⁶ Emigration, argues Blyth, has compounded the post-communist states’ already weak capacity to develop infrastructure, with investment now concentrated in real estate and finance rather than manufacturing. Not only is there an increased dependence on foreign capital inflows and remittances from expatriate labour to finance large deficits, but the banking sector became foreign dominated as French, German and other European banks moved in. All this has meant that, when the banking crisis hit former communist countries in 2008, many foreign banks threatened to pull out to maintain liquidity in their home countries. Hungary, which entered the EU in 2004, had experienced a steep decline even prior to global meltdown. Facing bankruptcy in 2008, the then Socialist Party (MPSZ) government of Ferenc Gyurcsany accepted an IMF, EU and World Bank bail-out of £15.38 billion in exchange for further austerity and neoliberal reforms. Deep recession and Gyurcsany’s increasing unpopularity, not least due to his lying to parliament about the state of the economy, led to his resignation in 2009, leaving the way open for Fidesz’s landslide victory in the April 2010 election and subsequent re-election in 2014.

And what followed, according to Bálint Magyar, author of The Anatomy of the Hungarian Mafia State, has been the institutionalisation of ‘legalized robbery’ as Orbán monopolises power and redistributes the country’s wealth utilising the ‘illegitimate extension of the entitlements of the head of the patriarchal family to the whole of the nation’. As Orbán redefines the nation as his personal ‘household’, its assets to be disposed of at the patriarch’s will, public interest has been systematically and relentlessly subverted to private interest while corruption has been centralised around Orbán’s ‘adopted political family’ with its ‘highly hierarchic pyramid-like order’ and ‘patron-client chain of vassal relationships’. In the final analysis, concludes Magyar, what Hungary’s mafia state represents is the ‘privatized form of the parasite state, the business venture of the adopted political family managed through the instruments of public authority’. ²⁷

Despite Orbán’s repeated boasts of economic growth and the glory years ahead, the natural consequence of centrally controlled asset-stripping is the rapacious spread of poverty. Reverse distribution of wealth towards the wealthy has been accompanied by a decrease of real social spending by 13–14 per cent, according to the OECD. And nearly 33 per cent (approximately 3.2 million) of the Hungarian population live in poverty, including 1.5 million in deep poverty, according to Eurostat figures for 2013. Furthermore, 70 per cent of the country’s approximately 700,000 Roma, who under communism had guaranteed work, were reported as excluded from the labour market in 2012. ²⁸ Roma suffer disproportionately from poverty, but they are not the only section of the Hungarian population to do so. As Éva Tessza Udvarhelyi, a founding member of the grassroots organisation ‘The City is For All’ (A Város Mindenkié) explains, the transition to capitalism, and the collapse of socialist industrial production, brought with it extreme regional stratification with ‘certain regions, especially in northeastern Hungary … plunged into persistent poverty, creating segregated enclaves of almost total unemployment and misery’. ²⁹ But a leader who spouts ‘Hungary for the Hungarians’ – a phrase that excludes Hungarian Roma – does not want to admit that his policies are punishing the poor. The muting of critical voices, particularly those that focus on class, is also furthered by the racialisation of poverty. As Zoltán Balog, in charge of ‘Gypsy’ integration, puts it, ‘Poverty is common, but it has a Gypsy face’.

The ‘workfare society’ and the racialisation of poverty

Orbán’s plan to create new ‘jobs’ through the ‘workfare society’ (munka alapú társadalom) is another key feature of the fundamental change Hungary is undergoing. ‘Family’, ‘work’, ‘order’, ’nation’ – the values written into the new Hungarian Constitution – provide the framework for the compulsory Hungarian Work Plan (HWP) where so-called ‘jobs’ have been divested of the normal rights associated with labour. In November 2014, Orbán, elaborating on the Fundamental Law’s reference to the ‘usefulness of citizens’ work’ as a determinant of social rights, announced his intention to do away with unemployment benefits altogether, declaring that in future the only option available to the unemployed would be public works.

Political scientist Dorottya Szikra has contextualised the HWP as a move away from active labour market policies, aimed at getting the unemployed back into mainstream employment, towards a punitive programme mostly based on hard labour in forestry, waterworks and local renovation. She illustrates the super-exploitability of a scheme that involved the creation of a new ‘public works minimum wage’ at 70 per cent of the national minimum wage. ³⁰ Needless to say, the government provides no evaluation of its scheme’s effectiveness. But independent surveys show the fallacies of the scheme, even when taken on its own terms. A report prepared for the European Commission directorate of employment affairs estimates that 200,000 ‘vulnerable’ people were employed on the scheme in 2015, that it is expensive to run (costs tripled between 2011 and 2014) and that approximately one-fifth of current public works employees are being dismissed and then re-employed on lower salaries by their former employer. ³¹ Analyses provided by the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) and the Network Against Poverty suggest that those working under the HWP fail to develop skills, being too tired or too trapped by employers who need cheap labour and do everything they can to obstruct their employees from seeking better paid work. The MTA study revealed that only 13 per cent of those employed on the HWP in 2012–2013 went on to find alternative employment. ³² A mid-term assessment in 2014 by the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights also expressed concerns that ‘inequitable working conditions and often pointless work’ comprised a ‘severe violation of basic rights and dignity’. ³³

But then the purpose of the HWP was never to extend the body of those in work but to deliver up to local authorities (responsible for its implementation) a cheap super-exploitable labour force for public works, with the new benefits regime rendering those in that workforce all the easier to discipline, given the choice either to work or to starve. For, given the corrupt relationship between local mayors and the ‘adoptive political family’ that Magyar identifies, the scheme brings with it the additional risk that local mayors are not only milking the scheme’s funds but using it to discipline and punish the poor, particularly the Roma, who are perceived to be indolent and lacking discipline. Local authorities, for instance, have the power to exclude the unemployed from the scheme if they fail to keep their houses and gardens tidy or if their children truant from school. They can exclude for other arbitrary reasons too. For instance, Roma women in Gyöngyös, a small town in north east Hungary, were excluded because of ‘wearing traditional costumes’ at work. ³⁴ Research carried out by a number of thinktanks, including Political Capital, suggests a link between Hungary’s Work Plan, Roma marginalisation and electoral fraud. For those seeking employment, these schemes can be used as a lever to secure their vote through the promise of rewards or threat of sanctions. ³⁵

All these concerns were brought together in journalist Pablo Gorondi’s investigation of the plight of Roma labourers in the village of Ózd, which is governed by the far-right Jobbik mayor David Janiczak. ³⁶ One-third of the total population of 34,000 of Ózd, some hundred miles from Budapest, are Roma, and Roma labourers make up the bulk of the 1,300 residents on its public employment programmes, mostly on city-run farmland and other public projects. Since Janiczak came to power, the Roma have to start their working day at 6am, two hours earlier than before, entailing long walks to work at a time when there is no public transport. There is a lack of drinking water and toilets on the sites. And to top it all, the mayor is constructing a surveillance system to ensure that the workers do not slack. Janiczak said the city had spent 340,000 forints ($1,260; €1,100) on eight video cameras, and that those in the public employment programme should ‘get used to being observed’. ‘Every person in Ózd has two options – they either live in order and integrity and build the city, or they destroy it’, Janiczak told the newspaper. ‘The majority of these destructive people are Gypsies, without whom … it would be easier for the city to develop.’ If there were fewer Roma, Janiczak said, the city would spend less on social benefits and people would feel safer. If efforts to integrate the ‘destroyers are unsuccessful’, he added, ‘authorities will use the full force of the law’. Chillingly, the mayor’s latest move to attract investment to the area is to build a new prison in Ózd creating 250 jobs. Presumably the Roma would build the prison, only to be incarcerated there.

Life is tough for Hungarians today, but many maintain their humanity. They seek to support their fellow Roma citizens in intercultural initiatives or are part of a network of hundreds of volunteers who, in the absence of government, formed distribution networks to feed, clothe and shelter tens of thousands of refugees passing through their country, representing perhaps the awakening of civil society. Many others are responding to the authoritarian policies of their leaders with humour and satire. The National Consultation on Immigration that preceded the militarisation of the border was popularly referred to as the ‘National Insult’ and a crowd-sourcing campaign was launched by the satirical Two-tailed Dog Party to provide an alternative set of billboards, with one declaring, ‘Come to Hungary, we have all got jobs in the UK’ and another stating ‘Sorry about our prime minister’. ³⁷ One cartoon published in Magyar Narancs depicts Orbán with a Hitler-style moustache made out of the kind of wire used in the fence along the Serb-Hungarian border. There have been heart warming displays of solidarity with refugees, a brave intervention by a group of Hungarian lawyers opposed to the lack of legality at the border, ³⁸ as well as inspiring acts of individual bravery – not least amongst historians and academics who are refusing to be intimidated.

Where appeasement leads

Yet this response has not been matched at the EU level. Whether money received by the government via EU structural funds has been misappropriated is clearly a cause for concern, as is Hungary’s violation of treaty obligations and treatment of refugees. At the same time, European leaders do not appear willing to dig deeper. The political scientist Professor Jan-Werner Müller asks why the European Commission has been so feeble ³⁹ ‘in the face – in fact – if not in name’ of ‘the first far-right government in post-war European history’ whose nationalist leaders’ declared intention is to foment a ‘pan-European culture war’. ⁴⁰ Not only are EU leaders tolerating authoritarianism in Orbán’s self-styled ‘illiberal democracy’, but they stand by as Orbán stirs up trouble amongst Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring countries of Romania, Serbia and Croatia, both through his irredentist claims and his provocative use of the military at the Serbian and Croatian borders.

While it is the Austrian Social Democrat Chancellor Werner Faymann who has been most vocal in condemning Orbán’s treatment of refugees, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, though clearly losing patience with Orbán, continues to work with his party in the European People’s Party (the centre-right alliance in the European Parliament that includes Fidesz and Germany’s Christian Democrats). David Cameron, for his part, enjoys good relations with Orbán whom he considers an ally in the cause of EU immigration reform. Cameron, even more than Merkel, is amongst the EU leaders sheltering Orbán from criticism. By so doing, they shore up the myth that Fidesz is a conservative party. Cas Mudde, an academic expert on the extreme Right, believes that the European People’s Party is frustrating any attempts to sanction Hungary. But perhaps the biggest appeaser of Orbán’s rightwing extremism has been Horst Seehofer, the Christian Social Union (CSU) prime minister of Bavaria, who, in early summer 2015, was accused by the Central Council of Jews of fuelling anti-foreigner feeling with his repeated references to ‘en masse asylum abuse’. Seehofer went out of his way to endorse Orbán’s handling of the refugee crisis, inviting him to address a CSU meeting (in a former Bavarian monastery, of all places) on his way to an EU crisis summit on migration in Brussels where representatives from the Czech Republic and Slovakia echoed Hungary’s opposition to the EU-wide quota system. At a joint press conference, Seehofer, who wants to defy Merkel and close Bavaria’s borders with Austria, described Orbán as ‘Europe’s border guard captain’ who ‘deserves support, not criticism’. Orbán, on his part, warned against Merkel’s ‘moral imperialism’ and compared himself to a knight at the battlefront standing against a threat of brute strength. ⁴¹

Orbán, nicknamed the dictator by Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission (Orbán, in return, calls him the ‘Grand Duke’), fancies himself leader of all the electoral Right parties which dream of an illiberal future. He is even causing trouble in Germany, encouraging rifts between the Christian Democrats and the CSU, its sister party in Bavaria. Far from being stupid, Orbán has embarked on a policy to militarise the border, confident that politicians like Cameron and Merkel will not ultimately oppose him. Leaving aside the question of organised corruption, there are aspects of his policies towards refugees and the Roma, as well as his workfare scheme, that are replicated in other European countries.

Orbán is Fidesz, in much the same way as Berlusconi was Forza Italia. His only electoral opposition at the moment comes from far-right Jobbik. Now the second most popular party in Hungary, Jobbik is linked to a number of vigilante and paramilitary forces. Many in the police force are recruited from the same culture that breeds the paramilitaries; they have been accused of turning a blind eye to Jobbik’s intimidatory tactics in the Roma villages. And while the courts have, to date, provided some checks, outlawing the Hungarian Guard for instance in 2007, Orbán has sought to intimidate the legal profession, seeking to pack the judiciary with government loyalists. In April 2014, a court in Gyula in Békés county, southeast Hungary, ruled against outlawing the Szebb Jövõt Vigilante Association, which is closely linked to Jobbik and is suspected of being formed of exactly the same people as made up the Hungarian Guard.

Collusion, whether direct or indirect, could be developing between elements within the criminal justice system and the paramilitaries as evidenced by the case of four neo-Nazis convicted of the serial killings of six Roma and multiple other crimes, as well as forming a private militia to terrorise Roma in the villages of central and eastern Hungary. Two of the murderers had been on the radar of the intelligence services but surveillance (including phone taps) was suspended just prior to the first serious attack in July 2008, while the getaway driver is now known to have once been an informant for the Military Security Office. ⁴²

An analysis made in 1930 by Walter Benjamin throws light on the relationship between the state and private militia. In Theories of German Fascism, Benjamin warned that the nationalist paramilitary groups (FreiKorps) that flourished in the interwar period were to prove very useful to sections of the military (Reichswehr) and other vested interests hostile to democracy in the Weimar Republic. They were nothing less than ‘mercenary hordes’ ‘available for hire at any time, like rice or turnips, by arrangement through private agencies’, he wrote. This, too, is the reality in a country that once was Hungary and is now the land of Orbán.