CONSERVATIVE

Poland & Hungary Under Fire
Filip Mazurczak
If you get your news from left-liberal papers
(particularly German ones), and if you take the
pronouncements of Brussels bureaucrats seriously, then
chances are that you believe that since Viktor Orban’s
centre-right Fidesz took power in Hungary in 2010, the
country has turned into a dictatorship akin to Iran or
North Korea, and that Poland—where Fidesz’s close
ally, the Law and Justice Party, took charge of both the
parliament and presidency in recent months—is on
that same path. In reality, democracy in Budapest and
Warsaw is no more threatened than it is in Washington
or any West European capital. Accusations of
“dictatorship” and “breaching of democracy” are truly
baseless and, upon closer inspection, really reveal fears
Poland and Hungary are running a course independent
of Brussels, coupled with enduring German prejudices
against Eastern Europeans.
The current political situations in Poland and
Hungary are remarkably similar. In both countries,
voters defeated liberals who had become out of touch
with ordinary citizens and were involved in highly
publicised scandals and who often followed EU
dictates when they conflicted with the interests of their
constituents. In Hungary, the Democratic Coalition led
by Ferenc Gyurcsany, a former leader of the Hungarian
Communist Party’s youth wing in the 1980s, had ruled
in 2006-2010. The first major crack in its support
occurred when a recording of the Prime Minister saying,
among other things, that “we have obviously been lying
for the last one and a half to two years”, was leaked to
the public.
In response, a series of anti-government protests
raged across the country. The public media did all they
could to cover up Gyurcsany’s cronyism, and as a result
Hungarian protestors tried setting the national television
station, MTV, ablaze. Police brutality was applied
against the demonstrators. At this time, Orban—with
impeccable credentials as a veteran anti-communist
dissident—led many of the protests. In 2010, Orban’s
Fidesz party gained an outright majority in parliament,
with 52.73% of the vote. At the next national election,
Fidesz’s supported was somewhat smaller—44.54%—
but could still form a parliamentary majority without a
coalition partner.
In Poland, the publication of candid talks among
governing politicians revealing their contempt for their
voters also meant the beginning of the end of liberal
rule. Between 2007-2015, the Civic Platform party
ruled Poland. While the party initially gained power
promising tax cuts, in practice it increased the number
of bureaucrats by one hundred thousand, raised taxes,
seized $51 billion of private retirement funds to lower
the government deficit, and drifted leftwards on social
issues such as homosexual civil unions (which most
Poles oppose and which ultimately failed to pass through
parliament by a narrow margin thanks to a handful of
rebellious conservative Civic Platform deputies). In
2014, the weekly Wprost published a series of secretly
recorded conversations of Civic Platform politicians
in a posh restaurant, where they would regularly spend
A view of ‘Cracovia’ from the Liber Chronicarum (also known as the Nuremberg Chronicle) published in 1493.
8
Winter/Spring 2016