Hungary

[Samof94]

What exactly makes Hungary more prone to authoritarianism than its indo European neighbors??? It wasn’t a democracy at all during the interwar years and its democracy has seriously been compromised by Victor Orban.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

What exactly makes Hungary more prone to authoritarianism than its indo European neighbors??? It wasn’t a democracy at all during the interwar years and its democracy has seriously been compromised by Victor Orban.

I'm not sure whether you can say that Hungary is especially hostile to democracy. It has a much deeper "Democratic" tradition than most of its neighbours, linking back to its unusually egalitarian government in the medieval period after the Golden Bull of 1222: certainly it has a deeper liberal tradition than its Southern neighbours Romania and Bulgaria (like, the fact that there is a thriving resistance to Orbanism is evidence of something, if you catch my drift).

There's also a lot of odd stuff around Hungarian nationalism, and how it both resented its subordinate role in the Habsburg empire and desired to stamp its own Magyar brand across the entire domain, as well as the true humiliation from the post WW1 treaty (I can't remember its name, but it was possibly the most punitive of all the actually implemented treaties).

Edit: it was Trianon

[Samof94]

What exactly makes Hungary more prone to authoritarianism than its indo European neighbors??? It wasn’t a democracy at all during the interwar years and its democracy has seriously been compromised by Victor Orban.

I'm not sure whether you can say that Hungary is especially hostile to democracy. It has a much deeper "Democratic" tradition than most of its neighbours, linking back to its unusually egalitarian government in the medieval period after the Golden Bull of 1222: certainly it has a deeper liberal tradition than its Southern neighbours Romania and Bulgaria (like, the fact that there is a thriving resistance to Orbanism is evidence of something, if you catch my drift).

There's also a lot of odd stuff around Hungarian nationalism, and how it both resented its subordinate role in the Habsburg empire and desired to stamp its own Magyar brand across the entire domain, as well as the true humiliation from the post WW1 treaty (I can't remember its name, but it was possibly the most punitive of all the actually implemented treaties).

Edit: it was Trianon

I was thinking of modern Hungary. Even Russia via Novgorod has some of those traits. to

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

What exactly makes Hungary more prone to authoritarianism than its indo European neighbors??? It wasn’t a democracy at all during the interwar years and its democracy has seriously been compromised by Victor Orban.

I'm not sure whether you can say that Hungary is especially hostile to democracy. It has a much deeper "Democratic" tradition than most of its neighbours, linking back to its unusually egalitarian government in the medieval period after the Golden Bull of 1222: certainly it has a deeper liberal tradition than its Southern neighbours Romania and Bulgaria (like, the fact that there is a thriving resistance to Orbanism is evidence of something, if you catch my drift).

There's also a lot of odd stuff around Hungarian nationalism, and how it both resented its subordinate role in the Habsburg empire and desired to stamp its own Magyar brand across the entire domain, as well as the true humiliation from the post WW1 treaty (I can't remember its name, but it was possibly the most punitive of all the actually implemented treaties).

Edit: it was Trianon

I was thinking of modern Hungary. Even Russia via Novgorod has some of those traits. to

Well, you did post on the history subboard...

I guess the importance thing is Magyar nationalism has often felt bruised and at odds with its neighbours. Though this is hardly unique to Hungary.

[Samof94]

What exactly makes Hungary more prone to authoritarianism than its indo European neighbors??? It wasn’t a democracy at all during the interwar years and its democracy has seriously been compromised by Victor Orban.

I'm not sure whether you can say that Hungary is especially hostile to democracy. It has a much deeper "Democratic" tradition than most of its neighbours, linking back to its unusually egalitarian government in the medieval period after the Golden Bull of 1222: certainly it has a deeper liberal tradition than its Southern neighbours Romania and Bulgaria (like, the fact that there is a thriving resistance to Orbanism is evidence of something, if you catch my drift).

There's also a lot of odd stuff around Hungarian nationalism, and how it both resented its subordinate role in the Habsburg empire and desired to stamp its own Magyar brand across the entire domain, as well as the true humiliation from the post WW1 treaty (I can't remember its name, but it was possibly the most punitive of all the actually implemented treaties).

Edit: it was Trianon

I was thinking of modern Hungary. Even Russia via Novgorod has some of those traits. to

Well, you did post on the history subboard...

I guess the importance thing is Magyar nationalism has often felt bruised and at odds with its neighbours. Though this is hardly unique to Hungary.

Being non indo European is an obvious reason too. Austria rewrote their role in the Anschluss as victims.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I don't really think the Indo European thing is that relevant tbh?

[RINO Tom]

I don't really think the Indo European thing is that relevant tbh?

I don’t know the extent to which Hungarians take pride in being “non-Indo European,” but the Uralic components of the nation’s admixture disappeared almost immediately, and I always got the impression that Hungarians saw themselves as ~normal Europeans~ with an additional cultural trinket added on (their non-IE language).  Long story short ... I agree, lol.

[Estrella]

Sorry if I'm necromancing an old thread and if these things are just unfocused rants, but I wrote some stuff about Hungary in response to similar questions. tl;dr yes, it's mostly Trianon, but there's other stuff too.

There are a couple of reasons for that:

- Hungary is a bit similar to Poland in that it has a kind of siege mentality/persecution complex - in Poland's case, it was because of existing between Germany and Russia, for Hungary it's the Treaty of Trianon, when they lost a large portion of their territory and population. This, together with the fact that Hungary never had real democracy before 1989 creates a fetish for nationalist 'strong leaders'.

- After getting in power, Fidesz set out to take control of the media - turning the public TV into pretty much an organ of the party (their news have the informational value of Правда and consist of constant propaganda about MIGRANTS! and SOROS!), running massive advertising blitzes (the economy is amazing! migrants are bad! don't let ((Soros)) have the last laugh!) and straight out buying opposition media, turning them into government mouthpieces.

- The country is, in fact, doing pretty well - low unemployment, good GDP growth, more spending on social services (Fidesz is much like PiS when it comes to economy) and a perception of stability and order.

- And, as Phil said, the opposition makes the French left look like tactical masterminds.

It's difficult to say where things will be going from here. Assuming the opposition parties really do form an alliance for the 2022 election, they will almost certainly deprive Fidesz of its two-thirds majority and perhaps break the sense of inevitability about Fidesz staying in power indefinitely. The problem is that Fidesz and Fidesz-adjacent people control all the media, either directly (public TV and radio) or indirectly (hostile takeovers of private media) and don't shy away from using it to their benefit. For years, the M1 evening newscast has been a stream of propaganda about the good work the government does, the perfidies of oposition, the evils of migration, Soros and EU etc etc. Granted, Hungary is not alone in this, TVP is basically the same these days. Lengyel, Magyar, két jó barát, in all the wrong ways. Hungary, however, is unique in that there are almost no neutral or opposition media left.

Some people - not just Orbán apologists - like to talk about he's popular not because of his stranglehold over the media and scaremongering, but because his government is actually good. Bullshxt. I could go over a litany of what Fidesz is doing wrong, but here are just two examples:
- the aptly named "slave law", a 2019 labour law reform that, among other significant changes, increased maximum yearly hours of overtime from 250 to 400 ("hurr durr economically leftist far right!")
- Pancho Aréna, a €10 million stadium built in Felcsút, a small village... that also happens to be the place where Orbán lived as a kid. It's something unbelievable; a stadium for thousands of people and the only access road is literally a village residential street, there are no facilities anywhere and the most interesting attraction in the surroundings is a railway to nowhere. Fortunately, the structure is built of wood - if there is a God, that thing will burn down to cinders at some point.

Any change will have to come from within, though. Even if EU had the balls to discipline Hungary (assuming that it wouldn't just backfire and make Orbán more popular), they'd be stopped by the V4. If Orbán tried to do the things he is doing now during his first term in the late 90s, Hungary wouldn't come anywhere close near EU and all surrounding countries would condemn him - but that's not happening now. Orbánism used to be based on Hungarian irredentism towards neighbouring countries, but today it uses modern far-right tropes about transnational elites. 2021 Orbán doesn't hate nationalists from the rest of V4 and they don't hate him. They might not be as shamelessly anti-democratic, but fundamentally they see him as "one of us". They would never allow EU to actually punish him.

As I once put it in a rant on AAD,

He doesn't care that much about Trianon either. Even the farthest far-right doesn't, beyond occasional grumbling - just like far-right in neighbouring countries.

It's all about Brussels, Muslims and (((Soros))) now. Which is certainly worse* - you used to have Hungarian idiot nationalists yelling about retaking Felvidék and Erdély and Slovak/Romanian/whatever idiot nationalists yelling about fifth columnists. Annoying, but because this isn't Yugoslavia, turning those ideologies into reality was beyong the pale. Now they are all on the same side, fighting together against the same enemies and what's worse, they have allies in mainstream politics and in government. Man, V4 sucks.

* and I'm saying this despite being glad that I'm too young to remember most of Slota's alcoholic rants about getting into tanks and razing Budapest. It's much better for me not to have to listen to the leader of a governing part talk about how I'm half-"ugly mongoloid type with crooked legs that arrived on a hairy, even uglier pony".