"The biggest difference with Russia is that there's a much greater degree of individual freedom in Hungary," Martin told me.
The Media Has Some Signs of Life
Figyelo, formerly a respected business publication, is one of several Hungarian media outlets that have been acquired by Orban loyalists since he came to power in 2010. Since 2016, it has been owned by the government's official historian, Maria Schmidt. Most regional newspapers in the country have in recent years passed into the hands of Fidesz-friendly owners. Like in Russia, these media, "watched over" by government loyalists, are part of a shameless propaganda machine with a Kremlin-like disregard for the facts.
There's only one TV channel available to all Hungarians that is not a government mouthpiece (RTL Klub, owned by Germany's Bertelsmann); Andy Vajna, Orban's film industry commissioner, purchased TV2 station, the nation's second biggest, in 2015. An Orban ally turned nemesis, Lajos Simicska, announced after Orban's re-election that he was shutting down his newspaper and radio station, which he had used to accuse Orban and his family of corruption. Simicska's Hir TV, an all-news channel, will keep broadcasting.
Even that degree of pluralism, however, would be patently impossible in Russia. One of the first things Putin did after coming to power was strangle NTV, the only widely available television broadcaster that didn't feel obligated to toe the Kremlin line. Now, he enjoys full control over all traditional media with a broad nationwide reach, confining opposition and independent media to a few online outlets. It's debatable, however, whether moving toward such total control makes any political sense once a relatively high share of voice has been achieved. The temptation remains for at least one non-political reason: Orban's economic model rewards his allies through channeling government funds to them, which in media take the form of government-bought advertising.
The Courts Limit Corruption
Perhaps the strongest similarity between Orban's Hungary and Putin's Russia lies in the ways in which both are corrupt. "The best investment that can be made in Hungary is in a good relationship with the government," Martin told me.When I asked Gyorgy Laszlo, chief economist of the Orban government's key think tank, Szazadveg, why the government's effort to increase Hungarian ownership in key industries such as energy and banking largely transferred assets to politically connected individuals, he countered with a smile, "Where is it different?" In Russia, it certainly isn't. In the 1990s, I heard similarly glib answers from the ideologists of that era's privatization campaign; they'd say that the first generation of national capitalists might be robber barons, but their children would form an enlightened post-Communist elite. But the Hungarian model of corruption is closer to modern Russia's rather than the one that sprang from the fall of communism.
"It's not an oligarchy-captured government, it's the reverse capture of business by government," Toth from the Corruption Research Center told me.
Toth and a colleague recently studied government procurement tenders in Hungary between 2010 and 2016 and found that tenders with the participation of four people close to Orban -- Lorinc Meszaros, Istvan Garancsi, Simicska (who later fell out with the prime minister) and Orban's son-in-law Istvan Tiborcz -- were on average less competitive and resulted in higher government payouts than if the four didn't take part in the bidding. That's exactly the kind of pattern that emerged in Russia, where government procurement helped turn a few Putin friends into billionaires. Another typically Russian form of corruption is white elephant projects, mainly funded in Hungary with government-distributed EU cash. Toth's favorite example is the construction of 11 observation towers for tourists in a remote village; in Russia, of course, the white elephants are proportionally bigger.
Even on this, though, there are important differences between Russia and Hungary. Toth estimates that 15 to 24 percent of government procurement is corrupt. In Russia in the first half of 2017, the Finance Ministry found that 42.5 percent of the total amount of government-owned companies' procurement contracts was distributed without a competitive procedure at all -- a clear indication that these are corrupt deals. According to Martin, the overall share of corrupt and cronyist business in the Hungarian economy is between 5 and 10 percent; in Russia, according to a 2015 estimate by Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov, corruption causes an annual loss of 10 to 20 percent of official economic output.
Russia, in other words, is far more deeply corrupt than Hungary. One reason for this is that, as all the NGO experts I've talked to in Budapest have told me, Hungarian courts are still independent and not afraid to rub the government the wrong way. Another is that low-level corruption visible to citizens is virtually non-existent compared to post-Soviet countries. Finally, politics are still competitive, and that places a natural limit on how bold stealing can be.
Of course, moving toward Putin-style government methods and economic mechanisms is a slippery slope, and many Orban opponents expect Hungary to continue its slide. Martin, however, says he doesn't believe Hungary will end up as a dictatorship: Orban's balancing act between Putinism and European rules is deliberate and finely tuned.