Given Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's reputation -- he's been called a dictator and an autocrat, albeit a "soft" one -- as a Russian in Budapest, I couldn't avoid wondering whether his rule was anything like Vladimir Putin's in Russia. So I asked some people who'd know -- both Orban loyalists and members of civil society groups that have come under attack from the government and its media.
As a result, I think that Orban's style of running his country resembles Putin's in a number of important ways. But the differences, at least so far, outweigh the similarities -- they're on key issues that determine whether a country is a democracy or a dictatorship. It's important to make a clear distinction between a government that legitimately pursues illiberal and often noxious policies and one that is fundamentally illegitimate, repressive and a danger to its citizens, whether they realize it or not.
Orban and Putin share an obsession with sovereignty -- the kind that critics would call unlimited personal power. Their goal is not to allow any external force to undermine their power to make decisions on their nations' behalf, be that wealthier Western countries, multinational corporations or non-governmental organizations. Orban, however, has been far more sophisticated than Putin in reaching for that goal. That sophistication isn't "softness" -- rather, it's a sharper sense of what's sufficient.
The Elections Are Real
When I asked Gergely Gulyas, head of ruling party Fidesz's parliamentary faction, whether his party's high-turnout landslide on April 8 reminded him of President Vladimir Putin's March 18 victory, he bristled: "It reminds me more of the Bavarian election. Given our legal framework, that would be a better example." (In Bavaria, of course, the center-right Christian Social Union, which has strong ties with Fidesz, leads in the polls ahead of the October state election with similar numbers to those garnered by Orban's party this month). "I've read articles comparing Orban and Trump with Putin and Erdogan, but it's part of some journalistic reality," he continued. "If you live here, it's a normal pluralistic democracy that complies with European rules."
European rules, of course, allow some dispersion, and Hungary isn't quite Bavaria. Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted "a ubiquitous overlap between the ruling coalition’s campaign messages and the government’s anti-migration, anti-Brussels, anti-UN, and anti-Soros information campaigns, evident, in particular, in outdoor advertising" and "unexpected distributions of public money" during the campaign. Neither is standard practice in established democracies. At the same time, the observers noted "a high degree of contestation." Compare that with the OSCE's language on Putin's March re-enthronement:
Restrictions on the fundamental freedoms of assembly, association and expression, as well as on candidate registration, have limited the space for political engagement and resulted in a lack of genuine competition.
Though there have been some calls for a recount in Hungary because of possible voting irregularities, no one has suggested the massive falsification detected by independent observers of the Russian election -- up to 10 million fake votes for Putin, almost 18 percent of his total. And the high turnout in Hungary wasn't caused, as in Russia, by local officials' pressure on public employees. There is one similarity: The opposition parties in both countries have failed to present a united front, which makes them easier to defeat. "If they weren't complete morons, the opposition could have beaten Orban," investment fund manager Viktor Zsiday told me. "It's not as if he'd get Chechens to kill politicians near the parliament." That, of course, is a reference to the murder of former Russian deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov near the Kremlin in 2015.
The Pressure on Critics Is Softer
On Thursday, the pro-Orban weekly Figyelo published the names of more than 200 alleged "mercenaries" for his arch-enemy, financier George Soros, including staffers at Hungary's Helsinki Committee, the local branch of Transparency International and the Soros-funded Central European University. It resembled the lists of "traitors" and "Russophobes" that started cropping up on pro-Putin propaganda websites and social networks after the Crimea invasion. I showed up on some of those, and felt threatened.
"We're facing increasing psychological pressure," Gabor Gyulai, head of the refugee program at the Helsinki Committee, told me.
But Gyulai, along with Transparency International's Jozsef Peter Martin and the Corruption Research Center's Istvan Janoth Toth, told me they didn't consider themselves in physical danger. Their organizations are all, to some extent, recipients of Soros funding -- the equivalent of taking money from Fethullah Gulen in Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey or from the U.S. government in Putin's Russia. In those countries, such a connection would lead to harassment by police and pro-government thugs and to a very real threat of imprisonment. Not in Hungary: They get beat up in the press, but there's no threat of violence against them or their families.