One does not need to encourage Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to stir controversy. At Globsec, a security conference held this past weekend in Bratislava, Slovakia, he suggested that anyone – including a refugee – who illegally crosses a border is a criminal and should be treated as such. In the remainder of his remarks, he spoke of Hungary’s ongoing “national revival” and of the need for the “stability of leadership,” presumably referring to his own position at the head of a party enjoying a near-constitutional majority in Hungary’s gerrymandered parliament.
As if to compensate for Mr. Orbán’s abrasiveness, Hungary’s government is trying to improve its public image abroad. In Washington, the PR group Levick Strategic Communications and its executive vice-president, former Congressman Connie Mack IV, are leading the efforts to portray the country and its leadership in a more favorable light by reaching out to policymakers and think-tankers. Hungary’s government also provides funding to The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, an organization that does valuable work documenting the crimes of communism, whose director Marion Smith defends Mr. Orbán against his Western critics, accusing them of “interventionist machinations.”
But some of these efforts might backfire. Earlier in June, the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) published a report by a group of authors, chaired by Klaus von Dohnanyi, the former social democratic mayor of Hamburg, which argues that the common criticisms directed at Orbán’s policies are grossly exaggerated.
“Viktor Orbán loves to provoke,” Mr. von Dohnanyi admitted in a recent interview. However, the report claims, lazy Western journalism is largely to blame for the bad impression that his policies are making internationally. “[T]he reporting of numerous media sources is simply incomplete and one-sided, and at its worst deeply flawed.”
While the report acknowledges that Mr. Orbán’s government has made mistakes, it paints a rather innocuous picture of his agenda, downplaying his nationalism, his praise for “illiberal democracy,” or the sweeping constitutional changes, enacted without much cross-party discussion. Even when there have been missteps, “[contradicting] the rule of law in their details,” they were “intended to free the state from what it viewed as structures and persons inherited from the immediate post-communist era.”
But few are buying the picture of Mr. Orbán as a benevolent, though perhaps fallible, leader fighting the heritage of communism and standing as bulwark against the extremism and xenophobia embodied by Hungary’s far-right party, Jobbik. Thorsten Benner, the director of the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute lambasted the DGAP report as a “convenient tool for those who want to ignore [the challenges of authoritarian populism] and instead go back to business as usual with Orbán.”
Mr. von Dohnanyi’s report prides itself on being the result of extensive consultations “with either politically independent experts or experts with differing political views” in order to present an accurate picture of what is going on in the country. Political Capital, a policy research and consulting organization based in Budapest, was among those that provided their input, much of it highly critical of Mr. Orbán’s government.
However, Bulcsú Hunyadi, an analyst with Political Capital, told me that his colleagues are highly disappointed with how few of their suggestions had been actually taken on board in the final version of the report. The organization also published their own critique of the report, emphasizing the controversial policy decisions brushed aside by the DGAP paper.
Moreover, earlier this year, one of the co-authors of the report, Dániel Hegedűs, who works as a research fellow at DGAP, criticized Mr. Orbán’s government for taking Hungary, “since 2010, on the pathological path of voluntary peripheralization, currently striving for the goodwill of Russia, which is itself at its last stages economically and financially.”
Mr. Hegedűs distanced himself from the report with an op-ed published in the Hungarian magazine Magyar Narancs last week. “Whom has DGAP’s working group harmed? Mostly itself and the DGAP,” he wrote, calling the final report “just as superficial [as the Hungary’s media coverage in the West], only biased in the opposite direction.” In an email exchange, however, he declined to comment publicly on the “internal DGAP processes.”
But more than the credibility of a large and reputable German think-tank is at stake. Democratic governance in Hungary has almost certainly deteriorated under Mr. Orbán’s watch, if we are to believe indicators provided by groups such as the World Bank. On the measure of “Voice and Accountability,” for example, which forms a part of World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, Hungary has performed worse in the past four years than at any point since the creation of the dataset in 1996, far below Poland, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic.
On World Justice Project’s assessment of “Rule of Law” around the world, Hungary ranks 37th, far behind Poland (21st) and the Czech Republic (20th). It performs worse than Romania (32nd), Botswana (31st) and Ghana (34th).
Many Hungarians are also voting with their feet – in spite of their reputation of being a closed, insular nation. “Half a million Hungarians have left, and London has become the largest Hungarian city, save for Budapest,” says Máté Hajba, who directs the Free Market Foundation, a libertarian think tank in Budapest.
At the conference in Bratislava, Mr. Orbán said that the word “reform” did not do justice to the depth of the changes he implemented in Hungary. That could well be correct, but the direction of those changes does not bode well for the future of democratic capitalism in his country.
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