As for Orbán, he said that the fate of large companies operating in the country must be connected to the fate of Hungary itself. “We will cry together,” he said of the large foreign-owned firms, “and we will laugh together.” It’s hardly fair, he added, that they should be laughing while the rest of the country cries. But tears may be the order of the day: despite Orbán’s folksy expression and the promise to review these “temporary measures,” investors are reluctant to put their cash at stake in an environment where a new “crisis tax” can simply eliminate profits. Tamás Király, deputy head of mission at the Hungarian Embassy in Ottawa, admitted that dealing with investor complaints was one of several challenges he had to deal with. The other, of course, is the pesky new “framework for all media.”
Some critics are also fearful that the government’s new constitution—previously expected to be introduced on March 15, Hungary’s National Day, it has been delayed until late April—will further entrench FIDESZ in power. Other initiatives have simply left observers scratching their heads. Among them is the recent move to change the rules of access to the former state security archives, which contain thousands of tapes, files and over 50,000 names. How to deal with such sensitive documents has been a problem for all former Communist countries once they shook off their former masters, but none have allowed individuals to eliminate the evidence of the past. Under Hungary’s new rules, though, citizens who were spied upon would have the right to remove their own files.
History professor Christopher Adam of Carleton University, who has worked in those archives, says he cannot imagine what would lead a government that ostensibly espouses democracy, and is led by a man who was no doubt a victim of those pre-’89 spies, to allow its history to be dispersed. Why are they so afraid of what someone might find in those files? “Imagine if the government of the new federal Germany had decided to allow all the victims of Nazism to remove their own files,” Adam says. “We would now have scant record of those times.”
Meanwhile, Viktor Orbán is polishing his plans for the EU during his six-month turn on the main stage: an enhanced energy security program (he has always been wary of too much reliance on the Russians), an eastern partnership with such outlying countries as Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, and, in a well-aimed kick at Nicolas Sarkozy’s French government, a Europe-wide program of aid for the Roma. (It was Sarkozy who angered the EU’s bureaucrats when, last year, his country expelled some Roma and returned them to Romania and Bulgaria.) But on Jan. 12, in a move destined to annoy everybody, the Orbán team also installed a giant 202-sq.-m carpet, featuring a map of historic “Greater Hungary,” in Brussels’ Justus Lipsius building, where the EU’s 27 leaders meet for summits. Greater Hungary is the pre-First World War country that included Slovakia, and much of Romania and Serbia, all cut away by a peace treaty that most Hungarians still feel was grossly unfair. (Any notion of restoring the old borders has been met with derision by Hungary’s neighbours.)
In a Dec. 23 HírTV interview, Orbán made it clear that he was not cowed by outside attacks. Fear of foreign criticism, he said, “is characteristic only of countries that lack self-confidence. We are not one of those.” But criticism is rampant among Hungarians as well. The question, according to the blog Hungarian Spectrum’s Eva Balogh, is whether “it’s problematic to have a country leading the European Union that is in violation of democratic principles.” The next six months should be interesting, both for the EU, and for Hungary.
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