A Nation Saves Itself
On my mind from early
Monday morning, I saw a nation that saved itself rather than sacrifice itself
to the poverty in the promise of a leadership that had been in power for so
long it had run out of ideas.
Hungary was hungry
for change, and they went out to get it. The scale of the victory was telling:
from the opposition Tisza Party not even contesting parliament at the last
election, when the ruling Fidesz Party gained a super-majority and a fourth
term for Viktor Orban, to the ruling party suffering such a catastrophic defeat
that Mr Orban conceded within minutes of the polls closing.
Power and Its Costs
There are many
analyses of these results, and they will probably continue for years with
different angles and postulations to the point of exhaustion; it is irrelevant.
Mr Orban, a long-serving Prime Minister who had modelled the country after a
fashion, could have taken the opportunity, after any one of his electoral
victories, to bow out in a blaze of glory, handing the baton to a protégé. But
power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; many men fall prey to
that lure.
You could look into
the history of Viktor Orban, the people who helped and mentored him, and the
exposure he had to liberal democracy before he turned towards illiberal
democracy, supporting such conservative causes that antagonised broader Western
European values, and wonder how the quest for power and the desire to retain it
made the man seem more villainous than respectable.
Hope Over Fear
That reputation for
villainy over respectability, however, is precisely what made Peter Magyar's
campaign such a masterclass in political messaging. Religious zealotry and
Christian nationalism can only do so much when a government has run out of
answers to the questions that most urgently trouble ordinary people: the cost
of living, wages that do not stretch to the end of the month, a healthcare
system groaning under neglect, hospitals short-staffed as doctors and nurses
leave for better prospects elsewhere, and the everyday concerns of communities
that had long felt invisible to those in power. These were the realities that
Magyar took seriously, and that Orban could not convincingly address.
What Orban could
offer instead was fear. Enemies were conjured beyond the borders: Brussels
encroaching on sovereignty, migrants threatening the national character,
foreign financiers orchestrating Hungary's undoing. But fear of the outsider
offers little comfort to people struggling inside their own homes, pitted
against each other, whilst the ruling party tilts on patronage and
patrimonialism, favouring partisans and acolytes against others.
Hope and expectation
over fear and trepidation, over the foreign influences of a similar nationalist
ilk; an unwillingness to compromise on the fight against corruption; taking
Hungary from the isolation and recalcitrance that Europe saw as backsliding to
the promise of situating Hungary back in the West for advantage and prosperity,
whilst building back the institutions that had lost their independence to
cronyism; this was what won the people.
Democracy Always
Matters
Those people, and
especially the youth among them, saw in Magyar a hope and a future that, had
Viktor Orban won again, would have seemed even bleaker. For Viktor Orban to
have been electorally humiliated after appearing unassailable and invincible
for more than a decade is a message that populism can totally run out of road
and find itself at the precipice of a cliff edge, without any possibility of
recovery.
Beyond the jubilation
for Hungarians and the evidently hard work of fixing things that lies ahead, we
all celebrate with them the realisation that democracy matters and that
everyone needs to get out to vote, if they really do desire change.
Hajrá Magyarország!