The Case for Populism

Maria Schmidt
The New York Times, Oct. 16, 2019

Hungarian rebels on a Soviet tank captured in the square in front of Parliament in Budapest during
the 1956 revolution.CreditCreditAssociated Press

We Hungarians have rarely had easy lives. As was the case with other nations that
came under the direct domination of the Soviet Union in the 20th century, we had to
struggle to retain our national culture and way of life. Yet our trials have prepared us
well for the challenges of the 21st century.

After World War II, the Soviet Union foisted a social experiment on Hungary, forcing
us to live in a Communist society for almost half a century. In 1956 we rebelled
against the Soviet-backed regime in an effort to regain our national independence.
Our revolution failed, however, and we paid a heavy price. Liberation would come
decades later, after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

In the totalitarian regime imposed on Hungary by Communist Moscow, politics was

practiced in impenetrable, smoke-filled back rooms. There was a total absence of
information on the streets, so the public relied on gossip to find out what was
happening.

At the same time, people couldn’t care less about who had and who hadn’t fallen out
of grace with the Communist leadership. Society was split between Them (party
members and careerists within the ramparts of power) and Us (those whose
principal aim was to lead independent lives on the periphery).

Under Communism, it would have been unimaginable for me to go out with a party
official or share a friendly word with an army or police officer. Such people existed in
a different world than the rest of us. Anyone valued or decorated by officialdom was
a nonperson in our eyes. We had our own heroes to look up to. We had the freedom
fighters from ’56. We had our poets, like Gyorgy Petri; our writers, like Imre Kertesz;
our painters, like Gabor Karatson (one of the most important forerunners of the
Hungarian Green movement); we had our singers and historians.

The stifling atmosphere under Communism prevailed through the 1970s. But then,
in the 1980s, things started to change. The old guard of Communist officials retired,
and their successors didn’t care much for the regime’s official ideology; they were
asobsessed as the old guard had become with accumulating money and influence. As
a result, the regime became increasingly insecure, while we became more liberated
and self-assured.

When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, we sensed
that it was only a matter of time before the Hungarian regime unraveled. The veteran
party leader Janos Kadar knew that Mr. Gorbachev’s reforms would be lethal, and he
told the Soviet leader so.

Civilians got a close look at Hungarian rebels fighting the Soviets in 1956.CreditAssociated Press

He was right. The young officials who took power in the late ’80s soon accepted the
inevitable and gave in to change. In June 1989, they permitted the reburial of Imre
Nagy, the reform-minded former prime minister who was executed after the 1956
revolution. At this momentous occasion, the young Viktor Orban publicly called for
free elections and demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary.

In September 1989, the regime opened the Hungary-Austria border, allowing tens of
thousands of East German refugees who had flooded into Hungary passage to West
Germany. This destabilized the East German regime and unleashed a chain of events
that would ultimately lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of
Germany, and of Europe. “It was in Hungary that the first stone was removed from
the Berlin Wall,” Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, later recalled.

These were unforgettable days for us. In the summer of 1989, President George H.W.
Bush visited Budapest and assured the leaders of the new opposition that the United
States would not let Hungary down like it did in 1956. Free elections were finally held
in 1990, and the representatives of the old regime were voted out of office. The Soviet
Union withdrew its last troops from Hungary, and we left the Warsaw Pact.

Excited to regain control of our destiny and emerge from the Iron Curtain, we
Hungarians naïvely believed that Western Europe would share in our elation. We
thought that other nations would empathize with the suffering we had experienced
under Communism and offer us a helping hand in overcoming the challenges we
faced.

Sadly, instead of treating us as potential allies who were finally joining the free
world, the nations of Western Europe treated us as vanquished losers of the Cold
War who had to defer to their wisdom. They used economic power to gain control of
our markets, then kept us waiting in the antechamber of the European Union for 15
years. We did not experience a genuine reunification with Western Europe. Instead,
we were forced to adapt ourselves to the West. It never occurred to the West that
perhaps it should adapt itself to us.

During this time, Brussels and its neoliberal economic agenda gained increasing
sway over the member states of the European Union, effectively denying citizens the
right to make their own economic choices. In doing so it degraded national elections
across the Continent, reducing them to formal exercises in changing governments,
not policies.

Meanwhile, in Hungary some of the successors of the old Communist regime

managed to retain significant influence over the nation’s economic and cultural
institutions.

Fortunately, their power was dealt a significant blow in 2010, when Mr. Orban was
elected prime minister in a sweeping victory. The political elites who preferred to
maintain the status quo during the 2008 financial crisis left Hungary’s middle class,
as well as its most needy citizens, high and dry. This impaired the democratic
legitimacy of Hungary’s governing parties, which is why voters looked in a new
political direction.

Viktor Orban, now the prime minister of Hungry, speaking at the reburial of Imre Nagy in 1989. In the
speech, he called for free elections and demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops. CreditIstvan
Csaba Toth/MTI, via Associated Press

Since then Mr. Orban has put Hungary’s interests first when crafting his economic
policies, and he has refused to follow the policy directives laid down by European
Union bureaucrats in Brussels. He has also worked to replace the neoliberal
vanguard that led the country toward bankruptcy during the financial crisis. To
bolster the economy, he imposed special levies on multinational companies and
banks to distribute the burden of the crisis as proportionately as possible between
the market players who caused it (and profited from it) and Hungary’s citizenry.

In 2014, Mr. Orban proclaimed that Hungary was breaking with the kind of early
21st-century liberalism that had been bankrupted so spectacularly in 2008. Instead,
he declared a desire for a nonliberal society — he called it “illiberal” — based on
community, Christianity and solidarity. He understood that the West was suffering
from a systemic crisis, in economic terms and within the liberal order itself.

Nine years have passed since Mr. Orban’s landslide victory in 2010, in which he won
over two-thirds of parliamentary seats — a feat he has since repeated twice. This is a
clear demonstration of the popularity and success of his policies. Hungary’s economy
is in good shape: Inflation and unemployment are at low levels; gross domestic
product growth stands at about 5 percent; and real wages have increased by 40
percent in the past few years.

The nonliberal shift promoted by Mr. Orban and the spread of populism that it
heralded were consequences of an imbalance within the liberal order, one that
favored elites over the needs of everyday citizens. As liberalism runs out of steam,
true majoritarian democracy and popular representation is returning to Hungary.

And the same is happening across Europe. In the European Parliamentary elections
earlier this year, the “populists” (democrats, in other words)
significantly strengthened their position. The European electorate voted for a balance
of stability and change — for preserving the European Union without losing more
member states, and for keeping alive all of the European Union’s worthwhile
achievements while discarding anything that has proved unsustainable. Voters sent a
clear message: They want more flexibility in politics, less ideological dogmatism and
more readiness for compromise.

While some may not be able to accept it, the old world is disappearing. It can’t be
saved. What can and should be saved is Western (Christian) civilization. We must
realize that, as the historian Niall Ferguson once wrote, “the biggest threat to
Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity
— and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.”

We Hungarians are well aware that nobody has our best interests at heart other than
ourselves. That’s why we continue to insist on liberty, democracy and our
independence as a nation-state.

As citizens of a free country in the heartland of Europe, we have served as

gatekeepers between East and West for a thousand years.

We hope to do so for a thousand more.

Maria Schmidt is an author and historian whose research focuses on 20th-century

dictatorships in Europe. A former adviser to the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor
Orban, she is the director general of the House of Terror museum in Budapest.

This is an article from World Review: The State of Democracy, a special section
that examines global policy and affairs through the perspectives of thought leaders
and commentators.

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 18, 2019, Section S, Page 4 in The
New York Times International Edition

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/opinion/hungary-communism-european-
union.html