Viktor Orban has taken advantage of the pandemic to rule by decree—bypassing Parliament—until the crisis is over
villain, Viktor Orban cannot resist revealing his plans. The Hungarian prime minister has never hidden his desire to entrench himself in power. Before taking office in 2010, he remarked ominously: “We have only to win once, but then properly.” True to his word, when handed a big enough majority by Hungarian voters, Mr Orban hollowed out the Hungarian state, rewriting its constitution, purging the country’s courts and nobbling the media.
No one can say there was no warning. Mr Orban’s career—which has encompassed everything from anti-Soviet liberalism to right-wing nationalism via Christian Democracy—has been dedicated to the accumulation and maintenance of power, rather than the pursuit of principle. Those who knew him well saw what was to come. In 2009 Jozsef Debreczeni, the author of a critical biography, warned: “Once he is in possession of a constitutional majority, he will turn this into an impregnable fortress of power.
To the frustration of those who have spent the past decade trying to stop him via legal means, Mr Orban is more astute than they think. His “reforms” tend to reach the edge of legal acceptability, but no further. If Mr Orban ever does hit an obstacle, he surrenders some gains, while keeping the bulk of them. Opposition figures, civil-rights monitors and commentators around the globe have denounced the latest move as a big step towards dictatorship.
If Mr Orban is lucky in his enemies, he is even luckier in his allies. Fidesz is still a member of the powerful European People’s Party, a group of centre-right parties across Europe that carves up top jobs in the. The commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, belongs to the same family, as does Angela Merkel. Under the’s umbrella, Mr Orban was treated as an unruly teenager while rearranging the Hungarian state, rather than a tumour in Europe’s body politic.
Reining in Mr Orban will be hard, but not impossible. “The only language he understands is power and money,” says Andras Biro-Nagy of Policy Solutions, a research institute. Brussels has little legal power to stop Mr Orban, but it does have money. Stemming the flow ofshould do it.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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