Debts & Democracy: Hungary Builds an EU Autocracy

(March 2012)

Hungary is one of the most indebted East European economies with external liabilities in excess of 106.5bn Euros, equal to its gross domestic product. The state must repay 5bn Euros of sovereign debt this year. How will the country service the next major batch of its liabilities when they mature late in March?

The administration has also curbed the competence of the parliamentary ombudsmen, suspended the data protection authority and taken powers to end the independence of the central bank. It has seized the reserves held by the private pension funds. It has introduced a basic uniform tax regime by means of a legislative formula designed to make it administratively difficult for future governments to alter it. It has denied official recognition to many religious denominations including the Episcopal and Methodist churches, several Jewish congregations and all Muslim sects.

And the Fidesz constitution emphasizes the supremacy of Christianity in Hungarian culture, narrows the grounds for protecting the individual against unfair treatment and specifically fails to outlaw hostile discrimination meted out on the grounds of sexual orientation, an explosive issue here in homophobe Eastern Europe. Horrendously, the constitution denies the enduring culpability of the Hungarian state for the murder of some 600,000 of its Jewish, Roma, homosexual and politically dissident citizens during the Holocaust and seeks to trivialize the tragedy by equating the Holocaust atrocities with those committed during the subsequent Soviet administration.

Index, the authoritative Hungarian news agency, understands that the government is responding to the intensifying pressure brought to bear simultaneously at many levels with catastrophic ineptitude crystallized in the conflicting attitudes expressed by politicians and diplomats. But the source of the confusion is the prime minister himself.

His power base has been assembled in the worst tradition of East European dictatorial control. All significant initiatives within the Fidesz establishment must necessarily originate from the boss. All his subordinates function under merciless expectations to suspend their personal judgments as a prerequisite of survival in their lucrative positions. Such working conditions generate savage pressures of responsibility as well as paranoia at the top.

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