How should we understand the Hungarian government’s Euroscepticism anno 2020?
How should we understand the Euroscepticism of the Hungarian government during the coronavirus Covid-19? There is an abundance of domestic and international criticism directed at the Fidesz government in the way that they are handling the crisis. For anyone interested in politics, it has been hard to avoid reading about Fidesz’s “power-grab”, which might have lasting effects on the already porous state of the rule of law and democracy in Hungary.
In a nutshell, the Enabling Act gives the Hungarian government the power to govern by decree, without an end date. While the Hungarian parliament can end the state of danger, 2/3 of the seats in parliament are occupied by Fidesz-KDNP, rendering this clause useful for Fidesz to claim, in the face of criticism, that there is indeed a way to end the state of danger by parliament, while in effect it is meaningless.
The Act also added two new crimes, one of which makes spreading disinformation about the coronavirus punishable to up to five years in prison. As of 16 April 2020, “[t]here are 226 criminal proceedings pending in connection with the epidemiological situation, 59 of which are due to the spread of fake news”. That is reason for concern, because the judicial independence in Hungary is highly questionable (more about that in a later post).
I think that the Hungarian government, when parliament approved the Enabling Act on 30 March, knew that it was going to face fierce criticisms from “the international community”. When we zoom into the reactions of key political figures of the Fidesz government, they tend to sing the same tune. One such response is by Minister of Justice Judit Varga, whose cunning responses force you to think twice about the implications of her words. However, not in reaction to the coronavirus, I’d say. She directed the attention to the fact that overcoming the crisis should be the number one priority.
Similarly, co-founder Fidesz and MEP Tamás Deutsch, in response to Donald Tusk’s criticisms of the risk of abuse of power, stated that:
A third and last example of the government’s response to international criticism comes from the government spokesperson, Zoltán Kovács. Kovács defended the Enabling Act by emphasizing that democratic institutions in Hungary, like the Hungarian parliament have not been suspended:
The political opposition has also come under fire by the Hungarian government during the unfolding coronacrisis. These are signs of nervousness among the Fidesz leadership. One example of this were the accusations directed at the Mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, for the recent surge in the amount of corona cases in an elderly home in Budapest. After being accused of negligence, Karácsony, in an unexpected move, reacted to the accusations by publicising the four letters where the city of Budapest requested assistance to test the people in the elderly home weeks before the outbreak of the virus.
In terms of its external relations, the Hungarian government’s reaction to the coronavirus looks a lot like its handling of the migration crisis in 2015. In order to fuel fears among the Hungarian public, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán expressed, during one of his weekly radio interviews on Kossuth Radio, that Hungary is under attack by outside forces that are trying to interfere in the internal affairs of Hungary. According to him, “there are some who are eager to seize control of the country, they would like to plunder it and to obtain its resources. This network is headed by George Soros, it is his people in Brussels who are in the positions from which criticisms are being levelled at us”. Note: This quote is from April 2020.
In 2017, the government campaigned with a “Stop Soros” national consultation to legitimise (clearly for domestic purposes) its violations of EU law back in 2015, when the country did not participate in the relocation scheme for migrants from Italy and Greece. Also then the government referred to “[t]ogether with officials in Brussels, George Soros is planning to dismantle border fences in EU Member States, including in Hungary, to open the borders for immigrants”. Eventually, even a so-called Stop Soros legislative package was passed in parliament that penalised activities by Hungarian nationals or organisations aimed to assist asylum seekers in applying for asylum.
While these examples sound like issues that are only for a domestic audience and with domestic implications, they have a profoundly European character: both the non-compliance of the European relocation scheme and the Stop Soros legislative package ended up at the Court of Justice of the EU. In both cases, the European Commission started infringement procedures.
So, let’s move on to the concept of Euroscepticism. The aim here is not to give an extensive academic account of whether or not the Fidesz government is Eurosceptic, that has been done elsewhere by yours truly. The short answer is that the Hungarian government definitely is Eurosceptic, and that it has adopted a rather interesting approach to the EU, which I would call a form of inverted Euroscepticism.
But first things first: what may we understand under Euroscepticism, party-based Euroscepticism to be precise? There are dozens of typologies and definitions in the literature, but a rather simple and oft-used definition was coined by Aleks Szczerbiak and Paul Taggart in the early 2000s.
They differentiate between hard and soft forms Euroscepticism. The hard variant expresses a “principled opposition” to European integration, a turning-ones-back-to-the-EU, if you will. But it is the soft variant that nicely captures what we will mean when we use the term (party-based) Euroscepticism in this post.
Soft Euroscepticism is where there is NOT a principled objection to European integration or EU membership but where concerns on one (or a number) of policy areas leads to the expression of qualified opposition to the EU, or where there is a sense that ‘national interest’ is currently at odds with the EU trajectory.
(Szczerbiak and Taggart later review their definition and omit the part where opposition to some policy areas can be enough to consider a party Eurosceptic, but that’s besides the point here.)
So what makes Fidesz soft Eurosceptic? Short answer? A nice overview is offered in the EU Coalition Explorer of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Slide 666 of the Coalition Explorer summarises the policy preferences of Hungary, according to country experts. Hungary’s government mostly objects to/rejects a common EU approach in migration policy, energy policy, social policy, fiscal policy and its national approach to China, the US and Russia. My own research found that the Hungarian government explicitly expresses those preferences very similarly.
Fidesz has been using inverted Euroscepticism as a strategy to dealing with European integration and its EU relations. My rather unscientific definition of inverted Euroscepticism is:
a strategy where a member state’s actions are at odds with the ‘European interest’.
An attentive reader would see the parallel with the above definition of soft Euroscepticism. My reason for making the claim that the Fidesz government used inverted Euroscepticism stems particularly the way that Fidesz campaigned for the European Parliament elections of 2019. During a speech in February 2019, PM Orbán stated the two main aims of Fidesz for those elections:
It is Hungary’s goal for anti-immigration forces to be in the majority in every institution within the European Union’s institutional system: as a first step, anti-immigration forces should be in a majority in the European Parliament; a few months later they should be in a majority on the Commission; and later, as a result of national parliamentary elections, we would also like them to be in a majority in the European Council. Our second goal is to be — as has been the case in the past — the most successful party in Europe; but at all events we want to be the most successful within the European People’s Party.
The first sentence refers to the aim to change the EU from within. That would imply that the political institutions like the European Commission are no longer led by liberal forces, but illiberal ones — which Orbán himself claims his party to be.
This relates directly to the second reason why, in my eyes, Fidesz’s strategy is one of an inverted Euroscepticism: The fact that in the end of the day it is not possible to separate Hungary’s Euroscepticism from its democratic backsliding, or de-democratisation. What the democratic backsliding process exactly looks like, and how it relates to Euroscepticism will be discussed in the second post of this series on politics in Hungary.
This is part one of a series of posts about politics in Hungary. In the next post, we will have a look at the democratic backsliding in Hungary. We will use academic literature and existing indicators to look at the state of the rule of law and democracy in Hungary. But we will also present the Hungarian government’s response to these claims and have a look at what some supporters of Fidesz have to say about Fidesz.
Stay tuned and please like and share this post if you enjoyed the read!
