Reacting to news of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Sunday’s Hungarian election, many of his admirers insisted that he had, after all, done a good job. Jordan Bardella, president of France’s Rassemblement National, wrote that Orbán had “led Hungary’s economic recovery, promoted family policies that helped maintain the birth rate, and defended his country and Europe’s borders against migration.” Dutch nationalist leader Geert Wilders insisted Orbán was “the only leader with balls in the EU”; for others, the fact that he had admitted defeat proved his democratic spirit.
Many accounts focus on Orbán’s authoritarian hold on power, whether rewriting the state’s Fundamental Law or packing the Constitutional Court. His Fidesz party’s influence on public media and the education system was also an important tool for shaping opinion.
Yet the fact that Orbán has now been ousted at the ballot box tells us that he had relied on a more organic kind of support that has been exhausted. While voter turnout soared on Sunday, his Fidesz party’s base shrank from 3.1 to 2.3 million.
In a preelection article, I wrote of Orbán’s promise of a “work-based society” and an economy based on job creation. Putting Hungarians in work, he argued after the 2008 economic crisis, would make them more self-reliant than if they counted on credit or on welfare benefits. In rallies ahead of Sunday’s vote, Orbán spoke of increasing job numbers by more than one million since returning to office in 2010 (the rise, per official data, was more like 750,000). Yet if there was rapid progress by this indicator leading up to the 2022 election, it then stalled badly.
The COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine undermined the social compact on which Orbánomics was built. As Dávid Karas points out, while Orbán’s post-2008-crisis rhetoric focused on regaining “sovereignty,” Hungary’s jobs plan remained dependent on foreign direct investment, from German…
Auteur: David Broder
