Social Research: An International Quarterly

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the main parties responsible for the system change in 1989–92 were the Association of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) and the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). SZDSZ was founded and led by liberal intellectuals, primarily from Budapest, samizdat publishers, and organizers of oppositional actions, who drew their initial strength from having been the major opponents of the Kádár regime. Yet after the system change, only a small percentage of voters supported the party because of its liberal principles. Rather, SZDSZ gained support because it was perceived as the most radical enemy of communism—and rightly so, since it organized and led the first free plebiscite and earned majority support for its rejection of a presidential system.

MDF, on the other hand, was a kind of conservative national nostalgia party. It was well established in smaller cities, reestablishing some continuity with pre-communist Hungary. Its leaders were also committed to a Western model of liberal democratic institutions, so Hungary would probably have profited most from a coalition government formed by these two parties that might better have handled [End Page 267] the sometimes painful reforms. However, the presidents of both parties rejected this proposal. Doing so was their first mistake, and it led to their final downfall.

The MDF party won the first free election and formed the first free government. Since it had no absolute majority, it was forced to enter into a coalition with other minority parties. Thus, the first government was very heterogeneous. It included representatives of liberal conservatism and of the extreme right, who made loud claims for their own agendas, sometimes successfully.

The prime minister, József Antall, a decent conservative man, was politically weak and also mortally ill (in fact, he was dying while still in office). His policies were confused and economically harmful, but they did respect civil liberties. Hungary even had two important political figures at that time: the president of the republic, Árpád Göncz, and the president of the then-newly established constitutional court, László Sólyom. Though serious political mistakes were made, these two towering figures made us believe that the new liberal democratic institutions were solid and could not be challenged, much less destroyed. However, and this could be seen only in retrospect, the most lethal mistake was committed during their time in office: no new constitution was forged and discussed by the population. People were left without a political backbone that they could rely upon, which could have united them as one citizenry. Another key mistake was the repeated thwarting of the effort by several members of parliament to make public the list of informers during Kádár's regime. Instead, the dossiers remained in the safe of the former secret police and were used for blackmail or aired in bits and pieces to serve certain political interests.

Many of these mistakes resulted from one simple overarching blindness: the system-changing parties had no idea about the people they were supposed to govern. Hungary had never been a liberal democracy. The Hungarians were and remained subjects, not citizens. They were accustomed to autocratic and totalitarian governments. They had no idea about initiating something, taking responsibility for [End Page 268] something. They knew only one right coming from the Middle Ages: ius supplicationis, the right to ask favors of their masters. Kádár applied this feudal right correctly when he said that all Hungarian citizens have the right to demand a passport. The political system was transformed in 1989–90, but the population was not. The new democratic political elites did not even try to change this inveterate attitude in order to include the population in the system-change process—first, because they failed to see it; second, because they were too lazy to do something about it; and third, because they also profited from it.

As happens all the time, the chickens came home to roost. The second free elections were won by the Socialist Party with an absolute majority. Obviously, something went very wrong, not because the Socialist Party won but in the reason it won. People voted for János Kádár's regime against the new regime; they voted for "the flesh pots of Egypt" and desired to worship a golden calf. Perhaps in awareness of this, the Socialist Party did not want to govern alone and so asked a system-changing party, the SZDSZ, to join its government. The liberal SZDSZ agreed—after all, its politicians also wanted power, even if only in order to have more influence—and in doing so committed suicide. True, the first government of the Socialist Party (under Gyula Horn) kept the institutions of liberty intact and never misused the parliamentary majority that could have given it absolute power. Despite this, the political sky began to darken.

Viktor Orbán, the leading figure in another little liberal party, Fidesz (Party of the Young Democrats), sensed at that point a new opportunity. He realized that his party would not gain significant power on the left (where it then stood) because that space was already occupied. He saw, however, an unoccupied place on the right, due to the significant losses of the conservatives (MDF) in the 1994 elections. Thus he moved his party to the right. In the following elections in 1998, he made an alliance with Kisgazda Párt (the Free-Holders Party), a former right-wing associate of the MDF, and won power through this party's help. Even in those early days, Orbán showed his true face: he destroyed Kisgazda Párt and its leader, without whom he would not have become prime minister. [End Page 269]

At this time, Fidesz was still a real party. Orbán was its uncontested leader, but other politicians with individual stances were also significant figures in the party, mainly Orbán's old friends from college, as well as some others. Although Fidesz placed limits on the power of the legislature immediately upon taking office, individual liberties were not touched, and people were able to think that they were witnessing a "normal" case of a new government establishing itself, or that this was merely an unpleasant government. It turned out soon that this was not the case.

Orbán was certain that he would win the next election, but to his surprise, this did not happen. In 2002 he lost against the Socialist Party. Though the government was comprised of a number of other parties as well, throughout the next four years the main struggle took place between the Socialist Party and Fidesz. In fact, Orbán never acknowledged his 2002 defeat. He wanted to tear down the Socialist Party and regain power as soon as possible, and never lose it again—a declaration of war against the democratic practice of handing off power from one government to another.

Since the terms of a prime minister, unlike that of a president, are unlimited, a prime minister can rule not as a president but as a king. It is not unusual, even within Hungarian history, for the same party to be repeatedly reelected, but not with the same prime minister. For example, the dominating party in autocratic Hungary (Miklós Horthy's time) produced six prime ministers in 20 years, whereas Fidesz, up to now, has produced only a single one: Orbán, who has been in power for 12 years.

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in order never to lose power, one must first gain power. the eight years in Hungarian history following the 2002 election belonged to Fidesz, even while the Socialist Party governed. Its offensive developed slowly at first, then with increasing speed. Even as Hungary became a member of the European Union under the Socialist Party, with great support from the population, and even though the Socialists were reelected in 2006, Fidesz had already become the dominating political power in Hungary. Why and how? [End Page 270]

First of all, it was a centralized party where the leader was never questioned. Fidesz became more and more equivalent to Orbán; it did not exist without him. What Lenin once termed "democratic centralism" became the organizing concept of Fidesz. By contrast, the Socialist Party was "democratic." I put "democratic" in quotation marks for although different politicians and different concepts were expressed and accepted in this party, the conflicting factions and platforms rarely represented different concepts or ideas, but rather, more often than not, different personal relations, cliques, and sometimes chains of corruption. Having won the elections of 2002 against Fidesz, the Socialists could not even find a prime minister from within their own party and instead, after a long hesitation, chose the economist Péter Medgyessy, who used to be in the Kádár regime—a kind of business spy. He sought to gain sympathy by raising salaries and wages to a degree that almost completely ruined Hungary's finances. Eventually, his own party asked for his resignation.

Medgyessy was replaced by a rising star within the Socialist Party who was never supported by all factions of his party: Ferenc Gyurcsány—a decent man, a friend of liberal democracy, a good campaign leader who was entirely unfit for the job of prime minister. Like a great actor, he played the role of prime minister without being one. He came up daily with many ideas, some of them even good, without having the stamina to follow through on or realize any of them. He was also weak when it came to confrontations within his own party, for example when he supported a very bad candidate as the future president of Hungary against a good candidate simply because she belonged to an influential clique within his own party. Yet after his half term (2004–6) the Socialist Party was still strong enough to win a second victory.

This was more than enough for Fidesz. Orbán decided that enough was enough; in one way or another he would topple Gyurcsány and the Socialist Party for good. Gyurcsány himself in fact provided a great opportunity. No one knows what would have happened without Gyurcsány's infamous speech in Öszöd, but in my view something very similar would have occurred, since the takeover seems to [End Page 271] have been decided already in the inner circles of Fidesz—only the timing and the method had to be determined.

Gyurcsány provided a golden opportunity for his opponents when, as the prime minister of Hungary, he confessed to his party in a secret speech in Öszöd that he had been lying day and night. A recording of the speech was leaked in September 2006. In response, the building that housed the Hungarian television service was attacked and broken into by political hooligans, in an obvious putsch attempt, but by whom it was organized remains unknown. The police were unprepared and weak, and so was the government. The following month, on October 23, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was celebrated and all the major dignitaries and political leaders came to Budapest, violence erupted again, on a still greater scale. This time the police and the government drew the wrong conclusion from their weakness in September. They wanted to show strength, but they did so in the wrong way. In order not to stand by impotently, the police shot rubber projectiles into the violent crowd, injuring bystanders as well as protesters.

Orbán had already won by controlling the scene, playing the role of the defender of Hungarians against the vicious government. Socialists could still have pulled themselves together by asking Gyurcsány for his resignation, but they were afraid that once he left, Orbán would immediately step in. (Of course he did anyway.) Finally, too late, Gyurcsány handed in his resignation and was succeeded by Gordon Bajnai. It was a terrible moment for the world economy, the financial crisis of 2008. Bajnai managed the country during the crisis solidly and well, governing over the ruin of a party and the ruin of liberal democracy, but the second system change was already in the making, and those who didn't see it coming were blind. Having no inhibitions is always a winning card if certain traditional inhibitions are absent.

True, Fidesz's victory was not due solely to the violence of 2006. Orbán needed also a huge and loyal following, and he created it by organizing his own personal network in the country, the socalled citizen's circles (polgári körök). They were not democratic circles [End Page 272] or civil organizations, but local centers of Fidesz's power, like party cells. They could be mobilized for demonstrations, for political action, to provide mass support. This became important, since after the failed coup Orbán turned to the weapon of referendum to mobilize his following to reject a few decisions of the government concerning university fees, healthcare contributions, and other costs. Though the social projects rejected by the referendum were, in the main, rational, Fidesz had struck a real nerve among the Hungarian population. This happened in the referendum on the issue of whether Hungarian citizenship (a passport) should be offered to ethnic Hungarians living outside Hungary. After the unjust Trianon Peace Treaty that concluded World War I redrew Hungary's borders, more than a million Hungarians found themselves living in neighboring countries, especially Transylvania (Romania). It was a matter of national and human solidarity to grant them Hungarian citizenship. Fidesz supported the idea; the Socialists said no. Due to this decision of the then-governing Socialist Party, Fidesz gained the support of most ethnic Hungarians living outside the redrawn state. Once in power, Fidesz immediately decided to grant those newly expatriated Hungarians the right to participate in Hungarian national elections by absentee ballot, a right it did not grant to citizens working abroad. Fidesz thus secured for itself several hundred thousand votes in all forthcoming parliamentary elections.

As a result, despite the decent government of Gordon Bajnai, the Socialist Party collapsed in the national elections of 2010. Due to the struggle between small oppositional parties, Fidesz received a two-thirds majority in the parliament. Not much earlier, the coalition government of Socialists and "Free Democrats" could have misused its two-thirds majority, but did not. It was never questioned for a minute, though, that Orbán would misuse his majority in order to lay the foundation for his nearly absolute power via a second system change. Thus the system of illiberal democracy, termed NER—System of National Collaboration—was ushered in, and from this time onward, only those who collaborated with Fidesz were treated as "true Hungarians." [End Page 273]

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the project was there from the beginning, and so was the power to realize it, yet it had to be realized step by step. First came the new constitution (the Fundamental Law) with a strongly ideological (right-wing) "historical" preamble. Although it was a purely Fidesz constitution that had no support from the opposition (half the population), it was amended every time Fidesz wanted to pass an unconstitutional law. The function of the Constitutional Court, former pride of the new democratic Hungarian republic, was changed along with the process of electing judges. Freedom of the press was limited, and state-owned media became from the first moment the instrument of Fidesz propaganda. The traditional opposition newspaper Szabad Nép was shut down and the almost-objective conservative newspaper Magyar Nemzet was discontinued. Almost all local newspapers were in Fidesz's hands, as was one of the two commercial channels (Channel 2) on television. One single radio station was, after a long battle, left for the opposition, and half of a television channel was granted to them by a Christian denomination, the Community of Faith (Hit Gyülekezete). As a result, 90 percent of the Hungarian population was left with access only to Fidesz propaganda. And as we know, only a well-informed public, not a brainwashed one, can make rational political decisions.

Brainwashing has also been going on since the beginning by means of so-called national consultation questionnaires distributed by the government to all Hungarians. These questionnaires ask a few questions to which only one answer can be given, questions I would not dare ask a four-year-old child. The obvious agenda behind the practice of "national consultation" is to demonstrate popular support for the government (since no other answer can be given than the one required by it); the less obvious agenda is brainwashing to create obedient subjects.

Soon after Fidesz gained power, there were virtually no checks and balances left. As a result of the limits mentioned above on the legislative branch, the legislative and the executive branches became identical. Though some judges remain true to their oath to uphold the law, the top judge was an Orbán appointee, and the attorney general [End Page 274] a faithful Orbán man. As a result, neither the oligarchs nor Orbán's family members (e.g., his son-in-law) have been called to account for their obvious wrongdoing, whereas a functionary of the Socialist Party has been imprisoned for many months without being charged.

As Kant teaches, all desires can be satisfied with the exception of the desires for wealth, fame, and power. One cannot have enough power; one always wants more and more. Orbán is certainly possessed by the desire for power.

As noted above, at the beginning Fidesz had a few acknowledged leaders, even if Orbán was always primus inter pares. It also had a following of respected conservative intellectuals and scientists who were dissatisfied with left-wing or liberal government and preferred a conservative one. This has changed. Orbán tolerates less and less criticism, not to mention oppositional opinions, from Fidesz's own followers. Anyone who utters a critical word would be dismissed (as happened to those who supported Central European University during the move to expel it from the country). Recently a Fidesz journal was taken out of circulation and off the internet because of two papers it published, one by a former Fidesz intellectual, that challenged dictated norms. As a result, all the independent leaders have either left Fidesz to join other parties or been pushed into the background. Those who remain are obedient lackeys, cynical opportunists, or just scoundrels. They have no ideas or ideologies, or perhaps it is better to say that their ideas change according to the daily demand. Originally, as we have seen, Fidesz had a liberal stance, then became a conservative party, then moved to the right wing, and then—now that the once-far-right party Jobbik has taken a more centrist position—to the extreme right (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/08/10/is-hungary-run-by-the-radical-right; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-election-jobbik/hungarys-jobbik-eyes-election-gains-after-ditching-far-right-views-idUSKBN1GY2BT).

The opposition accuses Fidesz of gross corruption. It hit the right target but used a misnomer. It might be true that roughly 20 to 30 percent of the money Hungary receives from the EU goes into [End Page 275] the pockets of Orbán's close supporters, or perhaps even into his personal pocket, but there is no proof—and in my mind, it is not even important. What is important is the new system of redistribution, which has nothing to do with traditional corruption. A government is corrupt if ministers accept money or any other form of favor from wealthy businesspeople in exchange for political positions, political influence, favorable business connections, or opportunities. In this traditional sense, there were corrupt politicians in the Socialist Party, as there usually are in all parties, yet this is not the case with Fidesz. A more apt description was given in a famous Hungarian collection of papers coedited by Bálint Magyar, a well-known former SZDSZ minister, and Júlia Vásárhelyi, and published in 2013. Here Hungary was termed a mafia state and its policy compared to an octopus. The title of the book, Magyar Polip: A Posztkommunista Maffiaálam, translates as "The Hungarian Octopus: A Postcommunist Mafia State."

Taking into consideration the whole structure, I would rather speak of re-feudalization than of typical capitalist corruption, because the dynamics of giving, receiving, and reciprocating are closer to the former than the latter. The Orbán government creates its own oligarchy, and the wealth of this oligarchy depends entirely on the party. Just as a king distributed and redistributed land, titles, and castles among the nobles who supported him in war or peace, while confiscating their estates if they failed him, Orbán can make loyal or favored people enormously rich—as he did for his son-in-law and for his old buddy Mészáros, a former mechanic from his native town who became a millionaire and mayor—and he can similarly deny wealth in cases of disobedience, as he did with his old college friend Simicska, who had the temerity to imagine himself as someone who counted. The EU offers profit for Hungary, and this profit is redistributed as rent. In a reversal of welfare state redistribution, where profit is reallocated in favor of the poorest, the ruling party in Hungary redistributes in favor of its self-created oligarchs.

It is no wonder that in Hungary the wealthy have become 10 times more so in an astonishingly short time, while the poor have [End Page 276] gone deeper into poverty (though this has also occurred elsewhere, not only in Hungary). That the reverse redistribution of profit as rent is not a hungaricum, a special Hungarian case, was presented and argued for by two Hungarian sociologists, Péter Mihányi and Iván Szelényi, in a significant paper—one of the two mentioned above that were considered dangerous and taken out of circulation by the Hungarian government.

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one might ask why this government was twice reelected. is the Hungarian population so stupid or so used to slavery that it does not mind anything that might be done with or against it?

Although I have enumerated several factors that might have contributed to this outcome, including the absence of a democratic tradition, disappointment in the result of the first system change, the mistakes of democratic governments, and the putsch attempt, I should also add fear of chaos, of lack of leadership. It is, after all, possible for a country to have a strong democratic leader (like Angela Merkel) who is not a tyrannical one. All of this, then, might have contributed to the first (or second) Fidesz victory in 2010, but what about the next two, in 2014 and 2018?

The answer is normally the following: due to the new electoral law passed by the Fidesz parliament, it is almost impossible for the opposition to win. For example, in 2014 Fidesz won only 44 percent of the votes, yet it received two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. In 2018 it received less than 50 percent of the vote and again received two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. This is true, but it is not an explanation. Here is another answer: Fidesz achieved a second electoral victory because the opposition parties hated each other more than they hated Fidesz, and so they refused solidarity with one another. This answer too is insufficient, for if only three opposition candidates had stepped back in favor of another opposition delegate, Fidesz would not have ended up with two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. Even this, though, does not explain why the poorest people, the losers (e.g., most gypsies), voted for the government. Surely, many continental [End Page 277] European societies went through a similar development in the previous century. This is the reason several journalists, sociologists, and politicians describe the Orbán system of "illiberal democracy"—that is, of "NER"—as "fascism," "autocracy," "a mafia state," or even "national socialism." Yet I think that we are confronted here with an altogether new phenomenon. This is why I used the politically neutral term "tyranny." One can easily refute claims of its being fascist by pointing out that there are opposition parties, there is no capital punishment—in fact it is not a totalitarian regime. My assertion of the regime as autocratic is also easy to contradict: autocratic regimes, even military dictatorships, are normally based and supported by a class (for example, Hungary under Admiral Horthy). "Populism," the term most often applied, not only to regimes, but also to far-right or far-left parties, is also a misnomer, because populist parties do not create oligarchies, even if under their rule there might be gross corruption and theft (e.g., Chavez or Lula).

This new kind of tyranny does not yet have a name, but it can be described. Orbán's Hungary, which is the result of many contingencies and can be explained with reference to the Hungarian past, serves as a model for this description. In fact, the systems of Orbán's closest friends, such as Putin and Erdoğan, are similar. The differences among them are due to differences in their historical traditions and to the fact that Hungary is a member of the EU, whereas Russia and Turkey are not. Yet it is not because of its similarity to other illiberal democracies that the analysis of the Orbán regime as a model is important, but because of the attraction of this model for some hitherto liberal democratic countries. For example, Orbán recently referred to Italy's interior minister, Matteo Salvini, as his "hero" (https://www.ansa.it/english/news/politics/2018/08/28/salvini-is-my-hero-says-orban_0f95e55b-568d-4c4e-b152-e51d803ab971.html).

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hannah arendt was the first to discuss (in her 1951 book the Origins of Totalitarianism) the transformation of class societies into mass societies. In the Soviet-ruled territory, the transformation [End Page 278] happened suddenly, violently, and rapidly. In other parts of Europe, the transformation was slower. In liberal democracies of mass societies where governments, that is, the representatives, were elected by popular vote, the motivations behind voting preferences were changed. This is easy to see if one casts a glance at the most representative cases, Italy and France. For many, many decades, the same parties competed in those countries for the support of the electorate. Class affiliations (wages, taxes, employment, and so forth) and family traditions were the most decisive factors for the voters, and parties campaigned accordingly. Traditional parties can follow this familiar path—even the renewal of the welfare state promise fails to attract the attention of the electorate. The old slogans sound empty. The poor are not a unified class, so they have no class interests. As a result, traditional parties lost support (both conservatives and socialists), and new parties appeared from nowhere. The stability of the multiparty system was lost; everything became fluid and labile. Ideologies began to take the place of interests. Again, once again, sound the warning.

A state where the government was legitimated through electoral victory by a majority vote was once called "democracy," and rightly so. Yet nowadays, in many places of our world, the same tyrants are elected and reelected several times by a majority. And they are not democratic states; they are tyrannies. Now, only liberal democracies—states characterized by the division of power, by checks and balances, with respect for and practice of all civil liberties—can be termed democracies. "Illiberal democracy" is no democracy.

If the old parties are collapsing and being replaced by new parties without a face or tradition, if tyrants can be elected and reelected several times by a majority, if wealth is distributed in reverse, what motivates people to strive? The answer is simple: ideology combined with identity politics. Fukuyama, in his new book, Identity (2018), put his finger on the overwhelming influence of identity politics, and not only in tyrannies. Identity politics (in the plural) can differ widely from each other, depending on the kind of "identity" upon which they are based. Since I'm speaking of the Hungarian case, I have the [End Page 279] most typical and most traditional European identity politics in mind. Since World War I, the dominating forms of identity in Europe have been the nation, nation-state, and "national identity." National identity can be based on citizenship, but in the Hungarian case (and in most European cases) it is ethnic—nationalism is ethnic nationalism, which is not yet racism, but it can become so.

Ideologies can be positive. By "positive," I do not intend a value judgment (good, progressive, or the like). Rather, positive ideologies are those that promise something for the future: radical changes, classless society, an earth without pollution, world domination, a welfare state, the happiness of all. Positive ideologies—the benevolent ones and the dangerous ones alike—have their own intellectual ideologists; they can be supported by scientists, poets, philosophers, a kind of cultural elite. The ideologies of modern tyrannies are, however, negative—they operate against or in opposition to something rather than working toward something; they have no support from intellectual culture. The Hungarian elections under Orbán exemplify this very well.

Orbán addresses only ethnic Hungarians, and among ethnic Hungarians only his own following. He does not concern himself with members of the opposition at all. According to him, liberals, socialists, and others betray their country, for example, by voting against "Hungary" (that is, against Fidesz) in the European Parliament. To sum up briefly the essence of the dominating ideology: Hungarians are the best, the cleverest, the hardest workers, and the greatest democrats, yet we are always misunderstood, slandered by ghastly liberals and communists. In the face of that slander, Fidesz (that is I, Orbán) protects you, and has always in mind the interests of our people. I (Fidesz) defend our glorious past, our traditional culture, and so on. If you support me (Orbán/Fidesz), you support the Hungarian people.

During the election of 2014, the ideological campaign was centered on defending Hungarians against the increase in gas and electricity prices that provided "extra profit" to foreign interests. To counter this, Fidesz set a fixed price on gas and electricity. From that [End Page 280] time forward, all Hungarians received a statement on their gas and electricity bills that showed how much of an expense the government spared them. Eventually market prices went down and Hungarians lost a lot of money, yet their bills still showed the "favor" of the government. The attitude was obvious: you have a father who defends his children from evil (this time from capitalist exploiters); be assured that he takes care of you, and therefore you should obey him. The refugee crisis came as a grand gift to the Fidesz government. Orbán never spoke of refugees, not even of immigrants, but instead about the hordes of migrants: he would defend Hungary, Christianity, European culture from illegal Muslim invaders who rape our wives and daughters, are terrorists, who take our jobs, destroy our tradition, and so on and so forth. This rhetoric had nothing to do with the real problem of migration. There are no illegal "migrants" in Hungary, yet Orbán and his "mamelukes" succeeded in convincing a huge segment of the Hungarian population that millions of hungry and dangerous colored people, "migrants," were about to invade the country. Several very poor people, the losers of Orbán's regime, were asked why they voted for him. All of them answered that it was because he protects against the invasion by migrants, although they themselves never saw even a single migrant.

Tyrants also learn from one another. In Turkey, Erdoğan sought and found a face to use as the target of hatred: Muhammed Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish preacher living in exile in the United States. Orbán similarly looked for a target, and he found it in the person of George Soros. Soros is a billionaire, a Jew, and of Hungarian origin; in addition, he has written about migration and is known as a political activist—a perfect personification of the devil in Orbán's thinking. Posters portraying Soros as the devil played a significant part in the Fidesz campaign before the election. The choice appeared to be motivated by Orbán's antisemitism, but to presume this is to make a mistake. Orbán is no antisemite; he has no convictions at all, as he himself proved when swinging Fidesz from the left to the right in order to take advantage of a political void. He is interested solely in maximizing [End Page 281] his power, and he will use any ideology (antisemitism included) if this strengthens his power and satisfies his lust for more and more.

Thus, Orbán's ideology is not positive but negative. He defends Hungarians—their culture, religion, family traditions, and male supremacy—against something and from something (communism, liberalism, new left, pluralism, even gender studies). A negative ideology does not appeal to the imagination of the intellectual. As a result, the intellectuals who at the beginning supported Fidesz gave up this support, with the exception of a few who hated liberals and leftists more than anything. It seemed as if Fidesz would not need intellectual cultural support at all. Orbán's only cultural love is football (soccer), and accordingly, he had a stadium erected in his native town, as well as in many other places, and for ethnic Hungarians outside the country. Yet as far as I know, he has never gone to a concert or the theater or an opera other than for an official celebration. He is not interested in science, and whether or not he reads books, I do not know.

A negative ideology is called, after Nietzsche, nihilism. It is the ideology of the "last man." No wonder, then, that Orbán, with all his negative ideology, has not received the kind of adoration due a führer. After the election of 2018, Fidesz launched a Kulturkampf that has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with power. Orbán simply could not tolerate a sphere of life that is not controlled by him.

What can Hungarians do, then? They can destroy, or at least try to destroy, the existing culture and create a so-called culture for writers, artists, and scientists who belong to their own camp. There are always unrecognized or unappreciated artists and scientists ("real Hungarians") who accuse others, the recognized or acclaimed ones (liberals, atheists, cosmopolitans, to sum up: "fake Hungarians"), of deliberately neglecting their "real Hungarian" work. Fidesz has established alternative scientific and other cultural institutions where members are well paid for creating non-liberal, non-leftist work—even nonconservative authors who represent unacknowledged, sidelined, "real Hungarian" art and literature. Let me exemplify this [End Page 282] with a crazy story. While visiting Turkey, Orbán, by way of praising Erdoğan, praised the great Turkish-Hungarian friendship (Hungary was under Ottoman Turkish occupation for 150 years). In addition, he stated that Turks and Hungarians are related, and so are the Hungarian and Turkish languages. Every serious Hungarian linguist knows that this is not the case, that the Hungarian language belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family and is unrelated to Turkish. Orbán, however, decided to establish a special scientific institute the main task of which is to prove that the Turkish and the Hungarian languages stem from a common root. He dreams of being his own Lysenko.

This Kulturkampf has now reached the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This old, hitherto autonomous institution is not just the community of leading scientists but also the chain that links scientific research institutions. The government decided that it cannot go on this way, that scientific research must be controlled by the state and scientists must be told what is to take priority in research, what is most useful. At this moment, as I am writing, the battle is ongoing, but there cannot be any doubt about its outcome. Still, ideology cannot produce scientific results, nor does it write poetry or novels. One cannot command recognition. Rákosi could not do it, Kádár could not do it, Orbán will not be able to do it.

Although the Kulturkampf has only now entered the cultural and higher scientific institutions, the battle has already been fought on other terrain: in schools and universities; that is, against schools and universities. Schools are now supposed to produce good, obedient subjects, and on the pretext that students get the schoolbooks free, these texts are shaped according to Fidesz propaganda, especially as far as history and Hungarian literature are concerned. As for universities, the state nominates a chancellor to sit above a university's elected rector and deal with the business of teaching. Although not all chancellors are obeying orders, and there are people of culture and goodwill among them, the autonomy of state universities is lost. Parents, if they can afford it, send their children to private universities or abroad. After finishing gymnasium (secondary school), many [End Page 283] students leave for London, Vienna, the United States, or any German city. This is in itself quite normal. Yet, if things remain as they are today, these students may never return.

The long and presently unfinished story of the Central European University (CEU) is also a chapter in the Kulturkampf. Yet it is a special chapter that requires special attention. It is a contemporary version of the old story about the wolf and the lamb. The wolf decides to devour the lamb, but he needs to find ideological or moral justifications. The lamb answers always rationally, defending its innocence, but the wolf goes on and on, with new absurd accusations to justify devouring the lamb, which is what he had already decided to do at the start. In this way, though Fidesz had for two reasons already decided to close the university, it passed an anti-CEU law in order to justify its decision. The first reason was that since no state universities remained autonomous in Hungary, private universities also suffered under heavy pressure, given that they depended on the state's financial support. CEU, however, was not at all dependent on the Hungarian state, not even financially. Intolerable! If this remained the case, it would be able to do what it considered right and good independent of the state, so it must go. The second reason was the fact that this university was established and even financed by enemy number one, the devil himself, George Soros. Yet since it was not a Hungarian dependency, CEU and its president, Michael Ignatieff, did not fold under pressure. A long negotiation began, during which the lamb acted rationally, answering all the wolf's questions and meeting all its demands. Still, the wolf did not give up, not even after the US ambassador expressed his hope for the university to stay in Budapest. In December 2018, CEU announced that it was being forced from its Budapest campus by Orbán's government. A few of the university's departments and American degree programs are moving to Vienna.

While not directly Kulturkampf, it still must be mentioned that about half a million Hungarians live and work abroad, mainly students and highly qualified intellectuals, and that there is a great shortage in the country of doctors, nurses, and other skilled professionals, including laborers. [End Page 284]

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tyrannies always collapse, but whether hungarians will escape with their sanity and sufficient clarity for a new start remains to be seen. In November 2018, in order to remain a member of the most powerful faction of the European Parliament, Orbán signed a declaration asserting Fidesz's alliance with the center-right European People's Party, thereby committing to liberal democracy, the rule of law, and respect for civil organization. Yet it is no secret, for Orbán has declared as much in many of his speeches, that his aim is to shift this faction, and perhaps the whole EU, in the direction of illiberalism and ethnic nationalism. One does not need to indulge in much fantasy to believe that since ethnic nationalism never unites but always divides, Orbán's project is the death knell for the EU.

The EU is the last chance for continental Europe to remain a politically and culturally important player in the world theater. If the Union fails, Europe will have a past but no present, and even less of a future. It will be transformed into a museum.

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i was asked for this special issue of social research to tell the Hungarian story from the system change of 1989–90 until the present, and this is what I have done. Yet this story reminds me of a Hungarian saying: "I told this to my daughter that my daughter-in-law should also understand." The story of Hungary can also serve as a warning for other nation-states on the European continent.

Liberal democratic institutions were invented once upon a time by European philosophers, but were set to work first in the "New World" while having a stormy history on the European continent. In 1914, at the birth of ethnic nationalism, Europe committed its original sin, World War I, which resulted in an unjust peace, the emergence of three totalitarian states, and the Holocaust. The same will not happen again, but something similar might … and as Hegel famously said, the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

After the Second World War, it seemed as if some Europeans did learn something from history after all, as if liberal democracy could [End Page 285] set roots in Western Europe and later also in Southern Europe. Yet, as it currently appears, these roots were not strong enough, and liberal democracy seems to have become, at least on the European continent, an endangered species. The decline has not happened suddenly, but it was noticed only recently. Why only recently? The answer is, I think, primarily because the leaders of the EU acted as bureaucrats, even if their task was far from being bureaucratic. They talked about European values as if those values were taken for granted, forgetting that in the twentieth century, Europeans left 100 million European corpses on European soil. In addition, those leaders failed to draw up a constitution of the EU that, in times of identity politics, might have served at least as a crutch. European identity is still (or already) weak and is not holding its own against ethnic nationalism. The sudden strengthening and even victory of ethnic nationalist parties in most European states is seemingly due to the migration crisis, and there is indeed a European migration problem, yet to use it as an ideological weapon in favor of "our" (French, German, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish) culture and ethnic nationalism is not an answer to the problem.

What then is the answer? Class societies cannot be restored, yet the gap between the poorest and the wealthiest grows continuously in all states, in all regions. Tyrants elected and reelected and reelected again by majorities are doing well; their numbers are increasing, and so is the redistribution of wealth in reverse.

What is to be done? It is not the task of this paper to answer this overarching question, even if I knew the answer. But I do not. [End Page 286]