Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was expected to win re-election to a fourth consecutive four-year term this weekend, due to a rigged electoral system and a largely state-controlled media that bent over backwards to make the united opposition will reach many voters. But the scale of Orbán’s victory surprised most observers. United for Hungary’s candidate, Péter Márki-Zay, lost the popular vote by 53% to 35%, giving Orbán’s Fidesz Party another large constitutional majority in Parliament. It was also a crushing defeat for the European Union.
Perhaps the result will force Hungary’s opposition to consider the primarily economic reasons why so many Hungarians vote for Orbán.. Following Fidesz’s landslide victory in the 2010 elections and years of economic hardship, most Hungarians experienced an increase in living standards. While an economic recovery after 2014 that created thousands of new jobs helped Orbán, his policies played a huge role, creating a cross-class coalition for Fidesz.
Hungary’s liberal opposition has largely flouted these policies and has been unable to offer a strong alternative. But the beneficiaries feared losing if Orbán were removed from power.
Some press reports have focused on Orbán’s freezing of gasoline prices and other large handouts ahead of the election. In response to runaway inflation at the end of 2021, Orbán limited the prices of basic products such as flour, sugar, oil and chicken. These measures, strongly reminiscent of the communist era, proved popular.
The government also required gas stations to sell their fuel at below-market prices. After the Ukraine war broke out, the government forced retailers to bear the costs as prices rose, or else they would lose their business. Hungary became the only European country where fuel prices did not rise, reinforcing Orbán’s image as a strong leader and champion of ordinary people.
But Orbán’s long-term policies to improve voter well-being have apparently escaped the attention of most analysts, despite his pivotal role in establishing and maintaining his loyal base. These policies focused on increasing employment and take-home pay, channeling generous social benefits to working families with children rather than the non-working poorand expressed themselves in a national renewal speech.
Orbán has framed his government’s economic policies as part of a fight against various enemies, including Muslim immigrants and “LGBTQ+ propaganda.”
After 1989, neoliberal transition policies cost Hungary, a country of ten million people, a million jobs, a devastating decline. The Orbán government sought to correct this by building a “work-based society” using various instruments to boost employment, including tax incentives for large employers and a popular public works program for poor people in rural areas that created 200,000 jobs. with wages below the minimum.
By all accounts, the jobs program won the loyalty of many who felt left behind by the economic transition.
Just as important, the Orbán government used taxes and other policies to increase purchasing power so that most Hungarians, including those on low incomes, could rightly feel that they were doing better since the mid-2010s. . Orbán steadily increased the legal minimum wage each year until it surpassed the subsistence minimum in 2018, for the first time since 1989.
In preparation for the recent elections, the Orbán government increased the minimum wage once again, by 20%, benefiting one million employees (a third of private sector employees) directly, while at the same time creating pressure to increase the wages of the most qualified workers.
In addition to this emphasis on work and wages, Orbán built his popularity on family policies that, far from being fair, provided unprecedented levels of public resources to families with children. By excluding unemployed parents, public sector workers and those active in the shadow economy, Orbán could focus his government’s resources on serving working families in the formal private sector.
For example, families with three or more children are practically exempt from Personal Income Tax (IRPF) since 2012; since 2019, families have received large grants and loans to buy cars and build or buy homes, and a full PIT refund in early 2022. As employment increased after 2014, more families began to benefit.
Reflecting the importance of these pro-family policies, in March, at the height of the election campaign, the Fidesz-controlled parliament elected the minister charged with implementing them, Katalin Novák, as Hungary’s first female president.
Orbán has framed his government’s economic policies as part of a fight against various enemies, including Muslim immigrants and, since 2020, “LGBTQ+ propaganda.”. He is a master at terrorizing the population and presenting himself as the savior of Hungary, defeating imaginary enemies, strengthening the traditional family and increasing the birth rate. Using the image of a Russian mother and daughter on billboards across the country, Fidesz campaigned to protect “Hungarian children”, imploring voters to reject “homosexual propaganda” in a referendum held simultaneously with the election. .
Make no mistake: Orbán’s economic policies play as big a role in his political success as the widely documented distortions of the Hungarian electoral system. However, the opposition has not been able to respond effectively. Many voters identified Márki-Zay and the parties behind him with the neoliberal economic policies that cost Hungary and other post-communist countries so dearly in the 1990s, and Fidesz exploited their suspicion.
Hungarians are ready to vote for a strong leader who violates European rules if it serves their economic interests. The challenge for Hungary’s opposition is to devise a mix of economic and social policies that will appeal to a large majority of the voting public, including the growing middle class and those left behind by economic transition and Orbán’s policies alike.
DOROTTIA SZIKRA
AND MITCHELL A. ORENSTEIN (**)
PROJECT SYNDICATEBUDAPEST/PHILADELPHIA
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