Thursday, March 17, 2022

WAR IN UKRAINE TURNS HUNGARY ELECTION CAMPAIGN ON ITS HEAD

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, 25 February 2022. 
EPA-EFE/STEPHANIE LECOCQ


Budapest
BIRN
March 14, 202208:05

Viktor Orban has moved from fighting phoney battles with fictitious enemies in this election campaign to championing himself as the guarantor of peace and stability for Hungarians at a time of war.

Billboards publicising the Hungarian government’s anti-LGBT referendum to be held the same day as the April 3 general election have been pushed into the background almost overnight. So, too, the campaign slogans of the Hungarian opposition about cracking down on corruption or raising teachers’ pay. The war in Ukraine has radically
 transformed the political reality in Hungary.

“The war is highly troublesome for Orban and we see the whole 12 years of his friendship with [Vladimir] Putin come tumbling down on him,” Andras Biro-Nagy, director of Policy Solutions, a critical think tank, tells BIRN.

It is proving more than embarrassing for Orban that he visited Moscow just three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the last EU and NATO leaders to meet Putin. Thus, the Russian president, previously a major ally for Orban, has now unexpectedly become a liability and one the biggest threats to his re-election chances in the election.

“Orban and Putin or the West and Europe – these are the stakes. A choice between the dark or the good side of history,” Peter Marki-Zay, the joint opposition’s prime ministerial candidate in the April 3 election wrote on Facebook.

He also accused Orban of rolling out Putin’s political model in Hungary, undermining European unity and serving Putin’s interests for the last 12 years.

“The opposition is trying to seize the opportunity to frame the election around the existential question: East or West? Where do we belong?” Biro-Nagy says.
Transformed into a dove of peace

Yet Fidesz is pushing another narrative, a less grand overarching one, perhaps lacking moral considerations, but one that is proving equally as powerful.

It took the government and its spin-doctors several days to come up with a new slogan, but Orban’s newly discovered rhetoric about “peace and stability” – amplified by the legions of pro-government media – is beginning to hit home.

“We have to stay out of this war, we should not be involved,” Orban now intones repeatedly, underlining his long government experience. He has also managed to portray Marki-Zay as a politician who would send Hungarian troops into Ukraine and involve Hungary in a war that is not “ours”.

“Our research shows that Hungarian society favours peace. We do not share the existential fears of Poles about the Russians,” Agoston Samuel Mraz, director of the government-allied think tank the Nezopont Institute, tells BIRN.

Mraz believes the current situation could work in the government’s favour; amid growing international insecurity, the willingness of voters to change government tends to diminish. Fidesz, he says, is closely monitoring the mood of society and is tailoring its messages to suit.

“After the 1956 revolution, Hungarian society, under huge pressure, compromised with the communist regime and the Russians. This was not a free, but pragmatic decision of a society opting for relative welfare and security,” Mraz says.

Hungarian opposition leader Peter Marki-Zay speaks during a protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the headquarters of the International Investment Bank (IIB) in Budapest, Hungary, 01 March 2022. 
EPA-EFE/Szilard Koszticsak


It also explains why Orban and his ministers endlessly repeat that energy trade with Russia should not be included among the Western sanctions. Higher utility prices would undermine this notion of stability, which – at least in the minds of government spin doctors – would erode government support.

At a conference organised last week in Budapest, Ukraine’s ambassador to Hungary, Ljubov Nepop, in a voice cracking with emotion, questioned whether the Orban government cared more about low utility prices than human lives? “Are you not ashamed?” she asked, tears in her eyes.

This deeply rooted need for stability might explain why there have been no mass demonstrations against the war in Hungary, unlike in Prague or Berlin where hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets with withering attacks on Putin and his allies at home and abroad.

Yet observers point out it might have more to do with the inability of the opposition to mobilise its voters and organise big demonstrations beyond the few thousand people who regularly attend.

“Currently, it seems that the opposition has not been able to turn the situation to its advantage,” election expert Robert Laszlo from the independent think tank Political Capital tells BIRN. “They were probably too cautious and shy in the beginning, while the government is vehemently pushing its new narrative with the help of its loyal media and has managed to ‘retune’ its voters in no time. The communication bubbles created by the state media and government billboards are proving unbreakable, especially in the countryside.”

Other experts agree that Orban’s new central narrative of safeguarding peace and stability is gaining traction in society. Although polls are usually not very reliable in Hungary as results tend to depend on the affiliation of the polling institute, an end-February survey by Median indicates that the government has managed to actually increase its lead over the joint opposition. Orban’s monolithic voting block of 2.2-2.5 million is not being eroded, it seems.

Mraz, from the government-allied Nezopont Institute, says their polls show Fidesz support growing slightly, but what’s more important, opposition voters are becoming more disoriented. Undecided voters, seen as a potential reservoir for opposition parties, have become even more insecure and could plump for the safe choice of the government at a time of such instability.
Economic clouds loom

However, other challenges lie ahead for the government over the final weeks of the campaign.

Stability could be undermined by the free fall of the Hungarian currency, which has sunk to a record level of 400 forints per euro since the war began on February 24. A positive upshot of Fidesz’s much-heralded economic growth of the last 12 years is being eaten up by instability and inflation.

The opposition Democratic Coalition (DK) is gleefully reminding voters that when Orban took power in 2012, the exchange rate was at 269 forints per euro, meaning an overall devaluation of almost 50 per cent over its 12 years in power, by far the biggest among the Visegrad Group of Central European countries. The Hungarian currency’s exchange rate is slightly below that of Zimbabwe’s, DK writes, mocking the government’s slogan that Hungary is moving ahead, not backward.

Government circles admit privately that the galloping inflation and deteriorating exchange rate could pose a bigger threat to election victory than the actual war in Ukraine.

With just two weeks before the election, insecurity dominates the mood, both within society and among the political elite. Orban’s new balancing act – supporting the EU and NATO, but keeping the door open for energy business with Russia and generally voicing his reservations about sanctions as effective measures to bring about change – appears so incoherent at times that the government appears to be adjusting strategy on the hoof.

For example, Orban announced Hungary would not send weapons to Ukraine, not even allowing weapons to transit its territory. But it then appeared to backtrack in a carefully worded government decree, which allows the transport of weapons to NATO allies, only ruling out direct transport to Ukrainian forces.

The same happened with its refusal to station NATO troops on Hungarian soil. Now, it seems, the government is open to having them, and the optimism of Defence Minister Tibor Benko about the Hungarian military not needing support is no longer valid.

The almost daily corrections reveal that Orban is trying to realign policies with Western allies, but often too little, too late. Orban’s ambivalent approach to the war has brought relations with Poland, Hungary’s main ally within the EU, to a new nadir, and it looks to have cemented Fidesz’s toxic image in most Western capitals.

But questions of foreign policy and international affairs leave the majority of Hungarian society unmoved or even just confused, possibly as a consequence of the country becoming increasingly inward-looking and provincial during the 12 years of the Orban government.

“It is yet to be seen which of the Orban’s peace and security narrative or the opposition’s West vs. East approach will convince voters more,” Biro-Nagy of Policy Solutions admits. “But what’s highly challenging for Orban is that he has no control over what’s happening in Ukraine, or even in the economy – he can only do damage control.”

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