Political Developments
Political Developments
The political year of 1998 reshaped power relations originally established after the change of the political regime in many regards. The theory, which recognized our national party structure to have reached its final stage and which declared that the political powers gaining ground in Parliament in 1990 would be a determinant force in Hungary in the long term was quashed. It was established that the parties continually seem to be fighting with questions of self-definition and, consequently, their exact position on the political map is not yet stable. The generally admitted thesis declaring that Hungarian electors tend to listen primarily to their emotions, create blocs, and hence raise a certain political group to the skies through their support but then leave it behind and sympathize with another group was also actually disproved in the election year, a period much longer than the calendar year itself. It became clearly apparent that the electors would not rush from one political party to the other if they had to vote. Given a chance to vote, the tradition of one-third of the citizens opting for the left center and one-third for the center-right party was once again revitalized in 1998, after a pause of several decades. The two camps could already be chalked out prior to the beginning of the campaign: one of them was embodied by MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party), which had not lost its electors after its four-year term and even received the highest number of votes at the elections, whereas the other was represented by Fidesz (Alliance of Young Democrats, later Fidesz Hungarian Civic Party), which actually combined all the supporters of the conservative side. However, this did not conclude the development of our national parties: neither the left, nor the center-right should be considered as an organic and homogeneous group; the number of parties to be delegated to the next Parliament, the future of the liberals seated to the left of the political field, the fate of the small parties at the right or the fortune of MIÉP (Hungarian Life and Justice Party), a party to call itself a national radical aggregation, still remains a question.
The only thing to remain certain is that political ideologies drew away from the everyday life of the public by the third free election, and failed to gain any ground ever since. Owing to the transformation of the economy and to political experience gained since the change of the political system, the electors’ relationship with public life, public affairs, and publicity has become much more rational. Most began to think not in terms of people and the nation but advantages and money. In the polling-booth they marked a certain name in hopes of a higher income and voted for the party they believed would take the least away from them.
The center-right political group called “Civic Alliance” got on its feet after the legislative elections so much so that it actually maintained its campaign throughout the summer, as if the 18 October 1998 municipal elections represented the third round of the elections. Fidesz did not only prove to be successful in determining the theme of dialogue and thus dominating publicity, but - quite unusually in domestic political life - also took certain PR aspects into account to specify its actions. In the month directly preceding the local government elections, it essentially only kept PR in view. It considered the electors as the consumers of its messages and repeated its ideas which seemed to be appealing to the recipients but at the same time had also been fraught with trivial ideas in sentences phrased in the most unsophisticated way. The permanent campaign proved to be successful, and Fidesz won for the third time in 1998. It did so despite the fact that the biggest opposition party, MSZP, and moreover SZDSZ (Alliance of Free Democrats also heralded themselves to be the winners - for the reason of filling the Lord Mayor’s post. Everyone won, but first and foremost it was Fidesz. It seized the majority at the county-level assemblies (16) and consequently it was offered the opportunity to build up its still non-existent party organization with politicians in the local government. After their victory at the elections the Prime Minister explicitly announced a re-arrangement of power relations. At one of the events held with a group of coalition sympathizers, the “Civic Gondola”, Viktor Orbán indirectly promised many positions to their center-right supporters in economic and cultural life, and in the media. Various steps aimed at achieving the above-mentioned objective marked the two-and-a-half-year activity of the Fidesz-MDF-FKGP (MDF: Hungarian Democratic Forum; FKGP: Smallholders’ Party) Government. The principle of pillage was realized during the rearrangement of the power relations to the utmost extent. Neither public administration nor any state institutions independent therefrom, none of the corporate enterprises and neither cultural nor media life escaped the attention of the coalition camp. The Government seated its own people in the most positions possible, which was motivated not “merely” by the establishment of a client system but also by the weakening of power in the center-left bloc. Having risen to power, the members of Fidesz rewrote the rules that have been fundamentally recognized for ten years in political life. The most important change was the replacement of a consensus-hunting and politicizing approach by a confrontation-based governing technique. (The cabinet became so definitive in public life from the very first months, that it not only refused the floor from its coalition partners but even withdrew the leading party of the coalition, Fidesz, from publicity.)
The rearrangement of the power relations did not leave the government structure untouched either: the Office of the Prime Minister grew stronger than ever before. Today, Hungary could be characterized by a kind of prime ministerial government mostly suggesting the German system of chancellery, with control strengthened by a very small group made up of the “hard core” of Fidesz (along with Viktor Orbán: László Kövér, István Stumpf, József Szájer, and János Áder) and a consultant group working for the Chief of State. The Office of the Prime Minister does not simply provide a political and intellectual background to the Chief of State but with the help of its duplicate executive offices and analysis groups, it became the first and foremost decision-maker. Today, the ministries do not decide in any fundamental issues without the “Chancellery”. What strengthens the power of Viktor Orbán but weakens that of the Government is that the ministers that he himself selected are not supported by a political background, so a few ministries are not even able to articulate any ambitions that differ from the central volition. (The Prime Minister “grasped” the portfolio and minister, which could contradict the program dictated by the Office of the Prime Minister with the issue of the budget. This is how the Ministry of Agriculture or the educational portfolio received higher sums than ever before). So, the Chief of State is not compelled to be aware of any opponent “in the camp”, after all he has to fight with the apparatus because of its “weak” ministers. The paradox of the situation is that the Prime Minister’s technocratic ministers - lacking any political support - accord with the operators of the administration more than the members of Fidesz’s “hard core”. The former define such political intentions that can be coded and hence executed by the apparatus, whereas the efforts of the latter could not be interpreted in a world of practical politics. For instance, the portfolio was capable of translating the “conservatism” of the Minister of Finance properly to the language of budgetary figures: it allowed the economy to run with various austerity packages for almost two years. At the same time, the ministerial apparatus was inefficient to do anything with political intentions such as “busting the red spider web”, establishing balance in the media or preventing the outflow of public funds.
Not just the government structure but also the relationships between the political institutions underwent some change. For the first time in ten years, the Government became so dominant that, in conjunction with decreasing its controlling role, it relegated Parliament to the background. (The introduction of a new working order for Parliament - according to which the Honorable House only holds its plenary sessions every three weeks - naturally also contributed to this change.)
The power structure, established in 1998, was continually changed, reshuffling in the Government was constant, although the first replacements and ministerial ‘super sessions’ took place only as recently as 2000. Owing to its central role almost each change had an impact on the Office of the Prime Minister, whose coordinating role could not predominate over certain portfolios, although it was involved in professional political decisions. Its executive offices, whose approval was a precondition of any decision being made, materialized parallelism within the administration rather than harmonize the ideas of the portfolios. Let me just mention the two key ideas that provoked debates in the ministries: two strategies were made on economic policy and two on regional development, however, they were eventually all overpowered in the debate with the Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Agriculture and Regional Development.
The coalition first identified the limits of its power in the first third of 1999, when a kind of activism typical to its successful campaign and later to the operation of the new government structure and named “whole-ground attack” in political journalism had lost strength. In addition to the resistance of the apparatus, spectacular conflicts between the government party and the opposition, which produced supporters for the social liberals after all regardless of confrontations within the coalition, NATO air strikes, and natural disasters, 1999 was also the period of disillusionment. The idea of a chance to “abolish the past forever”, connected to the center-right Government led by Fidesz, all but vanished. The party’s image was damaged, its politicians lost their creditworthiness, and the electors had to realize that the “other side” of the bipolar political system was not the immaculate youngster’s camp either.
In spite of a defection by a part of the electors, the political structure - relying on two dominant parties - stabilized in 1999 and 2000. Today, even after a two-and-a-half-year term in government, Fidesz is supported by almost the same number of electors as in May 1998, and MSZP has never had such a large base. Such mistakes led to the equalization of the two camps’ support, and subsequently to the predominance of MSZP which Fidesz may have thought to avoid. Similar to the previous cycles, the communication strategy of Fidesz could have repeatedly thrilled the electors with the sense of lacking any consequences, at least in the first two years. Concealing the issues, failing to answer certain topics raised in public or to admit the mistakes, camouflaging the problems, holding the positions of some officials involved in dubious affairs, lacking to define responsibility or manipulation in many cases all annihilated the creditworthiness of Fidesz, which attached great importance to the policy of action with words. The leading government party reacted at the scandals, the consequences of the observation issue, the questionable company deals of the Prime Minister’s closest friend, the ex-president of APEH (Tax and Financial Control Office), the attacks in response to the Lockheed letter, and the corruption-suspicious stories of the smallholders in autumn 2000, just as its predecessors did. Since matters that injured not the legal but primarily the ethical standards had been put on the agenda, the intention of Fidesz was not to get at the truth but to hold back, confuse the facts, and make them chaotic. Moreover it made counter-attacks, which evidently no longer met the electors’ expectations. Fidesz was taken captive of its own designed image insofar as when in the beginning of 2000 the Minister of the Chancellery and later the Government Head equally announced a “country-building government”, it was unable to achieve its stylistic change accepted by the intellectual groups and the media.
The year 2000 meant a sharp turn in the life of the Smallholders’ Party and the coalition. Whereas in the first few months until the election of the President of the Republic, the identity of the party to act as the dominant power of the center-right camp was still a question (this is why Fidesz and FKGP fought against each other within the coalition and why the Békejobb also tried to join the battle), the existence of the Government was threatened by the smallholders’ corruption scandals in the final months of the year. The political strength of József TORGYÁN and FKGP crumpled, and it became evident that Fidesz would again lead the conservative camp in the forthcoming elections, nevertheless, it became questionable if the present coalition can survive until the spring of 2002.
Marianna Mucsányi
