World Affairs
Politics through the looking glass
Published 17 October 2005
Observations on Hungary
It's a country where people say "hullo", when they mean "goodbye". Where first names come last and last names come first. Where the most unsocialist political party one could imagine calls itself "Socialist" and where the case for public ownership and a national health service is argued by the conservative opposition. Welcome to Hungary - and to a topsy-turvy political landscape straight out of a Savoy opera.
In the three years since it took office, the Socialist-led government of Ferenc Gyurcsany has sold off 160 state-owned enterprises, imposed VAT on medical prescriptions, abolished a tax on stock-market profits and sent troops to Iraq in support of President Bush. It also plans to cut the top rate of income tax and extend privatisation into areas even the Iron Lady dared not go - the railways, the post office and, most controversially, healthcare.
Gyurcsany, a former Communist Youth leader whose personal fortune of $17m derives from the first wave of privatisation in the early 1990s, has received enthusiastic backing from neoliberal institutes, western business journals and US government officials. "The immediate future seems to be in safe hands," says the US ambassador to Hungary, George Herbert Walker III (who is George W Bush's cousin).
Meanwhile the case against the Hungarian Socialists' Thatcherite agenda is made by the country's "right-wing" opposition. "Fidesz", the largest opposition party and strong favourite to win next year's elections, wants to introduce a "National Assets contract", requiring that the privatisation of certain public assets - Budapest Airport, the state railway, the post office, the intercity bus company and the Hungarian health service - would need a two-thirds majority in parliament. "The [current] privatisation law needs only a simple majority and it is about selling assets. The National Assets contract is about keeping those assets," said Fidesz's Eszter Pataki.
Fidesz has not ruled out renationalising Budapest Airport if the government sells it, and there is a precedent: the party repurchased the M1 motorway when last in government.
Fidesz's dislike of privatisation is shared by the smaller Munkaspart (the Workers' Party), a Marxist remnant of the old Communist Party, which governed Hungary for more than 40 years. Co-operation between the staunchly anti-communist Fidesz and the Workers' Party would have been unthinkable a decade ago, yet co-operate is what they did last year in their successful campaign to force a referendum on government plans to privatise healthcare.
Fidesz's leader, Viktor Orban, once referred to the Hungarians who had grown up under communism as "the lost generation". But, faced with the impact of the neoliberal "reform" process, which has reduced four million Hungarians (40 per cent of the population) to poverty, Orban now concedes that for most Hungarians, life is much harder today than it ever was in the days of communism.
What the political debate in Hungary demonstrates is that the real division of our time is not between "left" and "right", but between those who support the neoliberal agenda of privatisation, tax cuts for the wealthy and running the economy for the benefit of western multinationals, and those who don't. There can be no doubt that if Margaret Thatcher were Hungarian, she would vote Socialist. Whatever would Gilbert and Sullivan make of that?
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