Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia, the three neighboring countries on the border between Central and Eastern Europe, have completely different statuses in the minds of the Western media. True, there are manifold differences, but these countries also have some hidden similarities that the Western establishment doesn’t (want to) know anything about. Each one of these countries being in the midst of election season—Serbia held elections in the December just gone, while Croats and Hungarians will head to the polls later this year—perhaps it is time to see what these hidden similarities can reveal to us about Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia respectively, as well as what they tell us about the Western political and media establishment.
Judging by the mainstream media bloviations about the state of democracy in Hungary, Serbia, and Croatia, the uncritical consumer is bound to conclude that Hungarian democracy is in the worst condition, the Serbian one is problematic but not as problematic as its Hungarian counterpart, while the Croatian democracy is more or less flawless. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in power since 2010, has been portrayed as the main threat to democracy in the whole of Europe for many years at this point; Serbian leader Aleksandar Vučić, serving as prime minister from 2014 to 2017 and as president from 2017 until now, is also presented as an authoritarian politician, while Croatia’s Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, in power since 2016, is virtually unknown to the wider international public. In mainstream media circles, however, he mostly bathes in the status of a reliable European bureaucrat, possibly an aspirant for high positions in the EU. How accurate are these media images?
Although partially based in reality, these views say less about the state of democracy in the aforementioned countries and more about how obedient the leaderships of these countries are to the centers of power in the United States and the EU. For example, Croatia under Plenković is completely loyal to the European mainstream. Laws inspired by the progressive policies of the West are adopted, albeit somewhat softened due to the fact that Croats, like the citizens of other post-communist countries, are relatively conservative in their values. From the openness to the influx of migrants, who in the past few years have completely changed the labor market in Croatia, to the adoption of the so-called Istanbul Convention, which introduces the jargon of gender theory into national legislation, Plenković’s HDZ party, nominally conservative and Christian democratic, in practice behaves similarly to the German Christian Democrats and the British Conservatives, who are Christians and conservatives more in name than in reality.
As is well known at this point, the Hungarian case is diametrically opposite. Orbán’s Fidesz party has stood firmly against the importation of dominant EU mainstream values, engaging in an all-out cultural war with its opponents. When the migrant crisis broke out in 2015, Hungary built walls on its borders. Orbán banned gender theory indoctrination in schools, while at the same time giving generous incentives to young families to have more children. This is the main reason for the orchestrated multi-year attacks on Orbán’s government, which have turned him into a feared symbol, a perceived threat to liberal democracy. As such, Hungary is reviled as an increasingly ‘illiberal’ backwater.
The Serbian case is a mixture of the Croatian and Hungarian ones. President Vučić pretends to be a strong guardian of Orthodox Christian values, but in practice, he semi-secretly implements policies of rapprochement with the liberal West and its values. In a country whose population harbors extremely conservative values, Vučić has installed the lesbian Ana Brnabić as a prime minister. In reality, she is little more than a political puppet, boasting no real power. Her only function is to signal to a West that is easily impressed when it wants to be how Vučić’s Serbia is open to alternative sexual lifestyles (which, as 2022’s street riots on the occasion of the LGBT parade in Belgrade demonstrated, is not true). At the same time, for the domestic audience, Vučić continuously calls out the West for its alleged systematic obstruction of Serbia, while simultaneously engaging in the never-ending negotiations with the EU. Rhetorically, Vučić takes the side of Russia—a traditional Serbian ally—in the current war, but in a nod to political reality, Serbia votes against Russian aggression in the UN and even secretly allows the transport of its arms to Ukraine. Vučić has two faces—one for Serbia and another for the West. His entire political life boils down to explaining to the West that he doesn’t really mean what he says in Serbia, and at the same time explaining to Serbia that he doesn’t really mean what he says to the West.
Thanks to these concessions, Vučić’s treatment in Western politics is not entirely bad. In the Western media, on the other hand, Vučić does not have the status of being better than Orbán—but due to comparatively much less frequent criticism, he has the status of being less bad. While Orbán is seen as an outlaw in their own ranks, Vučić is treated as an external ally. So Vučić gets better treatment than Orbán because he is a bigger follower of the foreign power centers, and he is treated worse than Plenković because he is only half-obedient.
How much truth is there in the views of the mainstream establishment on democracy in these countries? If we ignore the usual sensationalism and hypocritical selectivity (Western democracies are not treated equally when they threaten human rights), we could say that the criticisms of Hungarian democracy are partially justified and that the criticisms of the Serbian democracy wholly justified, even that the criticism in the latter case doesn’t go far enough. But their view of Croatian democracy is fundamentally flawed—because of Plenković’s alignment with the mainstream values, they turn a blind eye to its shortcomings.
I don’t want to say that democracy is equally healthy in all three countries—after all, after half a century of communism each one of those democracies is still in the early stages of recovery. What makes them different are mainly cultural and civilizational peculiarities. While the Hungarians and Croats lived for centuries in the multicultural Habsburg Monarchy, where both were granted their national parliaments and profited from a certain level of autonomy, Serbia spent many centuries under the Ottoman Turkish administration without a developed political culture. Hungarians and Croats are mostly Catholic, which means that they live with a sense of religious universalism; Serbs are predominantly autocephalous Orthodox Christians, so they are particularistic instead of universalistic, drawing inspiration not from the more spiritual Constantinople, but the imperial Muscovite Orthodox tradition. This difference is visible even today in the public discourse both in politics and media. Serbian politics is much more closed, corrupted, and intertwined with the mafia than Hungarian, or any Western politics, while the Serbian media combines a toxic mix of British tabloid-like sensationalism with Soviet-era loyalty to the ruling party: The Sun and Pravda rolled into one.
But all these differences are hidden beneath the surface similarities between the supposedly flawless Croatian democracy and the varying degrees of rot said to be infecting the Hungarian and Serbian ones. While in the first half of 2016, Croatia briefly benefited from a truly sovereignist government led by the non-partisan Prime Minister Tihomir Orešković, it was subjected to the same abusive broadsides that Hungary is today. As soon as Plenković, a former member of the EU parliament, became prime minister later that same year, such criticism miraculously evaporated. But how, without a sudden critical turn in the world media’s coverage of his leadership, did Plenković manage to pull off becoming uncannily similar to the caricature Western elites make of Orbán? There has been next to no protest at the democratically dubious methods he has employed to mitigate the possibility of his being removed from power.
In fact, here Plenković may have gone a step further even than Orbán, as evidenced by the case of the referendum initiative Narod odlučuje (‘People Decide’) from 2018, when his government stifled citizens’ attempt to vote in a referendum on the reform of the electoral system, which would have led to a fairer distribution of votes in the parliamentary elections, but a less favorable one for his HDZ party. Although the organizers reported that they had collected significantly more signatures than needed to call the referendum, the government appointed a commission to count the signatures, which, after a suspiciously long period of time, announced that a huge number of the signatures were invalid—just enough, in fact, for the referendum to be called off. While it is theoretically possible that the irregularities in the collection of signatures were considerable, the fact that independent auditors were not allowed to participate in the counting of votes, along with the additional fact that the evidence was destroyed at the end of the committee’s work, casts a shadow of doubt on the legitimacy of Plenković and his political establishment. If this had happened in Serbia, it would have been prominent news for a day or two. If it had happened in Hungary, there would be best-selling tomes devoted to the matter. But when it happens in Croatia, the Western media is silent.
What are Plenković’s similarities with Vučić’s style of government? Conspiracy theories and paranoia. Vučić is known for constantly repeating in public that he receives numerous threats and fears that someone will murder him. If we take into account the Serbian tradition of political assassination—such as the defenestration of the royal dynasty Obrenović in Belgrade in 1903, the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that set in motion a series of events that culminated in the First World War, the murder of Croatian political leader Stjepan Radić in the middle of the Belgrade parliament in 1928, or the killing of Vučić’s predecessor, Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić, in 2003—Vučić may not be wrong. But Plenković has a similar paranoia, around which he has built an entire conspiracy theory—although he is otherwise one of the politicians who labels the unorthodox views of others as “conspiracy theories.”
Plenković’s fear is based on an incident from 2020, when 22-year-old Danijel Bezuk wounded a policeman with a firearm in front of the Croatian government building, escaped, and killed himself before the authorities managed to get him. From day one, Plenković built a narrative that he himself was a target (for which the police found no evidence), and Bezuk a product of the radicalized atmosphere of the right-wing opposition on the Croatian political and alternative media scene. Plenković directly called out the conservative party Most (‘Bridge’) and the sovereignist Domovinski pokret (‘Homeland Movement’), and he persists in his narrative to this day, even after the Croatian secret service (SOA) found in its 2020 report that Bezuk had acted not as an instrument of the opposition parties, but as a “lone wolf.” Again, if Vučić had so cynically pounced on a promising murder, it would have been interpreted as further evidence of his paranoia. If Orbán, without evidence, and against the findings of his own secret service, blamed an attack on his political opposition, it would be a first-class scandal across the entire EU.
Why is it not that way for Croatia? The answer has already been given—because Plenković is a follower of the Western political and ideological mainstream, while Orbán is not. These small examples point to a fact that many consumers of the English-language media fail to notice, namely that the conventional reports on smaller countries in Europe are not only unreliable in the extreme, but depend on the degree of political servility in the countries concerned. The more obedient you are, the more praised (or invisible) you will be in legacy media, and the greater room you will have for maneuver when it comes to subordinating democratic norms to political ideology, as Vučić and (to some extent) Plenković have happily discovered. In fact, excessive praise from Western embassies and mainstream media giants is far from a reliable measure of political democratization. Often, it is more likely to be interpreted as permission for the anointed leaders of these feted countries to abandon some of the most basic democratic principles.
