Editor’s note—The following essay is adapted from a speech delivered at CPAC Brazil on Sunday, September 24, 2023.
Muito obrigado, caros amigos. Thank you, dear friends,
Taking this stage on behalf of CPAC Hungary, I realize I stand on a path trodden by generations of Brazilian and Hungarian stewards of what is today a profound friendship. What an honor and a privilege! That such a bond should exist in the first place defies intuition. How can a middling, landlocked, European statelet with an indecipherable language expect to sit at the table of a near-superpower with 22 times the population, soon to be the world’s fifth-largest economy? The first bridge across this seemingly unbridgeable chasm seems to be history, but it has much to do with Brazil’s present as well. Early in the 19th century, your country proved a haven for thousands of Hungarian patriots fleeing Habsburg persecution, joined by later waves of migrants seeking a better life. Brazil and Hungary may be half a world away, but the heart of our friendship pulses at every event, festivity and commemoration gathering the roughly 100,000 Brazilians of Hungarian ancestry living in your midst. Through their rootedness, they remind us that the West spans both sides of the Atlantic, and that the Old World is inextricably enmeshed in the New.
From that solid foundation, the last electoral cycle saw our societies deepen their ties even further. In February 2022, at the start of a year in office that would suspiciously prove his last, Prime Minister Jair Bolsonaro visited his Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orbán in what we like to think of as the Mecca of Western conservatism, the capital city of Budapest. The two leaders touted one another’s achievements, highlighting shared approaches to mass migration, falling birth rates, the traditional family, the looming multipolar world, and the threat of cultural Marxism. They termed this partnership a “coalition of the sane,” but they could just as well have called it the ‘Olavista alliance,’ after the world-famous Brazilian conservative philosopher Olavo de Carvalho. The common resolve of Bolsonaro and Orbán to deny the Left the cultural hegemony it enjoys in Western Europe and North America reminds us that Olavo’s thought, on both sides of the Atlantic, remains as timely as ever.
There was more to the visit. Two years into the global hysteria over COVID-19 and mere days before Russia invaded Ukraine, the two leaders were seen taking a hard stand against the globalist order that those two events would harden into place. They signed a spate of bilateral memoranda on everything from aiding persecuted Christians in the Middle East to defense contracting, from water management to sanitation cooperation. In doing so, they showed the world a path to prosperity away from the rotten multilateral system that had been hijacked by left-globalist ideology. This path remains within our grasp even as Washington and Brussels tighten their grip, so long as conservatives in power stand with one another against the financial blackmail they’re increasingly met with as soon as they deviate from liberal dogma. Bolsonaro called Orbán a “little big brother,” a reference to his 13 years in power. But he was being too humble. The admiration runs both ways, and Hungary can’t wait to see the Brazilian Right back in power. Fora Lula!
I’ve been asked to address Hungary’s post-communist experiment and the potential lessons to be learned from it. It would be arrogant, however, to set Hungary up as some sort of model for a nation so far-flung, not least because, contrary to conventional wisdom, our transition ended not with the Soviet Union’s collapse, and its legacy remains less than consensual, even within Hungary. It is indeed tempting, but misleading, to view the onset of democracy in 1989 as the irreversible culmination of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History.” However nominally democratic the new system, the scores of 40 years of repressive communism aren’t so easily settled by suddenly giving people a voice, and communist traits can—and do—survive in the crevices of the new order. Hungary has learned the hard way that ‘past is prologue,’ and that the contours of the new Hungarian state remain a work in progress, shaped in contrast to our evolving notion of what came before.
Mainstream historiography tends to foreground the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 as the beginning of the Soviet Empire’s end. But I would submit that the first hole in the Iron Curtain was actually torn two months before November 9, near Sopron, along the Austro-Hungarian border. The 240 kilometers of electrified, barbed-wire fence separating East from West had been gradually dismantled through the summer of that year, with East Germans crossing into the West in droves instead of waiting for West German visas at the embassy in Budapest. On September 10, Hungary lifted the last remaining restrictions by reneging on its commitment with Moscow to prosecute illegal crossings. The Iron Curtain was instantly turned into a heap of scrap iron, a reminder of Central Europe’s submission to the Soviets, a relic of a bygone age. No less than 70,000 East Germans fled to the West within days.
Hungarians, for their part, had been relatively freer to travel than Poles and Czechoslovaks, but were still deeply impacted by the opening of the floodgates. The roundtable talks that had begun that summer between the regime’s reformist elements and the opposition would take a year of fits and starts to produce the declaration of the new Hungarian republic, the calling of new elections, and the formation of a new democratic government. The last Soviet soldier wouldn’t leave Hungary until June 1991. But for Hungarians living through the drawn-out process, being able to visit family members in Vienna meant that a grave historical injustice was beginning to be repaired.
Hungary, a thousand-year-old nation firmly anchored in Western Christianity, had been ‘kidnapped’ by the East, to borrow the famous expression by the Czech playwright Milan Kundera in his famous essay The Tragedy of Central Europe. In 1949, after four years of an independent, agrarian government, Soviet occupiers employed intrigue, subterfuge, and conspiracy to rig that year’s election, leaving Hungary no choice but to join their sphere of influence. Kundera quotes the head of the Hungarian news agency moments before Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to repress the glorious revolution of October 1956: “We will die for Hungary and for Europe.” The post-1989 transition, therefore, was not merely about emulating non-Soviet political norms. It was about recovering an identity and restoring Hungary’s place in Western civilization.
Whereas communism’s first decade in Hungary is considered harsh even by Soviet standards, it is the three decades following 1956 that elicit the most historiographic controversy. Under Stalin’s puppet Mátyás Rákosi (1948-56), mass repression killed thousands, show trials sent hundreds of thousands to prison, while collectivization brought about widespread shortages and deprivation. This reign of terror overpowered even the regime’s softer faction, not least reformist Prime Minister Imre Nagy, whose bid to tread a sovereign path to socialism in 1955 was swiftly nipped in the bud, sending him to an unmarked Romanian grave three years later. Soviet repression of the 1956 uprising brutally killed 3,000 and sent a quarter-million Hungarians into exile.
What followed under János Kádár (1956-1988) is admittedly a pivot towards what is variously called ‘goulash communism’ or ‘socialism with a human face,’ with Hungary becoming the ‘happiest barrack’ of the Eastern bloc. Goulash is a stew-like dish made of sundry ingredients, and Kadar admittedly fused his iron grip on the country with a modicum of economic liberalization, consumer freedom, and cultural liberties. But the marginally higher living standards these policies enabled among Hungarians who remained home fooled nobody but the nomenklatura. Even in the regime’s latter decades, Hungary sported the highest rates of alcohol abuse, suicide, and obesity, and a general sense of demoralization was killing the national spirit. Hungary remained a ‘barrack,’ after all, even if the least miserable one, with the purported advances in well-being only helping to solidify Kádár’s power monopoly. The sole, last-ditch attempt to cast off that yoke in 1956 was still referred to in official channels as a proto-fascist, CIA-funded, Horthyist counter-revolution, as opposed to a homegrown, pro-democracy uprising. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
The system didn’t genuinely begin to crack until the mid-1980s, when its economic unviability became too apparent, and the communist elite was left no other option than to appease its critics out of anguish at what could follow (as you will see, they came out rather unscathed). September 1987 saw the founding of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), the party of József Antall, who would become our first democratic PM three years later. It was followed the year after by Fidesz, a motley group of law students led by a young Viktor Orbán that banned the over-30s from membership and adopted a liberal—almost libertarian—outlook, at least in the beginning. In June 1989, 200,000 people attended Imre Nagy’s reinterment on the 31st anniversary of his murder. Such a symbolic concession to the 1956 generation showed that events had left the regime no alternative but to compromise on memorial matters. But burying Nagy as a national hero was only the start, as the young Orbán highlighted that day in a famous speech. Hungary wouldn’t get back on the path to national freedom until the very last Soviet soldier departed the country. And even then, the transition would be far from complete.
The main lacuna was the lack of transitional justice. Among the newly formed parties sitting across the roundtables from the regime’s lame ducks, there was a clear resolve to dismantle the single-party-state in favor of a pluralistic democracy. But there was also a sense of duty to repair past inequities, compensate victims, and draw conclusions—yet these latter aspirations were left unfulfilled. By necessity, Antall and his entourage compromised with the very apparatchiks who would pass them the governing baton, and one such concession was not to hold them accountable for past crimes. Unlike in the rest of the Visegrád countries, national security concerns were invoked so as not to release a full list of human rights abusers. Instead of lustrating them out of the public square, state agents and secret police informants could simply convert to democratic politics without their crimes ever being made public. Torturers and murderers, particularly those called on in 1956, walked away scot-free too. It is often remarked that in the first Parliament, there were more past informants than MPs from the MSZP, the successor to the regime’s party organ. A bill introduced in 1991 by Antall’s party to suspend the statute of limitations for all “serious crimes” committed between 1944 and 1990 passed handily, only to be voided by the Constitutional Court. Short of full decommunization, Hungary’s transition seemed peaceful and orderly. The price paid was not bringing to trial the perpetrators of past atrocities.
The sense of unredressed inequity grew in 1994, when the post-communist MSZP won an absolute majority whilst the opposition fractured. Led by Gyula Horn, the socialists capitalized on nostalgia for the old welfarism, even as they committed to pro-market reforms and compensatory measures for the victims of the very communism they had helped orchestrate. Horn even made a deal with the liberals to reach a two-thirds super majority in Parliament, securing passage of an unpopular austerity package whilst allaying concerns that communism had somehow returned in democratic garb.
Yet all this proved to be a pack of lies. The economy kept cratering, while nothing was done in the way of memorial redress. This should have come as no surprise: Horn had served as Kádár’s foreign minister and had lied about his repressive role in 1956. Fidesz proved the revelation in 1998, shooting from a 7% to a 30% voting share. Orbán’s first cabinet undertook growth-spurring reforms, oversaw Hungary’s accession to the NATO alliance, and crucially, began to cleanse residual communists from stately institutions, while passing a ‘status law’ offering education, health benefits, and employment rights to the 3 million Hungarians severed by the 1920 Trianon Treaty. Ultimately, Orbán lacked the experience to appraise his chief foe: liberal and leftist hegemony of the culture. He went on to lose in 2002 to Péter Medgyessy, another former apparatchik allied with the liberals. About that first fitful premiership, Orbán often remarks, “We were in government, but not in power.”
Orbán’s following eight years in opposition were a time for strategizing and reflection. Medgyessy’s quibbles with the liberals led him to resign in 2004, giving way to Ferenc Gyurcsány, another former communist who had cashed in on the transition by becoming CEO of a privatized company. Though he won in 2006, Gyurcsány was revealed later that year to have told a private MSZP meeting that the party had been “lying” about the state of the economy to win that year’s race. Mass protests ensued, calling for his resignation, but he trundled on until 2009. The following year, Orbán rode the wave of discontent to a 53% share of the vote, but in order to reach the two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution, he struck a deal with the Christian democratic KDNP. The drafting of a new magna carta got swiftly under way. Adopted by Parliament in April 2011 and entering into force in January the following year, the so-called Fundamental Law (FL) is Hungary’s first post-communist, truly democratic constitution. In 1989, the communist charter from 1949 had simply been amended, making Hungary the only Eastern bloc nation that didn’t start from scratch at the onset of democracy. Orbán’s mission was to change that.
The Fundamental Law aimed at no less than solidifying the democratic foundations on which the state was to stand, giving Hungarians a renewed sense of historical purpose. After years of scandalous mismanagement, the Law nudged the government toward sound finances and a cleaner, more efficient administration. The document’s preamble—the National Avowal—affirms Hungary’s Christian roots and traditional family values. The life of the fetus is said to start at conception, and marriage is defined as a union between a man and a woman. Ethnic minorities beyond Hungary are declared to form “part of the political community,” thereby earning the right to vote. The Fundamental Law sought to break the self-serving compromises of the transition elite by weakening congealed post-communist structures, not least the Constitutional Court. Under the guise of protecting what they called an “invisible constitution,” activist judges had become accustomed to overriding legislation backed by popular majorities. By dethroning this undemocratic form of lawyering and restoring parliamentary supremacy, the Fundamental Law has rehabilitated Hungary’s political and legal traditions, dating back to the 800-year-old Golden Bull. More importantly, it declares the 1949 Stalinist constitution to have been invalid, the regime’s party to have been a “criminal organization,” and the humanitarian crimes committed under both Nazi (1944-1945) and Soviet occupations to face no statute of limitations. It affirms the rule of law to be incompatible with even the slightest remnant of the communist order.
To the extent that 2011 was the endpoint of the ‘regime change,’ the long yearned-for culmination of a 22-year process, what lessons can be derived from it, 12 years later? Firstly, since political nature abhors a vacuum, transitions are more often drawn-out processes than clean breaks. If understood as the amalgamation of a cultural and a socio-economic variant, communism’s insidious ability to infiltrate the post-1989 state lives on even today, in the left-liberal airwaves and the ivory towers, in the global philanthropies and the universities. Second, these transitions are often observed, monitored, and judged by international bodies and NGOs lacking the slightest awareness of the local past and with little stake in its future. Evident differences aside, the European Union’s (EU) bureaucracy shouldn’t be surprised when the average Hungarian sees undeniable similarities in the methods employed by the Kremlin and Brussels. Both are helmed by out-of-touch elites seeking to steamroll smaller countries into their one-size-fits-all prescriptions. And last, Hungary’s ability to reach future highs of national purpose and cohesion will continue to hinge on its ability to gauge the dark depths of its past. Hungarians seeking to appraise their newfound sovereignty should rediscover what life was like in the 45 years when they lacked it. They can do so by visiting Budapest’s Terror House, a government-funded effort at historical remembrance housed in the very same rooms where Nazis and Soviets tortured Hungarian patriots. Their country’s experience proves that the wheel of history can run on lofty and noble aspirations, but that turning a page of terror requires naming the culprits. Only then can the work of healing and rebuilding truly begin.
