Left and right in Hungary - the Vienna debate

On the 19 October, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna organised a debate on Hungarian politics between Prof. Charles Gati and myself. It was well attended, with around 60 people present. The debate was widely reported in the Hungarian media. What follows is the written version of my introductory remarks. Much of the debate was recorded on video and will shortly be available on my home page.

1. Before one can make sense of the dynamics of Hungarian politics, one has to understand the sociology, the history and the cultural norms of Hungarian society.

There exists a very deep cleavage in Hungary, which to some extent is similar to the experience of other late modernisers, and which is structured by the dilemma of how much to adapt from the West and how much to construct from one’s own resources. This goes back to the 19th century.

2. After 1989, the cleavage became mapped on to party politics and gave rise to a far-reaching polarisation. Neither side has a monopoly of virtue or of truth. It is simply untrue that there is a single, universal template of modernity that all late arrivals must copy. Equally, Hungary is not a closed society, it is a part of the spectrum of European cultures and partakes of that. But that is not, repeat not, how this cleavage line is lived. The left takes the view that Fidesz and its hinterland are betraying the Western, European tradition and does not hesitate to say so, repeatedly and, in a style that is contemptuous and patronising, as if to say that the left and the left alone has a monopoly of what is European, modern, just or virtuous. The left’s position, then, is universalist. The right resents this, insists that there are perfectly usable raw materials in the Hungarian tradition that are in no way inferior to any other . It takes, therefore, a particularist position. From a theoretical perspective, we can suggest that the left essentialises the West (constructs an imagined West, to use Benedict Anderson’s language), while the centre-right operates with an essentialised view of what Hungarianness is and regards the left as having betrayed this by reason of its links with the unreconstructed communist past.

3. Why the cleavage and why has it acquired this political role? The system change of 1989-1990 was overwhelmingly elite-led, with very limited popular input (the funeral of Imre Nagy was carefully choreographed), hence the elite divide was mapped onto Hungarian politics and acquired a party political shape, which it has retained to this date.

4. The consequence is that party politics are far more deeply divided than a surface analysis would allow – it amounts to an ontological divide, with strong closures. It can be termed a cold civil war. There are two contending reality-defining agencies, locked in an ongoing process of reciprocal potentiation; three, if we give Jobbik this status. Both sides are convinced of their rightness and rightfulness, and regard the other as irrational, dishonest and harmful. Value pluralism has no place here, epistemologies are closed or mostly so, there is no awareness of contingency or reflexivity, let alone of the double hermeneutic. There is a far-reaching intellectual conservatism - no Bourdieu, no Giddens, not much Habermas, hardly any Foucault etc.

5. In this cold civil war, all methods to weaken the other may be employed – discrediting (lejáratás); exaggeration (Hungarian hyperbole plays a role here); category error (muddying of categories - összemosás); giving every intiative the worst possible reading; black-and-white thinking; the constant demand that the right distance itself (elhatárolódás) from something or another (the left and Jobbik do not distance themselves from anything); dismissing the centre-right’s competence and professionalism (hence the successes of the centre-right become inexplicable); trivialisation, elbagatellizálás (issues that might discredit the left are dismissed as trivial ); silence, agyonhallgatás (not responding to counter arguments) – in all, no prisoners are taken, there is very little attention to the doctrine of self-limitation. Hence the democratic infrastructure is weaker than it might be.

6. In 2010, the party system was transformed. The left suffered a devastating defeat at the polls. Fidesz gained a two-thirds majority, the SZDSZ disappeared, Jobbik made its breakthrough and the LMP, a new eco-left party, entered parliament, though it is noteworthy that this is largely a Budapest phenomenon. The domestic support for and rootedness of the left is much eroded, hence the constant recourse to a somewhat mythicised, essentialised "West" or "Europe" or "progress", which has in any case long been a keystone of the left's ideology. But this does nothing to strengthen the left's domestic position . At the same time, the reiteration of the proposition that the left has a monopoly of being "'European" strengthens the inwardness of the right (kurucosodás). Western media, especially in Germany and Austria, have been significant allies of the Hungarian left and thus, a political actor in Hungary itself, but with zero Hungarian legitimacy. This breeds resentment on the right.

7. The left cannot, will not see that the real danger to democracy in Hungary is not Fidesz, but Jobbik, very largely because it never formulated a theory of what constitutes democratic conservatism, Christian Democracy and centre-right. In this context, with Fidesz regarded as the primary enemy of democracy, the offer by the LMP to forge an electoral alliance with Jobbik is quite logical and quite bizarre.

8. Hungary is a democracy, in that it meets both the criteria of rule by consent (elections) and democratic infrastructure; Fidesz has taken major steps to restore this, despite what the left argues. The stories spread by the left and taken up by the foreign media, which cannot check these narratives, can be regarded as mistaken, erroneous, false, mendacious (take your pick). Nevertheless, the ongoing questioning of power cannot be adequate in a cold civil war, when all critiques are seen as hostile and destructive. Left and right must agree on a basic minimum of what constitutes common ground, what is the national interest, the state interest, the social interest, but this is still outstanding (hence the earlier reference to ontology). There is, therefore, no dialogue between the two sides. To present only the one side of the Hungarian political scene, as the foreign media tend to, is thoroughly misleading, if not actually specious.

9. The reform programme launched by Fidesz can be termed a "compensatory revolution". The system change in Hungary was, as argued, overwhelmingly elite-led, with the result that too much was salvaged from the previous system - power, network capital, political skills, contacts, property, money. Fidesz's starting point is that there must be a level playing field, so that these relics (csökevények) constitute a major obstacle to the functioning of democracy, prosperity, civic values and agency (this above all). Hence the radical reform programme to bring the country up to date, an aggiornamento (felsorakoztatás) in economic, political, cognitive, semantic and intellectual terms in order to overcome the deficits in these areas, so that citizens can enjoy genuine agency. Estimates put around half to two-thirds of Hungarian society as having problems with coping with the demands of late modernity.

The two-thirds majority for Fidesz did not happen by chance and constitutes the legitimating basis for this compensatory revolution. And, for what it's worth, a year and a half after the elections Fidesz still enjoys majority support, Jobbik is overtaking the MSZP and the MSZP may well split before long (and did indeed split, after the Vienna debate).

Sch. Gy.