Looking with envy at Hungary

Despite a difficult first year, it is riding top of the polls, well ahead of its bedraggled post-communist opponents. The party is united around its leader and the leadership team. One of the main guests is the junior coalition partner, who received a standing ovation for his speech. The party congress itself was a well-organized affair, with a spectacular set, music, lighting, and a pre-designed leadership speech designed for maximum media coverage. If you are thinking that this cannot be in Poland, you are right: it was in Hungary, at the annual congress of the Fidesz Hungarian Civic Party led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
It takes only a short visit to Hungary to see that the Polish political disease is by no means a necessary legacy of post-communist societies. Polish politics, especially right-wing politics, is the antithesis of not only Western political standards, but even below the reduced threshold of what it takes to be successful in Central European politics. Over the last 10 years, the Polish right has been riven with dissent, with leaders constantly backstabbing each other and squabbling about secondary issues of no concern to ordinary voters. Even when they are able to unite, as did Solidarity Election Action (AWS), that unity is skin deep. Most AWS politicians are devoted to subverting either their own prime minister, their junior coalition partner Freedom Union (UW), or themselves. Little energy is devoted to building a genuine party machine, and anyone who has attended a Polish right-wing party congress will know that it has more in common with the ambience of a get-together of a provincial family that has fallen out with itself than of a professional political machine.
What a relief therefore to find a right-wing politician in Central Europe who has what it takes to be a proper leader, and one that is looking to extend his dominance of the political scene and win the next election.
How was it done? Orban's own past is similar to that of other Central European dissidents in the 1980s, when he was a student activist in Budapest. Like many young dissidents, for a number of years he was supported by George Soros, the Hungarian ZmigrZ billionaire who also funded dissident movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Initially after 1989, Orban and his political group, called Fidesz, seemed destined to go the way of other Central European intellectuals, into the ghetto of center-leftist and liberal politics, permanently playing second fiddle to post-communists and railing against the threat of the NfascistO right.
Yet following the defeat of the right in the 1993 Hungarian elections, Orban and his supporters made a dramatic decision. Loyal as they were to the principles of liberalism, they realized that this meant not one iota unless they managed to achieve political power. That meant breaking with those on the center-left who believed in alliance with the post-communists, and making peace with the fundamental values of the center-right, acknowledging the permanent political strength of social forces such as local communities, church, family, and traditional morality. Over the subsequent years, Fidesz built itself as an opposition to the post-communists, building bridges with the right-wing opposition, while at the same time maintaining its pro-Western and professional credentials with the West European right, especially the German CDU and British Conservatives. That caused their former friends on the European liberal political scene to fume, and was symbolized by a disavowal by their former mentor Soros.
The effects were not long in coming. With the progressive decline in authority of the post-communist government, and the perceived sell-out by former anti-Communists, Fidesz was the only party to benefit from the wave of public dissatisfaction after four years of corrupt communist rule before 1997. Now Fidesz represents a politically dominant synthesis of a desire to join the West, both politically and professionally, with a recognition that there is a need to defend the historical, cultural and moral instincts of Hungary.
The tragedy of Polish politics is that this synthesis has never occurred. With the collapse of the right in the 1993 elections, the UW had the opportunity to pick up the banner of the right. Instead it decided to continue down the road of promoting Nrationalism in politics,O carping at every turn about the stupidity of the masses. In contrast, those who went on to form AWS were marked with a deep suspicion of liberalism. Although both AWS and UW are now in coalition, they hate each other deeply, and each would gladly see the other's demise. The success of forming a post-liberal consensus within Hungary is the key to the permanence of Fidesz and Victor Orban; the failure to do so in Poland will be the seed that leads to the inevitable parting of AWS and UW. That time is not now, but it will have to come.