Prepare yourself for another round of peacock dancing performed by the high-wire artist Viktor Orbán. (That’s a scary image, isn’t it? Does he have a safety net?) This time the aim is to lull suspicions about his commitment to democratic principles and European values in order to prevent Fidesz’s expulsion from the European People’s Party. I hope he will not succeed because any concession he offers is merely a worthless piece of paper. Nothing he puts forth will ever change the real nature of his regime.
With two modest concessions Viktor Orbán thinks he can buy his party a place in EPP. The concessions were announced this morning during Gergely Gulyás’s “government info.” One is the postponement of the creation of a second, parallel judicial system that would handle cases brought against the central and local governments. This new judicial structure would be under the direct supervision of the minister of justice. The law that created these new courts was passed in December, and by May 162 people, mostly civil servants, had applied for judgeships.
There are weighty objections to the system of administrative courts as it would function in Hungary’s illiberal democracy, including government pressure on the judges and the inexperience of the newcomers. The Polish government’s somewhat similar attack on the independence of the judiciary resulted in the initiation of Article 7 against Poland, and it was clear from early on that Hungary was heading toward at least an infringement procedure on account of its attempts to interfere with the independent judiciary.
The second concession is the cancellation of a 7.5% tax on advertisements, a law aimed at further crippling the non-government media. The original 2017 bill envisaged a graduated tax, depending on size, which would have hit the larger companies, like RTL Klub, which was the real target, especially hard. That original law had to be changed due to a strong response from the European Union. Eventually, it was lowered to a 5.3% tax on all media companies with an income of over 100 million forints. Three years later, the government announced that the tax would be raised to 9%, but as the result of a general outcry, it was lowered to 7.5% in January. Today, Mihály Varga, minister of finance, standing alongside Gergely Gulyás, announced the total cancellation of the advertising tax.
These are the two scraps the Orbán government has thrown to the bureaucrats in Brussels. Let’s hope that members of EPP are not hungry enough to fall for them.
Do we know anything more today than we did yesterday about what is in Viktor Orbán’s head as far as his strategy is concerned? Yes, perhaps we do. Ágoston Sámuel Mráz, director of Nézőpont Intézet, a think tank that works closely with the government and depends on it financially, gave a talk at a conference organized by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in which he admitted that the EP election results didn’t meet Viktor Orbán’s expectations and therefore he “will not be the tip of the scale” in the new European Parliament. However, perhaps he can remain in EPP by convincing the leadership to establish a so-called “platform” within the group. It would be a subgroup of politicians who share the same ideology. Orbán himself suggested such a solution in one of his speeches about a year ago. Mráz expanded on the idea and outlined two such possibilities: (1) the Visegrád 4 countries that resist immigration could form a platform or (2) a group could be created that would include Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, RMDSZ, and the Latvian, Bulgarian, Czech, and Slovene parties. That would be, Mráz pointed out, a rather substantial group of 37 MEPs. And, if EPP doesn’t fall for these ideas, Fidesz could always join the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). That Fidesz would join Matteo Salvini’s Liga is out of the question. At the moment, I hope that Fidesz joins its Polish and British friends in ECR.
And now, here is an allegation that has only tangential relevance to Orbán’s efforts to hang on to Fidesz’s membership in EPP but exposes possible Romanian-Hungarian electoral fraud affecting the composition of the European Parliament.
Csaba Lukács, a reporter for Magyar Hang, hails from Transylvania and therefore pays special attention to what’s going on there. He noticed that an incredible number of votes were cast for RMDSZ/UDMR (Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania) from counties that lie beyond the Carpathian Mountains, where very few Hungarians live. He compared the figures to earlier election results and found some startling numbers. In some counties where one can hardly find a Hungarian, more people voted for RMDSZ than in counties close to the Hungarian border very many Hungarians. Closer observation revealed that RMDSZ received a lot of votes in counties where the governing social democratic party is especially strong. Lukács estimated that the number of these most likely fraudulently obtained votes totaled 35,000. I should add that without these 35,000 votes RMDSZ could have sent only one parliamentary member to the European Parliament. Now, they will have two seats, which naturally means two extra seats for Fidesz, given the “special relationship” between Fidesz and RMDSZ.
How did they get those 35,000 extra votes? Csaba Lukács came up with a plausible explanation. When he phoned the campaign manager of RMDSZ to inquire about all those votes from outside the Transylvanian region, he was told that the secret of the high number of votes was RMDSZ’s ability to delegate 9,000 observers to every village beyond the Carpathians. These observers were neither RMDSZ sympathizers nor Hungarians but Romanian nationals whose job most likely was to vote for the Hungarian party. They then asked some relatives or friends to do the same.
Soon after the appearance of the first Magyar Hang article, the Romanian media was full of stories about the electoral fraud perpetrated between the Romanian Socialist Party and RMDSZ, because clearly this ruse couldn’t have taken place without the cooperation of the two sides. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Hungarian government was also involved. I don’t know enough about Romanian politics to venture to suggest reasons for this generosity on the part of the Romanian Socialist Party, but RMDSZ has been supporting the socialist government, and perhaps this extra seat is payback for that loyalty.
The Romanian-Hungarian media, which is no longer independent and is in the service of Fidesz, naturally reported the official denials of the RMDSZ officials, who explained that Romanian nationals voted for RMDSZ because of the radiating personality and clear message of Viktor Orbán. In Hungary, Gergely Gulyás was outraged at the very suggestion that something fraudulent could have happened and accused Magyar Hang of inventing a scandal. Well, fraud or not, Fidesz will have at least two friends in the European Parliament.
