The Fall of Orban: The Zebras Did It.

"Deceptive Propoganda!"

It must have been the zebras. Hungarians are a tough lot of people: they can take a lot of punishment. And God knows they get it. There is a saying: "The Hungarian back does not bend. It breaks" The zebras broke it.  Back in 1989 the headlines used to read:  "Hungary leads the way out of Communism" Hungary Kicks the Ball to Freedom"... As an editor at Budapest Week in the 1990s our bread and butter story was about how Hungary had embraced capitalism and was hurtling towards the bounty of an EU future and how everything was coming up roses for all the "entrepreneurs" lining up to buy shiny purple "manager suits" at the "manager shop" at the spanking new shopping mall. Today Hungarians live in the poorest nation in the EU. Hungary is rated as the most corrupt nation in the EU. People in the southern counties take dawn buses to better paying jobs in Romania. They hop across the border to save money shopping for groceries in Austria. But the zebras clinched it. 

I thought the nostalgia train would be the cause, but it was... the zebras. 

Viktor Orbán has been building a Disneyland inspired personal palace west of Budapest in Hatvanpuszta, next to his home village of Felcsút, where he had already built a vanity football stadium in his back yard and a story book nostalgia railroad to bring visitors to it... using EU money, of course. Well, who would want to deny Hungary's number one soccer fan his own adolescent dream football academy and stadium? And the new "agricultural institute" being built in his Dad's name in the next village, Hatvanpuszta... next door to the estate of Orbán's best friend from High School, the village plumber who suddenly became Hungary's wealthiest construction oligarch, Lőrinc Mészáros. Why shouldn't there be a game park with African antelope and ... zebras. Michael Jackson had Bubbles the chimp. Why shouldn't the Orbán family have their own zebras?

Pancho Arena next to the Orbán residence, Felcsút.

Government corruption and ego are dangerous partners. Americans may recognize the symptoms from their own experience with Viktor Orbán's good friend, the Orange Clown Demon of Mar El Lago: grandiose ego projects, giant photographs on Government buildings, name on the currency. In Hungary we have similar tendencies - usually expressed in fantasies of Hapsburg era kitsch - but it finally came down to the zebras. Everybody hated the fucking zebras. Hungary has the highest percentage of dog ownership in Europe: 50% of Magyars own a dog. Dogs eat meat. Meat, in Hungary, is expensive. So you wind up with a lot of unsatisfied, angry dog owners and pooches who debate the drawbacks of a  quasi-vegan diets. And then your Prime Minister goes and gets a herd of zebras for the garden at his new palace in the countryside. I don't know what the feed bill for zebras is. The vet bills must be astonishing, especially when he has to take care of the antelopes as well. This was going one safari animal too far. Or as we say in Hungarian "Tele van a hócipőm!" (My snow shoe is full.)

Name your enemies! Péter Magyar and Zelensky

What came as the biggest surprise to many of us was not that Orbán and FIDESZ had lost the election, but that they actually seemed to believe their own controlled state news broadcasts and polling services.  In the past year, the ruling party Fidesz has maintained the most sophisticated system of media capture and control yet seen within the European Union, They came to believe their own propaganda. I love radio, but for the last decade Hungarian radio has become a parade of misinformation, government spin, and sports. It was as if they were performing a parody of 1960s Hungarian communist radio. Every now and again we would get mail asking us to participate in a new FDIESZ "civilian referendum"... in order to promote opinions like "Should we pay for Zelensky's war?" "Should we allow George Soros to laugh at us?" Your tax forints at work! 

Greedy Ukrainian money- grubber  in the mail again!

When Meta, YouTube and Google banned political ads, FIDESZ organized state funded troll brigades such as the "Digital Warriors" and "Megaphone" to "occupy" the comment sections and spread faked AI images and videos of the opposition. The false flag operations suspected to be linked to the Russian Intelligence service (A bomb found alongside the oil pipeline in Serbia. A proposed assassination attempt against Orban) The Russians, never ones to learn from their mistakes, had sent in the same teams that had failed to sway previous elections in Moldova and Romania.

Demonstration at Hatvanpuszta

So much has been happening in the last few days that it is hard to organize a single theme to address it. I was already in Hungary in 1989 during the "rendszervaltás" - the "change of systems" from late Kádár era communism to the beginnings of democracy. At that time I was a resident in the Bibó Kollegium on Ménesi ut in Buda, the residential college of the ELTE Law School which birthed FIDESZ as the student government which then  reorganized as a liberal youth oriented political party. The atmosphere in Budapest is not merely similar to the feelings going around back then, but more focused on change. On regaining power in 2010, Orban used his supermajority in parliament to concoct a new constitution and a new national system which we now call "NER" or "National Cooperation System." 

The NER poster required by law to be hung in every public building... kind if like a modern Lenin portrait.

NER is a term rarely used by the government itself anymore, and it has become a term that recognizably describes the mafia-like oligarch system by which Orbán's family, friends and vassals have - in the name of Hungarian patriotism -  divided up the economy and made deals to favor their primacy in Hungarian society. (Perhaps the best explanation of NER I have found is Sandor Esik's piece.), Bloviating fake patriotism became a trademark of FIDESZ, just as it is with MAGA followers of Trump. Orbán's followers refer to themselves as "The National (Nemzeti) side" as if any opposing opinion is an anti-Hungarian attack against the nation itself. Openly criticizing NER by name became a prosecutable offense. NER came to symbolize the deep pocket corruption of FIDESZ, and was its most public expression was observable in the monopoly Orbán had over the press and media. There are independent media outlets in Hungary, but 85% of the country get its information from state-run media and newspapers. 

Surprise! Nobody likes a thief!

Blog readers may have recognized that I rarely if ever brought up the topic of politics in the twenty years that I have been cluttering up this blog. The reason is that like most Hungarians, I feared retaliation if I drew attention from supporters of the Orbán regime. As a former political essayist for magazines and news sites in Budapest, I long ago learned that, yes.... somebody is reading your piece and somebody is keeping a list of names. So today feels like a breath of fresh air. I'm not, however, interested in reviving my former career as a political writer: I'm too old to be astonished by anything anymore. After fifteen years of carefully controlled state news, so much new information has been coming out since Sunday night that it is almost impossible to keep up. But it is exhilarating to watch the youth of Hungary - who have only known Orbán and his NER system for most of their lives - looking to a fresh future. And we have the zebras to thank for that.