Orbán's Defeat And The Path To Atonement
Orbán’s defeat in Hungary last weekend gives us hope for an end to the destruction being wrought by the global movement of oligarchs against the people. Individual defeats, however, will not be enough to end the threat; there needs to be a full reckoning.
In a leaked recording, the now-defeated aspiring Hungarian dictator, Viktor Orbán, compared himself to the mouse in the Aesop fable “the lion and the mouse” as he offered unlimited assistance to Vladimir Putin.
In the full transcript of the October 17th conversation, translated and released by Bloomberg, he is reported to have said:
Vladimir, first of all it is a great honor for us. Of course we are friends. Our friendship began in 2009, when you received me at the St. Petersburg library. But yesterday our friendship rose to such a high level that I can help in any way — there is a story in our Hungarian picture books where a mouse helps a lion. [Both laugh.] I am ready to help immediately.
It is good that we can meet again, because after COVID we have not had regular meetings; before the pandemic we met almost every year. I am very pleased that we can have a personal meeting again. In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.
The context is as devastating as the words. Their conversation was following a call between Orbán and American president Donald Trump the previous day, in which the Americans had suggested meeting the Russians in Budapest. Putin was already aware of the suggestion, noting in the same conversation:
According to Donald, Budapest is a suitable venue for such meetings because Viktor Orbán is a friend of both of us.
Indeed, Orbán’s Hungary was the Russian-backed model Trump was following for the systematic destruction of American democratic institutions.
The link between Orbán and Putin illustrated by that call, and the link between Orbán and Trump illustrated by last week’s campaign visit to Hungary by American vice president JD Vance, clearly show the strength and nature of this destructive alliance.
Under Orbán, NATO has been obstructed, Europe has been weakened, the defence of Ukraine has been impacted, but, most importantly, Hungary has become the poorest nation in the European Union.
None of this is by accident. The modus operandi of the global hard right movement is to drain resources from entire nations to feed the insatiable appetites of their oligarchs. It is the pursuit of a society split between owners and workers, a return to the worst of medieval feudalism.
A population will not willingly become so subservient without motivation — or an enemy on which to blame for their incipient subservience. In the United States, the war in Iran is designed to create a distracting emergency. The rush to throw racial minorities and immigrants into concentration camps for deportation is about creating the scapegoat around the pain caused by a country whose minimum wage has stayed at $7.25 per hour since before even Orbán came to power. Accounting for inflation, $7.25 US today is the equivalent of just $4.71 US in 2009 dollars, the year the $7.25 rate was set, a real loss of over one third of its effective value. The American oligarchy will not stop pushing this down further until the majority of the population are living in shanties, as the continued drop in real wages amid rising housing costs pressure the working class to do literally anything to survive.
If there is any doubt as to the link between the feudalist movements of Hungary and the United States, Donald Trump publicly endorsed Viktor Orbán in last weekend’s election at the same time as vice president JD Vance went to Hungary to campaign for him while complaining, without any sense of irony, of foreign interference in their election.
The good news in all this is that the voters are on to the movement. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre’s obvious kinship with his brothers-in-oligarchy in the US lost last year’s election, after being the presumed winner for the previous year. All it took was Canadians understanding his relationship with and sympathy for Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
In Hungary, in spite of 16 years of efforts to suppress the opposition vote and destroy the country’s democratic institutions, the people came out to vote in such vast numbers that even Viktor Orbán could not pretend to have won the election. Nearly 80% of eligible voters cast ballots giving the opposition over two thirds of the seats in their legislature, enough to systematically undo the damage caused by Orbán’s overtly fascist government.
In the United States, the MAGA team have been systematically trying to suppress votes and steal this fall’s mid-term elections. The SAVE voter suppression act is intended to keep voters who oppose the MAGA movement away from the polls, and the high turnout and high impact of Hungary’s election is an object lesson in why this matters. An election can only be won by those who can vote. Limit who can vote and you can limit who can win. Taking away this destructive incentive is the principle reason voting should be mandatory.
If the American population follows the Canadian and Hungarian leads in dispensing with their oligarchy and cutting short the path to western feudalism, the opposition may well be strong enough to defeat the MAGA movement this fall with enough force that there can be no pretending otherwise. If Orbán can be forced to concede, maybe even Trump could be forced to acknowledge that the end has arrived.
Defeating Orbán and Trump, though, will not end the problem unless it is dealt with properly and thoroughly. The path to atonement for the United States on the international stage exists, but it is bumpy, and it is not clear that it will be followed.
Those who enabled Orbán and Trump will need to be brought to swift and thorough justice. It is often said that the MAGA movement is a result of the enslavers of the Confederacy never coming to justice for causing the American civil war. It is not too late to right that wrong this time around.
The administration must be held accountable for their war crimes, their crimes against humanity, their theft of national resources, their suppression of rights, and every specific crime committed by everyone at every level of the government. No ICE agent who participated in an illegal raid, imprisonment, or assault should be spared. No oligarch who abused their financial power to destroy the working class should be allowed to keep their obscene wealth. No supreme court justice who gave license to the president to commit crimes with impunity while hiding behind the presidential seal should be allowed to remain on the bench and out of prison for such patent corruption.
There can be no moving on as a society unless all of this happens. We cannot allow structures to remain in place, nor our desire to forgive and forget to overwhelm the justice that is required.
Those who seek to destroy democracy, to restore the feudalism of an era we rightly call the Dark Ages, an age of obscene wealth and obscene poverty, must be brought to heel or these defeats will be little more than Pyrrhic victories, granting the oligarchs enough time and space to regroup and come back harder in the next election cycle.
Democracy is fickle. Freedom is not a given. Rights are not guaranteed. Justice is not automatic. It will take a whole population to fix this if we want to prevent it from ever happening again.
There’s a lot of work ahead but, hopefully, the tide has turned.