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Who will confront the hatred in Hungary?

The European Union seems happy to ignore the repression that is happening under Viktor Orbán

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Sunday 2 January 2011
  • Article history

All sides agreed that there should be no fuss when Hungary's Viktor Orbán took over the presidency of the European Union yesterday. The EU's technocrats would allow Orbán to play the big guy on the international stage, as long as he let Brussels run Europe behind the scenes. Brussels assured Orbán's rightwing Fidesz party in return that it would not look too closely at how he runs Hungary.

Both parties will maintain the pretence that Hungary is a decent democracy and not discuss the ugly little state that is growing within Europe's borders. The silence of Europe's rulers will suit Fidesz nicely. Ever since it won a landslide victory over the corrupt and incompetent Hungarian left, it has been turning Hungary into a… well, I will not call it a fascist country or even a neo-fascist county, but just note that an old, foul stench wafts from the "new society" Orbán's patriots are building on the Danube.

You can catch a smell of it in Fidesz's propaganda. Its first act was to order public buildings to display a passage from its manifesto. "In spring 2010, the Hungarian nation gathered its strength once again and brought about a successful revolution in the polling booth," the citizenry was informed. They should rejoice because Fidesz will lead Hungary to a bright new tomorrow based on "work, home, family, health and order".

Fidesz then seized control of private pensions, hacked back the powers of a supreme court that might have checked its supremacy and established a media council, which can impose large fines on broadcasters and print and online publishers for such fuzzily worded crimes as "offending human dignity". It has packed the council with party loyalists, naturally, and already Hungarian newspapers and magazines are publishing blank pages in protest against official censorship.

Robert Alföldi, the director of the National Theatre in Budapest, has experienced at first hand the hatreds a Hungary built on "work, home, family, health and order" are generating. Before Christmas, demonstrators from the Jobbik, a party whose attitudes towards the Jews and the Roma mark it as truly neo-fascist outfit, marched to demand his removal. He was "a fag, a pervert and a Jew," they cried, unfit to hold his post.

Strangely, they could not specify Alföldi's precise crime. He is gay, that is true. He allowed Hungarian nationalists' traditional bogeymen at the Romanian embassy to take a room at the theatre, but then he mitigated the alleged offence by cancelling the booking after protests. The only good evidence the far right can find for its charge of sexual "depravity" was a poster for his version of Aristophanes's Lysistrata, which, in line with the play's sexual theme, featured a phallus.

The petty details do not matter because Jobbik became a force to be reckoned with after winning 17% of the vote in the May elections. Orbán's Fidesz is prepared to accommodate its demands. Anna Lengyel, from the Budapest production company PanoDrama, tells me that sneering politicians call Alföldi "Roberta" in Parliament – Robert/Roberta, he's gay, get it? – and she expects Fidesz will force him out soon. She is careful not to claim that Hungary is a rightwing dictatorship, but she is astonished that the EU is ignoring threats to the independence of artists, judges and reporters.

To be fair, not all Europeans are biting their tongues. Angela Merkel's government, among others, has done its democratic duty and protested. There is no use pretending, however, that the EU's paramount desire is anything other than to keep up appearances and avoid nasty confrontations. A senior official told the Economist that Fidesz was elected with a clear mandate for change. If change involves attacking fundamental rights, then that does not appear to be Brussels's concern.

Here, it is customary in the liberal press to attack the EU and, by extension, David Cameron for their toleration of the European far right. I won't follow precedent because I have no wish to join the selective moralists of liberal England, who beat their breasts and denounce Cameron for allying with unsavoury east European parties, but stay silent when leftwing British charlatans indulge an Islamist far right, whose hatreds of gays and Jews are as putrid as anything you can find behind the old Iron Curtain.

More broadly, I am not sure that "far right" is a label that helps us understand the dark forces swirling around Europe's periphery. When my contacts in Hungary imagine a dystopian future, it is not a rightwing dictatorship they speculate about but Alexander Lukashenko's post-communist Belarus, which still spouts the language of socialism and allies with the nominally leftwing Hugo Chávez. What is in a name? Leftwing Belarus attacks freedom of the press as vigorously as right-wing Hungary and, indeed, Chávez's Venezuela. In Hungary, the right goes for the director of the National Theatre. In Belarus, the old Soviet left goes for the Belarus Free Theatre, whose actors I saw perform in London in 2010 without realising that they would be running from the secret police in 2011.

WikiLeaks's behaviour in Belarus confirms the impression that it is foolish to try to divide authoritarian movements into arbitrary categories. I guess most readers think of it as a left-wing enterprise and of Julian Assangeas a buccaneering fighter for free speech. Yet in Belarus and Russia, WikiLeaks is represented by Israel Shamir, an antisemite and Holocaust-denier, who is not the first to come forward when tyrannies in Moscow and Minsk need exposing, to put the case for the prosecution at its mildest.

The Belarusian opposition has published circumstantial evidence that he may have handed confidential information to Lukashenko's goons, charges that Assange's gormless British admirers should force him to answer, but probably won't.

In these muddy circumstances, talk of left and right is a distraction. Europe has democratic and authoritarian forces. Authoritarians everywhere sound the same, as they praise nation and order, and damn democratic governance as a fraud. Wounded by the banking crash, a disaster of western capitalism and the failure of the eurozone to cope with the crisis, democrats are everywhere retreating. As its economic certainties melt, the EU ought to affirm liberal political values and take on authoritarian regimes wherever they find them.

As 2011 begins, the ominous example of Hungary already shows that the EU prefers easy evasions to principled stands. This is not shaping up to be a good year.