Dark money, dirty politics and the backlash against human rights
In late 2017, I arrived in an icy Budapest to give a journalism workshop at the Central European University. One of the first things I noticed when I disembarked from the airport bus in the centre of the Hungarian capital was the posters. They seemed to be everywhere. From billboards and bus shelters a craggy, ageing face framed by a thin smile and an aquiline nose looked down. I recognised it instantly as the CEU’s Hungarian-born founder George Soros. Next to the image was a line of text: “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh.”
This propaganda drive cost the Hungarian government almost
€20 million. For Viktor Orbán, it was small change in his almost decade-long
campaign to portray George Soros as the number one enemy of the Hungarian
people. Its success has inspired far-right leaders and activists around the
world.
Orbán, a well-built man with the broad shoulders of a
weightlifter, has revelled in his status as Europe’s most successful
nationalist demagogue. As Brussels looks askance, Orbán has built barbed wire
fences to repel immigrants. Laws have been introduced to protect ‘family
values’: marriage is defined as solely between a man and a woman; human life
begins at the moment of conception; large families get mortgage breaks; there
are tax incentives for stay-at-home mums. Hungary’s media and civil society are
tightly controlled. Many of the institutions that Soros funded – including the
Central European University – have effectively been forced out of the country.
A few months after I gave my talk at the CEU in Budapest,
Orbán made a pre-election address in front of the Hungarian Parliament. Even by
Orbán’s standards it was more foghorn than dog whistle. The prime minister told
his compatriots that they were “fighting an enemy that is different from us.
Not open but hiding. Not straightforward but crafty. Not honest but
unprincipled. Not national but international. Does not believe in working but
speculates with money. Does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the
whole world.”
Orbán’s words could have been lifted from The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion. When Jewish leaders accused him of anti-Semitism, Orbán
decried them as enemies of free speech. In April 2018, his Fidesz party won a
third consecutive term in office.
It is easy to forget that in the late ‘80s, Viktor Orbán was
one of the most articulate voices of a new liberal generation railing against
the moribund communist system. He began working at the Central European
Research Group, which was funded by the Soros Foundation. Orbán soon received a
Soros-funded scholarship to study at Oxford, but only stayed in England for
three months before returning to Hungary to run in the first free elections in
1990, winning a seat for the recently-created Fidesz. He was just twenty-six.
Within eight years, he was prime minister and widely seen as one of the most
trenchant anti-authoritarian voices in Eastern European politics. But after a
single term, he lost power in 2002.
Defeat hit Orbán hard. Out of office and languishing in
opposition, he vowed to regain power. The onetime Hayekian libertarian reinvented
himself as the nationalist protector of Hungarian minorities in neighbouring
states. He made stirring speeches defending the Catholic Church. “Personally,
Orbán has never been very religious,” says Kim Lane Scheppele, a legal scholar
at Princeton who studies Hungary and first met Orbán in the 1990s. “He used
this new uniform as a route to power. That’s all that matters to him. Power.”
Orbán’s ultra-conservative reinvention was not an overnight
success. In 2006, Fidesz unexpectedly lost a second successive election. Now,
Orbán looked abroad for strategic advice, to the world of highly-paid political
consultants. Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu introduced his Hungarian
friend to the legendary US pollster Arthur J. Finkelstein.
Few lobbyists were as well connected in Republican politics
as Finkelstein. Having worked for Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald
Reagan, and once shared a college radio show with the radical libertarian Ayn
Rand, Finkelstein had begun running a consultancy that specialised in working
in post-communist states in eastern Europe. In Ukraine, Finkelstein introduced
another veteran Republican lobbyist, Paul Manafort, to pro-Russian Ukrainian
oligarchs.
A long-time New York associate of Donald Trump, Finkelstein
also had a hand in Manafort becoming the Republican candidate’s campaign chair
for five months in 2016.
Finkelstein made Hungary the centre of his political
consulting empire. He relocated to Budapest and began working for Viktor Orbán.
‘Finkie’, as Orbán liked to call him, believed that the most successful
political campaigns united voters against a clearly defined enemy.
It wasn’t hard to find a villain in crisis-stricken Hungary.
The country was a financial mess. In 2008, Hungary was bailed out by the
‘Troika’ – the World Bank, the EU and the International Monetary Fund – who
demanded harsh austerity measures. Finkelstein and his protégé and business
partner George Birnbaum told Orbán to target “the bureaucrats” and “foreign
capital”.
The strategy was a huge success. In 2010, Orbán won
two-thirds of the vote. Safely returned as prime minister, he now sought to
consolidate his rule. “We had an incumbent with a historic majority, something
that had never happened in Hungary before,” George Birnbaum later told Swiss
journalist Hannes Grassegger. “You need to keep the base energised, make sure
that on Election Day they have a reason to go out and vote.”
Finkelstein set about finding a new foe for Orbán. This
time, however, the adversary would have a face. “Arthur always said that you
did not fight against the Nazis but against Adolf Hitler. Not against al-Qaeda,
but against Osama bin Laden,” Birnbaum said. Finkelstein had an idea for the
perfect guy in the black hat. Someone who was hated by the right as a Jewish
funder of progressive causes, and despised by the left as the embodiment of big
capital: George Soros. Orbán’s friendship with Netanyahu and vocal support for
Israel gave political cover against accusations of anti-Semitism.
With uncanny prescience, Finkelstein had come up with a
“campaign idea, so big and so Mephistophelian, that it will outlive itself”. It
was a grim irony that the Soros bogeyman was created by two Jews whose families
had fled Europe. Birnbaum’s father was an Auschwitz survivor.
Soros was already a hate figure on the American right by the
time Finkelstein pitched up in Budapest. He had spent huge sums funding
political movements around the world, including in the US. Soros first
attracted the attention of the Republican right after speaking out against the
Iraq War and donating money to the Democrats against George W. Bush in 2004. On
Fox News, Bill O’Reilly described Soros as “an extremist who wants open
borders, a one-world foreign policy, legalised drugs, euthanasia, and on and
on”.
Orbán went further. With Finkelstein’s guidance, he
constructed Soros as an existential threat to Hungary’s very way of life.
Soros’s support for democracy and open societies was really a stalking horse
for a globalist plot to destroy the nation state itself. This was a new model
for attack politics in an era of global division, one that the far right would
exploit to devastating effect.
During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Soros went from
obscure Fox News talking point to moral panic. As I drove across the United States
in the months before the election, I was bewildered by the number of voters who
mentioned Soros. His name came up in blue-collar bars in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania and outside up-market shopping malls in Cleveland, Ohio.
At the time, I was barely aware of Soros. I knew he had
‘broken the Bank of England’, making $1 billion on Black Wednesday in 1992 as
Britain was forced to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. I
knew he was a major philanthropist. But that was about it. By the end of my reporting
trip through America, I was a Soros aficionado. I had seen his face surrounded
by flames in a poster in the window of a suburban house and been told that he
was masterminding a communist take-over of America. Trump’s final TV ad
featured Soros as a visual representative of “global special interests”.
It subsequently emerged that accounts connected to the GRU,
the Kremlin’s military-intelligence agency, were pushing Soros conspiracy
theories on Facebook ahead of the presidential election. Russia had long
criticised Soros, wary of the democratic revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and
other post-communist states on its borders that it believed Soros had
supported. In office, Trump would often spread anti-Soros propaganda,
mendaciously accusing him of funding a caravan of migrants on America’s
southern border.
Soros has also emerged as a cipher in British political
debate. He openly spent millions funding anti-Brexit campaigns after the EU
referendum, much to the chagrin of right-wing newspapers. During the 2019
British general election, Conservative candidates were accused of having shared
Soros conspiracy theories on social media. Labour was also embroiled in a
long-running controversy over anti-Semitism in the party.
All of this would be familiar to watchers of Hungarian
politics. Orbán, as his confidante Steve Bannon pointed out, was “Trump before
Trump”. He was the only EU leader to endorse Trump in 2016, and he had taken
the anti-Soros mythology and run with it. After Orbán’s re-election in 2018,
the crackdown on Soros-funded organisations intensified. An act of parliament
was passed to change the licensing of foreign universities and limit
international-funded non-governmental organisations. Vladimir Putin had done
the very same. Orbán’s move was directed very precisely at Soros-funded
institutions.
The Central European University, which had promoted
independent academic research in the region since 1991, eventually announced
that it was moving much of its operations to Vienna, though the Budapest campus
remains open. “In Hungary, the law is a tool of power,” Michael Ignatieff, the
university’s rector, said at the time. The Hungarian office of Open Society
Foundation, the main vehicle for Soros’s philanthropy, closed.
The relentless focus on Soros gave Orbán the cover to
dismantle the pillars of Hungarian democracy. In 2011, a year after
re-election, he introduced an entirely new constitution in just nine days.
Veteran judges on the constitutional court were forced to retire so that their
seats could be filled with more Fidesz-friendly jurists. Most of the media was
taken over by the party’s oligarch supporters.
Laws were introduced that distorted the popular ballot.
Orbán gerrymandered electoral districts to ensure his dominance. Liberal
strongholds, predominantly in cities, were divided so that large numbers of
voters were packed into a handful of parliamentary seats, while districts in
Hungary’s conservative countryside have far fewer people. Fake parties were
created to split the anti-Fidesz vote.
In 2014, Fidesz received fewer votes than it had in 2002 and
2006, when it lost elections, but it ended up with the parliamentary
supermajority that it needed to push through radical constitutional changes. In
2018, Fidesz won more than two-thirds of the seats in the Hungarian parliament
despite taking less than half of the vote. “Orbán combined American-style
gerrymandering with the British first-past-the-post system,” legal scholar Kim
Lane Scheppele told me. “He has turned Hungary into a dictatorship in plain
sight.”
Orbán is a master of distraction and political sleight of
hand. Often when he introduces a legislative change that cements his power, it
has been accompanied by a contentious symbolic gesture that flames Hungary’s
culture wars and grabs the attention of the opposition and international media.
“When Orbán wants to do something in Parliament, he will announce that he is
building a statue to a wartime anti-Semite or something equally appalling, and
everyone runs off to cover that,” said Lane Scheppele. “It’s the same tactics
that Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings use in Britain.”
Ahead of the 2018 general election, Israeli private
intelligence firm Black Cube was reportedly involved in a campaign to discredit
Hungarian NGOs, especially those linked to Soros. Black Cube agents using false
identities secretly recorded prominent civil society activists. The tapes were
released to a Hungarian government-controlled daily newspaper three weeks
before the vote. Orbán used the revelations to attack civil society
organisations.
Black Cube had previously been hired by disgraced Hollywood
mogul Harvey Weinstein to collect information on actresses and journalists
investigating his sexual predations, but this was the first time that the firm,
created by former Israeli intelligence officers, had been cited in an election
campaign. Black Cube refused to confirm or deny whether it had worked in
Hungary but said it fully complied with the law and took “legal advice from the
world’s leading law firms”.
Orbán’s political takeover - buttressed by a German
industrial lobby that relies on cheap labour in Hungarian plants – has largely
been bankrolled by cash plundered from the European Union that he rails so
fervently against. A 2019 New York Times investigation found that Orbán uses
billions of euros in EU subsidies as a patronage fund that enriches his allies,
protects his political interests and punishes his rivals. “The ideology is a
ruse. The money is where the action is,” said Lane Scheppele.
Brussels has done little to stem the tide of Hungary’s
rampant corruption. Instead, Orbán has treated his frequent public dressing-downs
in the European Parliament as a PR opportunity. He smiles for the cameras as
Western politicians berate him. His florid responses – anti-liberal,
anti-globalist, anti-EU – are clipped and circulated across social media.
It is a message that chimed with voters across
post-communist Europe, frustrated after decades of being told that there was no
alternative to a market-led liberal democracy that often enriched the elite and
left the majority disenfranchised and alienated. As Bulgarian political scientist
Ivan Krastev and US law professor Stephen Holmes wrote: “The very conceit that
‘there is no other way’ provided an independent motive for the wave of populist
xenophobia and reactionary nativism that began in central and eastern Europe,
and is now washing across much of the world.”
Europe’s migration crisis gave Orbán the chance to take his
message of ‘illiberal democracy’ to an international stage. In July 2015, as
the number of Syrians coming through Turkey and Greece increased, Orbán adopted
a very aggressive stance against accepting refugees. As the Hungarian
government hastily erected holding centres along its border with Serbia, he
warned of invading Muslim hordes. When Angela Merkel announced that Germany
would admit hundreds of thousands of refugees, Orbán and other leaders of the
so-called Visegrád group – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia –
publicly rejected the German prime minister’s humanitarian appeal. “I think it
is just bullshit,” said Mária Schmidt, one of Orbán’s closest political
advisors.
For most refugees, Hungary was only a staging point on the
way to Western Europe. The numbers settling in Central and Eastern Europe have
been relatively small. But immigration plays into wider societal concerns about
demography in many post-socialist states. More citizens have left the EU’s
eastern states in the wake of the 2009 financial crisis than have arrived as
migrants. Images of crowds of migrants outside Budapest’s Keleti train station
fed a perception that Hungary was being overrun.
Orbán declared that the gravest threat to the survival of
the white Christian majority in Europe was the incapacity of Western societies
to defend themselves. Hungary’s government passed a series of anti-immigration
measures, including a “Stop Soros” bill in 2018, which makes it a criminal
offense to provide assistance to undocumented migrants applying for asylum or
residency permits.
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights
organisation, has accused Orbán of systematically denying food to failed asylum
seekers held in detention camps on Hungary’s border – an action it described as
“an unprecedented human rights violation in 21st-century Europe”. He has also
made homelessness a criminal offence.
The migration crisis elevated Orbán’s status among global
ultra-conservatives. When the influential World Congress of Families met in
Budapest in 2017, Orbán was met with rapt applause. Founded by American and
Russian ultra-conservatives in the 1990s, the WCF has become an important forum
for the backlash against rights. The Southern Poverty Law centre as listed the
congress as an “anti-LGBT hate group”.
Orbán’s appeals to ‘Christian liberty’ may be just rhetoric,
but he has actively sought to turn Budapest into a capital of conservative
thought. American white nationalist Richard Spencer has been a frequent guest,
as have numerous leading Russian conservatives and former Australian prime
minister Tony Abbott. Steve Bannon told me that he was “very close” to Orbán
and had to cancel a scheduled visit to Budapest in late 2019 to assist
President Trump’s battle against impeachment.
British Tories looked eastwards, too. Conservative MPs such
as Daniel Kawczynski expressed their admiration for Orbán’s regime. A group of
pro-Brexit libertarians, including leading figures from the TaxPayer’s Alliance
and the Adam Smith Institute, lobbied for the establishment of a Museum of
Communist Terror in London inspired by the similarly-titled Budapest
attraction. Elsewhere, former Thatcher speech writer John O’Sullivan – a
prominent advocate of the Anglosphere at the turn of the millennium – has run
the Orbán-friendly Danube Institute think tank in Budapest.
In December 2019, shortly after the British general
election, Tim Montgomerie, an advisor on social justice to Boris Johnson, addressed
a Danube Institute meeting in Budapest. Montgomerie praised Hungary’s “interesting early
thinking” on “the limits of liberalism.” “I think we are seeing that in the UK
as well,” he said, adding that Britain should forge a “special relationship”
with Orbán’s Hungary after Brexit.
Orbán, however, demurred when Brexiters called on him to
come to their aid. Despite pleas from his long-time ally Nigel Farage, Orbán
refused to block the European Union’s extension to Brexit in September 2019.
That same month, at an international demography conference
in Budapest, Orbán returned to his favourite theme: immigration and George
Soros. “Political forces,” he said, wanted to replace the white European
population with “others”. What more openly fascist thinkers call ‘the great
replacement’ is promoted by the Hungarian head of state.
“The political vision nurtured by the World Congress of
Families has become frighteningly mainstream,” says my openDemocracy colleague
Claire Provost, an investigative journalist who has spent years tracking the
backlash against rights for women, LGBTQI people and minorities. “The longer I
spend with these groups, the less I think they’re actually fixated on specific
issues like abortion. While they talk a lot about women’s wombs, theirs is a
much wider political project, to support authoritarian societies led by
‘strongmen’.”
Viktor Orbán has shown how quickly supposedly liberal
democratic norms and conventions can be defanged and dismantled. Of course,
autocrats are also on the rise in many other parts of the world, bolstered by
many of the same American and Russian networks and socio-political dynamics
that are helping to upend politics in Europe. From the Philippines and Brazil
to Turkey and India, a new generation of strongmen has emerged. They often use
similar tactics – weaponising religion and mobilising fear of the ‘other’ – but
have adapted these strategies to local circumstances.
The authoritarian model “moves around not as a caravan but
as spare parts”, says Princeton legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele. Populists
take inspiration from one another but also buy advice from “political
consultants that go from place to place and help the new autocrats set up
shop”. Steve Bannon boasted to me that he talked to Europe’s populist leaders
“on a fairly regular basis” and was “still working behind the scenes driving
stuff.”
There is often a temptation to believe that your country is
immune, or at least inoculated, from the worst authoritarian excesses. I
watched the early hours of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 in a bar in
New York’s East Village, surrounded by young liberals. As Republican victories
mounted up and Clinton’s path to the White House became increasingly
vertiginous, one turned to me and said, “Even if Trump wins, it doesn’t matter
that much. The constitution will protect us.”
I heard a similar sentiment dozens of times in the hours and
days that followed. But in truth, the American system of checks and balances
had already been eroded long before Trump arrived on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Previous presidents often used executive orders to bypass Congress, especially
after the end of the Cold War.
In the UK, the limits of an uncodified constitution have
become increasingly apparent. Brexit has seen executive power increase
markedly. In the name of popular sovereignty, long-held conventions of British
parliamentary politics have been abrogated. The Supreme Court may have ruled it
unlawful, but many voters seem to have little problem with a prime minister
misleading the Queen, as Boris Johnson did when proroguing Parliament in late
2019. The end, increasingly, seems to justify the means.
As the rise of nativist movements in Europe graphically
shows, hard-won political battles can quickly be reversed. Change does not
always mean progress: it can bring fewer rights, freedoms and opportunities.
Dark money and shadowy, unaccountable networks of political influence and
persuasion, empowered and amplified by powerful and largely unregulated
technology, are swiftly bending democracy out of shape. Worse still, they are
destroying faith in the idea that politics can and should be transparent, and
accountable to citizens. The question now is what can be done to stop democracy
going dark.
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