Stefano Bottoni. <i>Orbán: Un despota in Europa.</i>

Stefano Bottoni’s biography of Viktor Orbán, published before the 2019 local elections in Hungary, is a book that should be available in English and Hungarian, although he wrote it for an Italian audience. The book goes beyond a biography, describing and analyzing Hungary’s political history of the last three decades in order to better understand the phenomenon of the leader of Fidesz (Fiatal demokraták szövetsége, or Federation of Young Democrats), who has not only been dominating Hungary but who has also influenced politicians from neighboring countries and fascinated the media around the world.Bottoni, who teaches history in Florence, having spent a decade at the (former) Institute of History of the (former) Hungarian Academy of Sciences, begins his book with a discussion of the fact that the Hungarian leader has hardly been studied sine ira et studio but has mostly been used as a screen to project all kinds of wishes and hopes (by his followers and admirers) or all kinds of fears and prejudices (by his many enemies in Hungary, Western Europe, and North America). Stefano Bottoni calls Orbán a “tyrant” too, and criticizes his extreme authoritarian and populist tendencies, but he also explains very well this most successful Hungarian politician in the context of current Hungarian history, a context that most of Orbán’s admirers or adversaries usually ignore. Bottoni provides many new insights into the most recent period of Hungarian and European history as he analyzes the relationship between Orbán and Hungarian society. He pays particular attention to the system of “National Cooperation”—in place since Orbán’s takeover of power in 2010—which strives to marginalize political opposition and to take full control over society, economy, and culture.Those liberal elites in the West who are the major critics of Orbán, according to Bottoni, did not and still do not understand how this system functions. They made the mistake, between 1994–98 and between 2002–10, of believing that the Socialist-Liberal governments somehow represented Hungarian “civil society,” which they did not, while ignoring the harsh consequences of the neo-liberal policies of those years. These governments also made the mistake of refusing to even mention any national topics on their agendas, fearing the resurgence of interwar nationalism, thus leaving this area to Orbán and others. After Hungary’s accession to the EU, this led to “the rise of an exclusivist nationalism which was difficult to control on the one hand, and [Hungarian society’s] loss of belief in the idea of capitalism and the free market” on the other (16).In the first of nine chapters, Bottoni emphasizes that Fidesz was not simply a “liberal” youth movement and that Orbán had specific, Central European ideas of a freiheitlich or freisinnig liberalism in mind: a modern form of nineteenth-century classic liberalism based on the idea of a central social class, a Bürgertum that includes both entrepreneurs as well as representatives of the state administration, and its conservative values about the “nation” and the “family” (40). This was reflected in the change of the name of Fidesz in 1995 to Fidesz–Magyar Polgári Párt (Hungarian Citizens’ Party—however, the English word “citizen” does not transport the same meaning as Bürger in German, which is much closer to polgár) (63). Although Bottoni admits that Orbán radicalized some of his views since the early 2000s, he also identifies “a trajectory that had begun thirty years before and that focused on sovereignty and power” (30–31). In 2001, Fidesz became part of the moderate European People’s Party, leaving the Liberal International behind (57). During his first term as prime minister, 1998–2002, Orbán had already shown signs of independence in foreign policy that had, in some respects, irritated Western European liberals, for example, when he introduced a “status law” in favor of the Hungarian minorities who lived in the neighboring states (82). In 2002, President George W. Bush “punished” Hungary for favoring the purchase of Swedish bombers instead of F-16s made in the USA, at a time when the US media was complaining about the rise of antisemitism in Hungary (92). A year later, Orbán criticized Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld’s war against Iraq. After losing the 2006 elections, Orbán radicalized his views, becoming a “plebeian” leader who would lead “the people” against the “inner enemy” who had just won a slight majority of the votes (107). Instead of representing mostly the Bürger as before, Fidesz now embraced the “little Hungarian,” who was suffering from the evil ways of international capitalism and cosmopolitan elites in Brussels. At the same time, Fidesz became a technocratic movement that integrated former communists if they showed unshakable loyalty to Orbán (109).Bottoni argues that the total triumph of Orbán in the elections of 2010 and 2011 (national and local) was the result of a long process that had begun in the 1990s, one that was related to the crisis of Western values and the unclear orientation of the European Union. Hungarians, in an uncertain international context, particularly after the world financial and economic crisis of 2008, gave priority to political stability instead of democracy. However, he also emphasizes that Orbán’s take-over of power in 2010—and the systematic transformation of the state into a “predatory state” that tends to swallow all public and private assets in order to distribute them among groups loyal to the leading party, attempting to integrate or at least control all sectors of society and culture—was not the result of a preconceived “master plan” but rather the result of Orbán’s intelligent political skills, using various crises to increase his power. And, Bottoni insists, this was only possible because in 1989 democracy was introduced without the participation of the majority of the Hungarians and because the accession to NATO and the EU had led to major disappointments and feelings of loss among many Hungarians, feelings Orbán would convert into political gains. The immigration crisis in 2015, for example, gave the Hungarian leader the chance to pose as the protector of Hungarian interests against the Western leaders of the EU, who had a very different vision of the future of Europe compared to the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian people.Stefano Bottoni’s book on the rise of Viktor Orbán and his system is a brilliant, thought-provoking study that sheds new light on Hungarian contemporary history and society in a wider European context. It is a welcome invitation to further discuss the meaning of this extraordinary phenomenon.

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