It has been a busy first half-year for Hungary. In January that country rather bumblingly stained its first-ever assumption of the European Presidency with a controversial new media law. Now, since Easter, it has a new constitution. But is it any good? One Hungarian, the writer Péter Zilahy, declares in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that it surely heralds “magical times” – but not in any positive sense (cue the tweet!):

Here’s his lede:

A thousand years and no wiser: The new “basic law” of the Hungarians bases itself on Christianity and the Holy Crown. Minister-President Orbán nonetheless speaks of Europe’s most modern constitution. A Budapest farce.

The whole reason for this new constitution was the electoral landslide enjoyed last year by Victor Orbán’s right-wing FIDESZ party, brought about by popular disgust with the moral laxity and economic incompetence displayed by the Socialist government in power since 2002 – back when the Socialists in turn electorally deposed an Orbán government! Actually, that Socialist-led regime even managed to get itself re-elected in 2006, but only through what was revealed after-the-fact as basically a campaign of lies.

In any event, in 2010 FIDESZ was back and with a 2/3 control of the Hungarian parliament that enabled it even to amend the constitution, up to then a legal hodge-podge in fact consisting largely of the Communist-era’s basic law. Now the Hungarians have a new one, with strong rhetorical as well as practical emphasis on Christianity and the family.

Except that for many – even most – post-Communist Hungarians outright Christianity holds little appeal. This certainly includes Zilahy, and that provides the motivation behind his anti-constitution polemic here. “Now then, it can’t do any harm to have God on our side, especially considering we are a secular nation and a secular state,” he snidely observes, and also delves deeper behind that contradiction first mentioned in his lede between a new basic law that is supposed to be so forward-looking yet which invokes Christianity and especially the Holy Crown of Hungary’s first Christian king, St. Stephen I (Szent István; reigned 1000 – 1038 AD).

Of course, if you’re going to invoke St. Stephen, you probably also will prefer to talk about the lands in his kingdom, Zilahy notes, which unfortunately include much more than merely those contained within the post-World War I Hungarian state – and so the arguments with the neighbors start up once again! Oh well, if that’s going to lead to a fight, at least we have Olympic-champion fencer Pal Schmitt (Hungary’s current president) on our side – shades of Lancelot and King Arthur!

(You want further “magical times”? Apparently the “National Creed” which is the preamble to that new constitution declares that the entire 46+ years between the Nazi occupation of Hungary (March 1944) and the first post-Communist elections (May 1990) as legally non-existent! Zihaly doesn’t get around to bringing this up here.)

It’s around this time of year (as well as at the end of June) that Euronerds’ thoughts turn to the EU member-state about to take over the six-month rotating EU Council Presidency. By most accounts I have seen, the presidency about to end – that of Belgium – has gone rather well, despite being the first one ever to be conducted entirely by a caretaker national government. Next up is Hungary, which has already publicized its intended agenda emphasizing topics such as treatment of the EU’s Roma population, Croatia’s membership application, and something called the “Danube Initiative.”

However, as we can see from a good summary in Der Spiegel, it looks like the rest of the EU might well insist on another item, namely Hungary’s new structure of state media supervision. That country’s right-wing ruling party, FIDESZ (the Young Democrats), gained a more than two-thirds majority in the national parliament in elections last April as the country threw out a detested, incompetent, and mendacious Socialist Party government. That enabled FIDESZ to alter the state constitution how it likes, and the new set of media laws are part of a series of sweeping changes the new government has introduced.

The problem is, it plainly looks like the new legal regime for media is designed to impose firm government control, of a sort strange to most free societies that more resembles the sort of Communist regime from which Hungary managed a peaceful transition more than twenty years ago. There is to be a Media Council, inevitably staffed by FIDESZ politicians, with the power to fine TV, radio, magazine and newspaper organizations as it pleases, presumably for any trumped-up charge it can come up with, with no possibility for appeal. Further, journalists from now on will be required to disclose their sources, whenever the matter at issue can be fit by the authorities within the flexible category of “national security.”

Already, even before Hungary has had a chance to assume the Presidency, there have been outcries against these new media laws from within the EU, such as from European Parliament members and even the foreign minister of Luxembourg, who publicly stated that Hungary risks putting itself in the same authoritarian category as Belarus. The Der Spiegel lede states the question baldly: “Can something like this be – in the middle of Europe?”

Unfortunately, this won’t be that easy to address. First, is it really true that the country’s FIDESZ government has in mind the creation of an authoritarian state? Even if so, what can be done? – especially in view of the awkward fact that Hungarian officials will be charged over the next six months with an important leadership role in guiding the EU’s business? The denunciations made public so far are fine, but in the institutional realm EU member-states are rather loathe to chide each other for their internal behavior. (As opposed to candidate states: both the EU itself and its more-powerful member-states see no problem in bossing them around.) I suppose the test-case here could be the shunning of Austria within the EU back in 2000 after Jörg Haider’s right-wing party entered the governing coalition there; I don’t recall that was very effective.

It’s an ugly situation, which I doubt will really ever be addressed in any substantive way. It’s potentially made even worse when you consider the financial dimension: Hungarian premier Victor Orban has been notably hostile to outside pressure to tighten state finances. Yet his country still has its own currency, the forint, and the amazing proportion of native debtors who have obligations denominated in some foreign currency instead (often the Swiss franc) makes them (and those who loaned them money) very vulnerable to any forint loss of value. Watch this space – that is, if you have the sort of morbid curiosity always looking for the next highway pile-up. This could turn out to be another Ireland, but an authoritarian one; that is, it could get very ugly.

UPDATE: Now what was I sayin’? Here’s Josept Cotterill of FT Alphaville on the Fitch rating agency’s downgrade today of Hungarian sovereign debt to BBB-, just one step above “junk” status.

Greetings from Budapest! Which immediately gives rise to the question, in our EuroSavant context, of “What’s going on in the Hungarian press?” Which immediately gives rise to my answer of “Well, remember that mere momentary location really need have nothing to do with what appears on these pages, since EuroSavant itself is predicated on the wondrous power of the Internet to make much of the world’s press available to the curious web-surfer no matter where s/he might be, as long as there’s Internet access. Besides, hyperlinks to the articles I discuss, allowing readers also able to read the language in question to see for themselves what is actually written in a discussed article, are an important element of my entries – as links in general are for most weblogs – so that local availability of the paper editions is less than completely useful.”

To which you might respond “Point taken.” Or you might reply instead “Don’t give me any of your windy pontification, you pompous on-line $&*&^%#$$! To my understanding your function is not supposed to be standing up on a cyber-soapbox to cyber-nit-pick, but rather to give us some idea of what the European media is writing in languages we don’t understand – and you’re awfully late in getting to that here!” Right then – let’s take a look . . . (more…)

Away from events around the Persian Gulf, for now, for just as coalition forces inexorably advance across Iraq, so too does the European Union’s expansion process proceed towards its anticipated destination of adding 10 new members sometime around May, 2004. After the populations of Malta and Slovenia had previously given their assent to EU membership for their countries (sorry, I don’t cover them), this past Saturday it was the turn of Hungary. (more…)