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BUSINESS WORLD CULTURE VIDEO POLICY INOSLAV BEŠKER FOR GLOBE VIKTATOR ON THE AGENDA Will Croatia vote in the fall to expel Fidesz from the European People's Party In Croatia, we often pretend not to know who Orbán is and what he is. And many of us are not ready to see that Orbán is not a dictator who came to power by force, but that he is an autocratic expression of the political majority in the Hungarian political nation. Author: Inoslav BeškerPosted: May 7, 2020 11:06 pm The servile attitude of the Republic of Croatia towards the Hungarian declared or liberal regime of Viktor Orbán strongly calls into question the very orientation of Croatia and its majority, not only the Government or the Parliament, as well as its declared Christian Democrat orientation. Unlike liberal Europe, which - on the Catholic foundations of Schuman, Degasperi and Adenauer - has embraced both the three divisions of power and the system of checks and balances, Orbán, just like Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, controls the situation with media and judicial control. The same method is contained in the genetic code of the Croatian Democratic Union: it was applied by President Tudjman (and went on: remember how "inappropriate" Zagreb mayors were elected in vain), finally inheriting it from President Tito (also known for his objection to Vladimir Primorac that “there are some judges there who abide by the law like a drunken fence”). Let's not be fooled: the Croatian Democratic Union can lose a majority in Parliament, but only when it exaggerates corruption and clientelism - as happened briefly in 2000 and again in 2015 - but when we add up the strength of the moderate right expressed in the party's motherland. to a large extent from the statist right-wing League of Communists) with the forces of the extreme nationalist, sovereignist and deeply illiberal right, it is evident that the majority of the Croatian political nation inclines to the views developed to the extreme by the victorious options of the Kaczynski brothers in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Take, as a litmus test, only the slogan "Ready for home", an expression of adherence to the fascist forces that lost the war in Europe 75 years ago (but not their source, nor the hope of the return of their "new order"). Even the "most European" forces in the Croatian Democratic Union, the same ones that their allies on the right mockingly christen "Brussels companies", have neither the courage nor the reckoning to decisively move away from at least that symbol of fascism, as shown by the reaction to Minister Medved's provocative staging in Okucani. . Orbán does not go that far either, even he remains on the line of regent Horthy de Nagybány , an liberal but parliamentary autocrat who did not introduce fascism, but entered into an alliance with the fascists to restitute at least part of Hungary lost by the Trianon Peace Treaty (the Novi Sad massacre was not fascist rather national-chauvinistic; the latest frictions between Hungary and Romania over the demand for the return of autonomy to at least the Hungarian Szeklers in Eastern Sedmogradska show that a whole century is not enough to completely calm ethnic re-indications). It is possible that Croatia within the Union, and in fact the Croatian Democratic Union within the European People's Party, refuses to oppose the assassination of freedom of the press and the three divisions of power in Poland and Hungary because it must be formally neutral this semester while presiding over the Union. This is, after all, the narrative that the HDZ offers to those who want to listen. The corollary narrative is that we must not infuriate the Hungarians while energetically holding us by the scruff of the neck since the Hadez government led by Ivo Sanader ceded to them not only 50 percent of the Croatian oil industry, but also 100 percent dominance in it. For the last elections, Prime Minister Plenković promised that Croatia would buy the sold part and that INA would be in our hands again. Yes, it just isn't. At the same speed with which the then SDP Prime Minister Milanović achieved Plan 21. Let's just remind ourselves that honesty is not an ideological, but a national-political category. In Croatia, we often pretend not to know who Orbán is and what he is. And many of us, even aware of the politician's disastrous role in breaking solidarity and bargaining - the only basis on which Europe can defend itself against its own age-old national war instincts - are unwilling to see Orbán as a dictator who came to power by force, against his will. people, than that he is an autocratic expression of the political majority in the Hungarian political nation, that behind him compactly stands more than 50 percent of that political nation, or an even higher percentage of ethnic Hungarians in it. Paul Lendvai , published by Oxford University, published a book: “Orbán, the‘ strong man ’of Hungary” in which he arguably shatters the myth of Orbán as the new dictator. He is - as we reported then - a long-time author: he was born in August 1929. As Pál Lendvai he became famous in 1951 with the book "Tito is the enemy of the Hungarian people", but after 1956 he emigrated to Austria, and in 2011 he published the book "My playful a country ”in which he analyzed not only Hungary, but all of the former Habsburg Mitteleuropa as a source of ethnic hatred, discord and anti-Semitism. He also knows something about it: his ancestors are Jews, and the surname warns of his origin from Lendava, once a Hungarian center in Prekomurje (the synagogue there, one of the two remaining in Slovenia, was not demolished by Horthy). Lendvai, a high school student in the Horthy era and a party activist in the Rákosi era, knows from these experiences the difference between a dictatorship and an authoritarian regime. He reminds that paramilitary soldiers are not seen marching in Pest, notices that the police politely protect groups that are demonstrating something, that no one is afraid that the secret police will come to him in the wee hours of the night and take him away. There is no, says Lendvai, even a cult of personality (without which Croatia has not known for the last 100 years, personalities alive or at least dead, in a way Tito was beatified). Still, Lendvai can’t keep quiet about the nickname “Viktator,” which says something about the reception of Orbán’s character at least in part of the nation. Orbán's power is ensured by broad control of the media and the judiciary, Lendvai emphasizes. He adds that "behind the strong talk about protecting heavily burdened families from evil multinational corporations is partnership capitalism in which someone must be on the right political side if he wants to survive economically." Of course, the authoritarianism described in this way, with a mixture of control of the media, the judiciary and the state of close partnership capitalism, is nothing particularly new, nor is it Orbán's invention and patent. But this nicely explains the inclination that Viktor Orbán attracts in certain Croatian circles. In the last century, Predrag Matvejević spread the concept of democracy in Europe as a name for the political aspect of such a society (honestly admitting that the coin was not his, that he had probably heard it in the Czech Republic). Thomas Piketty uses the term "social nativism" for a more socially oriented variant of national sovereignty. Call it it one way or another, the essence remains mostly the same, as in that story about how to call what smells like a rose and looks like a rose. RELATED NEWS Viktor Orban MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS GORDAN GRLIĆ RADMAN ANSWERED TO VIKTOR ORBAN FOR THE GREAT HUNGARY MAP 'Any territorial claims in the European Union are unthinkable' CHRONIC 'CARTOMANI' MILANOVIC REACTS TO ORBAN'S ANNOUNCEMENT 'We are irritated, but every time we are surprised by the maps that emerge from the pages of some leaders in the neighborhood' The character of Orbán's sovereignty is further illustrated by his fierce pressure to control the education system, and especially higher education, which is therefore oriented towards adult citizens. Orbán also decided to control the space of university freedom (perhaps that sounds familiar), suffocating the Central European University (CEU), which even independent observers (e.g. Timothy Garton Ash ) unreservedly considered the best university in Hungary, and certainly the most independent of the ruling ideological paradigms. CEU was founded in 1991, with a $ 880 million foundation, by financial speculator George Soros . He redeems some of the troubles he has caused to his anonymous victims by getting rich at their expense through targeted philanthropy. At one time, Orbán himself received a scholarship from the Soros Foundation, with which he studied political science at Oxford. He understood the function and meaning of education. That is why he turned against CEU and Soros, pushing through the Pest Parliament a law that cannot allow foreign universities to operate in Hungary if they do not have a home abroad (and CEU does not have one). Education is - especially in ideologically constrained states (regardless of the type of ideology it places) - an important, even key ideological apparatus of the state. It is no wonder that those who would change the ideological paradigm invest in it, from these or those starting points (such as Soros, who advocates Popper's "open society" or Fethullah Gulen , who through schooling promotes the re-Islamization of excessively secularized and unacceptably corrupt Turkish society). It is no wonder, then, that the coryphaeus of rigid statist ideologies, such as Orbán or Recep Tayyip Erdogan , see in such figures an incarnated devil. Of course, Orbán's methods are nowhere near Erdogan's ruthlessness in the purge of the university and everything where he sees even the shadow of his former sponsor Gulen - but the Hungarian prime minister's anger at his former sponsor is equally rational, with equal abuse of religion, at least not the same. According to the populist pattern, Orbán has always built an image of himself as an outsider fighting against elites, in the name and for the benefit of other outsiders who make up the bulk of (not only Hungarian) society. Invoking the people or the nation has always been a favorite tool of those who had no arguments for open conflict of opinion (not without the devil, Samuel Johnson said a long time ago that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels). Also following the populist pattern, Orbán, Lendvai points out, spread the image of a man of the people, who loves football and spaghetti westerns and who watched Charles Bronson at least fifteen times in Once Upon a Time in the West: an icon of a lonely and selfless fighter for justice. , whatever may happen. Lendvai, an insider of Hungary's not-so-great opportunities, does not fail to point out that Orbán is not a discharge of the dissidents there, because his father, he says, was a typical representative and user of Kádár's "non-wave" system, also known as "gulyáskommunizmus" (goulash-communism). : the people had to leave politics to Kádár's Munkáspártia and pretend to believe in its leading line, and the Party in turn left the people alone in the happiness of family life and some small business, or a guaranteed job (there was even room for mockery in literature and film, we were recently reminded of the “tunnel of socialist horror” that Péter Bacsó infiltrated into his film, as part of an amusement park ). The core of the leading political clique in Hungary is still Orbán's close friends from the late 1980s. With their help, shortening his stay in Oxford, he "cleansed" Fidesz of "opponents", those who believed more in ideals than in the boss. Studying the political history of the West in Oxford, he discovered the power of religion as a political apparatus and turned from a liberal into a paladin of Christian culture and civilization. There is no point in recalling how Orbán once advocated a model of Polish Solidarity (as it was christened by the then Cardinal Wojtyla ), that he invoked the anti-communism of that St. Pope Wojtyla, but to pretend not to understand what this leitmotif of John Paul II means and what it calls for . And, of course, he discovered the strength of national frustrations: Orbán, more intelligent than the irredentist 64 counties, or parafascist Jobbik, rides on the myth of the "Trianon trauma" - the thesis that Hungary 100 years ago, after defeat in World War I, was unjustly dismembered and reduced from the status of a superpower to a small Hungary from which Slovakia, Sedmogradska (Transylvania), and Vojvodina with southern Baranja, Međimurje, Prekomurje and, finally, Rijeka, access to the Mediterranean (and, in fact, Croatia with Slavonia) were taken. He rides on the political claustrophobia of a continentally locked and historically frustrated nation that others reportedly hate because it is of better quality than them (and that sounds familiar, it seems). One of the consequences is that Hungary has shared about a million citizenships with its compatriots in the surrounding countries (it is known from whom it saw this). On the other hand, the success of Orbán's partner Hungary (we probably learned something about his friend Hernadi and his methods), abundantly funded by the European Union (whose money was flashed by Budapest), is shown by the fact that about half a million Hungarians left Hungary at the same time. stampede largest since 1956, but this time quiet. It is unlikely that Orbán's rule would have been so long and solid, if not for the hand of incompetent and greedy ex-communists (again sounds familiar, right?) Disguised as social democrats: they led the country catastrophically, totally unprepared they slipped into the 2008 crisis. the only Hungarian party whose some champions are in the "Panama Papers". Croatia was careful not to vote against Hungary even recently, gaining expressions of gratitude from Pest (but INA stayed where it was, not packed in gratitude). No one says publicly: "Horváth nem ember", Kossuth's joke that he does not see any Croatia on the map is repeated, and Jelačić on the Square no longer waves his sword to Hungary, but to Bihać, Šibenik and, perhaps, Peschici (Mikaljina Pještica) . The HDZ will still have to make a statement this fall, when the president of the European People's Party, Donald Tusk , as he recently announced, puts on the agenda the exclusion of Fidesz from that European conservative political family, the majority in the Union. Tusk recalled the Bucharest program of the European People's Party, where the basic guidelines are: “Freedom as a fundamental human right is inseparable from responsibility; respect for traditions and free association; solidarity in helping the needy who must equally strive to improve their situation… ”etc., including subsidiarity and, ultimately, pluralistic democracy. Tusk believes Orbán’s Fidesz violates all of these points. How will Plenković's Croatian Democratic Union decide ? The problem is if it is aligned with illiberalism with the help of media and judicial control. But the problem is also if he votes against Orbán, but out of opportunism, firmly squeezing the Croatian fig in the Croatian pocket.