Bruner Blog

Rah Socialists!
Yes, I know France is the bigger story in the news at the moment, what with 17% of the population just voting for neo-Facist Le Pen and putting him in direct competition with Chirac for the next elections. (BTW, Did anyone else see the most recent Saturday Night Live, where they had a mock commercial for travel to France, touting its fine art, great dining and virolent anti-Semitism? It ended with a line to the effect of, “With everything that’s going on in the world today, isn’t it about time we got back to hating the French?” I’m sure it got someone’s nose out of joint.)

But there was another European election story that hasn’t gotten quite as much coverage: Hungary’s. (In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I lived there for a while and brought back a great souvenir: a wedding ring, so I kinda keep in touch with the place.)

They re-elected the Socialists! Yay!

In case it’s not clear why that’s a good thing, it’s because the other guy was a jerk. A big nationalist spoiled brat (he’s 38, a year and a bit older than me), Viktor Orban, the prime minister for the last four years, who thought the sun shone out his ass and took the country alarmingly to the right. (There was a great campaign with a photo of Orban letting an old peasant lady kiss his hand, which caused quite a stir at the time, juxtaposed against a photo of the lead candidate of the liberal Free Democrats kissing an old lady’s hand. That about said it all.)

The Socialists were in power for four years just before Orban’s government, and in my estimation they didn’t do so badly. I was there for part of their term. What was striking was how these bunch of former Communists (granted, Hungary was considered the the best barracks in the camp for the last several years of East European Communism) instituted a bunch of real capitalist econimc reforms (e.g., liberalising the currency to much local suffering for a while and hastening privatization), economic biting of the bullet that the previous government, the right-wing MDF, Hungary’s first democratically elected government after communism, had been unwilling to confront.

So the Orban government enjoyed many of the benefits of the Socialists’ reforms that significantly improved the economy in the last few years. But Viktor, after betraying the original party’s roots as young liberal idealists, took the country for a serious tilt to the right, rubbing all sorts of historical wounds and making alliances with a party as extreme right as Le Pen.

Although I saw first-hand what the ravages of Communism did to the spirit of that country, and I wouldn’t wish a return to that on any nation, I am confident that the re-election of the Socialists to power in Hungary is another step in the right direction, for now, anyway, for that little country I have so much affection for.

For details, see a piece here written by a good friend of mine, Chris Condon, in Business Week.

Also a great NY Times piece that puts in excellent perspective just how divisive this election was for Hungarians. (It’s all my wife talked about for weeks. She even flew back to vote in the critical first round of elections.)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 22nd, 2002 at 8:34 pm and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.