In a coincidence with unnerving undertones, Hungary began hosting the European Union's rotating presidency this January just as the country's newly created National Media and Communications Authority (NMCA) began its anointed task of monitoring Hungary's public media. Under a new law which passed in Hungary's Parliament in mid-December — but was drafted as early as June last year — the NMCA will be able to monitor newspapers, TV and radio stations and impose fines of up to 200 million forints (about $950,000) for "unbalanced" and "immoral" reporting and for violating new rules on sex-, drug- and alcohol-related coverage.
Because of the law, half of TV programming in Hungary must henceforward be allotted to Europe-originating media productions, and one quarter of air time will go to broadcasting Hungarian music. All Internet bloggers will have to register with state authorities.
Most of the NMCA members, including its nine-year-term chairman, have been appointed by Viktor Orbán, Hungary's current prime minister and head of the center-right Fidesz party that was swept into power with a two-thirds majority in April 2010. Since then, Fidesz has enjoyed the ability to pass laws without consulting the opposition, comprised of the Hungarian Socialists, the far-right Jobbik party and, with four percent of the vote, Hungary's greens.
Recently, The Economist declared Orbán "hungry for power" and The Washington Post lamented the "Putinization" of Hungary. France's Le Monde reported that Hungary's artistic institutions are being "manhandled" in a "culture under the pressure of nationalism," Britain's The Guardian said that "democracy [is] becoming eroded," while Germany's Der Spiegel called Budapest Europe's future "capital of anti-Semitism," awash with "a new wave of hate." Adam Michnik, one of Poland's most well-known journalists, wrote in the country's second-largest daily that "Orbán's Hungary is taking the same route as Lukashenko's Belarus," while his Hungarian counterpart Gyorgy Konrad told a German newspaper that the law reminded him of the national socialists' rise to power in 1933.
Perhaps the most effective criticism came when the European Parliament openly debated disallowing Hungary from hosting the EU's presidency, a largely ceremonial honor. Left and center-left members of parliament joined by the foreign ministers of Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, voiced skepticism about the law's compatibility with EU principles as stated in the Lisbon Treaty. German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that "as soon-to-be EU president, Hungary bears a special responsibility for the image of the European Union in the world." And on Jan. 4, the French government called the law "incompatible with the application of ideas on press freedom that have been validated in European treaties."
How did Hungary become the thorn in the eyes of Eurocrats?
A large part of the credit should go to the eight-year term of the Hungarian Socialist Party. Fidesz's victory in April — it secured 263 of 386 seats — signaled a broad resentment among Hungarians against governmental corruption and nepotism and a willingness to give Fidesz a mandate to fix the country's fiscal problems. Two months after Orbán became prime minister, his spokesman said that the outgoing Socialist government had left the state finances in terrible shape, with a Greek-style default scare a distant, but distinct, possibility. Economists and markets agreed, while the forint continued to decline.
So far, however, Fidesz has failed to alleviate the country's fiscal troubles. In mid-2010, Orbán dismissed EU and International Monetary Fund demands to cut the deficit and, after the current government's budget was passed in December, the market's three major rating agencies downgraded Hungary's public debt to BBB-minus, a notch above junk-bond status.
Yet this seems to have left most Hungarians with no qualms about what their government is doing. Students and Green members of parliament protested against the media law, but no broader outcry of dissent has been rallied against the government's abuse of its parliamentary majority.
For this reason, members of the European Parliament call for political and economic sanctions are misplaced. EU charters don't apply to national governments, and it is therefore improbable that sanctions will ever come into effect — as Hungary's current hosting of the EU presidency shows — but even if they did, they would appear to go against the majority of Hungarian voters' wishes. Until now, the highly partisan Fidesz has not threatened the democratic process itself, and it remains to be seen whether the opaque media law will in practice amount to censorship.
It would also be helpful to remember that a state-run media supervisory board is not a novelty on the Continent. Just last November, the Greek Radio and Television Council censured a TV station for running a comment by a relatively well-known Greek painter: "I do not understand why the rapist is more evil than the girl who shows her tits out and provokes." To unanimous public acclaim, the station was fined 15,000 euros.
If, as Hungary's government has insisted, it is trying to "improve" the media, rather than "wage a war" against it, and if the NMCA applies it "in a wrong way, or there are problems, as a result of objections, parliament will change this law, you should not have any doubts," then the media law will not reflect the spectacularly sour mood of world newspapers. At its most basic, it might prevent Hungarians from watching "South Park" on TV.
To be sure, the media law is just the most widely discussed of a series of anti-democratic measures, widely seen as an attack by Orbán's government on the country's independent institutions: its constitutional court, central bank, presidency, the budget-overseeing fiscal council and even citizens' private pension funds. "Crises taxes" have been levied; many uncooperative civil servants have been fired.
It is disconcerting that Orbán's government is edging towards a slippery slope, and foreign ministers might emulate Germany's Guido Westerwelle, who called his Hungarian counterpart to discuss amending some recent legislation. But no journalists have been beaten up on the streets of Budapest by government-sponsored thugs: We need not call Hungary fascist or Putinized just yet.
