On Friday 15th May, Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán seemed to pull the rug out from under his critics. At a press conference in Belgrade that afternoon he told reporters he expected to surrender his powers to rule by decree “around the end of May“. The move would “give everyone the opportunity to apologise to Hungary for the false accusations they made against us in the past months” he claimed.
The surprise announcement in Serbia came a day after a heated debate on Hungary in the European Parliament — a debate which Orbán had conspicuously declined to attend. MEPs who on Thursday called for tougher EU actions against Budapest were seemingly left high and dry on Friday. Criticism of Hungary’s 30 March ‘Enabling Act’ by OSCE, the Council of Europe and the International Bar Association was made to look hysterical. Yet, things are not as they seem.
Orbán’s most recent manoeuvres fall into a long-established pattern of strategic feint and dodge. He has, in a private May 2012 address to Fidesz policy staff, termed this his “dance of the peacock“. Hungary’s PM is adept at camouflaging the destructive inside the outrageous. The former can be smuggled past international bodies more readily if one appears to retreat on the latter. Meanwhile the theatricality of ‘performative transgression’ blurs distinctions between real and apparent danger while simultaneously moving the frontier of accepted behaviour.
Justification for creating an ‘extraordinary legal order’ in Hungary — a situation bypassing normal legislative and/or judicial procedures — was always shaky. The country already enjoyed robust legal provision for tackling pandemics, notably the 1997 Act CLIV on Health and the 2011 Act CXXVII on Emergency Management. Extensive powers to activate public safety measures (including a general curfew) were thus available on the basis of pre-existing laws. This year’s novel emergency powers had ends other than infection control.
Actions taken under cover of the emergency have seriously destabilised the already precarious functioning of Hungary’s opposition parties. Though Orbán may soon surrender the power to govern by decree that does not, in and of itself, equate to annulment of emergency laws enacted to date or mitigation of their lasting effects. In the last week, Fidesz has in fact taken additional procedural steps to ensure that the most damaging legislation survives formal cessation of the emergency.
More than 70 special decrees have been enacted under the emergency powers, many with scant relation to the presenting crisis. Perhaps the most worrying to date is no. 135/2020. This decree has been employed punitively against municipalities which voted for opposition parties in the October 2019 local elections.
The decree confers power on central government to create so called ‘Special Economic Zones’ (SEZs) within the territory of local authorities. However, the true purpose of these zones is not assisting post-Covid economic recovery via the relaxation of regulation or tax burdens. Rather their function is the transfer of freehold title and planning control of land owned by municipalities, together with the levy of local business taxes, to the county-level governments.
This is significant. Victory for the united opposition in Budapest’s mayoral election last autumn made international headlines. However, it was the electoral breakthrough in provincial cities, approximately half of which turned to the opposition, that really spooked the Hungarian government.
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