Eastern Europe Today: Counter-Revolution against a Counter-Revolution

Abstract

In Hungary, a socialist-liberal coalition led by the young and gifted Ferenc Gyurcsány, a billionaire businessman and a former secretary of the Communist Youth League before 1989, was returned to office in 2006 after an election campaign based on left-populist promises which, in a secret speech to his parliamentary party, Mr Gyurcsány himself announced to have been a bunch of deliberate lies. After the speech had been leaked, riots erupted in Budapest, and the headquarters of state television--the symbol of mendacity--was torched. Protests continued for months, deteriorating rapidly, dominated by the symbolism of the Arrow-Cross, the Hungarian Nazis famous for their anti- Jewish terror in the encircled Budapest of 1944. The protests were adroitly mined by the parliamentary right, led by the former prime minister, Viktor Orbán. The government coalition proceeded with its radical austerity measures, immense tax increases, social and health expenditure cuts, closing down hospitals (the first deaths caused by the chaos in the health service have already occurred), schools and cultural institutions, cutting or stopping subsidies altogether, planning to privatize the hospitals, the railways, the electricity board and municipal services, liberalizing prices (e.g., those of medications), introducing fees for every visit to a (state) doctor, fees for university students, doubling the price of public transport, freezing wage and pension increases --all necessary to reduce public debt and trade deficit in order to meet the so-called 'convergency criteria' demanded by the European Union, mandatory for joining the eurozone. Credit-rating agencies such as Standard and Poor's, have more influence on government policy than the electorate.