Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán only needed a few years. In that short time he managed to turn his country inside out. Civil liberties and press freedoms were reined in, the democratic separation of powers annulled, and a constitution passed in the spirit of the country's former authoritarian-nationalistic leader Miklós Horthy.
Hungary is politically isolated in the European Union, and on the verge of national insolvency. And now the European Commission has launched legal action against the country. Brussels sees Orbán's constitutional reform as a violation of EU law, and is threatening to deny economic aid to the heavily indebted country. It's a remarkable development for a country once seen as a model for reform to be emulated by other countries in the region.
Orbán himself, formerly a much-admired politician, now seems like a dubious mix of Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez. But the diminutive politician from the tiny northwestern Hungarian village of Alcsútdoboz is by no means a special case. Orbán and his Hungary represent a political movement that is sweeping across central and southern Europe.
A dangerous storm is brewing in the shadow of the euro crisis. The devastating consequences of the 2008 global financial crisis were never fully overcome in Eastern Europe, and more countries in the region are falling into financial and economic imbalance, battling sprawling debt, high budget deficits, recessions and unemployment.
But it's not just the fragile economies that are at risk. Many central and southern European societies also lack political and social stability. These regions have two decades of uninterrupted reforms and tough austerity policies behind them. Many people there are exhausted, and democracy fatigue, euroskepticism, and aversion towards the once deified West are on the rise.
"In many respects, it's a process similar to the disillusionment in Eastern Europe with socialism in the 1970s and 1980s," says Hungarian economic scholar and publicist László Lengyel. "The danger of this is that entire social classes or regions like those in eastern Poland, Slovakia and Hungary fall victim to hopelessness and extremism." » | Keno Verseck | Wednesday, January 18, 2012
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