Hungary has become the go-to example for democracy in demise. Recent protests, however, have highlighted a fatal flaw in strongman President Viktor Orban’s model, even if they don’t signal an end to his power.
Orban has worked to undermine democracy in Hungary. The Fidesz party, under his leadership, has rewritten electoral regulations, clamped down on the independence of courts, converted previously independent media into state propaganda, and forced an independent university to leave the country.
Those changes have solidified Orban’s power and made it close to impossible for the opposition to gain control of the government. Indeed, despite winning only 50 percent of the popular vote, Fidesz claimed victory for two-thirds of parliamentary seats in the 2018 elections.
But his seemingly unshakable control faced a new test as protests swept through Budapest in response to a new law passed by the Fidesz-controlled parliament on Wednesday.
That law, termed the “slave law” by its critics, authorizes employers to demand 400 hours of overtime a year — about 8 hours a week — from their employees while also withholding pay for that extra work for as many as three years.
That law aimed to fix a growing problem for the isolationist country. Even as Orban cracks down on immigration, young people are eager to leave for better wages and freedoms elsewhere in the European Union. That has meant that there are not enough people to fill jobs, leaving employers scrambling. Instead of addressing the cause of the labor shortage, the solution Orban dreamed up is to just make people work more. Unsurprisingly, that law has proved wildly unpopular.
For what is often referred to as the “soft fascism” of Hungary’s government, this is a clear challenge to the nativism and opposition to the European Union that underpin Orban’s support.
The protesters, despite their force and conviction, however, aren’t yet unified, large enough, or well-organized enough to constitute an existential threat to the government. But they did signal the potential for a growing, organized opposition, and they may well galvanize further demonstrations. For the Orban government, they also yielded the bad optics of violent street confrontations and video of an opposition MP literally being dragged out of a television studio.
For Orban, the protests also demonstrated that a slick propaganda machine will only take your authoritarian government so far before bullets and tear gas have to start flying in your defense.
The worst sign for Hungary, however, is the reality that this law was intended to fix: a lack of workers. For Orban, bent on promoting his ultra-anti-immigration platform, there’s no easy fix. Even if he backs down on the “slave law” to quell growing dissent, that won’t fix the fundamental flaw that caused the labor shortage in the first place.
