HAPPY new year to readers of this blog. I am in Budapest for the customary press trip at the start of a new EU presidency.
Given the furore over Hungary’s new media law, it has not been a good start of the year for Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, as he himself admitted at a press conference this morning. “I agree this is a bad start. Who would want a start like this? But I did not write the script. We adopted a law we considered to be perfectly OK, but the world criticised us… There is nothing we can do to change it. We will protect the law and I will protect our national policies.”
Such is the combative stand of Mr Orbán. Having flown scores of journalists to Hungary (The Economist is paying its own bill), Mr Orbán risked letting the beast into his house. But far from being devoured, he played the lion-tamer: part verbal whiplash, part soothing and calm.
Journalists, he said, had every right to criticise his media law. But governments played by a “different traffic code” and had no right to tell Hungary to change its legislation. Germany has warned Hungary that, as EU president, it has “a special responsibility for the image of the European Union as a whole”. France has asked for the law to be modified.
Such calls, says Mr Orbán, are “unnecessary and too hasty”. Worse, they are an “insult” to Hungary. Still, the prime minister left himself ample space to modify the legislation if the European Commission formally concludes that it breaches EU law. This seems unlikely. Commission officials have been explaining this week that the EU’s charter of fundamental rights does not apply to national policies; it only covers the actions of European institutions, or of member-states when they are enacting EU laws.
And if the commission does demand changes, Mr Orbán says, other countries should by rights also amend their media laws. That is because the Hungarian legislation has been inspired by the laws of other unimpeachable European democracies.
“If this passage of the Hungarian media act should be amended, then the media laws in France, Germany and the Netherlands should be changed too, as there is nothing in our legislation that is not in their media laws. I defy anyone to find anything in our law that is not in other EU member states’ media laws.”
Was Mr Orbán offended by comparisons that have started to crop up between him and Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, as well as the Belarusian president, Alyaksandr Lukashenka?
“From 1998 to 2002 [Mr Orbán’s first stint as prime minister] the western press said I was reminiscent of Hitler and Il Duce. Now they compare me with Putin and the Belarusian president. I will leave it up to you to decide if this is progress or not… Personally I am not hurt by such remarks but I think it hurts, it is insulting to Hungary. Hungary is a democratic country.”
Listening to Mr Orbán connect his present troubles with his anti-Communist past, one gets a sense of a man convinced that he has right on his side. Armed with a two-thirds majority in parliament, he seemed this morning to be on a mission to transform the country after the mess that the previous Socialist government had left behind.
Yes, he said, there have been controversies over many of his policies, including taxes on big businesses, turning down IMF strictures, and extending citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries. But critics were ignoring his achievements: the deficit had been sharply reduced (3.9% of GDP in 2010) and the national debt would be brought down to about 70%-73% of GDP by 2014. The labour market was being made more flexible, and Hungary wanted to become “as competitive as China”.
What’s more, Hungary’s previously “unmanageable” relations with Slovakia had improved; the two countries would soon sign an agreement to build a gas interconnector to improve energy security. The constitution is an interim law dating from communist days in 1949; only now does Mr Orbán’s Fidesz party have the majority to change it.
As my colleague notes, the Putin comparison is discordant. No Hungarian journalists have been murdered. In his pugnacious manner, Mr Orbán is perhaps more reminiscent of France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy (who of course has Hungarian roots—in Budapest they like to pronounce the name the local way: “Shaar-kozy”). But now, with his flawed media law, Mr Orbán may also be taking on something of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi.
Źródło: The Economist online Jan 6th 2011