By Dr. Gábor Polyák
A parliamentary election is not decided only on election day, not even in combination with the campaign period immediately preceding the ballot. Theoretically, voters pass judgment on the political performance of the most recent governmental term, reflecting on both, the governing parties and the opposition. The role of the public sphere in this process is to provide ongoing control over the political processes and to give the political elite feedback on its performance. The fierce communication of the campaign period primarily serves to mobilise supporters and to sway undecided voters. Whether the ideal of ongoing control and a campaign that facilitates voter choice is realised will ultimately depend on a variety of factors with an impact on the media system and the quality of political communication.
The Hungarian electoral system created by Fidesz has placed the opposition at a disadvantage in numerous respects. In reality, the only way for the opposition to compete with a genuine shot at success would be to enter into compromises that would simultaneously require the parties involved to give up their distinct political brands. Key aspects of this electoral system are of course the campaign regulations as well as the media and political communication environment created by Fidesz in recent years. It would of course be a mistake to write off the election in April and to conclude that the opposition’s potential defeat owes exclusively to the electoral system. Nevertheless, already before the election and the campaign period, the factors outlined below made it more difficult for the opposition parties to compete fairly and to convince voters based on their own programme and their own arguments that they offer a viable alternative to Fidesz.
- Playing a decisive part of the media system into the hands of Fidesz-friendly and politically loyal players
The Hungarian media system has been so massively transformed since 2010 that hardly any of the pre-2010 media owners are still present in the market, and the available selection of media products and services has also undergone vast changes. In the second phase of this transformation, new figures entered the market as media owners and emerged practically overnight as major players in the media sector, even without any prior experience in this market.
Weakened by the financial crisis of 2008, a significant portion of the media market was no longer attractive to western investors. While withdrawing from the Hungarian market, these investors sold their Hungarian media assets to domestic entrepreneurs—in a majority of cases with a full awareness of the implications – who used their political ties to amass the wealth and guarantees necessary for such acquisitions. These politically connected figures also continuously launched new media services.
Today, businessmen with close ties to Fidesz have acquired dominant, and in some cases even monopolistic, positions in all segments of the media system, from county-level daily newspapers to national commercial television, over tabloids and news sites, national commercial radio networks all the way to political weeklies. With the exception of online newspapers, the media controlled by these players reaches a greater segment of the audience than independent media or media that are critical of the government. Moreover, regardless of their market performance, Fidesz-friendly media receive substantial state support in the form of state advertising, government-provided credits or, for that matter, biased decisions by official authorities. In the meanwhile, the number of financially stable independent media enterprises is continuously declining.
The public service media fail to balance the disequilibrium in the media market. The organisational framework designed in 2010 allowed for the possibility of direct political influence over editorial decisions in the public service media. As a result of this framework, the public service media have become one-sided disseminators of the governing parties’ political messages.
Since 2010, Fidesz has also deliberately worked on ensuring that media with a mass reach stay out of the election campaign. The new election procedure law adopted in 2010 bans the broadcasting of political advertising in commercial media. Once the Constitutional Court determined that this particular statutory provision was unconstitutional, Fidesz amended the Fundamental Law to say that commercial television providers can only publicly disseminate political advertising for free. In 2017, the Fidesz majority in parliament adopted another law that severely restricts political campaigns. The law mandates that organisations which receive state support – thus including political parties – may only buy billboard and poster space at so-called list prices. In other words, the owners of such outdoor advertising spaces cannot offer any discounts to political parties. As compared to the previous, undeniably highly chaotic practice, this makes it a lot more expensive to put up outdoor advertising. For the opposition parties, the possibility to display outdoor advertising has also become substantially restricted because the owners of these spaces do not rent them to opposition parties.
To fully understand the importance of these decisions, it is important to note that a significant portion of such outdoor advertising spaces is owned by Lajos Simicska, who used to be a key player in the Fidesz economic and business empire. In 2014, however, he spectacularly broke off ties with his former party and gradually shifted his support to Jobbik. Today, Jobbik is the strongest opposition party, and since 2014 it has studiously begun to move away from the far-right, trying to rebrand itself as a moderate conservative party.
- Dominating the political agenda, to a significant extent with fear-mongering and hateful messages
Since 2015 Fidesz has continuously and successfully striven to make sure that the refugee crisis and immigration remain on the political agenda, and even become the dominant issues that define Hungarian political discourse. It has used relentless poster and media campaigns, along with frequent comments by politicians that seek to incite anti-refugee and anti-immigrations passions, as well as so-called “national consultations” – which are completely devoid of a legal or professional basis but nevertheless claim to proffer the only proper course of action on this issue – and even a referendum on the topic.
Among the political statements on the issue, a comment by Viktor Orbán stands out: The prime minister defended violent outbursts by the residents of a rural municipality against the owner of a B&B operator in their village. The aggressive actions by the villagers owed to the decision by the hotel owner to host a few refugee children for a brief vacation at his establishment. In an interview, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó claimed that he had been forced to run for his life in Brussels because of migrants. Another similar story was a video clip shot by the minister in charge of the Cabinet Office, János Lázár, in which he complained that there are too many migrants in Vienna. The Fidesz-friendly media not only provide the space for disseminating such communication, but they themselves produce and publish an unceasing stream of fear-mongering, threatening and inciting contents. To mention just the most recent examples, on 13 March 2018 the homepage of the online newspaper Origo.hu featured the word “migrant” a dozen times. The same portal presented a several-year-old crime as a current event, creating the false impression that the crime in question had been committed by immigrants.
In light of the above, the whole fake news problem manifests itself very differently in Hungary than in western Europe. The entire arsenal of governmental communication is based on a mendacious framework, such as for example the conspiracy theory suggesting that there is an all-pervasive Soros Plan, which uses a wide variety of institutions including the European Commission, the UN and miscellaneous Hungarian NGOs to flood Europe with migrants and to destroy European culture. As a result, the primary disseminators of fake news are not websites with a small audience reach but mainstream pro-government media.
At the same time, this also means that rational debate is mostly gone from the campaign and, indeed, from political communication in general. Fidesz has openly declared that it has no election manifesto. A slogan in the 2014 campaign had been that Fidesz’s election programme can be summed up in one word in Hungarian: Folytatjuk (We will continue [meaning they will proceed to continue what they had done until then])! In the current campaign period, Viktor Orbán has repeatedly declared that the time for debates is over. Although the opposition parties have detailed election manifestoes, these receive scant attention precisely because Fidesz refuses to participate in debates on public policy issues. From Orbán’s perspective, that’s understandable, of course. When he did debate opposition leaders in 2002 and 2006, his party suffered unexpected defeats at the ballot box.
Of course, the opposition parties’ responsibility is also undoubtedly implicated in this state of affairs, for whatever attempts they have made to regain the initiative in public communication by placing other issues front and centre have failed. Neither the manifest crises in education and healthcare, nor the corruption scandals implicating Fidesz’s innermost circles have proved potent enough to dominate the political agenda. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that all these issues are practically not covered at all in the Fidesz-friendly media. Public discourse has become extremely polarised since 2010, and as a result the respective audiences of government-friendly and of critical media encounter completely antithetical and mutually contradictory interpretations of reality.
- Sabotaging and discrediting critical media
Government party politicians’ ongoing refusal to talk to journalists who are not affiliated with Fidesz-friendly media further reinforces this polarisation.
One of the most severe restrictions imposed on the work of critical journalists is the blocking of their coverage of the Hungarian parliament, the National Assembly. The president of the National Assembly has the exclusive authority to determine the rules of parliamentary coverage, and the prevailing rules set by him limit the physical space for such coverage to a strictly and very narrowly delineated area of the parliament building. The president of the National Assembly regularly uses these rules to ban individual journalists and even entire newsrooms from parliament.
The government prohibits entire sectors, especially the managers and staff of public education and healthcare institutions, from talking to the media without prior authorisation from the government. Moreover, the entire governmental apparatus is barred from talking to certain media. Journalists working for critical media are not even allowed to ask questions at press conferences announced by politicians, and the government spokesman recently admonished a foreign journalist for trying to ask a question at a press conference.
In March 2018, Viktor Orbán refused to respond to questions posed by the critical news channel HírTV; he argued that the television channel is all ”fake news”.
The Fundamental Law adopted by Fidesz provides that “Hungary […] shall ensure the conditions for the freedom to receive and impart information as is necessary in a democratic society”. The kind of conduct described above does not mesh with constitutional requirements.
- Conflating government and party-political communication
The significance of election campaigns is further diminished by the fact that for years now the campaign period has been de facto continuously ongoing.
Using outdoor advertising campaigns and ads in Fidesz-friendly media, the government occasionally touts its own success and even more often it attacks its enemy du jour (“illegal migrants”, “Brussels”, “Soros”) in an unrelenting stream of negative messages – paid for by public funds, of course. In 2017, the government spent 23 million euros on its “Let’s stop Brussels” campaign, and a further 7.5 million on the anti-Soros campaign.
Despite the fact that even the Media Act adopted by Fidesz provides that any programme disseminated in the media that “promotes or advocates support […] for the government” qualifies as political advertising, and political advertising can only be disseminated during campaign periods, the government unabashedly uses Fidesz-friendly media for disseminating political propaganda messages. Mérték Média Monitor – the author of the present article is the president of this NGO – has filed four complaints since 2015 pointing to the legal violations in the government’s television and radio propaganda. The Media Council, however, which is entirely made up of members nominated by Fidesz, has routinely rejected or ignored these complaints. The Media Council’s view is that the government’s messages – “The Hungarian reforms work!”; Did you know? Brussels wants to settle an entire city’s worth of illegal migrants in Hungary!”; The Soros Plan – Let’s not leave it unanswered! – are messages that contain relevant public information and may thus be broadcast at any time. Unlike in the case of broadcasting political advertising, the channel disseminating these messages may charge for broadcasting such “public information”; disseminating these messages therefore also serves as a surreptitious means of funding government-friendly media.
Especially during the campaign period, the conflation of governmental and party messages is especially problematic. The equality of candidates and organisations that compete in the elections is substantially impeded by the fact that the government uses public funds to support the efforts aimed at increasing the popularity of one of these organisations, i.e. the incumbent governing party or parties. Nevertheless, at this very moment an intense governmental campaign is ongoing, this time against the UN’s refugee and immigration policy proposals. In the meanwhile, the sole campaign message of Fidesz as a political party is that everyone who allegedly seeks to open the Hungarian borders to immigrants needs to be stopped. In the 2014 campaign period, Hungary’s high court, the Curia, held that government advertising that promotes the government parties’ objectives can be regarded as the given party’s political advertisement. During the presently ongoing campaign, thus far no one has turned to the court in connection with the government’s advertisements.
The result of the factors outlined above has been to render the parliamentary elections in Hungary completely devoid of rational elements, for a significant portion of the electorate the election is purely about emotive elements and passions. Fidesz has created an alternative reality for itself and its supporters which is increasingly divorced from voters’ everyday experience. The wholesale liquidation of any type of public policy debate and the relentless stirring up of voters’ passions has had an influence not only on the tone of political and campaign communications but also on the quality of governance.
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