Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at the retrospective conference held on the 25th anniversary of formation of the first freely-elected Hungarian National Assembly (6 May 2015, Budapest).
My highest regards to our esteemed guests: Klára, Andrea, Former Prime Minister, Speaker of the House.
Somewhere in Vienna a young couple stand with their backs against a wall, watching the city’s whirl of people and traffic. It is 1984. At the end of a thirty-day student tourist trip in the West, they face a difficult decision: how should they continue their lives? In a dictatorship but at home, or in freedom but in a strange land? If you ask me what the first free elections meant to me, it is always this story that comes to mind. In 1984 I was 21 years old, and knew little about politics; but I knew that I did not want to live my life ground by the millstones of this dilemma, and I did not even want to think what decision any children I might have in the future would be forced to make. In freedom and at home: this is what the first free elections, and the establishment of the first freely-elected National Assembly meant to me.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
In telling you this, I think I have said it all. Observed from this vantage point (and is there really a higher vantage point than this?), the fall of communism is a success story of elemental power. In freedom and at home; however, Ladies and Gentlemen, when taking a more nuanced stance, I must admit that speaking today about an event which I was a part of twenty-five years ago is a difficult task, but also a privilege. A quarter of a century has gone by since the first freely-elected parliament was formed in Hungary. I believe that we may do justice to this ceremonial event if we not only talk about the era which this moment in history marked the end of, but also about the new era in history which it marked the beginning of. It does not take anything away from the celebratory nature of today’s conference if we remark that our connection with the events of that time – the way we relate to them now – is nowhere near as direct or seamless as it once was.
If we were to observe Hungary today through the eyes of all those years ago, if we were to observe Hungary today through the eyes of the nineteen-nineties, we would not believe that we could come this far in such a short time, having overcome so many obstacles. If, however, we observe today’s Hungary through our present-day eyes, we tend to perceive things in a negative light and see the faults: the one million jobs which disappeared with the fall of communism, the eastern markets abandoned, or “spontaneous” privatisation. If we look at the goals which the people authorised the first freely-elected National Assembly to achieve, the conclusion we may come to is even more complicated. Hungarian voters wanted to be part of the West not only in political, military and economic terms, but also in having comparable living standards; they paid no heed, however, to whether this was really possible. But by 2010 most Hungarians saw themselves as losers from the fall of communism. Along the way we had lost the momentum, the energy and the enthusiasm which had defined the beginning of the nineteen-nineties. The 2008 financial crisis had decimated the trust which, after forty years of communism, Hungarians had once placed in an unregulated market economy and liberal democracy.
And beyond this, Ladies and Gentlemen, there is today a generational problem. More and more of us today will only learn about what we broke away from twenty-five years ago from history books or from the accounts of older generations; but more and more of us have or have had first-hand experience of where the weaknesses of Hungarian democracy have led – in particular, the weaknesses which emerged during the 2008 financial crisis. In consequence, today’s points of reference are rather divergent. Fewer and fewer of us notice the benefits of the fall of communism, while more and more of us can only see negative aspects. As is customary in history, it is the responsibility of the older generations (and I am afraid I must include myself in that category) to strike a balance between the diverging evaluations, and to maintain a satisfactory standard and style in those evaluations. It is therefore justified that we youthful radicals from twenty-five years ago have also been given the opportunity to speak at today’s event – and not merely on account of the constitutional positions we occupy.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The first freely-elected Hungarian National Assembly was formed on a busy working day. It was one day after we Hungarians had celebrated the first of May – without the usual socialist trappings. I would like to inform those who now only see the negative side of those changes that on the second of May nineteen ninety Hungary was a member of the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, Soviet troops were stationed in the country, we were on the verge of economic bankruptcy, and the state debt left us by the comrades was sky high. In those days it was far from safe to be a Member of Parliament, and in particular a member of the Government – let alone the Prime Minister.
We should therefore now pay tribute, with the greatest respect and appreciation, to József Antall: the first prime minister of a free Hungary. Fate allotted to him the enormous task of guiding our country from a seedy dictatorship to representative democracy, and from planned economy to market economy – sailing between the Scylla of domestic policy and the Charybdis of foreign policy. The ship only slowly followed the turn of the rudder, however, and it creaked and groaned, almost every single part of it in need of replacement. The new parliament, the Government and the Prime Minister were presented with a superhuman task. If we look at the laws passed by the first National Assembly, this picture clearly unfolds. With the dismantling of single-party state structures, the entire economy, churches, the press, the land ownership system, education, the military and the police all had to be placed on new statutory foundations. The socialist local council system needed to be replaced with a new local government system, and restitution had to be awarded for everything that had been confiscated, worn away or destroyed by communism (or should have been awarded, had there been the money to do so). And all this was to be done without a revolution. Back then, the Government found hornets’ nests wherever it probed. But in a little under fifteen years Hungary had become a member of NATO and the European Union, thus following a path we Hungarians had followed ever since King Saint Stephen, a path marked out anew for Hungary by the first freely-elected parliament.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Those who thought, however, that this newly-created Hungarian democracy would form a single, firm, united block were soon to be disappointed. The preceding forty years had been too long to allow us to pick up the old thread of Hungarian life or the thread of the old Hungarian life, and too short to allow us to wipe the slate clean. This is where we were trapped, this is what we suffered from. Markedly different interpretations of historical events made the passage of a new constitution impossible. In contrast to the countries that surround us, the first freely-elected parliament did not create a new constitution, but instead added patches to the already overly patched-up text of Act XX of 1949. Additionally, a market economy system revealed all those things which socialism had been able to conceal from the people for so long: unemployment, inflation, realistic market prices, and the critical state of large industrial corporations. For many, this revelation was a bitter one.
There were also some who would have liked to restore everything immediately. The promises which capitalised on nostalgia for the Kádár regime effectively derailed the process of the shift from communism. In the campaign for the 1994 general election – which turned out to be a mere auction of promises – those who only promised as much as the country’s capacities allowed did not stand a chance. This was the lesson to be learnt from the 1994 elections, and those irresponsible promises first wiped out the country’s reserves, and later led to the accumulation of enormous debt. A clear break was signalled, however, in the autumn of 2006, when the “Balatonőszöd speech” came to light. It is hard to decide which was more serious: the admission in that speech of having resorted to lies, or the subsequent smokescreen of deceit. As you may remember, the governing parties of that time tried to shift the responsibility which lay with the Prime Minister and his party onto the entire Hungarian political class since the fall of communism. This took us from a prime minister who had given his life to the country’s interests to a prime minister who sacrificed the country’s interests for his own political life. The reason that the period starting with the formation of the first freely-elected National Assembly had to end in 2010 was – in addition to the 2008 economic crisis – this crisis of confidence.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Former Prime Minister,
Twenty-five years ago, there were many things that were unimaginable for us. We did not imagine that we were embarking on twenty years of struggle. We did not imagine that it would take twenty years for us to find the will and the strength to accomplish the formidable and fundamental changes with which we can elevate Hungary to the status of a strong, proud, western-oriented, civic and Christian country. In the end we had to wait twenty years – and not only did we have to wait, but through all those years we continuously fought and worked for these changes. We believed in them, and did not abandon them, even when we suffered setbacks. Who would have thought back in 1990 – or in particular in 1994 – that our political community would be the one that would succeed in implementing those changes? I can still remember when, after the 1994 general election, we met in the garden of a village house with the Former Prime Minister and some others – whom I shall not name here, but whom I may describe with some goodwill as pleasant company – and discussed how we could forge a new political alliance, which we named a civic alliance. This was the first attempt after the 1994 defeat to form a civic alliance – and it failed. Only two years later were we finally able to achieve this feat. Who would have thought back in 1994 in that garden, that out of all the political communities it would be ours that would succeed in earning a two-thirds parliamentary majority? Who would have thought at the time, when the post-communists had returned to power, that we would finally bring the postponed revolution to a successful conclusion? In 2010, after a delay of some two decades – not bad by the record of Hungary’s history as a whole – the Hungarian people finally decided to stage a revolution. It was a peaceful constitutional revolution (but all the more decisive for that), with which the Hungarian people granted us enough power, based on a two-thirds electoral mandate, to do all which the country demanded; and thus, for example, it also enabled the current Speaker of the House to start his speech today with a quotation from the Fundamental Law, spoken with full sincerity and a sense of allegiance.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
We set Hungary on new foundations: instead of liberal utopias, we reinstated in our laws the connection between freedom and responsibility: the ideal and policy of mutual responsibility. And in 2014, with a second two-thirds electoral mandate, the Hungarian people also put an end to many debates which had persisted for decades. I shall pause here to draw a historical parallel. The situation which we inherited in 2010 was in many respects reminiscent of the state of affairs in 1989–90. I do not now want to quote Gáspár Miklós Tamás – someone not present here today, but to whom Hungarian democracy is much indebted – who highlighted the connection between democracy, the Bolshevik, the dog and the bacon; I do not wish to quote him now. I would, however, say that by 2010 our predecessors had simply put the country in hock and sold for a pittance our hard-won sovereignty. And the saddest thing about this, Ladies and Gentlemen, is that they were able to do this because the transitional constitution of 1989 did not oblige the government of the day to serve the national interest; the transitional constitution prescribed nothing to that effect. It did not protect communal property, and it did not oblige the government of the day to recognise and reinforce the affiliation with the Hungarian nation of Hungarians beyond the borders and across the world. And neither did it protect Hungarians from accumulating crippling debt or from the plunder of the country’s resources. As we all know, in the name of freedom hundreds of thousands of families eventually found themselves in debt slavery. The institutions of liberal democracy did not protect taxpayers from financial institutions which abused their superior positions, and the sacred market economy allowed international corporations to take away even our last pennies. Instead of the longed-for free Europe, we were given a Europe of bureaucrats preoccupied with calculating the size of chicken coops, rather than with ensuring the security of its citizens.
My Dear Friends,
In the past five years we have also found, however, that if we unite our efforts and we take a united stand, we are capable of achieving feats which might appear beyond our reach. At the end of the day, we rescued a country on the verge of bankruptcy, fired up the economy’s engines, liberated hundreds of thousands of families from debt slavery, and rescued local governments from that same situation. In 2010 we sent the IMF packing and, in the spirit of fair taxation, we also made international corporations and banks pay taxes. At the same time one of Europe’s most modern constitutions enabled us to carry out the most extensive and most difficult structural and economic reforms. We protect families, and provide work instead of benefits. We stand up for Hungarian interests in Brussels, and have also regained our national sovereignty. We have fought our fights with the relish of men facing tough challenges – and thank you also, ladies, for your contribution.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
In the nineteen-nineties none of us would have thought that we would ever have the opportunities which we have now earned for ourselves. Today we have sufficient mandate – and therefore the strength – to realise the programme of a civic Hungary. It took twenty years of struggle, a Hungarian-style, victorious constitutional revolution, five years of fighting, the removal of the old rubble and the laying of the foundations. The task of the next three years will be to furnish the building of this civic Hungary in the way we jointly dreamt we would twenty-five years ago – or even earlier. This is by no means a task of less magnitude – though different in nature – than was the break with communism or the victory of the 2010 constitutional revolution. This, too, is primarily our responsibility; this job, too, has been left to us; this is the responsibility of the community that fought for the fall of communism, the responsibility of all of us who are here today and who have invested twenty-five years of our lives in that cause.
Thank you for your attention.