András Kádár is co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and a partner of CENDEP in its human rights research in recent years. Last year he contributed an article to the special feature of the Journal of Human Rights Practice on COVID-19 and human rights. Unfortunately, the long production schedules of academic publishing don't fit well with fast-moving events, so we invited András to bring his analysis of the pandemic response in Hungary up to date.
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In my opinion piece “In its Nature — How Stealth Authoritarianism Keeps Stealing Along During the Pandemic, and How Can it be Stopped?” written for the Journal of Human Rights Practice, I argued that illiberal regimes during large-scale crises including the COVID epidemic were like the fable’s scorpion that stings the frog carrying it through the river although that means death for both of them. Their illiberal nature determines their often self-destructive ways of dealing with crises. At times that call for unity, they opt for polarization. Instead of transparency, they monopolise information and restrict the freedom of expression. They use the crisis to further weaken checks and balances instead of reinforcing public trust by strengthening the executive’s oversight.
These traits can have tragic consequences. Effectively combating such a health care crisis requires cooperation and trust from society. Any democratic government can only expect this if it explains and is ready to discuss its strategy openly. The Hungarian example shows that this kind of openness is simply not in the nature of illiberal regimes, and the most recent developments highlight this deficiency’s potentially fatal consequences.
In the first wave, Hungary was hit much less hard by the virus than many traditional Western democracies. This is primarily attributable to the fact that the country was reached by the epidemic relatively late, at a stage when it was clear to everyone how devastating its effects could be, and there was not only popular support, but in fact, demand for strict measures. On 13 March, in his weekly Friday morning radio interview, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán firmly declared that schools would remain open, as the virus did not put children at risk. In the evening of the same day, he announced that as of the following Monday schools would be closed.
The ruling party surveys public opinion with astonishing frequency. It seems reasonable to conclude that the sudden change in Mr Orbán’s stance was caused by the incoming poll numbers reflecting the demand of a public scared by the news from Italy.
However, on the one hand, it is a rare occasion that popular demand regarding painful measures coincides with what experts find inevitable. On the other, a decision-making mechanism that works well when testing imaginary enemies and the planned measures to be taken against them, is much more likely to fail against real threats like the pandemic. Especially if the public is given limited or even distorted information. And this is exactly what happened in Hungary during the second wave.
Hungarian infection numbers started to rise quickly in late August. The government responded with closing the borders, although experts warned that the increase had internal causes, so lockdown measures should be introduced instead. In mid-September, Mr Orbán dismissed these warnings and said that since it was the people’s will that Hungary should remain functional, he would not consider measures that would paralyse the country.
When on 1 October a member of the government’s own virus-research group said that unless more serious restrictions were introduced, the spreading of the virus would accelerate and the country’s health care capacities would soon be exhausted, a government member accused him of “falsely scaring” the public, and stated that the infection numbers had been stabilised. On that day, the number of new infections was 1322, within about a month, it quadrupled.
It was observed that in many countries that successfully combatted the first wave of the epidemic, it was more difficult to convince the population about the need for restrictions in the second, in part exactly because they did not experience the difficulties that the countries hit harder by the virus went through. For that reason, publicly dismissing experts’ warnings, withholding statistical projections and basing protective measures on the “will” of the uninformed people led inevitably to a significant deterioration of the situation in Hungary.
On 10 November, the government finally introduced more serious restrictions, most probably because the number of COVID-deaths crossed the psychological limit of 100 per day, and public pressure started to rise again. When announcing the restrictions Mr Orbán said – just like the virologist ridiculed six weeks before – that if no changes had been made, there would have been a 50% chance for the health care system’s collapse. However, as it takes two to three weeks to break the curve, it was clear that the epidemic would further accelerate before the situation could improve again.
Along this process, the government’s communication about what constitutes success and its own responsibility in the fight against the epidemic changed significantly. In early September, with a three-day moving average of two deaths per day, the Prime Minister said that he measured the success of the protection efforts in human lives and compared the country proudly to Sweden, where ten times as many people had died. He claimed that the country was fully prepared, and everyone should rest assured: whoever got the virus would be cured. He emphasised in a radio interview that “all [epidemic-related] decisions must be made by the government, therefore the responsibility lies with the government, and most of all, myself. I […] own this responsibility, this is my job, […] this is what I am paid for.” On 14 December, when Hungary’s daily per capita COVID death rate was the second worst in Europe and the three-day moving average of daily deaths was 170, Mr Orbán claimed in Parliament that the government “had no responsibility whatsoever” for the COVID-related deaths. He also accused the opposition of hoping for worsening statistics for their own political gains.
This brings me back to my original claim that illiberal regimes simply cannot help approaching crises in certain ways. Polarization, inciting against the opposition is one of those. But we are witnessing new examples of the other characteristic strategies too. The government continues to withhold crucial information: e.g. the health care ministry banned hospitals and other data holders from providing information to the public regarding COVID-infections and deaths broken down by regions or health care institutions. It took months for Hungarian journalists to obtain information about the number of patients in intensive care, until in late November one government member gave a number, hoping that “he recalls it correctly”. The government also continued to use of the pandemic for pursuing its own political agenda. E.g. – quoting the need for all to make sacrifices – it halved the local tax to be paid by enterprises. The measure hit a serious hole in municipal budgets, which the government compensated with individual subsidy decisions in the case of several municipalities led by the ruling party, but left unaddressed for opposition-led local governments.
The inconsistent, quickly changing policies and statements, the withholding of crucial information, and the further polarization of an already divided society almost inevitably lead to decreasing trust in the government. An illustrative and potentially tragic consequence is people’s large-scale unwillingness to get vaccinated. According to a survey by the Central Office of Statistics published few days before Christmas, less than 15% of Hungarians said that they would certainly ask for the vaccine, while 28.3% said that they might decide to get vaccinated. This reflects a significant absence of trust in the government at a time when the epidemic’s disastrous economic and healthcare impacts are obvious.
And even with these high stakes, instead of seeking national political consensus to encourage vaccination, the government has launched an attack on the, in fact, pro-vaccination opposition by falsely claiming that a prominent think-tanker was encouraging opposition politicians to undermine confidence in vaccines and sacrifice citizens’ lives for political gain.
Creating yet another political chasm around the subject of vaccination is clearly not in the interest of the country and its people. But an illiberal regime simply cannot help it. So it is up to us, the critics of illiberalism to do so: we will have to look out for each other, acquire and impart reliable information, and call the regime to account for its failures that are shown in the limelight of the crisis more sharply than ever.
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