“Netanyahu is staying here.” My friend said as we walked past the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace in Budapest that evening. A shiver of incredulity ran through me. Not incredulity at what my friend had just said — I knew that the Israeli prime minister had arrived in the Hungarian capital that day in early April — but a stranger kind of disbelief at the very existence of this man more responsible than anyone else for the death of over 50,000 people, including over 15,000 children, in the Middle East in the last year and a half. That such a man can really exist beyond disembodied bytes of news and is probably relaxing in a hotel I’m walking past at that very moment — somehow it felt unbelievable. But there was no other choice. In that act of acceptance, my heart turned corpse-cold.
Not that it mattered what you believed, or did not: that State visit which was to interrupt traffic flow across the city over the next few days, or Hungary’s strategically timed decision to pull out of the International Criminal Court that had declared Netanyahu a war criminal in several countries of the European Union. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, who had emphatically declared his nation to be an “illiberal democracy”, is an old friend of the Israeli politician. Of their many alliances, one of the most striking is their shared strategy of winning elections through aggressive smear campaigns designed by the American spin doctors, Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, who called this strategy “rejectionist voting”. They were contracted for the first time in 1995 by Netanyahu, then a young, conservative, Likud candidate, to win against the likely winner, the social democrat, Shimon Peres. Finkelstein and Birnbaum ran Netanyahu’s campaign on the wildly fabricated claim that Peres intended to give half of Jerusalem to the Palestinians which eventually won Netanyahu the 1996 election with more than 50% of the vote, initiating his spectacular political rise. After Finkelstein and Birnbaum had helped Bulgarian and Romanian politicians win elections with similar strategies of ‘rejectionist voting’, Netanyahu introduced them to the young and ambitious Viktor Orbán who was feeling particularly aggressive after losing the Hungarian election in 2002. The spin doctors’ strategy proved triumphant and Orbán won the 2010 elections comfortably. But very soon, his smear campaign needed the perfect face to vilify, fanning hatred against whom would seal the right-wing politician’s continued victory. And they found it in someone whom they could portray as a Jewish financier with the secret agenda to weaken and dominate Hungary.
This was the face that made my own sense of shock at the intensity of the Netanyahu-Orbán solidarity inevitable, even though that’s scarcely how I thought of it at that time. It belonged to the Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist, George Soros, the founder and chief patron of the Central European University. And this was the university chased out of Hungary by the Orbán government, barring a few affiliated institutes that remained in Budapest in sad desolation. One of these was the Institute of Advanced Study that has brought me to Hungary as a Fellow. Once considered the country’s most prestigious graduate school that trained presidents, diplomats and several members of the government, the Central European University quickly became the leading ‘anti-national’ university for the illiberal regime. Having lived for several years a short walk away from the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the quick transformation of the most prestigious to the most ‘anti-national’ hit me a bit too close to home.
Soros helped set up the Central European University in an attempt to address the eroded state of higher education in Hungary following the communist regime. The university rose to prominence quickly, and Orbán himself benefited from Soros’s patronage during the days he called himself a liberal. But Orbán’s disavowal of liberalism and the great popular support for his illiberalism are symptomatic of the fall of the liberal elite around the globe. In Europe, Hungary’s leaders set an early model for illiberal democracy; they had years to take it to a place of extreme, discriminatory nationalism before such nationalism started to make inroads into western Europe. The stamp of this regime on the nation’s universities has been devastating. Free in the past, they now charge fees that exceed the reach of most Hungarians struggling in a depressed economy. The country had the highest level of university enrolment in post-communist Europe. Now it has one of the lowest.
Illiberal Hungary’s ongoing evisceration of institutions will resonate with Indians who have paid attention to the relentless political onslaught on universities by parties of different stripes around them. While Orbán’s early attack on gender and sexuality studies (including the close associations his party has drawn between homosexuality and pedophilia) seemed to anticipate Donald Trump’s attack on the same, the Hungarian leader’s 2021 transfer of the control of State universities to quasi-public foundations run by his close allies recalls the oligarchy of communist dictators. But Orbán, as The Atlantic writer, Franklin Foer, put it, “is a state-of-the-art autocrat” who replaces “the truncheon or the midnight knock on the door” to assaults that arrive “in the guise of legalisms subverting the institutions that might challenge his authority”.
Positioned in the heart of Europe, the reactionary regime in Hungary has combined blatant authoritarianism of the communist East with the more nuanced legalistic techniques of the capitalist West. Trained in law himself, Orbán went fatally for the Achilles heel of the Central European University — that it was an American university, accredited in New York, operating on foreign soil. Amendments to the country’s higher education law quickly created requirements by nature of a bilateral agreement between governments that was impossible for the university to meet. Illiberal regimes in India that unleash goons on campus or break open curricula in blatant dictatorial moves may pick up a whitewashing trick or two from what its former rector, the Canadian intellectual, Michael Grant Ignatieff, called “an absolute masterpiece of this style of legal mugging”. Perhaps this is how the corruption of power works in the West — through the suffocating production of legal and ideological legitimacy. Maybe we are still better off with the blatancy of political malpractice on university campuses in India. At least no one with a real conscience has any delusion about what is really going on.
Saikat Majumdar is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest
