Fidesz
Article
Fidesz is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 04, 2021 and November 11, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “he and several of his college friends were elected to Parliament on the Fidesz ticket”; “During the next election, Fidesz did embarrassingly badly”; “The confirmed atheists of Fidesz”. It most often appears alongside Angela Merkel, Congress, Erdogan.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 04, 2021
- Last seen: November 11, 2021
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Angela Merkel (2 shared issues)
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- Congress (2 shared issues)
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- Erdogan (2 shared issues)
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- European Union (2 shared issues)
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- Hungary (2 shared issues)
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- Lyman Stone (2 shared issues)
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- Middle East (2 shared issues)
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- Modi (2 shared issues)
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- NYT (2 shared issues)
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- Orban (2 shared issues)
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- Russian (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Our story begins on March 30 1988, when young Viktor Orban founded an extra-curricular society at his college called The Alliance Of Young Democrats (Hungarian abbreviation: FiDeSz). Thirty-seven students met in a college common room and agreed to start a youth organization. Orban's two roommates were there, along with a couple of other guys they knew. Orban gave the pitch: the Soviet Union was crumbling. A potential post-Soviet Hungary would need fresh blood, new politicians who could navigate the democratic environment. They could get in on the ground floor.
He spoke about freedom, and democracy, and the popular will. He spoke against the older generation, and the need for a rupture with the crumbling traditions of the past. And also, he spoke against the Russian troops remaining in the country - the only speaker brave enough to say what everyone else was thinking. The voters liked what they heard: in Hungary's first free election, he and several of his college friends were elected to Parliament on the Fidesz ticket.
Separated from his pomp and platform, he was just a 27 year old kid without a lot of political experience. There was a glut of liberal democrats in Hungary - the country had just had a successful liberal democratic revolution - and Orban and Fidesz couldn't differentiate themselves from the rest of the market. Most liberal democrats wanted cosmopolitan intellectual types; Orban - despite his herculean efforts to lose the accent and develop some class - was still just a hick from Hicksville. During the next election, Fidesz did embarrassingly badly.
2) Why admire Orban? Here I think @slatestarcodex misses some important stuff, perhaps because his biographies miss it. Yes, Orban was incompetent in the 90s. So were MOST immediate post-Soviet leaders! And while Orban may have been corrupt, you can compare the personal wealth of the Fidesz clique to the cliques that looted Russia or Ukraine and realize that Hungary got a better class of corrupt leaders than much of eastern Europe. Moreover, Hungary actually had competitive elections with changes of power and leaders who *respected* those results! Maybe they were dirty but, like, it happened! This wasn't universally true!
Inline links: @slatestarcodex
Before we get there: I interpreted the paragraph Richard quotes as claiming that, if a teacher or doctor protests Fidesz or Orban in their spare time, as part of the normal exercise of their rights as a citizen, they can get fired or otherwise see their career suffer. That doesn’t seem to me like the government exercising control over the bureaucracy, that seems like a nightmarish escalation of the “cancel culture” that both Richard and I are against. In fact, this is an unusual but kind of compelling argument for directionally privatizing education and health care; if the government controls the hiring, promotion, and firing process for people in education and health care, that makes it harder for people in those fields to stand up to authoritarian regimes. But if you’ve got to have a government that controls major industries, and you want to leave room for democratic rights, you’ve got to have some kind of firewall between people’s off-the-clock activities and their government-sponsored careers.
Should probably plug here that Hungary has elections coming in 2022 in which all of the non-Fidesz parties have united into a single coalition, and are currently leading in the polls. Unclear how much that will matter given all the gerrymandering, but this is the most significant threat to Orban's power in a long time: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/hungary-anti-orban-alliance-leads-ruling-party-in-2022-election-poll