Today, Explained - Democracy Dies in Daylight

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

Democracies can fall many ways: military coups, assassinations, mass protests. But what does it look like when a democracy quietly backslides into autocracy? Vox’s Zack Beauchamp went on a trip to Hungary to explore (with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Johnny Harris, we're going to spend the week talking about the fact that you outfitted your whole family with Quip electric toothbrushes at getquip.com. Who should we start with? I mean, I think the person we should start with is my wife, Isabel, or Izzy, as we call her around here. She was kind of the impetus of this whole thing. I got back from Hong Kong all jet lagged. And in passing, I was unpacking. I was like, oh, I lost my quip. I should just order another one. And she goes, no, you're not going to order another one. Like you, you're not just going to indulge in your quip addiction without getting

the rest of us a quip as well. And you did. I did. We're used to hearing about democracies becoming autocracies. But it usually involves a military overthrow, maybe an assassination, a citizen uprising. But what about when it happens slowly, over time? That process is called democratic backsliding. Zach Beecham has been reporting on democratic backsliding for Vox, and he just got back from Hungary, which is sort of ground zero for the process. In Hungary, you really need to go back to right around the end of the Cold War. Hungary was obviously a communist country, and its current leader, Viktor Orban, that's prime minister, who was duly elected,

was back then a youth activist in the anti-communist movement. He got famous for giving a really rousing speech actually at the anniversary of the 1956 uprising against communism by Hungarians. Don't let your heads fall before your memories. Calm down. And Orbán built up this big reputation as one of the important political players

all before he was 30 years old. His movement, which initially started out as a kind of middle-of-the-road liberal thing, shifted to the right. And he began to exert profound amounts of control over the way that the party operated. Viktor Orban was our life and death boss in Fidesz for decades. In Budapest, I talked with a Hungarian legislator. Her name is Susanna Selenyi. She was in Fidesz, which is the name of Orban's party, but quit in 1994.

Basically, I left Fidesz in 1994 because I thought Orban has so much power by that time, which I just couldn't live with together with, you know? He was not only moving the party to the right, but displaying early signs of an authoritarian temperament in the way that he ran it. I didn't want in 1994 of activist to conservative leader? Yeah, the dominant party in Hungary, right after communism, was a social democratic center-left party. There were other parties, but there was no mainstream conservative party.

Orban thought that the best way for Fidesz to differentiate itself from the other post-communist parties was to develop a conservative identity. He is, according to basically everybody, a political opportunist par excellence. One of his biographers, in fact, a former Fidesz member, said that something like, and I'm paraphrasing, Victor Orban's greatest talent is being able to persuade himself of the absolute rightness of whatever is good for him at this particular political moment. And that's what happened with Fidesz early on. It started to become a mainstream conservative party. And it won an election in 1998. And so Orban, at the age of 35, was the leader of Hungary. But that term only lasted until 2002, where they were voted out of power. And Orban's lessons from this were interesting, according to the people that knew him and were talking to him at the time. They weren't, you know, this is the way democracy works. They weren't, you know, I screwed up. His reaction was, we lost because the competition was too fair.

He didn't think it that way. He didn't say it that way. But his view was basically that Fidesz couldn't get its message out well enough. And that was because they didn't control the media and the levers of government. And so he spent the next few years with some allies building up not only an independent media architecture that was slavish to the pro-Fides line, but also a plan. A plan for what they would do if they took power again, how they would change the Hungarian government, such that it would be very difficult for Fides to ever lose again. In 2009, he gave a speech that's now quite famous, in which he said they

wanted to build up a gravitational political center in Hungary that would be in power for 15 to 20 years. We're talking extended one-party rule. And that's what he was saying even before 2010. The second Orban term begins in 2010. So he's out of power eight years. That's right. But he comes back with this absolutely massive majority, in part because of corruption scandals afflicting the socialists, and in part because incumbent parties all did really badly around 2010 because of the Great Recession. And while Fidesz didn't campaign as an authoritarian party, after Orban took power, it was this incredible fast burst that started to change the way that Hungarian politics operated.

So what did he and Fidesz do once they got back into power? So there were basically three prongs to the Fidesz offensive on Hungarian democracy. The first one is changing the rules of the game. In the first two years alone, they rewrote the Constitution. And they rewrote it in ways that would give Fidesz distinct advantages. One of them was a pretty extreme form of gerrymandering. This made it such that it was possible for Fidesz to win two-thirds of the parliamentary seats with less than 50% of the national vote. They expanded the size of the constitutional court that reviewed their decisions

so they could appoint cronies to it. They set a maximum age limit for judges at age 62, the idea being you force people to retire, and then you can appoint your people and there'll be less scrutiny. Okay, so the first thing Orban and his party, Fidesz, do is rewrite the constitution. They start to take control of the judiciary. What's the second thing? The second is seizing control over the media.

When you're in charge of the government, you can put a lot of pressure on media organizations to sell. In a country like Hungary, public advertising is a big source of media revenue. They would withhold ads from government-critical publications and give them disproportionately to government-friendly ones. By 2017, one Hungarian scholar estimates, 90% of all media was either owned by the government or owned by somebody who was government-friendly. Okay, number two, take control of the media. What's next? The third one is a kind of crony capitalism.

Crony capitalism. Yeah, this is a really interesting one because like obviously the point of corruption is to make yourself rich, right? But that's not actually the strategic purpose of corruption in Hungary. The strategic point is that if you're concerned about somebody bankrolling the opposition or you're concerned about somebody starting up a new mediaentatiously punish people who cross the government by cutting off government aid, by refusing to give them fair bids on EU contracts, by sending auditors after them, harassing them with weeks or months of intensive and paralyzing bookkeeping to the point where it was very clear that you couldn't do well in business if you crossed the government. And Orban and his friends got super rich. And so it's a brilliantly designed system, right?

You rig the elections such that in a fair fight, the opposition has no chance. You make sure that there's no independent media that could make the opposition stronger and allow it to potentially overcome the unfair advantages that you built into the electoral system. And then you crush independent economic power so no one could start a new opposition party or any kind of new media outlets. It's this whole system that seems democratic if you look at it from the outside, but isn't. Democratic backsliding isn't just a thing that's happening in Hungary. It's contagious. That's next on Today Explained.

Okay, so which quip did you get for Izzy? I got Izzy a light silver chrome quip. Which is like top of the line quip, right? Yeah, I figured I needed to redeem myself here with my actions. The cool thing about the quip is that you can get family package. This is at getquip.com slash explain. Yep. You can poke around and you can see the family package and it comes with two plastic and two chrome. It's like, could it be any more perfect for the family? Plastic for the kids, chrome for the adults.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she was pleasantly surprised when it arrived. She liked it. Yeah. And it made up for the whole not having a quip for a while. All was redeemed, especially because in the family pack, there comes a large tube of toothpaste and three small travel tubes.

And she's a travel filmmaker as well. And so that just, that was the cherry on top. Wow. Zach, I mean, we've established that Hungary is basically in this sort of semi-totalitarian state, but what did being there feel like? What was it like in Budapest? Budapest is an awesome city. It's beautiful. There's this stunning classical architecture, a giant parliament building that

feels like a monument to democracy, a temple to democracy almost. It's a world-class city. It is consistently ranked as one of the top party cities in Europe. When I was there, I kept running into like big clumps of like college or 20s age people come over from other European countries to have a good time. They have this unique ruin pub scene. What is a ruin bar? Ruin bars are old buildings turned into bars

without any major renovation. Eat your heart out, Brooklyn. Yeah, you know, it's arty. It's fun. It's a great place to visit because you can just basically ignore the politics and move on. It's not obvious. Like, I was recently in the UAE, and, like, it's a great place to visit because you can just basically ignore the politics and move on. It's not obvious. Like I was recently in the UAE and like it's obvious that that's an authoritarian

country. So what's life like for people who aren't going to ruin bars? For ordinary people, it is not that different. But if you are in a sphere of work that involves politics tangentially or directly, you really feel the pull of Fidesz and the Orban government. There's one story, I can't tell you his name or the field that he works in, but he's a businessman who was doing really well and was happy with his work. And then one day he got a call from some random government official, had nothing to do with the sphere in which he was working. And the guy was like, I hear your company is for sale. In his head, he thought, no, no, it's not.

We weren't advertising or anything. We didn't have any plans to sell. But he has to take a meeting with a government official saying something like that. And the guy comes over and says, you know, I'm going to orchestrate a purchase for your company. He laughably claims it's from some wealthy, independent Middle Eastern buyer, which is obviously not true. And so then he realizes what's going to happen. If they didn't sell, they were going to be frozen out of the markets they needed. They wouldn't be able to get investment.

They wouldn't be able to get access to any EU funding because the government would block their capital. So he had to sell the government. And now he told me he's leaving the country. He said it's, this place is shutting down and he wants to go to a real European country where his kids aren't trapped by a government that represses them and controls their own destiny. If there's no one to criticize Orban and Fidesz from inside the country in any meaningful way, are there voices from outside, like the European Union have an opinion? The EU has been wishy-washy on Hungary. You know, they've voiced concerns about things that are going on. No, Mr. Orban, you have not the right to say that these people here are fighting against the Hungarian interest. It's the opposite. It's true. It's not your

interest, but your interest is not the Hungarian interest. What we are defending here is Hungarian democracy. But one thing that's interesting about the European parliament, the EU legislative body, is that they have blocks. They're kind of like super parties. You know, representatives from each national party of a certain kind is in this EU-wide super party. So all the social democratic parties are in one block. All the conservative parties, the mainstream ones, are in the EPP, as it's called, the European People's Party. And some of the factions in the EPP are like, we can't keep Fidesz in here. They're authoritarians. They're destroying democracy in their country. We have to kick them out.

But they can't mobilize enough support to do it. Because they've got friends. Yeah. They have friends and they're seen as leaders on the immigration issue, which is the principal way that Orban has gotten support. Right. I saw that Orban couches it all as what protecting Europe from the immigration wave that's waiting at its doorstep, right? That's right.

He calls it an invasion and he talks about the threat to Christian values. It's important to understand what that means. It is understood in civilizational terms, right? It is what Europeans, meaning white people, have done. A Fidesz MP and longtime Orban ally named Janusz Lazar, he went to Vienna. You know, it's a three-hour train ride from Budapest. And he went around the capital and he filmed all these different immigrants, mostly Muslims, but some Sikhs too, some Africans, walking around, and he talks about how dirty they made the streets and how dangerous they made the streets of Vienna

and how we need to do everything to keep them out of Hungary or they will destroy Budapest the way that they've destroyed Vienna. And these people aren't doing anything. They're just walking around. They're not, like, littering or beating people up. He's just implying, not implying, he's just implying not implying he's straight up saying the very presence of non-white people makes a city more dangerous and more dirty and that is the way that Fidesz has built up an independent popular base why so many people in Hungary like them they have figured out a way to

combine rigging the system with an ideology that resonates with a lot of conservative Hungarians. Have you ever read The Sun Also Rises? Yeah, I'm not a Hemingway fan. There's this really funny line where one character asks another, how did you go bankrupt? And the character says, slowly first, and then all at once. And I wonder, is that how Hungary's democracy is disappearing? I feel like we're used to seeing democracies overturned in a day by the military or something, but this is just this slow, creeping, insidious, oh, whoops, we're not a democracy anymore.

Yeah. Oopsie. No, that's right. Have you heard of this idea in philosophy called the ship of Theseus? Yeah, yeah. Remind me. Okay. So it's this neat thought experiment

which is mostly academic but it's it's from a greek myth basically if you take a ship and you take out one wood beam obviously it's the same ship right but how many wood beams do you have to take out before it's a different ship yeah but each time one individual beam shouldn't make the difference it's just a beam right but but when under how many different times because if you replace all the beams it's a totally new Yeah, this reminds me of one of my favorite onion headlines, which is, how bad would the environment can throwing away one plastic bottle be? Like 30 million people

wonder. Exactly. Exactly. So Hungary is like that, only it's democracy. You take out one little thing that is important to how a democracy functions, and you're still a democracy. You've got problems. Every democracy has problems. You take out another thing. Oh, okay. Every democracy has multiple problems. After a certain point, you're not a democracy anymore. But no one can say exactly

for sure when that happened. And that's exactly the point, right? Orban needs to be able to say, oh, we're still a democracy. Look, we have elections. We're still a democracy. Look, we have opposition parties. And not be as embarrassingly blatant about that being a lie as when Russia does it. Nobody's under the illusion that Russia is actually a democracy. But in Hungary, when you talk to Fidesz supporters, they're convinced that this was, you know, the last election was fair. I mean, you mentioned Russia. Russia is an obvious comparison here. But we've seen democracies crumble before. What about what's happening in Hungary feels new to you? The thing about Hungary that I find so fascinating and chilling is that it is an example of how a democracy can die in a country where people are still Democrats.

Poll after poll of Hungarians shows really strong support for democratic values they want to have free elections they want to have a free press they want to be free and the government's whole thing depends on a large portion of the population buying the myth that this is still a democratic system so this is not a crazy scenario in other Western countries you can think of too, right? There's all of this panic about weakening democracy and the rise of populism in Western countries, but nobody believes there's going to be a military coup in France. It's just not plausible. So how could these people be a threat to democracy? Well, Fidesz. Fidesz shows how modern right-wing movements corrupt democracy

without formally overturning it, and slowly, over the course of time, replace it with a system that looks like democracy, but doesn't function like it, to the point where their supporters can still be lackadaisical and think everything is fine, and people sounding the alarm, well, they just get marginalized. It's so much more clever, so much more subtle, and in that way, so much more scary. Zach Beecham is the host of the worldly podcast at Vox. He went to Hungary on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on crisis reporting. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.

Now you've resolved it sounds like you've resolved oh yeah the domestic strife never been better with our cheat brushing great and you're about to resolve your hong kong trip by posting the last borders video today right finally publishing the fifth episode about the strange housing situation in hong k People in Hong Kong are living in houses that are not much bigger than a coffin. Wow. So that video, what, youtube.com slash vox? Yeah. Is there a better website?

I think youtube.com slash vox, or if you just Google vox borders Hong Kong, you'll see it. And getquip.com slash explain for the toothbrushes. Totally. And that too. One last thing before we go, a recommendation. Check out the Reveal podcast if you haven't yet.

It's one of my favorites. It's got some of the best investigative work you'll ever hear on a podcast. One of my favorite episodes dropped back in the summer of 2016 before the election. It was called Pumped on Trump. And one unforgettable segment featured a Sri Lankan-American reporter hanging out with a Trump-supporting motorcycle gang. And the

gang was very confused about the reporter's origins, but they all talked it out. Find the Reveal podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and find out more about the show at revealnews.org.