It’s Friday night, and I have better things to do than to push back against Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column from Hungary, about the upcoming election. But what am I here in Budapest for if not for this reader service?

First, this stupid headline, which discredits the entire column:

A western European I met this spring in Budapest told me that his friends back home think that he risks being beat up by jackbooted thugs every time he goes out on the street. We laughed at how dumb people are back home, believing the media hype. Last week, an Alabama friend and his little boy came to visit for a few days. They didn’t have a political prejudice about Hungary, but they simply remarked about how wonderfully safe they felt everywhere we went in this city — this, by comparison to many American cities. The murder rate in many US cities is skyrocketing. Who lives in the “free world,” then?

Second, by what measure is Hungary not in the “free world”? Speech is free here (unless you want to talk to Hungarian children in school or on TV about how those penises of theirs might really be girl-penises — yep, you can’t do that here). The media is free to say whatever it wants — and it does, on both sides. There is not the slightest hint of a police state, or any of the other markers of Communism (the term “The Free World” was invented during the Cold War to describe the West). The idea that Hungarians are in shackles is typical progressive crackpottery. Seriously, come here and see for yourself.

I looked just now for video from the MCC Feszt in Esztergom from last summer. The anti-Orban liberal Peter Kreko and I appeared onstage for a dialogue before an audience. I wanted to find a clip to quote it on video here, but I couldn’t locate it. Anyway, Peter and I disagreed about a lot, but at the beginning of our session, Peter told the crowd that he has lots of complaints about the way Viktor Orban runs the country, but people should stop saying that Hungary is a “fascist” country. It’s not. It’s not even close. Goldberg interviews Kreko for her piece. Again, he’s one of the country’s leading Orban critics, but I wish journalists like Goldberg would listen to him.

Here’s the first graf of Goldberg’s piece:

On Tuesday, the day that the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled to Kyiv to show solidarity with a besieged Ukraine, Viktor Orban, the prime minister of nearby Hungary, trumpeted his neutrality at a sprawling rally in Budapest.

You’d think that he cared more about holding a campaign rally than Ukraine. What Goldberg doesn’t tell you, which she might not understand, is that Tuesday was a big national holiday in Hungary, and this rally, which gathered hundreds of thousands of people outside the Parliament, had been scheduled for a very long time. But then again, Viktor Orban does find it more important to show solidarity with his own countrymen and their interests, not those of foreigners.

Goldberg:

State-aligned media — which, in Hungary, is almost all media — had been blasting out Kremlin talking points for weeks, and it was easy to find people in the crowd who echoed them.

Again, a lie. In terms of overall audience, Hungary’s liberal opposition media are bigger than the pro-Fidesz media. If nine newspapers in the NYC boroughs and suburban counties were conservative, as the New York Times is liberal, you could claim that “almost all the New York City area media are conservative,” and be technically correct, but still wrong. A useful though admittedly rough comparison in the US is when conservatives complain that the American media are overwhelmingly liberal, and liberals say, “Hang on, you have Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.” As if those were any kind of balance!

Goldberg:

I’d met the opposition candidate for prime minister, Peter Marki-Zay, the mayor of the southern Hungarian town of Hodmezovasarhely, the day before, as he worked on his speech. One of his central points, he said, was that Hungary must decide between two worlds: Vladimir Putin’s Russia or the liberal West. “Putin and Orban belong to this autocratic, repressive, poor and corrupt world,” Marki-Zay told me. “And we have to choose Europe, West, NATO, democracy, rule of law, freedom of the press, a very different world. The free world.”

Well done, Marki-Zay! He played the visiting Times journalist like a fiddle. He certainly knows that Orban’s Hungary is not remotely in the same category as Putin’s Russia. Orban supports the EU and NATO. In what sense does he not support the rule of law? The press is certainly free here. Democracy? If Orban loses, he’s going to do what he did the last time he lost an election: go home. And so forth. But Marki-Zay knows what Michelle Goldberg was looking for.

Marki-Zay is right that he and Orban stand for substantively different visions for Hungary. I understand why liberal Hungarians would prefer Marki-Zay to Orban. But the idea that Hungary under Orban is an autocratic hellhole is ridiculous. If that were so, why has the man been in power for twelve years? And why, after twelve years, is he favored to win on April 3? Unless most Magyars are idiots who don’t know what’s good for them — and it would not surprise me if a liberal New York Times columnist thought so (“What’s the matter with Hungary?”) — something is not adding up in Goldberg’s column.

Goldberg:

Just as Israelis from across the political spectrum united to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarians of many different ideological persuasions are working together to defeat Orban, a hero to many American conservatives for his relentless culture-warring.

The Marki-Zay coalition includes the Jobbik party, which formally joined the anti-Orban coalition last December. Jobbik was, until recently, an openly anti-Semitic party. From the Times of Israel in 2012:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban condemned a Jobbik lawmaker’s call to create a list of Jewish politicians a day after thousands demonstrated in Budapest to protest the anti-Semitism of the far-right party.

“Last week sentences were uttered in parliament which are unworthy of Hungary,” Orban said during a parliament session on Monday. “I rejected this call on behalf of the government and I would like you to know that as long as I am standing in this place, no one in Hungary can be hurt or discriminated against because of their faith, conviction or ancestry.”

Orban’s denunciation and Sunday’s demonstration by an estimated 10,000 protesters came in the wake of a call last week by Marton Gyongyosi to create a registry of Hungarian lawmakers and members of the Hungarian cabinet of Jewish origin. Gyongyosi spoke during a Nov. 26 parliamentary debate on Israel’s military operations against escalated terrorist bombings from the Gaza Strip.

But in the past few years, Jobbik has tried to moderate its image. In 2020, Jobbik elected a new leader, a Catholic whose grandmother was Jewish. And yet, old habits die hard. Earlier this year, video emerged of one of Jobbik’s parliamentarians doing a Nazi salute and laughing about it. 

You would think that the fact that Marki-Zay is in a formal coalition with this party — which is not a fringe party at all, but the third-largest in the Hungarian parliament — would be of interest to a Jewish columnist for The New York Times. But I guess not; defeating Viktor Orban is more important.

More Goldberg:

Marki-Zay, who lived in Indiana from 2006 to 2009, often sounds like an old-school Republican. He favors lower taxes and a decentralized government. “We want to give opportunity and not welfare checks to people,” he told me.

He believes in Catholic teachings on gay marriage, abortion and divorce but doesn’t think they should be law. “We cannot force our views on the rest of the society,” he said. “One big difference between Western societies and certain Islamist states is that in Western society, church doesn’t rule everyday life.” Some on the left might blanch at the gratuitous invocation of Islam, but part of Marki-Zay’s skill is using conservative language to make case for liberalism.

Marki-Zay is a Personally Opposed, But kind of guy. He has said that if elected, he will introduce a bill to legalize same-sex marriage (Hungary now has domestic partnerships for same-sex couples), and overturn Hungary’s anti-LGBT media law — which is up for a national referendum on Election Day next month, and is expected to pass overwhelmingly. He also promised to overturn the constitution and start from scratch. 

One thing you learn from being here talking to Hungarians is that their economic lives have improved significantly under twelve years of Fidesz rule. Even people who are fed up with Orban and his high toleration for financial corruption say they are grateful to him for stability, prosperity, and for defending Hungarian sovereignty. Over and over I have had conversations with people who are sick of Orban and ready for a change, but unwilling to take a chance on an unproven amateur like Marki-Zay. Goldberg talked about his “skill” at using language to make a case for liberalism, but this completely ignores one of the biggest stories of his campaign: that it has been filled with gaffes (e.g., publicly accusing Orban’s son, a soldier and Christian pastor who stays out of public life, of being a closet case, and telling his supporters not to worry, that Covid would take care of lots of Fidesz supporters — implying that being old, they would all get sick and die). When I arrived back in Budapest in early February, I was shocked to see all my old conservative friends who had been downcast when I left at summer’s end last year, all happy, even ebullient. They had all feared Fidesz would lose, but Marki-Zay had been such a lousy candidate, tripping over his own tongue constantly, that Fidesz was riding high in the polls. Turns out that as mayor, Marki-Zay was fined multiple times for saying libelous things. He is not a cautious man.

Some of the anti-Orban crowd hoped that Marki-Zay’s gaffes would redound to his benefit, as Donald Trump’s did, by making him seem more authentic. It hasn’t happened. This is a different electorate, and now that there’s a war next door, they are even less eager to take a risk.

Goldberg:

The opposition has had to contend with a near blackout in the mainstream media…

How is that possible, given that the most popular news outlets in Hungary are aligned with the anti-Orban opposition?

Goldberg:

Even if Orban wins another term, Peter Kreko, the director of the Political Capital Institute, a Budapest-based think tank, thinks Orban’s dream of creating a right-wing nationalist bloc in Europe is dead. The war in Ukraine has driven a wedge between him and the nationalist government in Poland, which favors an aggressive response to Russia.

He might be right about that. It’s true that the Poles want a far more aggressive response to Russia than the Hungarians do, but if the war ends without a lot more destruction — if — then things will revert back to normal. The real problem with the nationalist bloc in Europe dream is that as Orban has said in the recent past, until and unless a nationalist-populist government takes power in one of the major western EU countries (e.g., France, Spain, Italy), nothing will come of it. I’m told that Macron is a shoo-in now for re-election in France. I don’t know about Spain and Italy, but Matteo Salvini’s political career in Italy, already in trouble before the war, will almost certainly collapse after his years of identifying openly with Putin.

Anyway, read the entire Goldberg column if you like. You know that I’m pro-Orban, so take what I say above in that light. I’m just trying to help you understand where this Times column goes seriously wrong in its analysis. The idea that Hungary is not free is simply lunacy, a claim that says more about the liberal imagination than actual conditions on the ground in Hungary. Do you really think that a people that lived for forty years under Communism, and who have had free elections since Communism’s end, would choose to live under bondage? You’d have to, if you accept Goldberg’s claim (which, to be fair, she got from Marki-Zay, who at least knows how to tell liberal Western reporters what they want to hear).

There are good reasons to vote against Viktor Orban and his party, but they barely come up at all in Goldberg’s column. I imagine that readers of the Times who think they’re getting an accurate take on the situation here in Hungary are going to be shocked when Orban goes back in on April 3. Ask yourself: if things are as dire in Hungary as Marki-Zay and Goldberg say, why is it that three weeks away from the election, this is what the polls look like:

When is the Times going to run an analysis on how Viktor Orban, after a dozen years in power, is on the verge of winning four more? What could he possibly be doing right, and why is the opposition so hapless? Are those even thoughts that Times columnists allow themselves to have? We are so cut off in the US from the way many others in the world think.  The whole reason I suggested last summer to Tucker Carlson that he come to Hungary and take a look is because I was here for maybe two weeks when I realized how different this country is from the way our media portray it.

At the Rudas Baths this morning, I spoke to a Hungarian who lived for years in America, and he said to me, “You hear Americans ask all the time, ‘Why do they hate us?’, but the way they ask it is not really wanting to know, but more like trying to figure out what’s wrong with foreigners for not thinking like Americans.”

By the way, for more commentary on Hungary’s election, check out the new piece by my TAC colleague Bradley Devlin.

UPDATE: Think of it this way: Hungary is no more “unfree” than Ukraine is, as Putin claims, a “Nazi” state. These are lies told not to promote thinking, but to short-circuit it. As I said, there are good reasons to oppose the Orban government and want a change, but you will barely find them in the Goldberg column.

The post Earth To NYTimes: Hungary Is Not A Slave State appeared first on The American Conservative.