Orbán and Sneaky Tyrannies

This is a history about how Viktor Orbán established his tyranny over Hungary.

Legal disclaimer : this text may contain factual mistakes, it may be biased, it is only how the author sees the story.

First of all you should understand what tyranny really is to understand sneaky tyrannies, like the one of Orbán. Publicly Orbán strongly alleges that they are democrats, even now in 2020.

Orban started to build his tyranny in the 90s. 2 main steps happened then. 1 : He corrupted some money ["székház botrány"] to establish a private wealth background around himself personally. 2 : He strengthened his power inside his party. Since then we see that his people are very disciplined, there is practically no criticism against Orbán inside his party and lawmakers and officials delegated by his party follow central policies like soldiers obey orders, it seems to me as if they were taking part in an obedience race.

Orban's take over the state happened with the 2010 general elections, after the previous ruling party [MSZP] ruined Hungary with shocialism. Orbán became very popular simply by letting MSZP ruin their own popularity and positioning himself as the central opposition of MSZP. The other sin that MSZP and the other parties committed is to not change the constitution to defend against tyranny. MSZP literally [though probably not intentionally] prepared the country for a tyrannical take-over.

One of the problems in the constitution was that the general election system improportionally favours the winner. The more popular parties win proportionally more mandates in the parliament. In 2010 54% of the voters supported Orbán, but due to the improportionality : this gave him > 2/3 of the seats in the parliament. > 2/3 has the power to change the constitution. Since then Orbán has constitutional power, which is literally full power. Yes, since 2010. He can rewrite the constitution to literally tyranny, with his concrete name inscribed as god of all hungarians. Any time when he feels fit. The only obstacle of this is that he knows that the general people [even many of his own supporters] would revolt.

Before the 2010 election Orbán personally publicly promised that he will not change the constitution substantially, but that was a lie. Already in 2011 he increased the improportionality in the general election system. Without that he would have lost power already in 2014 when he got the votes of 45% of the voters. The rest of the voters were strictly against him. Despite being rejected by the voters : due to the improportionality : he got > 2/3 of the seats in the parliament, yes : with 45% of the votes. This was repeated in 2018 with the support of the 49% of the voters. This is important to repeat : in a proportional election system Orbán would have lost power already after 4 years of ruling. But improportionality enables one to rule with full !!! power even while being rejected by the majority of the voters.

One tool in this is to divide the opposition parties. Mainly the bigger ones. Orbán established a system in which new parties are encouraged to form by large state financial aid. This caused fake political parties to form and take some votes from the opposition. Orbán managed to put his feet inside the big opposition parties. We see opposition politicians to accuse each other of being Orbán's man, even inside parties. We see opposition politicians to allege opposition of Orbán while acting in favour of him.

Orbán managed to achieve that the biggest opposition parties split to 2 parts or suffer big financial hits. With the opposition parties being small Orbán manages to have the opposition fractioned, which greatly decreases the ability of the opposition in the improportionate election system.

Orbán after becoming prime minister kept its party leader role, concentrating law making and executive power.

Orbán understood that key to power is media. He immediately established authority to regulate the media. Though interestingly he did not yet use this tool in practice, it is just in the bag, with some chilling effect perhaps. But he increased the state media by 2*. Now the state media occupies very large portion of the media in the country and it is hugely biased towards Orbán.

To take over the private media Orbán introduced significant extra taxation of the general media and increased state advertising in the loyal media. Really much and overpriced state advertising flows into the loyal media. This is beside financially powerful cronies buying up the private media. Also much political advertisement of Orbán are labelled as "government information" and simply officially paid by the state.

The internet remains a relatively free place of political opinion. Orbán understands this.

He wanted to slow the spread of the internet by introducing an internet tax. Fortunately mass protest happened and he quickly dropped this plan.

There was also plan to introduce power for the government to announce special emergency and during that time the government could take over the internet. Regulations are planned on big IT content distributors [Facebook, Google]. Orban was one of the most determined supporter of the EU law regulating speech on the internet for copyright protection [mandatory filtering, link tax]. It was also planned to force internet companies to maintain log about their users, their usage and provide it to the government. These tools were never used yet.

Organizing street protest is practically forbidden by requiring the organizer to take personal financial responsibility for whatever human or material harm vandals may cause during the protest. This tool was not yet used.

Private persons can not initiate referendums in constitutional or financial issues [in important issues].

Orbán wants to take power over the courts. The main plan was a law establishing a special court for affairs with the state, by the government having selection and financial influence over its judges. Any legal dispute with the state [election fairness, abuse of authority, ...] the decision makers would be the appointees of Orbán. This plan got delayed because of some opposition from the EU.


One of the pillars of Orbán is his power of the private business sector. He introduced negotiations with individual firms about special benefits, he applies harsh extra taxing and regulation on specific industries. Legislations were introduce to establish monopolies of business, given by the government, in certain sectors. These establish a huge power over private business. Orbán decides who gets rich or broke. This introduces chilling effect against advertising in opposition media, supporting opposition parties. Public money flows into cronies. One of the friends of Orbán became the richest person in Hungary from zero in 6 years, by making deals with the state. That is just the most visible story. Information about state expanses are being classified as secret or just not provided to the journalists. The state supports private foundations by its own judgment, by huge amount of money, without the gifted ones even having to publish what it was spent on.

Non government organizations and political parties got stricter regulations about where they can get money from and how much. The opposition is being strangled financially.

I could continue for long.
I finish with important notes :

Even if more than half of the hungarians wants to get rid of Orbán : it is already impossible. The trap of the tyranny is the chicken-egg problem that it can not be get rid off without first getting rid of it. That is why preventing of tyrannies is important. But even if it happened : the opposition are not angels either. One of the opposition parties [Jobbik [they were the biggest opposition party before Orbán cracked them]] supported some of the tyrannical laws of Orbán even from opposition, even while already publicly labelling Orbán as tyrant. One of the big parties [the former ruling MSZP] also knowingly kept the country in a state voulnarable for tyranny. And the whole opposition currently do not state that they want to get rid of the tyrannical tools, they only want to kick Orbán out of the tyrannical thrown but they do not seem to see that thrown as a problem, as a danger, they do not seem to want to destruct it.

The story of Orbán is not specific to Hungary. Not even to just some states, like Russia. But it is also present in most western countries, they also are going in the same direction. For example Great Britain's election system is very improportionate, and have big state media. Germany and Spain introduced link taxing, France and USA can deny access to internet by individuals, France have been in terrorism emergency state for years, EU as a whole introduced significant speech freedom restrictions for copyright, personnel data protection, the ban of full encryption is constant topic in the USA, and so on and on and on, USA, Germany, Estonia and many other countries were using election systems without any guarantees against cheating [voting via computers or paper mail]. People everywhere make the mistake of not valuing freedom and giving more power to the state. The pillars of tyranny are being established almost everywhere.

Job rescue is too expensive

USA, EU and many other states [perhaps most of the states] are rescuing the jobs that are threatened by the lock-down after the new corona virus. This is a big mistake. Because the affected people could do without it, just their employment should be allowed, but the job rescue propgrams are veeery expensive:

* The job rescue attracts huge rent seeking. Mostly keeping inefficient jobs. But also : operating the business without client value. For example flying airplanes without passangers, keeping restaurants open without guests.
* The job rescue is financed from taxing, which has a big extra cost.
* The job rescue covers those too who have enough saving to be without a job or can find new job quickly.

Joblessness during crysis

Pandemic -> people stop using airlines, theaters, cinemas, restaurants, ... -> they stop operating -> they fire employees. The pandemic causes these job losses. From here most people conclude that the losses of these jobs cause joblessness. But this is false. That is the mistake of confusing trigger and cause. Loosing a job does not cause joblessness. One can still work after a job loss, only has to find a new job. Only not beeing able to find a new one causes joblessness. And what causes that? Lets examine :

A human who is not sick and hence can work has a positive work efficiency. Hence it is worth to offer to it a job. Hence some firms do that. That is how firms operate. They turn work into client satisfaction. They offer x money for work and get y money from the client in return, where y > x. This is how firms make profit, which they exist for in the first place. The firms are in the business of offering employement, that is their self interest. No matter how small y is, firms would always want to offer somewhat less for work. And y is always there because we humans have always consumption whishes and investment plans. This mechanism always works, is not any different in the time of a serious pandemic or any other crisis.

But in most states firms are not totally free to offer jobs. Some laws restrict that. Most importantly : the wage minimum law. Which totally prohibits the employment of people whose work efficiency is below the wage minimum. "But wait a minute" - you may say - "the wage minimum did not grow recently, it did not become stricter." Well : it did not in the nominal sense. But it did relatively to the work efficiency, because the work efficiency got smaller. Work efficiency here is in the business sense : how much business value the employee generates for its employer. That is what determines the wage. Why did it get smaller?:

1 : Generally the efficiency of the economy got smaller, because of the movement restrictions, legal, financial, ... risks.
2 : Changing employer causes a temporary work efficiency loss, because the worker needs to learn things specific to the employer.
3 : The job loss is significantly sectorial, many workers need to change not only employer, but also profession. That causes even more need to learn.

The efficiency of many of the affected workers was near the wage minimum before the pandemic. With the efficiency drop : they got under the wage minimum and thus became illegal to be employed.

Hence now it is especially important to reconsider to drop the wage minimum law. Anyway it is harmful for everyone, even in calm times, it does not have any advantage.