Monday, July 11, 2011


[Congressional Record: July 5, 2011 (Senate)] [Page S4327-S4328] From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:cr05jy11-37]                                              
       
DEMOCRACY AT RISK IN HUNGARY  

  Mr. CARDIN. 
Mr. President, this week in Budapest there are two events  of particular interest to Americans. First, Hungary has unveiled a  statue of President Ronald Reagan in front of  the U.S. Embassy in honor of his contribution to the goal of ending  communist repression and commemorating the 100th anniversary of his  birth. Second, Hungary dedicated the Lantos Institute, named after Tom  Lantos, our former colleague from the House of Representatives who  worked tirelessly to promote democracy and human rights in the country  of his birth. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary  of State Clinton have represented the United States at these respective  events.   These gestures shine a light on Hungary's historic transformation as  well as the close bonds between our two countries. Unfortunately, other  developments in Hungary have cast a dark shadow over what should  otherwise be happy occasions.   Last year, Hungary held elections in which a right-of-center party,  FIDESZ, won a landslide, sweeping out eight years of socialist  government rejected by many voters as scandal ridden and inept. With  FIDESZ winning 52 percent of the vote, Hungary has the distinction of  being the only country in Central Europe since the 1989 transformations  where a single party has won an outright majority--not necessarily a  bad thing, especially in a region where many governments are  periodically hobbled by factionalism.   Those elections were also notable because more than 850,000  Hungarians--16 percent of the vote--cast their ballots for Jobbik, an  anti-Semitic, anti-Roma, irredentist party. While Jobbik is an  opposition party, it has clearly and negatively influenced public  policy discourse.   Under Hungary's electoral system, FIDESZ's 52 percent of the vote has  translated into a two-thirds majority of the seats in parliament. The  government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has used that supermajority  to push through one controversial initiative after another.   One initiative that has generated particularly sharp criticism is  Hungary's new media law. The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the  Media warned it could be used to silence critical media and public  debate, it overly concentrates power in regulatory authorities, and it  harms media freedom. In Ukraine, where democracy has put down only  shallow roots, the Kyiv Post editorialized that ``Hungary's media law  should not come here.''   Another area of concern stems from the government's fixation on  ethnic Hungarian identity and lost empire in ways that can only be seen  as unfriendly by other countries in the region. One of the government's  first acts was to amend Hungary's citizenship law to facilitate the  acquisition of Hungarian citizenship by ethnic Hungarians in other  countries--primarily Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. This  expansion of citizenship was pushed through even though, in a 2001  statement submitted to the Council of Europe, the Hungarian Government  firmly renounced all aspirations for dual citizenship for ethnic  Hungarians.   In a further escalation of provocative posturing, a few weeks ago  Speaker of the Hungarian Parliament Laszlo Kovar said that military  force to change the borders with Slovakia--a NATO ally--would have been  justified and, in any case, he added, the ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia  are ``ours.''   If one side of the nationalism coin is an excessive fixation on  Hungarian ethnic identity beyond the borders, the other side is  intolerance toward minorities at home. For example, one increasingly  hears the argument, including from government officials, that while the  Holocaust was a 20th-century tragedy for Jews, the worst tragedy for  Hungarians was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon--the treaty that established  the borders for the countries emerging from the defeated Austro- Hungarian Empire.   This comparison is offensive and disturbing. Ethnic Hungarians were  never targeted for extermination or subjected to mass murder by  Trianon. Moreover, this line of argument presents Hungarians and Jews  as mutually exclusive. But more than 400,000 Jews were sent from  Hungary to Auschwitz, and more than 10,000 Jews were shot along the  banks of the Danube--were they not also Hungarian? How could this not  be a tragedy for Hungary?   The government has also used its supermajority to adopt a completely  new Constitution which has been reviewed by the Council of Europe's  Venice Commission on Democracy through Law, a body of judicial experts.   The Venice Commission expressed particular concern with the  requirement that numerous issues can now only be addressed through  supermajority or so-called cardinal laws. In other words, ``The more  policy issues are transferred beyond the powers of simple majority, the  less significance will future elections have and the more possibilities  does a two-thirds majority have of cementing its political preferences  and the country's legal order.''   In short, the Commission concluded, ``the principle of democracy  itself is at risk.''   This combines, by the way, with a court-packing scheme--the expansion  of the size of the Constitutional Court from 11 to 15--and a reduction  of the retirement age for ordinary judges from 70 to 62, which will  reportedly mean 10 percent of all judges will be replaced.   To make exactly clear what he has intended with these reforms, Prime  Minister Orban declared that he wants to tie the hands not only of the  next government, but of the next 10 governments--that is, future  Hungarian governments for the next 40 years.   It is no wonder then that in Freedom House's latest ``Nations in  Transit'' survey, released this week, Hungary had declined in ratings  for civil society, independent media, national democratic governance,  and judicial framework and independence.   Ironically, just as attention shifts to the tantalizing possibility  of democratic reform in the Middle East, the red flags in Budapest keep  multiplying: Transparency International has warned that transferring  the power to appoint the Ombudsman from the parliament to the president  means that he or she will not be independent of the executive. NGOs  have warned that a new draft religion law may result in a number of  religions losing their registration. Restrictions by Hungarian  authorities on pro-Tibet demonstrations during last week's visit to  Budapest of the Chinese Premier were seen as an unnecessary and  heavyhanded limitation of a fundamental liberty. Plans to recall  soldiers and police from retirement so that they may oversee Romani  work battalions have predictably caused alarm.   In 1989, Hungary stood as an inspiration for democracy and human  rights advocates around the globe. Today, I am deeply troubled by the  trends there. I understand that it sometimes takes new governments time  to find their bearings, and I hope that we will see some adjustments in  Budapest. But in the meantime, I hope that other countries looking for  transformative examples will steer clear of this Hungarian model.                            ____________________