Row 95461

Content Data

This page contains data entry 95461 from the Axioma AXP content repository. The structured data below represents the complete record for this entry.

Raw Record

{
  "text": "As I said, this is a long story and I need to go back to the start of the latest democratic period of Hungary for context.\n\nIn 1990, the Soviet Union was collapsing and could no longer maintain her occupation of Eastern and Central European countries. Hungary held her first democratic election in about half a century. The (now ex-) Commies lost, but they maintained their status as the second biggest party. The winning right-wing coalition had the giant task of transforming the country from a repressive, Communist dictatorship with a planned economy and severely restricted private property into a democracy and a capitalist economy. The PM died mid-term, his right-wing coalition fell apart, the ex-Commies returned - having refashioned themselves as \"Social Democrats\", committed to carry on with the transition.\n\nOrbán, a young law student from a Commie collaborator family, was leading a minor liberal opposition party (the bigger one went to form a coalition with the ex-Commies). He was left out, sidelined, risking irrelevance. So what he did was joining the defeated right-wing and emerged as their new leader, bringing together their demoralised and fragmented forces. While entirely amoral, Orbán is pretty smart, and he had his eyes on power. His charisma helped him to a somewhat surprise win against the coalition of ex-Commies and liberals the next election. Leading a coalition government of the right-wing as one of Europes youngest PMs , he enjoyed four years in government that was generally considered as, well, good governance. People were overall happy with what he was doing, the heavy austerities associated with the transition were largely over, and despite a few inevitable scandals, it looked like an era of consolidation.\n\nHowever, the ex-Commies managed to find and equally amoral and reckless young populist, and pulled a surprise win against him in the next election (2002). Orbán was shocked and broken, disappeared from the public eye, gossips flew that he was treated with mental health issues in Austria.\n\nWhen he came back, he was a changed man, entirely consumed with the obsession of taking revenge (not entirely unlike Trump's mindset today). He started his long project of building up the machinery to grab power again (and never let it go).\n\nMeanwhile, the coalition of ex-Commies and liberals made a Greece. They took up and spent huge loans and when the global financial crisis hit, it found Hungary with its trousers around its ankles, only saved from default by a massive IMF bail-out. Austerity returned, civil unrest began (largely incited and fuelled by Orban) , the governing coalition collapsed and Orbán won a supermajority that allowed him to pass a new constitution on his own (by that time he was in full exclusive control of his \"side\", his internal rivals all left, all positions got filled up with his loyal yes-men, each without any political influence or power of their own). \n\nAnd then, a few weeks before the landslide victory, he went to St Petersburg and met Putin.\n\nAnd again, he came back a changed man. Once known for his fiery anti-Russian rhetorics and frequent clashes with the Russian ambassador, he suddenly turned 100% pro-Putin. Some sort of a deal has clearly been made.\n\nOnce winning by a landslide, he has built a large network of top oligarchs (getting rich by siphoning public funds to their private companies) and an even larger network of loyal, but personally weightless mid-, and low level apparatchiks/village strongmen. Hungary traditionally has sky high taxes, income centralisation being over 50%, so there is a large number of people who literally depend on the state. Either because they are so deprived (that a bag of potatoes buys their votes), or because they work directly for the state (public servants, teachers, health care workers), and even if you are a businessman, without political \"backwind\" you will struggle. Orbán exploited that to the extremes. He built a 25-30% strong voter base from those poor and typically poorly educated villagers, and made it crystal clear that any support can only go to people personally loyal to him. Public workers and civil servants critical of him or just not enthusiastic enough to support him got fired, cronies got massive tax exemptions and fat government contracts, NGOs and any sort of alternative, grassroot political organisations faced repression from authorities, and the new first-past-the-post, gerrymandered elections meant that he could now maintain supermajority even with that minority voter base against a fragmented and partially bought opposition. He gleichschalted public media and used the public funds siphoned out to his cronies to buy up independent/opposition media. Where he met resistance, he applied pressure and/or blackmail. All that media conglomerate started to hysterically demonise his opponents, and push Kremlin propaganda. His voter base by now has literally no access to any other political communication but that. (Hungarians, especially older ones, speaking an isolated, non-Indo-European language typically don't speak foreign ones). \n\nSo basically by legal (and often evidently criminal) means he built a hybrid regime, there are elections, which might be occasionally fraudulent, but not decisively so, where every and each position is filled with his cronies, his minority voter base keeps delivering him a supermajority, and increasingly bigger proportions of the population are existentially dependent on him. Speaking up carries definite risks, and he is in full, autocratic control even though his personal approval ratings are low and most of the country would rather see him dead.\n\nTo draw a parallel with the US, imagine the Democrats gone, fragmented into a dozen minor parties, each led by someone on Trump's payroll, all major news channels turned into Fox, Marjorie Taylor Green being the Attorney General, and 20-25-% of the private sector being controlled by Jared Kushner  - with both the Pentagon and the White House being full of FSB agents openly and directly instructing diplomats, officers, judges, civil servants and elected officials. But due to a new electoral system, all these stamped 'democratic', while solely relying on the rural, high school educated far-right Evangelical vote, with every other vote divided between small, divided and/or bribed \"democratic\" parties - and Chinese police legally patrolling your streets.\n\nIt's a trap with no evident exit.\n\nSo I, as a freedom loving Hungarian say: kick my country from EU/NATO, consider Orbán what he really is (a Russian mole) and make his dumbfuck voters face reality: their leader made our homeland a despised and untrusted international pariah, traitors to our formal allies, serving a psychopathic, murderous Russian mafia's interest.\n\nThen, one time we might become free again.",
  "label": "r/worldnews",
  "dataType": "comment",
  "communityName": "r/worldnews",
  "datetime": "2024-05-25",
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}

Entry Information

• Entry ID: 95461
• Repository: Axioma AXP
• Dataset: arrmlet/reddit_dataset_36
• Total Entries: 100,000