Orbán’s party, Fidesz, stands up bogus opposition parties during parliamentary elections as a means of dividing the anti-Fidesz vote. But they are unfair: The government controls the airwaves and media companies to such a degree that the opposition can’t get a fair hearing. NurPhoto/Getty ImagesĮlections there are free, in the sense that the vote counts aren’t nakedly rigged. It has been replaced with an authoritarian regime that wields a cynical interpretation of the law as a weapon the country is governed by rules like the border journalism permits, regulations that can seem reasonable on their face but actually serve to undermine essential democratic freedoms. Over the course of his eight years in power, Prime Minister Orbán has chipped away at the foundations of Hungarian democracy. It’s the immense security apparatus at the border - the barbed-wire fence, the refugee boys sleeping in the dirt, the border guard making trouble for journalists - that reveals the very modern kind of authoritarian state Hungary has become. When I was there, as part of a project supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Budapest was in the midst of several by-election campaigns for local office the city was drowning in campaign posters, as if desperately trying to convince visitors that Hungarian democracy was alive and well.īut the true face of modern Hungary isn’t gleaming Budapest. The capital, Budapest, boasts both beautiful classical architecture and one of Europe’s most exciting party scenes. To outsiders, it looks and feels like any modern European nation. This is the way things are in Hungary, a landlocked country of 10 million people sandwiched between Austria, Romania, and Ukraine (among other countries). We stopped talking, got into our car, and drove off, a border guard vehicle trailing us from across the fence the whole way out. I asked Maté about this he said the permit was a requirement for taking photos of the fence - but if we had applied for one, it would have taken forever to be processed or simply been denied. But this time, the guard asked something curious: Did we have a permit to be reporting here? This was not a requirement you’d expect in a European democracy Hungary even has constitutional protections for the free press. This kind of thing can happen to journalists at heavily policed borders. Maté translated, explaining that the guard wanted me to stop taking pictures of the fence. On the way back to our car, Maté and I saw a Hungarian police car pull up beside the fence. The once-sleepy border with Serbia was militarized, with cameras and border police patrolling the length of it. Every night, big problem here,” Hashmat told me.įear of refugees like these two had prompted the Hungarian government to go to extreme lengths to keep them out. Hashmat (L) and Faiz when I met them outside their living quarters in June. Though few cross the border into Hungary anymore, Hashmat and Faiz still live just outside the fence to be on call for the border authorities. The Hungarian government employed them as translators for interviews of other asylum seekers. We came across a clearing where two Afghan boys, Hashmat and Faiz, were living in a small, filthy tent on the Serbian side of the border. My translator Maté and I had abandoned our bug-covered car in a thicket on the way to the fence and trekked through the countryside on foot. Two years later, he sent a bill for the fence’s construction cost to Brussels, suggesting the European Union should repay Hungary for ”protecting all the citizens of Europe from the flood of illegal migrants.” The border fence had been built three years earlier on the Hungarian side, by the order of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who had sold it to the public as Hungary’s first line of defense against an “invasion” of asylum seekers during a massive surge in migration to Europe from conflict-ridden countries in 2015. When I visited a stretch of the Serbian side on a sunny day in June, the landscape would have been lovely - had it not been for the gigantic barbed-wire fence running straight through the middle of it. The Hungary-Serbia border runs through a wilderness, tall grass flatlands ringed by imposing clusters of trees and thickets.
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