Employment policy has been crucial to the success of Fidesz, Hungary’s governing party since 2010. Their so-called ‘work-based society’, which has led to skyrocketing employment rates, combined with a lack of political alternatives, has made poor, geographically isolated, ethnically diverse regions much more likely to vote for Fidesz.
While public work has served as a way to ‘tame’ negatively racialized Roma people in the Hungarian countryside – what Kristóf Szombati has called ‘illiberal paternalism’ – this program has been one way to address the very real structural problem of unskilled worker integration in Hungary. Meanwhile, the Hungarian opposition throughout the 2010s has insisted on the abstract values of democracy and liberalism, reflexively opposing the government’s illiberal vision without having a competing agenda.
In their 2024 book, Ervin Csizmadia and colleagues suggest that the opposition has never taken Fidesz seriously, assuming that what the government has been doing has been so obviously wrong that there was no need to spell it out. That may be their way of maintaining moral superiority, but as we have seen, that does not equate to electoral success.
Fidesz’s ‘Work-Based Society’
In most comment sections related to political content in Hungary – and elsewhere, I might add – you are likely to find multiple comments declaring that people under a certain IQ should not be allowed to vote. Other people enthusiastically agree that this could finally make ‘real democracy’ happen in Hungary, as only ‘informed voters’ would be allowed to vote.
Of course, those making these comments most likely do not have a detailed plan for how this would work in practice, but the popularity of the idea indicates that many people believe that the fundamental problem underlying the success of Orbán’s party is uninformed and misinformed voters. Even though it has become common sense in the Hungarian mainstream that the Orbán-regime’s ‘propaganda machine’ manipulates people into voting for Fidesz, the reality is much more complex.
There is no space here to address all the ways in which Fidesz has won the support of the electorate, including that of the lower classes, so I will focus on one prominent issue within this larger problem, namely Fidesz’s so-called ‘work-based society’ and how this has affected marginalized groups, including Roma people.
“Önök segélyt akarnak adni az embereknek. Nem vitatom el az e mögötti jó szándékot, de mi munkát akarunk adni. Abból meg tudnak élni az emberek. A nemzeti, keresztény, demokrata oldal elképzelése az, hogy a munkahelyek támogatására kell költeni. A számok azt mutatják, hogy jól is tesszük ezt.”
“You want to give people benefits. I do not doubt the goodwill behind this, but we want to give them jobs. Jobs provide livelihoods. The national, Christian, democratic side thinks that we need to spend money on supporting jobs. And the numbers show that we’re right.” [my translation]
This excerpt is from a parliamentary speech made by Viktor Orbán in February 2021. I chose to highlight this because it encapsulates well Fidesz’s attitude towards work ever since they came to power in 2010. They have built what they call a ‘work-based society‘, which has meant radical cuts in unemployment benefits and other forms of social assistance while making these conditional on participation in the massively expanded public work scheme. The withdrawal from the social sphere was necessary in their view so that people would be encouraged (read: forced) to work in order to survive rather than ‘live off benefits or crime’, Fidesz’s image of the ‘undeserving poor’ that implicitly evokes Roma people.
Fidesz’s public work scheme was designed to employ low-skilled, mainly Roma people in geographically and infrastructurally isolated regions where other employment opportunities have been scarce. Some have identified the reformed public work scheme as the source of further social exclusion and poverty as it provides participants with no skills or training, and they are therefore mostly unable to join the primary labor market afterwards, as was the stated intention of the scheme. It also deepens clientelist relationships between participants and mayors who coordinate the programme, further obstructing public workers’ chances of upward mobility by embedding them in local hierarchical relationships.
However, the reform of the public work scheme by Fidesz undoubtedly responded to a very real problem in Hungarian society: low employment. In 2010, the OECD Economic Survey identified the adjustment of active labor market policies to the needs of unskilled labor to be one of the most urgent issues in Hungary. After 2010, missing jobs were largely created through the reformed public work scheme. The scheme was welcomed amongst wide sections of the population in 2010, as tensions between the working poor and the Roma underclasses had become manifest throughout the 2000s, which was exploited by the far-right and led to the rise of the far-right party Jobbik.
The mayors who were responsible for implementing the program saw it as an opportunity to ease local tensions, which ultimately forced the previous socialist government to introduce the first expanded workfare program in 2009. Workfare then allowed Fidesz to “deliver on its pledge to ‘restore order’ in the countryside and provide its inhabitants (including the rural poor) with a less uncertain vision of their future.”
However, the OECD 2014 report on Hungary once again noted that there had been a widening skills mismatch: ‘a large structural excess of low-skilled labor supply’ alongside a tight supply of high-skilled labor. This skill shortage has since been exacerbated by emigration, which sharply increased after 2010, as the OECD 2014 report notes, and has mainly concerned young and skilled workers.
Moreover, Fidesz’s vision of a ‘work-based society’ has deepened inequalities due to the state’s withdrawal from welfare, reflected in the fact that in-work poverty has risen in Hungary by 58% since 2010. Still, the policy has identified a real problem in Hungarian society and provided a feasible answer to it that has tangibly impacted people’s lives, as we will see in the next section.
Case Study of North Borsod
Figure 1: Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén (BAZ) county on a map of Hungary.
Bálint Fabók has been investigating and writing about North Borsod, a region in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén (BAZ) county, one of the poorest counties in the country, located in the northeast, which also has one of the highest proportions of Roma people. Fabók has specifically been looking at employment rates in the county since 2010. In his article from March 2024, Fabók demonstrates that even outside of public work, Roma people’s employment rate in North Borsod skyrocketed from 22,7% to 40,1% between 2010 and 2022, while households of very low employment intensity decreased from 45% to 20%, leading to increased incomes.
The tendency he identifies is that the more people started working in a given town since Fidesz came to power, the higher the chance that Fidesz’s voter base has broadened there. The district of Cigánd has seen the highest increase in employment between 2010 and 2022, a whopping 54,1%, and Fidesz’s support has increased accordingly: in 2010, Cigánd was 104th out of 174 districts in terms of support for Fidesz, while in 2022 it had come up to the 8th position. Likewise, between 2013 and 2020, the number of those living in severe deprivation had decreased by two-thirds: this meant 2,7 million people in 2013 and 800,000 people in 2020.
The increase in the number of people employed between 2010 and 2022 was most significant in Borsod County, where public works played an important role, especially in small, poor villages without other employment opportunities. Importantly, when Fabók visited Cigánd and talked to non-Roma locals, almost all of them reported that there were no significant issues between them and local Roma people, even though the number of the latter had been steadily increasing.
It seems that, at least for the residents of Cigánd, Fidesz’s promise to restore order in the countryside has been fulfilled. This is reflected in voting behaviour: in the 25 Hungarian towns with the highest proportions of Roma population, Fidesz obtained at least 85% of the vote and on average 81% when looking at the 100 towns with the highest Roma population share. While Fidesz’s track record in alleviating poverty and combating inequality is not the best, as in fact it can be said that the poorest have benefited the least from 15 years of Fidesz rule, this is clearly not what they think. Based on Fabók’s analysis, it seems clear that while people may not have had access to jobs which provided them with a decent income, they do have jobs now, which many of them had not had before, and that this was a significant improvement.
It has become a cliché that Fidesz is most successful among the poorest and least educated classes because they are uninformed about politics and/or misinformed by Fidesz’s propaganda. However, this narrative desperately needs to be reevaluated, especially considering the connections identified above.
While throughout the 2010s, the mainstream narrative of the Hungarian political opposition and government-critical media was focused on government propaganda and voter deception, now that the economy is stagnating, the same commentators are willing to retrospectively acknowledge the (global) economic conjuncture until 2020. They repeatedly proclaim that until 2020, people’s standard of living had increased every year, which is why they were reluctant to replace Fidesz, but now that the economy has been stagnating for the past few years, Péter Magyar was able to become Fidesz’s biggest challenger to date.
Where were these acknowledgments before 2020? Why is it that it is clearly recognized by the opposition that material forces matter in how people choose to vote, and yet they are unable or unwilling to look at the material changes detailed above as a serious factor in Fidesz’s 15-year trajectory of success?
Moral Superiority and Winning Elections Do Not Go Hand in Hand
It is clear that Fidesz has had a political strategy to win working-class votes for a long time: overhead cuts or cuts on utility costs, the reformed public work program and periodic price freezes in recent years (in a country which saw its inflation rate increase to 25% in the beginning of 2023, the highest number in the EU) are all aimed to pacify working-class voters who are the most worried about their livelihoods and the most affected by these measures. While these measures are ambiguous at best (cuts in overhead costs tend to reduce household energy efficiency and price caps on basic foods have repeatedly forced supermarket chains to raise prices on other products), they are part of a political strategy and should therefore be understood and countered as such.
As elementary as that sounds, it is something that the classic Hungarian opposition has been unable to do. Thus, while these concessions to the working-class are problematic in several ways, it seems that at least for certain segments of the population, they have contributed to their conviction that Fidesz has their best interests at heart. Additionally, from a material perspective, the public work scheme has provided many people with a job when they had not had one before, even if much more cannot be said about its successes.
As Hungarian political scientist Viktor Kiss suggested in his 2023 article (sadly only available in Hungarian), the Hungarian political opposition and anti-government media landscape repeatedly predicted Orbán’s demise throughout the 2010s, rejecting the undeniable success Fidesz and supplementing a thorough understanding of Fidesz’s political strategy with moralizing critique.
In their new book entitled Waiting for Governance: The Hungarian Opposition from a Comparative International and Historical Perspective, Ervin Csizmadia and colleagues add much-needed clarity and nuance to the understanding of the long-standing weakness of the Hungarian opposition. They suggest that, broadly speaking, the opposition has not taken Fidesz seriously, thinking that their authoritarian tendencies, manifest in attacks on democracy, the system of checks and balances, and the rule of law were so obviously wrong that voters would surely come to realize this themselves. But it seems that voters did not agree with this, not in 2014, 2018, or even in 2022, when Fidesz won two-third of the vote for the third time in a row.
The opposition’s constant invocation of democracy and liberalism, along with its denunciation of Orbán as a ‘dictator,’ did not have the desired effect because this was not a political strategy. It was not the articulation of a competing agenda, but mere pleading with the electorate. By ‘competing agenda,’ I do not mean that opposition parties should have released a 400-page party program ahead of every election, but they should have had a competing vision which clearly articulated their understanding of democracy and liberalism, why they are better than Orbán’s illiberalism, and how the average person’s life is affected by these abstractions.
It is not too much to ask political parties to do political work, in other words, to identify the concerns of the electorate, to differentiate themselves from other parties, and to pinpoint the weaknesses of their opponents. Instead, the Hungarian establishment opposition has chosen to establish their own moral superiority, which may have made them feel better about themselves, but it has not helped them win elections.
Matthew Ellis writes compellingly about the American liberal mainstream’s unwillingness to fight ideological battles, based on their false assumption à la Francis Fukuyama that the great ideological battles of history had ended with the triumph of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. But, as we have seen both in the case of the American Democratic Party and the Hungarian establishment opposition post-2010, ideological and political battles need to be fought – otherwise, we end up pleading, which is not the same as doing politics.
The strategy of pleading seems to have functioned to fortify the Hungarian opposition’s moral superiority, which further exacerbated political polarization in the country because it demarcated the self-identified cosmopolitan, pro-West camp from that of the supposedly backwards rural Hungarians. The truth is that the opposition has been just as invested in consolidating the boundaries of Fidesz versus opposition groups, and thereby contributing to the reduction of group permeability as Fidesz, because they have, at least in terms of symbolic capital, benefited from such group polarization.
The attribution of Fidesz’s support solely to its indeed considerable propaganda machine has blinded much of the political opposition and anti-government media to the truly skyrocketing employment rates of people in Borsod county, among other places in the country. The reformed public work scheme is indeed problematic on multiple grounds, not least because its benefits for the reduction of poverty are ambiguous.
However, it does demonstrate the advantages that Fidesz’s vision for Hungarian society has over the opposition. First, Fidesz has a vision, while the opposition reflexively objects to whatever Fidesz is doing, thereby reducing itself to a reactionary player unable to interpret and shape reality on its own. Second, from the beginning Fidesz has had a political strategy meant to reckon with people’s problems and needs, as well as provide an answer that would tangibly impact people’s lives. Most importantly, many people, including those in Borsod, have believed that Fidesz has their best interests at heart, not because of propaganda but because of the material changes in their lives, no matter how limited.
The opposition needs to recognize what Fidesz has done right and abandon pleading as a substitute for ideological battle and political strategy, because if they do not, they will never even come close to exercising power in Hungary.
References
[1] See https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-economic-surveys-hungary-2014_eco_surveys-hun-2014-en.html ; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0958928714545446
[2] See https://brill.com/view/journals/rela/47/1/article-p84_005.xml
[3] See https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402382.2018.1511958
[4] ibid
[5] See https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09668136.2021.1990861
[6] Op. cit. 3
[7] See https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SzombatiRevolt
[8] See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967067X18300084
[9] Op. cit. 5., p. 1705
[10] See the OECD 2014 Economic Survey on Hungary, op. cit. 1
[11] See https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/141998
[12] To be more precise, Fidesz has not withdrawn from welfare but has undertaken a programme of upwards redistribution to middle-class families. See https://kluwerlawonline.com/journalarticle/International+Journal+of+Comparative+Labour+Law+and+Industrial+Relations/39.1/IJCL2023004 and https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/budapest/14209.pdf
[13] See Gyulavári & Pisarczyk’s 2023 paper, op. cit. 12.
[14] https://g7.hu/elet/20240206/eszak-borsodban-valik-igazan-lathatova-a-fidesz-sikerenek-egyik-fontos-osszetevoje/
[15] By classic Hungarian opposition, I am referring to the main opposition parties until 2024 when Péter Magyar built up his Tisza Party and nearly destroyed the established opposition, a process still underway.
[16] Unfortunately this is also only available in Hungarian, but Csizmadia’s new solo book The Logic of Hungarian Political Development (1990-2022) is available in English here.
[17] Of course, the usage of the word ‘choice’ here is ambiguous as these choices have been structurally conditioned. On the structural characteristics of the Hungarian opposition, see Ágnes Gagyi’s work here.
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