[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 98 (Tuesday, July 5, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4327-S4328]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      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

[[Page S4328]]

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.

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