There will always be loopholes, smooth operators & unscrupulous politicians

Voters have three typical reactions to the corruption scandals of the third Hungarian Republic: regret, if suspicion falls upon a representative of their party; outrage, if it is member of a rival party; and, most commonly, apathetic resignation that all politicians are prone to filching. Interestingly, at the same time we have a tendency to regard our own minor wrongdoings as normal elements of how society operates and fail to recognise that corruption is part of both western democracy and Hungary’s party history.
It is worth considering if Hungarian democracy would be in a better state if it had not emerged how János Zuschlag allegedly embezzled state funds, or that that scandalously high severance payments were made at Budapest public transport company BKV or that György Hunvald allegedly abused his powers as a Budapest district mayor? It would not, and that remains true even if we reasonably presume that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Seek the cause

Scandals become scandals when they come to light. Their existence indicates that there is some form of control, however weak it may be, over our elected decision-makers: high-ranking politicians can be arrested by the police and found guilty by the courts, and voters can remove from power those who abuse it. A lack of scandals is not a sign that entirely upright people are running the country, but that society does not exercise some form of control over politics. We do not claim that the more scandals we learn of, the stronger and healthier Hungary’s public life is, since it increasingly appears that we are speaking not of one-off isolated cases of lawbreaking, but of institutionalised corruption. Breaking the rules has become the rule, which undermines the democratic system, making way for political forces propagating radical solutions. In the past almost every party has made a lot of noise about bringing those guilty of corruption to account. In reality, restoring order has been used as a pretext for settling political scores after coming into power. In order to clamp down on political corruption it is not sufficient to treat the symptoms. We also need to examine the deeper causes.

Way back when

It is worth looking at the background to perhaps the largest scandal of multi-party Hungarian political history, the Désy-Lukács affair, which dates back almost a century. In May 1912 István Tisza, the key politician of the period, was elected House Speaker by Parliament. The significance of the appointment was that, as speaker, Tisza would be able to block opposition stonewalling and strengthen the government’s power.
In the heat of the debate opposition MP Zoltán Désy called out to Prime Minister László Lukács: “Is it permissible for a party that was formed from swindled funds to commit such acts?” A few days later the representative repeated his allegations that Lukács’s party had acquired money from the Magyar Bank for election purposes by making contributions to its election coffers a condition of state contracts signed with the bank, and that Lukács, as finance minister, sold his properties to the Gyulafehérvár Savings Bank and repurchased them using state funds.
The representative referred to government party abuses of more than two years previously surrounding the 1910 parliamentary elections. It should be noted that during the period of dualism it was much more difficult to remove government parties from power, partly because of the limited right to vote and partly because of the system of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 being maintained.
Election campaigns were on a different scale from those with mass suffrage, but the funding of the parties was nevertheless one of the murkiest aspects of the political system. The public prosecutor brought Désy to court on the grounds of slander with the permission of the prime minister. The final outcome of the lengthy and chequered case was that Désy managed to prove that he was right and the court cleared him of slander, As a result the prime minister was forced to resign.
Questionable campaign financing and suspicious property transactions – the story could not be more topical. The lesson we can draw from it is that there is nothing new under the sun: almost 100 years have passed since then, but lobbying and filling the party coffers remain the most agonising aspects of the Hungarian political system and are therefore the hotbeds of corruption. There is also another considerably more positive reading, however. In contrast to the limited right to vote of the 1910s and the rigid power structure resulting from the Compromise, today there is a much wider range of public opinion and voters have a means of stemming corruption by voting out the governing party. Even under the conditions of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy a century ago, society was a force, via the press, that was capable of putting pressure on the government, and there was a judiciary willing to rule in favour of an opposition representative and against the prime minister.

The nature of the beast

The greatest problem, therefore, is not Hungary’s lack of tradition in tackling corruption. Nor is the widespread assumption correct that Hungarian politics is experiencing an unparalleled moral crisis. We have seen that 100 years ago the situation was no better. Moreover, if we consider western European countries, we can see that esteemed politicians such as Jacques Chirac, Helmut Kohl and Romano Prodi have also faced such charges in court. New regulations on the much criticised party financing are suited to reducing corruption in public life, but are insufficient in themselves, since there will always be loopholes, smooth operators and unscrupulous politicians.
Firstly, we have to accept that such phenomena are part and parcel of parliamentary systems. The functioning of their institutions costs a vast amount of money, but is necessary. The real scandal is if there is no scandal and no public opinion, freedom of speech or an independent judiciary that enables abuses to be revealed and monitored.
Secondly, instead of coming to simplistic conclusions about corruption we should add “but at least there are consequences” to the widely-used phrase “politicians steal”. It is worth looking at the issue from a broader perspective, learning from the mistakes of the past and re-evaluating the positive and negative traditions of the history of Hungarian politics, rather than simplifying it to a question of the battle between the blameless and the corrupt.

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