Letters from Turkey
My dear Aunt,
my answer is definite no and
no. Hungary is not a dictatorship and Mr. Orban is not a dictator, no
matter what Daniel Cohn-Bendit
says
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgScDXYoQLE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgScDXYoQLE
The interesting questions to
me are these: could Hungary evolve into a dictatorship, does Mr.
Orban have the capacities of a dictator.
Please read how Francis
Fukuyama is thinking about such issues:
(Even those who do not
approve of Mr. Orban should acknowledge that the man ignites thoughts
in the minds of the finest thinkers.)
Prof. Fukuyama shows that
the British prime minister has more power than his Hungarian
counterpart, there is no Constitutional Court in the UK, and I would
add the UK does not even have a real
written constitution. So then why does half of the world believe that
England is a democracy, while Hungary is an autocratic country?
According
to Fukuyama:
...the
“democratic dictatorship” constituted by the Westminster system
has worked in English history because of the underlying moderation of
English politics: while some may have been tempted, few prime
ministers have sought to use their majorities to, for example, shut
down the opposition press.
And
we can go further, no British prime minister is allowed to do many
things even if legally empowered to do so. That is because politics
is governed greatly by unwritten conventions.
In
an openly brutal dictatorship you know your place. You are either for
or against, you know your friends, you know your enemies. Decision
makers in Hungary were socialised in a “soft dictatorship” ruled
by János Kádár. Now that was tricky. Most Hungarians were happy
that the brutal Stalinist dictatorship passed, Kádár did not
interfere with the personal lives of his subjects, who were able to
by small auto-mobiles, build their homes or live in small flats owned
by the city council. The country did not prosper but few people went
to bed hungry and everybody had a bed. There were no political
prisoners.
Few
people realised that they live in a totalitarian
system. The poet György Petri knew and expressed the essence of soft
dictatorship in two lines: “I glance down at my shoe and –
there’s the lace!/ This can’t be gaol then, can it, in that
case.”
There
were laws on the press, on the right of association and there were
the unwritten, even unmentioned conventions on how far one could go
in criticising the system openly. There was no formal censorship,
because it was not needed, self-censorship did the job. The system
changed more than 20 years ago, however 20 years is just a blink of
the eye for unwritten conventions to evolve.
As
a child I was struck by the posting in every public building:
“Spitting on the floor is strictly prohibited”. Why do they
forbid what nobody would do? Later I learned such notes had a
function earlier, when chewing tobacco was trendy. Tobacco elicits
salvation, poor guys had to spit, and they sometimes spat on the
floor, sometimes into those nice ceramic cylinders which were still
available in my childhood although without any function at that time.
A few years later the signs and the cuspidors simply vanished –
nobody is in urgent need to spit any more and everybody knows
spitting on the floor is not nice.
Lowering
the retirement age of thousands of judges from one day to the next is
not illegal, is not antidemocratic, not unconstitutional. It is
simply not nice. A gentleman would never do such a thing. The general
retirement age is actually being increased by 6 month every year
until it reaches 65. This will affect me, still, I say this is fair,
because it is gradual, foreseeable, predictable, I know exactly what
to expect if I live that long (I am working on it right now).
Decreasing the retirement age from 70 to 62 without any warning,
without any transition (well, except for a 6 months waiting period
for some) is not fair. And it does not make sense either. If the true
aim was to set a universal retirement age without exceptions they
could have done it gradually until the increasing retirement age of
the general public meets the decreasing age of the judges at 65. Why
not? So what is the true aim?
Professor
Fukuyama! Young democracies without strong conventions do need strong
institutions, checks and balances, and monitoring from outside. To
keep the floor tidy.
No comments:
Post a Comment