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simply abolished. Government money poured into the coffers of its business supporters with
the declared aim of building a right-wing entrepreneurial class that could challenge the old
communist elite.
At home Fidesz did all it could to bolster the
CatholicChurch
, giving it control of schools
and hospitals and hoping it could once again become the moral backbone of the nation; and
beyond the borders it has
extendedvotingrights
to Hungarian minorities, drawing criticism
from its neighbours and the EU that Hungary was ignoring Europe's borders. Most embar-
rassingly Fidesz attempted to commemorate the Holocaust and so alienated the Jewish com-
munity that local organisations decided to boycott it.
Orbán himself aroused intense opposition, both at home and abroad, for his trampling on
media freedom
(state tv news now resembles the propaganda arm of government) and his
raiding of private pension funds, but he turned this round as evidence that he was the defend-
er of Hungarian interests against the EU and foreign banks and businesses. The government's
order to cap the fees charged by foreign-owned public utility companies by ten percent in
2013 was typical of his populist approach. Similarly for a nation that feels it was treated un-
fairly by the twentieth century the Fidesz line that seems to absolve the Hungarians of any
complicity in the Nazis atrocities had a strong appeal.
Come the
2014 elections
, however, the electorate clearly was not put off by the controver-
sies, as Fidesz's support held up well across the country. The party only polled 43 percent of
the votes, butit still wonatwo-thirds majority inparliament. Voters hadfewalternatives. The
remnants of left-wing opposition have been embroiled in their own corruption scandals with
GáborSimon
, a former deputy-chariman of the Socialist Party, arrested for failing to declare
€770,000 in an Austrian bank account. Meanwhile the
far-right Jobbik party
has grown its
share of the vote to twenty percent, with support growing in the west of the country.
The view from Budapest
In
Budapest
,while governments came andwent after 1990,
MayorGáborDemszky
steered
the city forwards without any major upsets for twenty years, finally securing state funding
for the
fourthmetroline
, running from Keleti Station in Pest to Etele tér in Buda. However,
he stepped down at the 2010 elections before he was engulfed by the Fidesz tide. His suc-
cessor,
István Tarlós
, an engineer by trade, ran as an independent with Fidesz backing. He
immediately stamped his mark on the city by changing several
streetnames
, offending both
the Russians (by renaming Moszkva tér) and the Americans (by renaming Roosevelt tér), and
vowed to make the city a leaner, cleaner place by tackling the corruption of the Budapest
transport authority - particularly the soaring cost of the fourth metro line.
The city's intellectuals viewed Tarlós with suspicion: his attempt to ban a gay stall at the
Sziget festival in 2001 when he was mayor of Óbuda did little to endear him to them. Their
fears seemed confirmed when the new mayor overruled an appointment committee to put two
