Authoritarian leaders always seem to have the same kind of supporters. In the same way Donald Trump and Narendra Modi’s most loyal devotees believe they can do no wrong, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban’s most adamant defenders are also prone to defending the indefensible.
But perhaps that is the strange thing about culture wars: political supporters largely operate in the way they would with their football team. People do not see the truth, they see what they want to see.
However to understand Hungary, who enter the European Championship with a game against Portugal on Tuesday, you need to understand the country has had a tumultuous recent past.
From a young age, human beings are conditioned to believe that the government is with us. However in certain cultures, this mirage dissolves early. Many Hungarians feel as if the government has rarely been on their side, encapsulated by the dark times of communism and the infamous and vulgar Oszod speech in 2006, in which the socialist prime minister of the time, Ferenc Gyurcsany, divulged that his party had been lying “morning, noon and night” throughout his premiership.
Orban knew this better than anyone, and capitalised. Over the past 30 years, he has transformed himself from the leader of a radical liberal student organisation into the most illiberal and autocratic prime minister the EU has seen. Now, for many in Hungary, it feels as if someone is finally batting for them. By exploiting the country’s past and fierce patriotism, Orban has made the outsider the enemy and created a perception that he’s putting his people first.
Since his re-election in 2010, his party has presided over the dehumanisation of refugees, a crazed campaign against the Hungary-born American philanthropist George Soros, an intense pursuit of the independent press, and a seemingly bizarre obsession with Hungarian football.
Internally, it is only the football part that has been seen as indefensible – and even that is slowly changing thanks to the sport’s perceived improvement. Since 2010 Hungarian clubs have played in the Europa League group stage four times and once in the Champions League equivalent. Hungary have qualified for two European Championships and players from the country have participated in a Champions League semi-final for the first time. And as Orban himself said this month, “finally a Hungarian star has risen in football” in the form of Dominik Szoboszlai, one of the European game’s brightest prospects, though unfortunately absent from Euro 2020 because of injury.
This may seem small fry to some, but compared with the two previous decades, these look like big steps forward. When communism fell in 1989, Hungarian football was in the doldrums. On the pitch, the football was drab. Over the next 20 years, Hungarian sides made it to a Champions League group stage only twice and at international level there was consistent failure. Off the pitch, the sport was a joke. Stadiums were relics of a bygone era, hooligans made up a large percentage of the crowd and media coverage was 50% ridicule, 50% apathy.
There has been a huge cultural shift. And an economic one, too. As much as £2bn has been spent on football since Orban came back into power. Much of it has been invested in new stadiums, with more than a dozen clubs having new homes, funded in part by the government. The new national team stadium, the Puskas Arena that will host three Euro 2020 games, opened in 2019 at a building cost of £460m.
On top of that a raft of academies have been renovated and launched, including in Orban’s home village of Felcsut. The Felcsut club, Puskas Akademia, has received about £100m in state funds since 2010 and finished second in Hungary’s top flight this season.
None of this would have been possible without the media. In the 11 years of Orban’s premiership, government ownership of the media sector has risen from 34% to 55%. The CEO of Mediaworks, the organisation that owns Nemzeti Sport (a sports daily and the third most popular daily newspaper in Hungary), Laszlo Szabo, was a member of the government until April last year. The Nemzeti Sport editor-in-chief, Gyorgy Szollosi, is a friend of Orban.
Together with the public broadcaster Magyar Televizio, which shows the Hungarian national team games and top-flight matches after purchasing the rights at an expensive price, Nemzeti Sport plays an important role in defining the agenda.
This has had a huge impact on the way the football policy and the sport have been perceived. What was once seen as indefensible is now almost seen as a victory for the nation as the football improves. This will be in evidence when Hungary play at the Puskas Arena, the only host venue with a 100% capacity.
But here is the paradox. On the surface the perception of Hungarian football inside and outside the country has improved enormously. But scratch a bit deeper, and has it really improved that much considering £2bn has been poured in? You could argue that the improvements are circumstantial.
In 2018 Hungary lost to Andorra, Kazakhstan and Luxembourg. Qualification for the European Championship has become much easier. Hungarian club football has improved but the majority of this success is down to oligarchical money and is not sustainable. The two Hungarians in the Champions League semi-final in 2020 were Peter Gulacsi and Willi Orban at RB Leipzig, with the former having left Hungary before Orban was re-elected and the latter growing up in Germany.
At academy level, there is nothing to suggest that Orban’s lavish spending has improved anything. Hungary lost all their group games at the recent European Under-21 Chamoionship and in general the age-group sides are not performing any better than 15 years ago. The Hungary squad heading into Euro 2020 has only two players aged 21 or younger. If Hungarian football is to really improve, then this is where we need to see change.
Perhaps it is too early to judge. Germany’s reboot took 14 years to come to fruition, and England’s impressive rejuvenation is now more than 13 years in the making. Hungary’s is 11 years old, and though the overall feeling is that things are getting better we do not know if they really are. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian government: the perception it creates is not one based in reality. People will see what they want to see.
