A strange story aired a few days ago about Ervin Demeter, who in the first Orbán administration (1998-2002) served as minister without portfolio in charge of secret services, including the enormous archives of reports submitted by the tens of thousands of agents on their fellow citizens during the Kádár regime. In 2011, Demeter was also named government commissioner for the County of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, whose county seat is Miskolc. According to the reporter, Demeter, “who in his whole political career didn’t say anything important or memorable,” began his speech at the August 20th celebration this year by describing his dream that “dipshit, sleazebag Securitate agents” are after his job. “Was this just a bad dream or a premonition of a future event?” the 65-year-old politician asked.
Demeter’s nightmare about the Romanian Securitate gunning for his job came true in part on September 10 when the government named Zoltán Alakszai, a young notary from Miskolc (and no, not a Romanian), to take over Demeter’s job as government commissioner of the county. Alakszai, who was Fidesz’s mayoral candidate in the October 2019 municipal elections, lost to the independent candidate, who was supported by all the anti-Fidesz forces. The independent candidate received 54.8% of the votes against Alakszai’s 40.83%. Since Alakszai was jobless, his party made sure that he was taken care of for the future.
So, who was Demeter alluding to when he dreamt about the sleazebag Securitate agents? To understand the reference, we have to go back to the Miskolc of 2010 when Ákos Kriza, a native of Oradea/Nagyvárad, was elected mayor. Kriza was a relative newcomer to Miskolc, where he settled after he finished medical school in Târgu Mureș/Marosvásárhely. Once he became mayor, he relied heavily on friends and relatives from Transylvania and the Partium. If the members of the “Transylvanian Lobby,” as they were called, had done a good job, most likely nobody would have found their presence in the city administration objectionable. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. In 2014, after four years on the job, Kriza would have lost the election if the anti-Fidesz forces could have agreed on a common candidate.
Just before the end of his second term, Kriza announced his retirement, allegedly because of a serious health issue. Given all of the skeletons that have fallen out of the closet since Fidesz lost its foothold in the city, his escape was timely. Miskolc has a 52 billion forint debt, for which two members of the “Transylvanian Lobby,” Kinga Pálffy and Domokos Szélyes, are largely responsible. It may not be coincidental that they became quite wealthy during their stay in the city. Péter Farkas Zárug, also a Transylvanian, was Kriza’s closest adviser. Allegedly on his salary as a faculty member at the University of Miskolc, he managed to buy a small hotel in Austria. Life was good in Miskolc.
Apparently, the growing number of Transylvanians in the city administration caused ill feelings even among local Fidesz politicians. Fidesz tried to cool tempers by appealing to national unity, but eventually the party decided to leave this sensitive subject alone.
After the October 2019 municipal election, Azonnali had a long interview with the new mayor, a former high school principal, who, when asked about the reasons for the less than sterling performance of Ákos Kriza as mayor, said: “He didn’t rely on the grey matter available in the city. He called in people from the outside who didn’t have knowledge of the locality. They looked upon the city as nothing more than a business venture. But a town is also a community, which cannot be led along party or entrepreneurial lines.”
And that leads me to another group who came to Hungary from outside the borders, the “Transylvanian-Ukrainian lobby,” which has over the years become the spearhead of the Orbán regime’s attack on Hungarian history, literature, arts, anything that is labeled as liberal, cosmopolitan, and secular. The four men — Attila Vidnyánszky from Ukraine and Árpád Szakács, Szilárd Demeter, and János Dénes Orbán from Romania — have set out to reeducate Hungarians so they will abandon their mistaken notions about nation, homeland, and Christianity.
I’m not sure why Viktor Orbán feels that he needs the help of these newcomers in waging a cultural war against his own intellectual and artistic elite, but he is playing with fire. It is enough to spend a few hours on Facebook to discover the growing antipathy toward these cultural warriors. Hundreds of commenters are sending Vidnyánszky back “to where he came from.” He is needed more there, many contend, where the number of Hungarians is rapidly shrinking. Others stress the more than 200-year-old theatrical tradition that has developed in Hungary, which Vidnyánszky wants to transform according to his own ideas which don’t comport with the theatrical taste of Hungarians living within the Trianon borders. The Budapest National Theater, to whose directorship Vidnyánszky so fervently aspired, was playing, before the pandemic, to half-full houses.
Vidnyánszky’s theater in Beregszász/Berehovo (Ukraine), where commenters are sending him
There is a Hungarian saying whose origin has been greatly debated over the years that “the nation lives in its language” (nyelvében él a nemzet). But a common language has been proven time and again to be a necessary but insufficient condition of communality. A community’s past is organically attached to its surroundings and to impressions received over its lifetime. This is what we nowadays called socialization, which is described as “the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society.” Hungary, Romania, and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic developed in quite different ways in the last 100 years, and therefore people from these countries, who have received input from three different societies, will not necessarily “speak the same language.”
I believe that Viktor Orbán is making a mistake in entrusting Hungarians’ cultural reeducation to people who are relative newcomers to Hungary. They might not be the Romanian Securitate, as in Demeter’s dream, but they are still viewed as “outsiders” who have the gall to tell Hungarians how to think and what to appreciate.
