“Viktor Orbán is the prime minister of Hungary. He has been in power since 2010. During that time, he has underinvested in hospitals. Instead, public money has gone to pet projects, many of them related to the sports he enjoys. In his home village, Felcsút, the government built an elaborate soccer stadium with a heated field and 3,814 seats—which, as The New York Times noted, is twice the number of people who live in the village. Meanwhile, the nearby county hospital’s emergency ward has long struggled to cope with even an ordinary number of patients. On one evening in October, a visiting Times reporter found two harried doctors on call at midnight, and 30 people waiting for treatment.
During the past decade, Orbán’s government has also misdirected European Union money—some meant to encourage regional development in places like Felcsút, some meant specifically for medical development—to friends and party comrades. This kind of corruption, coupled with the Hungarian government’s nationalist rhetoric, has famously persuaded many educated people to leave the country, including doctors. Poor salaries in the health service haven’t persuaded them to stay. Now, thanks to COVID-19, Hungary faces a looming health crisis, as well as an economic crisis.”
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“On March 30, the Hungarian Parliament, which is controlled by Orbán’s party, Fidesz, voted to cancel all elections, suspend its own ability to legislate, and give the prime minister the right to rule by decree—indefinitely. None of these powers is needed to fight the coronavirus. None of them fixes the existing problems in Hungarian hospitals. All of them will help the Hungarian government push through other measures. Almost immediately, they were used to pass controversial edicts on museum construction and theater management, and to prohibit transgender people from legally changing their sex—issues without the remotest relevance to the pandemic. The government also wants to use its new powers to pass a decree classifying all information about a major Chinese railway investment in the country, the single largest infrastructure investment in Hungarian history. Once again, this has nothing to do with fighting the virus but it will conveniently keep the details of the business deal, and the names of the businessmen who benefit, out of the public view for 10 years.”
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“although Hungary is a small country, it is one whose creeping authoritarianism is widely admired. In early February, I wrote about the rapturous reception that Orbán had received at a conference of self-declared nationalist and far-right intellectuals—American, Israeli, and European—in Rome. I fully expect his tactics to be imitated: Anybody who disagrees with my emergency laws is trying to spread illness is something we will hear again. So is Whichever mistakes we made in the past, we are not responsible for them now. Indeed, I suspect that we will hear that sentiment again and again.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/hungary-coronavirus-just-excuse/609331/