Our original article was ten things we should miss about Victor Orban. However, the first time we really visited Hungary was only five years ago.
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traffic law enforcement. The Rule of Law
“Can’t you see the sign, it’s the double yellow line?”
if you break the law in Britain, Holland, or Orban’s Hungary, there is rule of law. In six years in Cluj, I have only once seen someone getting a ticket for parking illegally. (Maybe you do in the very center of town, but in much of the residential part, no, people park where they please.
Some people say it was a bit excessive in Hungary. They seemed ready to trap you.
Well, you can’t have everything.
Of course, the downside was the airbnb always claimed there was parking nearby, when there wasn’t. Maybe the airbnb owners were from Cluj, where people just park where they like and how they like.
2. Funding for events in Cluj
Did you notice how there used to be so much funding for events in Cluj? Like, Hungarian movies on almost every week at the arts cinema?
Well, you can probably kiss that goodbye. (For those using a weak digital translator, “to kiss goodbye” is a figure of speech. Do not actually kiss a movie screen. We use a lot of figures of speech on this website.)
3. Angry, ignorant neo-liberals
It was fun to watch people who had never even been to Hungary get angry at Orban for actually no reason. They talked about him being a dictator, yet couldn’t provide examples.
It was so easy to win arguments against these stupid people. Now that more of these people will actually travel to Hungary, they are less likely to make the same stuff up about Peter Magyar. We will have to actually work for our argument wins this time.
4. Hungarian cinema
Magyar is talking about cutting Hungarian TV. That cuts a lot of the great blockbuster kinds of movies that Orban’s government financed. Sure, they will be able to unlock more EU funds, but Mediadesk films just aren’t as grand or as fun to watch. They usually have the same three or four themes.
A lot of people might pretend to dislike “Orban’s” cinema, but those who can understand it appreciate it. Others dismiss it without even watching it.
We all know what the EU does to popular culture. Name some great UK comedy shows, they were created when it was just an economic treaty, the EC. As soon as EU funding came in, Belgian comics were ruined, British television was ruined, French movies were ruined, and Italian… okay, Italian stuff was bad because of Berlosconi, and it seems to have bounced back a little despite the European “Union.”
5. Great swimming pools
If you compare the swimming pools in Hungary to the neighbouring countries, you’ll notice something. Those in Hungary are more efficient, better run, tend to have slides and other parts that work, and more likely to be open when you go there.
A lot of the customers at Hungarian swimming pools and water parks are Romanian. But despite the large Hungarian minority in Romania, you don’t hear a lot of Hungarian at the swimming pools on this side of the border. You don’t cross the border to go to worse water parks or inferior swimming pools, do you?
6-100 Hungarian language education, etc
Do we have any evidence that Peter Magyar will be worse for the swimming pools? Or the hospitality industry in general? Or education, tourism, and the like?
No. Well, we do a bit. We can see what the EU has done to other countries that followed the dictates that Orban rejected.
Am I blaming this or that community? Not at all. All those communities existed in Hungary, you’d have seen them if you visited. Often, EU money is the problem.
Not only does EU money come with visible strings attached, it comes with the invisible string. If you are self sufficient, if you do your job well enough to prove that you don’t need it, you fear losing eligibility. This is the opposite of rewarding excellence. EU funding rewards dependence and incompetence.
That isn’t to say we’re against European projects. It would be great if the EU built a pan-European high speed railway, to repair Germany’s and France’s lagging systems and connect the East to the West. It would be great if projects were conceived to create things that benefit all Europeans.
Perhaps the EU could make films about Europe’s common history, the Roman Empire, the Celts, the Beaker civilization, or even the history of the European Commission itself. The times when Paris or Vienna were centers of art that attracted people from around the continent and around the world.
But no, the current leadership of the EU prefers to look at times when it was divided, to put shame on one or another part of the population. To look for crises that involve spending a lot of money, and shaming anyone who wants to research the crisis for himself, without handouts. Imagine if Pavlov or Darwin were stopped from their research by ultranationalists and antinationalists.
Next, we’ll write things we miss about the last Prime Minister of Romania, Bolojan. No we won’t. We don’t miss him.
