Guests: Andras Petho, Daniel Ziblatt

LL: I'm Laura Lynch, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

LL: That was Reuters on April 9th, reporting on the election of Viktor Orbán to his third term as Hungary's prime minister. Civil libertarians in Hungary say the strong majority Mr. Orbán and his Fidesz party received will mean a deepening assault on immigrants, the political opposition, and the media. This past Sunday, tens of thousands protested against Viktor Orbán's government in Budapest. Investigative journalist Andras Petho has been digging into Viktor Orbán's politics and finances. He is the founder of the website Direkt36.hu. Earlier this month he was accused of being one of 200 "Soros mercenaries," called for their alleged association with Orbán's public enemy number one: global philanthropist and political activist George Soros. Andras Petho joins me from Budapest, Hungary. Hello.

ANDRAS PETHO: Hello.

LL: Can you start by telling me a little bit about direkt36.hu? What does it do?

ANDRAS PETHO: Yes. Direkt36 has been around for three years, a little bit more than three years, and we are an investigative reporting organization, we are a non-profit, and what we do is that we dig deep into political corruption stories or you know abuses of power in general.

LL: And so does that mean that you have written directly about corruption in Viktor Orbán's government?

ANDRAS PETHO: Yes. Yes we've covered quite extensively how people close to Mr. Orbán, including his family members have been benefiting from state projects, from public money, often projects funded by the European Union which is you know a frequent target of Mr. Orbán's attacks.

LL: Now we've heard about the Hungarian government's animosity toward the American financier George Soros. Why has George Soros become the club that's wielded by the government against its perceived enemies?

ANDRAS PETHO: Well that's a good question. I think for that you need to understand a little bit more Mr. Orbán and his approach to politics. I mean he's a kind of a warrior type of politician. He's always in action and, you know, he's been part of Hungary in Hungary's politics since the regime change so nearly three decades. And so he built his whole story on the notion that Hungary is under attack and he's the only one who can defend it. And you know the enemies changed all the time. You know sometimes he was defending the country against the communists, and then you know it was Brussels, and then the IMF, and now it's George Soros. And you know certainly you know the values that Mr. Orbán is promoting are quiet different from the way that Mr. Soros and his foundation is promoting. I think it's also probably that you know he's a good target. He doesn't live here in Hungary. He doesn't really you know contrary to the government's attacks.

LL: What threat does George Soros represent according to Viktor Orbán?

ANDRAS PETHO: Well the government is saying that and this has become their main message ever since the migration crisis in 2015 that George Soros and his organizations are promoting migration and so that's why that's why it needs to be stopped. That's the government's version.

LL: Even though as you say Soros doesn't live there he does fund a university there and he's been accused by other regimes in the past of funding revolution as in Ukraine. So this isn't the first time that he's been held up as a symbol of a threat. But can you tell me what about the relationship between the Hungarian weekly Figyelo and the government of Viktor Orbán?

ANDRAS PETHO: Figyelo was bought by a businesswoman and historian a little bit more than a year ago who is quite close to the government. He's openly supporting the government and she used to be a close adviser to the prime minister. This has become a pattern in Hungary you know that the government is not controlling most of the media directly but through you know business people close to the government.

LL: So you have your name published in this magazine in a list of what are called Soros mercenaries operating in Hungary. What did you think when you saw that?

ANDRAS PETHO: It was a strange feeling. I mean of course it's not nice to see this happening. At the same time it wasn't that unexpected, that's surprising. I mean this was a kind of natural outcome of the rhetoric of the campaign, you know the government. And Mr. Orbán was talking about these so-called Soros mercenaries the run up to the election and so I think it was just a matter of time when you know somebody came up with some names, actual names.

LL: But there is a relationship between Direkt36.hu and Soros, correct?

ANDRAS PETHO: Yes. Yes. You know like every conspiracy theory; I mean it also had some element of truth. I mean but this was not a secret. Direkt36.hu is a proud recipient of grants from the Open Society Foundations.

LL: Which are run by George Soros, yes?

ANDRAS PETHO: Yes. Yes, which was founded by George Soros. But we also received grants from other foundations and actually most of our revenue is coming from our own readers, partly crowd funded organization, we have received support from thousands of Hungarians who are living here.

LL: So are you George Soros mercenary?

ANDRAS PETHO: I don't think so. But yeah it's just ridiculous.

LL: In light of the political atmosphere in Hungary, what does it mean to the safety of people who are being named as these agents for George Soros?

ANDRAS PETHO: Personally I and my colleagues haven't received any threats or verbal threats but I know that other organizations who have also been targeted by the government and government controlled media, you know, sometimes they get phone calls from people who are calling them traitors or sometimes they get phone calls from people who want to get the phone number of George Soros. So there are some bizarre situations.

LL: Does what's happened here with the naming as a mercenary; it seems to sort of put you in the crosshairs of this government, does it change anything about the way Direkt36.hu will investigate Viktor Orbán and his government?

ANDRAS PETHO: No, in fact we decided to respond to these so-called list in a low key manner. And you know I think the best response that we can do is to you know to continue our job and you know to demonstrate to the public that what we are doing is in the public interest. Investigative journalism is about holding powerful people and organizations to account and that's what we are doing and I think that's why we became you know one of the targets of this campaign. So I think the best response is to keep doing what we are doing.

LL: I thank you for your time sir.

ANDRAS PETHO: Thank you for having me.

LL: Andras Petho is a Hungarian investigative journalist and cofounder of the website Direkt36.hu. We reached him in Budapest. We contacted the Hungarian embassy in Ottawa to ask about press freedom in the country. We were told the new Hungarian government has not yet entered office, and were referred to earlier statements by the government on press freedom. Last month, a spokesperson said he reserved the right to decide who he regarded as a journalist because, in his view, some journalists are just activists exercising a journalistic activity. The re-election of Viktor Orbán was greeted with joy in right-wing circles and despair by progressive and moderate Hungarians. Yet Hungary is not an anomaly. When you look at the political landscape around the globe, right-wing populists lead everywhere from the Philippines to Italy, from Russia to the United States. In his speech to the French National Assembly in Paris yesterday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke about economic uncertainty, stagnant incomes — and the pernicious anxiety that can lead to political polarization.

LL: In too many countries, populism is spreading and democracy is eroding, symptoms of a malaise that afflicts our integrated world, Trudeau said. Daniel Ziblatt has studied the rise of anti-Democratic forces around the globe. He is a professor of government at Harvard, and co-author with Steven Levitsky of the new book, How Democracies Die. We reached Daniel Ziblatt in Boston. Hello.

DANIEL ZIBLATT: Hey there, nice to talk to you.

LL: How has Viktor Orbán’s political philosophy changed since he entered politics?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: Well he's a fascinating case because he's somebody who came on the scene really in the dying days of the communist era in the early 1990s as a liberal dissident and actually went to Oxford with a scholarship from George Soros and started really as a liberal dissident, founded of a political party in the mid-90s, sort of briefly became a Christian Democrat sort of in the West European world, and then kept pushing further and further to the right. He was briefly prime minister in the late 1990s, voted out of office, and then when he came back in to office in 2010 after the financial crisis he had pushed much further to the right taking on many of the kind of ideological characteristics that we see with him today.

LL: How do you identify politicians who do start out being not overtly authoritarian but become so over time?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: You know it's a tricky issue. In our book how democracies die we identify a litmus test a set of characteristics to kind of warning signs of politicians before they come into office show clear anti-democratic tendencies. So if they go after the media, if they accuse their rivals of being enemies, if they condone violence, these sorts of things. In many cases it's quite easy to in fact identify political views ahead of time. In the case of Viktor Orbán it's a little trickier because he began as a liberal. So our litmus test is not a perfect test, I mean it doesn't identify everybody before they get into office.

LL: Those warning signs were very public with Viktor Orbán and yet he won the vote anyway. So how do you explain that?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: Yes well once he's been in office clearly he's violating these criteria. Yeah I know this is the grave dilemma of our era. You know throughout the Cold War the way authoritarians came into power is through military coups. Three quarters of democracies died during the Cold War at the hands of men with guns. Since the collapse of communism the way authoritarians come to power is through elections and so it's a real dilemma. On the one hand there's certainly a mantle of legitimacy when somebody comes to power elected by publics but then you know that doesn't necessarily make them democratic if in turn once in office they attack and go after Democratic institutions.

LL: Right. But as I said he's winning anyway despite all of that. How does his right-wing philosophy play into those kinds of authoritarian populist movements we see rising around the globe?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: One thing I should say is that the 2018 elections there's been accusations by election observers of violations of basic procedures. So that helped him win. Before the 2014 election, election districts redrawn and gerrymandered in a way so that it made it easier for him to retain office so these elections have not been entirely free and fair and have been tilted in his favour so that's just one thing worth saying. More broadly though to your point about how this feeds into the kind of global trends that we're seeing, I mean one of the interesting things about Orbán as well is that he's very explicitly articulated a vision of what he calls illiberal democracy. 2014 he gave a speech in front of a group of students in Hungary in which he said “to be a democracy does not necessarily mean you have to be a liberal democracy.” And so he's tried to carve out a niche for himself and his regime type that's been emulated in Poland, to some degree in Czech Republic, and other parts of the world where the features of democracy are embraced, namely the will of the people, the majority, but other features of democracy, namely respect for pluralism, respect for diverse views, respect for civil society, rights for minorities, these have been not emphasized to the same degree. So he's carving out a niche, and this suggests a kind of new set of challenges for the system.

LL: So is the world undergoing a democracy recession?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: Well it's interesting my co-author Steve Levitsky wrote an article years ago called The Myth of Democratic recession and I think he still stands by that. And that's based on very careful research. If we look you know certainly democracies are more challenged today than they have been in the media post-Cold War era when democracy was the only game in town. But according to you know various organizations, Freedom House, different organizations that count the number of democracies in the world, the number of democracies in the world you know exploded after the early 1990s, continue to rise, and then in the mid-2000s basically began to flat line; meaning some democracies are dying, some democracies are coming to existence and enduring, but we’re certainly not in an era where democracy is growing around the world. I should say however that the election of Donald Trump in the United States has maybe changed this to some degree. You know the United States and other Western countries as well have often been advocates of democracy around the world since the 1970s. And the Trump administration is pretty indifferent to this. And so you know the international environment certainly has changed. I think going forward it's certainly clear that we really run the risk of Democratic recession.

LL: Tell me about how that affects your own country then, the United States.

DANIEL ZIBLATT: You know we have similar dynamics that work. The U.S. is certainly a much older democracy than many of the countries that have faced similar threats of Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Philippines, the countries you mentioned at the outset, so there's a lot more room for confidence that there's avenues for the opposition to organize and to win elections. But certainly the U.S. is suddenly facing and many people view that the current administration is using a lot of the same strategies that Viktor Orbán has used while in office; trying to capture the referees the law enforcement institutions of the state, sidelining being very critical of opposition media, and potentially attempting to kind of tilt the playing field through electoral reforms. There's been some talks of that haven’t gone very far. Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, regards Viktor Orbán as a great hero. He's been quoted as saying he's a great hero. So you know there are these links. Again I think American democracy is much more stable, much older, so you know I don't think tyrannies around the corner. But all of this has made Americans, I think it should, make Americans more alert and realize they can't take democracy for granted.

LL: But in the United States that you would have a man like Henry Ford who was a well-known anti Semite multimillionaire who toyed with the idea of running for president and that he existed but he didn't win elected office, how have American politics changed since those days to make things riskier now in your view?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: Yeah there's a tendency and a mistaken tendency to think that there was some golden age of American democracy now we've abandoned that. The truth of the matter is there have always been figures on the political landscape; Henry Ford you mention, Joe McCarthy, Huey Long who was governor of Louisiana who had clear authoritarian tendencies, George Wallace who was a segregationist governor from the south who sounded very much like Donald Trump on the campaign trail. These figures though you know were very popular. Public opinion polls showed them sort of garnering around 35 per cent support throughout the 20th century. But these guys all stayed very far from office. We never had one of these figures at the top of a major political party. And what changed we argue in our book is essentially part of it is how we select our presidential candidates has changed. You know the shift to a primary based system where before the general election voters select their own party's candidates has made it easier, has lowered the threshold for demagogues to get into the top position, and that reform came in the early 70s. You know of course the U.S. has continued to withstand… you know there haven't been demagogues leading party until 2016 so something really changed in 2016. And I think there are lots of factors that go into this but a big part of the story has to do with the inability of Republican Party establishment leaders to distance themselves from candidate Trump. And you know many have essentially although despising him and not liking him, including Republican voters; one out of four Republican voters in the presidential election thought that Donald Trump was not fit to serve as president yet they still voted. So something has really changed.

LL: I want to play you a bit of President Trump's speech at the CPAC convention in Washington in February 2017.

LL: What does it mean for democracy when a leader starts calling parts of society, in this case the media, the enemy of the people?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: It's frightening. You know especially in the United States a very old democracy where this is really entirely unprecedented. You know going back…You know a lot of people say that's just words, this is just hot rhetoric. You know similarly when President Trump and candidate Trump said you know there's election fraud is rampant in the United States, elections are totally rigged, there’s no empirical basis for this among my political scientist colleagues who studied this. So this is just rhetoric some people might say. But we make the case in our book you know that really words do matter because if you look at public opinion among Republicans attitudes towards the press and attitudes towards elections they've transformed in the last two years precisely as candidate and president Trump has used these words. And so you know significant percentages of Americans or of Republicans now think that elections are rigged when in fact there's no evidence of this. And this comes in large part from somebody in a powerful position like President Trump saying that elections are rigged, similarly when somebody says the media are the enemy of the people, the media are just making up stories, significant portions according to Pew surveys show that significant portions of Republicans now you know we're talking 40, 50 per cent of Republicans say that the media are making up stories about President Trump. And so if have large segments of the population in any democracy basically accepting these two key critical pillars of democracy media and elections are basically illegitimate it's hard to imagine sustaining a democracy in that context. So that makes us very wary.

LL: And Trump and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have something in common in targeting the press. Why do they want to target the press?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: Yeah. You know a lot of people talk about a kind of authoritarian playbook. There is no authoritarian playbook as far as I know. But what's certainly true is that people are you know they're emulating each other but I think when you have a political leader in any part of the world who's not fully committed to democratic norms, norms are a kind of form of constraint instead of unwritten rules, not committed to democratic norms. When confronting people who are critical of them it's hard to contain yourself. It's certainly tempting to try to tilt the playing field, to go after the opposition, to try to capture the referees of the political system. The problem is that those tactics are exactly the thing that lead to a kind of escalating politics that ultimately lead to a slow democratic decay.

LL: You propose a solution in your book to those who might be concerned particularly with what's happening in the United States to try to prevent a deficit and democracy there. Can you briefly tell me what you are suggesting?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: Yes in the last chapter of our book we proposed a set of solutions. We begin by diagnosing the problems and then we think underlying many of our problems in the United States and in other countries as well facing similar challenges is exactly as Prime Minister Trudeau mentioned high levels of polarization. The sources of polarization in different countries vary, but the root causes after a polarization each side views each other as. And so we proposed a set of ideas for how to address polarization. Some of these include you know the Republican Party itself needs to be transformed. The Republican Party is a kind of highly homogeneous political party, continues to be a very diverse multi-ethnic American society, that's one thing. Second point is you know what Democratic Party politicians and voters do. And we argued that they need to resist the temptation to fight like Republicans. There's a lot of talk among Democrats you know we need to emulate the strategies Republicans in order to prevent being taken advantage of. We argue in our book that’s really the mistaken strategy that you know in certain conditions certainly necessary to fight hard, but we think Democrats and all citizens of politicians need to fight in ways that reinforce democratic norms rather than undermining.

LL: We've got about 30 seconds left. Given the polarization in the United States right now, how much confidence do you have that those gaps can be bridged in the name of reviving democracy?

DANIEL ZIBLATT: Yeah I mean again I think you know we began this conversation talking about Hungary and I think the United States is certainly a much stronger position. I mean there are these kind of echoes. The U.S. you know has a robust civil society, a robust Democratic Party opposition, and so I think if people begin to learn that much more is at stake, you know, that there's a lot to potentially lose, then you know we only hope and we encourage and that's one of the purposes of writing the book is to show that you know we can't take democracy for granted. It's necessary for citizens. But certainly a lot hinges on elections.

LL: We will leave it there. Thank you very much, Daniel Ziblatt.

DANIEL ZIBLATT: Yeah, thank you very much.

LL: Daniel Ziblatt is the co-author, along with Steven Levitsky, of the new book, How Democracies Die. We reached him in Newton, Massachusetts. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Guest host Ali Hassan speaks with Canadian actor Cynthia Dale about her new role in the musical, Fun Home. She also discusses her long run on Street Legal, a show that's getting ready for a TV reboot. I can't wait. Years ago I was an extra on that show. If you look at the past archive you can see me in the background there. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. Use it to browse through past episodes of our show, search for stories you missed or hear the day's top stories right from your smartphone or tablet. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. We opened the program today talking about the influence hate speech online may have had on Alexandre Bissonnette, the convicted murderer who killed six people at a Quebec City mosque last year. Aymen Derbali survived the attack, but just barely, and he testified earlier this week at Alexandre Bissonnette's sentence hearing. We'll leave you with an excerpt from The Current's documentary: It was a Sunday. This is Aymen Derbali describing the attack to producer Susana Ferreira. I'm Laura Lynch, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current. 

JD: Michael Ignatieff left Canadian politics long ago. But now, he's at the centre of one of Hungary's most contentious political fights.
Mr. Ignatieff is now the President of the Central European University in Budapest. Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has passed legislation that threatens to shut it down. He says he's combatting fraud and foreign influence. But he's been met with thousands of people protesting in the streets.
Mr. Ignatieff calls the law an attack on academic freedom. And he's appealing to the outside world for help.
We reached Michael Ignatieff in Budapest.

CO: Michael Ignatieff, what does legislation in Hungary mean for the future of your school?

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: Carol, I think it would shut us down. We've been here for 25 years. We're a graduate institution that issues masters and doctoral degrees that are accredited in the United States and the government is basically saying you can't issue those degrees and if you're going to stay here you have to be pursuant to some bilateral agreement between the federal government of the United States and Hungary. And we won't sign anything that compromises our academic freedom. And so we've been resisting very very sharply. And I think it's awakened a chord in Hungary simply because we're one of the few remaining truly free institutions in the country. And that's why we end up getting you know, something like 70,000 people in the street chanting in support of academic freedom. Who knew?
You know, it's been a, Carol, it's been a very moving and emotional time for us. We haven't started those demonstrations, we don't have any part in them, but boy when you're in a university and someone's parading out your window saying you know “Free universities, free country”, it's pretty pretty strong stuff.

CO: Prime Minister Orbán says this is broad legislation that he needs to crack down on fraud. Do you think your university has been targeted?

ME: Well the fraud stuff is particularly outrageous. You know, we're proud of the fact that we're one of the very best universities in the region, one of the best in Europe. You know why is it happening? You'd have to ask the prime minister. He's got an agenda.

CO: But you think your university has been targeted?

ME: Oh I think there's no question it's been targeted. I could give you chapter and verse about this. This legislation actually has only one institution that it could possibly apply to. And that's us. I think he just is worried that we are a threat to him. In fact we're not any kind of threat to him. We're actually a university, we get up every morning and do those thrilling things like medieval history and analytical philosophy. You know, stuff they do at the U of T or Université d’Ottawa.
But he construes this as being some kind of threat to his regime. It never is never will be. But none of us here is going to be pushed around, and because we're private and independent and endowed, we can fight back.

CO: What do you mean when you talk about Prime Minister Orbán ‘s agenda?

ME: Well Carol, I mean I honestly feel we've been hijacked. That is, the government wants to get the attention of Washington. And so they've taken an American institution hostage as if to say you know “Hey pay attention to us. We want a meeting in the Rose Garden. We want this kind of attention. We can't seem to get otherwise.” So it's a strange business. I think there's another element to this which is apparent. You know Mr. Orbán received a scholarship from the founder of this university, Mr. Soros in 1989. And I think there's some weird uncontrollable father son dynamic here that I actually don't understand, don't care about. I think he thinks he can take a Soros institution hostage but we’re not actually a Soros institution in the sense that I don't answer to Mr. Soros, I answer to trustees and it's an independent institution.

CO: Mr. Soros, he's the founder of the university. He endows the university. So is it so off the mark that by Mr. Orbán would see an attack on this university as an attack on George Soros?

ME: Oh sure. I mean I see that. But if this is about academic freedom, then Academic Freedom cuts both ways. It's academic freedom in respect of governments, but it's also academic freedom in respect of founders. I mean I got you know the chancellor, vice-chancellor of Oxford University and the chancellor of Berkeley, and ex-president of Stanford on my board. You know, they're the people I answer to; they're the people who hired me. And this man, let it just be entered in the record, you know, is a Holocaust survivor, unbelievably generous towards Hungary over 30 years. You know it makes my blood boil. I don't answer to the guy, but he's done more for this country than anybody I can think of.

CO: But there is still a lot of support for Viktor Orbán, maybe outside of Budapest more, but that he is still a popular politician. His objective as he stated very clearly, is he does not like liberal democracies. He is trying to transform Hungary into a populist nationalist entity. He's got that vision, and does it appear that your university is in the way of that?

ME: I think there's no doubt about that. He thinks there's some electoral gain in taking a run at us. But I just think that taking a run at an American institution is actually a strategic mistake. I think taking a run at a free institution riles up Budapest. I think taking a run at academic freedom triggers you know support from academic institutions around the world. I don't, I just genuinely don't think he gambled on that. I'm not going to comment on his agenda. Liberal, illiberal is not my business. But you know, my only job is to defend this institution and that's what we're doing.

CO: Leaving aside your political adventures here in Canada, that career. You have been a journalist, and author, you have written about the Balkans, Eastern Europe for decades, and to some extent, have you become a player in the story that you've been analyzing for years?

ME: I don't think I'm a player. I mean I think I'm just I got caught in something that is a lot bigger than me. But I’ll tell you Carol, you know, I've been in and out of academic life all my life, but I think the last three weeks have taught me more about academic freedom as a value then than I ever dreamed. I mean, a lot of your listeners may think, oh academic freedom that's a privilege that professors have. You know, actually it has a much deeper connection to our democracy. Universities are among the first self-governing institutions and a lot of our ideas of democracy are connected to the idea of self-governing institutions. And when you see an institution fight like I've seen this one fight, you really discover a passion for self-government, self-rule, to be free of government interference that's very powerful. And I'm not swept up in it, I'm trying to lead it. But it's moved me a lot and deepened my attachment to universities and you know, to the stuff that we do and I think that's the thing I take away. I don't think I'm a player in the search but I think the fact you were kind enough to say, I’ve thought about this part of the world for a long time, I married into this part of the world. I think that actually helps me get some kind of handle on what's going on. But it's been an amazing adventure and it's not over and I'm not out of the woods and I don't want to proclaim victory. We're still in a really stubborn battle that could go on for some time and frankly I need, I mean I shouldn't be using you airwaves to do this, but I need all the support from Canada I can get.

CO: We will leave it there but we will be following this story. Mr. Ignatieff, thank you.

ME: Pleasure Carol.

CO: Good night.

JD: Michael Ignatieff is the president of Hungary's Central European University. We reached him in Budapest. And you can find more on this story on our website cbc.ca/aih.