All opposed, say nothing: Hungary’s election

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. From London, I'm Jason Palmer and in.

New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

In recent years, Britain's universities have gone all in on Chinese students. There are 140,000 of them, 50% more than five years ago. Critics say that dependence on foreign student fees comes at the cost of free speech.

And three years ago, a Ukrainian filmmaker released a movie about the aftermath of a war between Russia and Ukraine. Critics loved it, but it attracted little commercial attention. That is starting to change. First up, though. Hungary goes to the polls this weekend, its politics have long been dominated by one man over three terms as Prime Minister. Viktor Orban and his right wing party Fidesz have polarized the nation. He has also brought it more firmly under his control. He he looms over Hungary's media, courts and education system. Eight years ago he explained his ruling philosophy. He promised to turn the country into an illiberal state. This Sunday's election pits Mr. Orban's populist autocracy against a coalition representing liberal democracy. And it's a contest made all the more significant by the war taking place just across one of the country's borders.

Viktor Orban is a nationalist populist leader and he's quite a hero to other alt right politicians around the world.

Matt Steinglass is our Europe correspondent.

His re election contest on April 3 is much bigger than just Hungary. It's really a verdict on how the nationalist populist right is faring around the world. The war in Ukraine has given it a whole new focus because that war has become a global struggle between the fortunes of autocracy and democracy.

And so tell us about Fidesz, his party. What does it represent?

If you talk to Fidesz members, what they will tell you is that Fidesz is a patriotic Christian conservative party that represents traditional European values and that they're fighting against an alliance of internationalist globalists who want to erase national traditions and replace Europe's original population with immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. They think of this as a global effort, which is directed by the European Commission. And of course, George Soros, who is a Hungarian born billionaire and a liberal philanthropist who they believe directs a kind of conspiracy of NGOs around the world. They also have a very skeptical attitude towards traditional Western liberal alliances, including their alliance with NATO. You'll hear in the speeches that Mr. Orban makes, including this speech that he made on March 15th as part of his campaign, that he positions Hungary as if it were a buffer state somewhere in between Europe and America and Russia trying to balance those powers against each other.

What you're describing, a populist who is standing up for what he calls traditional values and is skeptical of Western alliances and globalism. And he sounds a lot like Vladimir Putin to me. How similar is he to Putin?

In some ways, Orban's system of government resembles Vladimir Putin's system of government. It's a regime based on the support of oligarchs. He hands out favors to friendly business people who then donate money to his party in order to keep it in power. It's a nonviolent system. So it's very different from Putinism in that respect. But some people see it as a kind of a Putinism light. He has a very long friendly relationship with Vladimir Putin. And the war in Ukraine is putting all of that to the test. Orban has refused to allow Hungarian territory to be used to transfer arms to Ukraine. And he is adamant that Hungary should not get sucked into what he calls someone else's war, which is a very different stance from a lot of other nationalist populist governments in Central Europe. Orban used to have a position of leadership within a whole block of right leaning nationalist populist governments, including Poland, to some extent Slovenia. And those relationships are being put at risk now because they see him as being insufficiently opposed to Russia.

So his stance on Ukraine sounds unpopular with other countries. But how popular is he within Hungary?

Inside Hungary, he's very popular. His Fidesz party got about 48% of the vote in the last elections in 2018, but that was enough to give them a two thirds majority in Parliament, which has allowed them to change the constitution and to change the electoral system in order to protect their power. They changed the way that elections work in Hungary in 2012 to increase the proportion of parliament that's elected in single district from pass the post votes, which automatically gives an advantage to the biggest party, which is Fides. And it also gerrymandered all those districts, cramming all the opposition voters into a few large districts, spreading out their own majorities over lots of smaller districts. And that has made it very, very difficult for other parties.

So tell us about these other parties. Who's fighting against Orban?

There are a whole array of other parties on the left, the center, the far right. Even this year they finally realized that if they were going to have any chance of defeating Orban, they were going to have to work together. So starting about a year and a half ago, six of them came together and they set up a party they call United for Hungary. They ran joint primaries to pick candidates to run for parliament and to pick one candidate to run for prime minister. And the candidate who ended up coming out on top, It's a guy named Peter Markizay. He is a right leaning independent mayor from no particular party who runs a relatively small city. Some people like him because he doesn't come off as a typical politician, but he has a tendency to say impolitic things that get him into a bit of trouble with the press.

And how do you rate his chances.

Given that the opposition probably need to win 54% to actually get a majority in Parliament? Because of all the gerrymandering, his chances do not look very good. In fact, at the moment, they are trailing fides about 50% to 44%. They are having a little trouble selecting one clear theme, which is not particularly surprising if you can consider how different these parties are. But the main reason why they're really in trouble is because Orban completely controls the media. State media channels are complete propaganda machines. They just pour out Fidesz party line. Over the years, oligarchs friendly to Orban and Fides have gradually bought up all of the major private newspapers and other media outlets. They spend far more on social media than the opposition can, and they use all sorts of government agencies and government resources to run their campaign.

And how are Hungarians faring under Orban's rule? Has he appealed to people with more conventional means like handouts and policies?

He eliminated income taxes for people under 25 last year. This year he gave people back a big tax rebate if they had kids. The economy is doing extremely well. Like economies all throughout Central Europe. It's going to grow probably by 4.5% this year. But inflation is very high. Those tax rebates are going to make inflation worse. They've capped prices on basic foods and on fuel. Unemployment is extremely low. And Orban tends to run on a pretty economic agenda. So the way that he couches his resistance to participating in the war in Ukraine is that they need Russian gas and oil in order to keep energy prices low for consumers.

So given all that, who do you think is going to win this weekend? And if it is Viktor Orban, what does that mean for Hungary's democracy?

It does look like it is leaning Orban's way at the moment. If he wins, that will be very discouraging to Hungary's opposition. A lot of them felt that this was the last chance that they would get to stop him from permanently locking up power. At this point, Fidesz controls so many of the country's institutions and by coming together into one united party, they thought that they had given themselves a shot at denying power to Orban. If they can't, then one thing that they feel is very important is that Europe not stop its efforts to try to prevent Orban from degrading Hungary's democracy. When I talked to Clara Dobrev, who is one of the main opposition candidates, what she says was the war in Ukraine makes it even clearer that there's no such thing as a soft autocracy, that illiberalism is a one way road and it leads to catastrophe.

Matt, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you John.

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British universities are really good at producing marketing videos to lure in new students, often by making use of existing students as the talent.

Hi guys. My name is Susanna and I'm a first year student at the University of Liverpool and today I'll be your tour guide.

So Glasgow is Gaelic for dear green place.

The university was founded in 1451 and.

It'S the fourth oldest university in the.

UK, we have a lot of Hogwarts vibes going on. As you can see with the tree.

What these institutions really want is more international students. They pay much higher fees than native Britons.

Any advice for the international student who.

Wants to come here?

I would say don't be afraid to apply.

But being too dependent on those fees has consequences, especially when one country provides so many of those new students.

Over the past few years, British universities have developed more ties to China.

Margaret Khadifa is a Britain correspondent for the Economist.

For example, they have affiliated campuses in China, they have research partnerships, and there are Chinese students that are attending British universities. But as China under Xi Jinping has become increasingly authoritarian, some have started to worry that Chinese students and cash could come at the cost of free speech on campuses.

And you say at the same time, those ties between China and British universities have been getting tighter?

Yeah, they have. So, for example, Manchester University, a top research university here in the uk, has research links with nine Chinese universities and it also hosts a Confucius Institute, which is a language school and cultural center funded by the Chinese government. Liverpool, another top research university, has an affiliated campus near Shanghai. And then, probably most significant, it's really student numbers that have shown how close this tie between British universities and China is. So right now there are more than 140,000 undergraduate or postgraduate students enrolled in British universities, and that is up from 50% from five years ago. And Chinese students today are about a third of non EU international students across all universities in Britain. And they're at least 15% of the student bodies at schools like Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Sheffield.

Which in terms of fees has to be pretty good for those universities.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's also good for them because China's an important country. So the UK benefits from Chinese students expertise, but yes, absolutely. So foreign undergraduate students pay much higher tuition rates than domestic students. So while there are less foreign international students in British universities, their financial contribution is really quite significant. And so right now, Chinese students probably bring in around 2.5 billion pounds per year. That's about 3.3 billion US dollars, and that's just in tuition fees. And this source of income has become more and more important for British universities, and that's because domestic tuition fees are capped and government spending per university student has flatlined in recent years.

But you hinted that there's a downside to this as well.

Yeah, so some academics are worried that being so financially dependent on a single country could compromise free speech. So, for example, if a university were to do research on or invite a speaker related to a sensitive topic like Tiananmen or Tibet or Taiwan. China could become upset by that and China could threaten to pull out their students, and that would be a huge financial cost to universities.

And have there been incidents where that kind of interference has been explicit?

Yeah, we've seen a couple examples where there's been some interference. So in 2019, academics at Nottingham University, which happens to have a Confucius Institute and a campus near Shanghai, canceled a speaker from Taiwan. And that was reportedly after complaints from Chinese officials, though, of course, the university denies that there's a connection. There are also these Chinese Student and Scholars Association. So those are associations that are backed by the Chinese state and it's intended to help new arrivals in Britain settle in. But those have been known to interfere with speech on campus as well. So in 2017, the association organized students at Durham University to barricade a building in an attempt to stop an event that featured a speaker who practices a spiritual movement that's banned in China. And even Oxford has had some issues with this. So there was a row about whether Chris Patton, who is Oxford's chancellor and was also Hong Kong's final governor under British rule, could visit Hong Kong. And it's believed that Oxford was told that its sort of status as a destination university for Chinese students was at risk if this visit went ahead. And there's been some survey data about self censorship. So there was a survey conducted in 2020 by researchers at the Universities of Exeter, Oxford and Portsmouth, and they surveyed social scientists who taught students from authoritarian regimes. And two fifths of those who specialized in China said they had self censored when teaching students from authoritarian regimes.

And presumably there's concern about just how far that influence could stretch to the point that it might be a security concern.

So the British government and some of its higher education associations have guidance that's designed to keep universities and professors from making agreements that would allow sensitive research to fall into foreign government's hands, including, of course, China's. There's also been a push for greater transparency by Jesse Norman, who's a Conservative mp. So he has proposed in a bill that universities should report any foreign contracts of more than £50,000 to the office for Students. That's the higher education regulator. The idea here is that if British universities or academics are accepting foreign funding that could compromise their research, they would at least have to be clear about where that foreign funding is coming from. But the real problem when you're thinking about foreign money in British universities is the fact that they're very, very dependent on foreign, particularly Chinese, tuition dollars. And these measures don't really address that.

So it really does just come down to the money. Then how to break that link, though? What can be done to address that issue?

So the government's International Education Strategy advises universities to recruit students from many countries to avoid becoming overly reliant on any one country. But for some universities, that advice is just coming too late. So India has the second largest number of students at British universities of any country. They've got about 85,000 students studying in the UK this year, but that's a fraction of the Chinese numbers. So one expert I spoke to said that Chinese interference is manageable on British university campuses as long as administrators and academics can still stand up for academic independence. And that's probably doable for a big, powerful university with deep pockets like Oxford. You know, the example I talked about earlier with the dispute over the visit to Hong Kong, you know, they likely rebuffed Chinese authorities in that case. But for some universities that lack Oxford's global prestige and its deep pockets, angering China could be too risky.

Margaret, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

The year is 2025. Ukraine has just won a war against Russia. Atlantis is a Ukrainian film that came out in 2019 at a time when no one thought that that would ever be possible.

Benjamin Sutherland writes for the Economist.

It delighted critics, it got rave reviews, but as the producer Vladimir Yatsenko told me, it just didn't work commercially. But the fortunes of the film have totally changed. You've got a lot of commercial interest. It's popping up on a number of streaming services and there's theatrical releases that are being prepared.

So what happens in the film? What's it about?

It's not a narrative driven film in the style of classical Hollywood cinema. It's essentially a couple veterans of the war who are attempting to deal with the new reality. And the whole society has been psychologically and physically traumatized.

And so what's unusual, what's noteworthy about the film?

It's visually breathtaking. In fact, astonishingly, the film consists of exactly 27 shots, which for 108 minutes is just astounding. It's orders of magnitude fewer shots than you would have in classical Hollywood cinema, where the director is really moving camera angles and directing your vision to certain parts of the screen. Whereas with Atlantis, the director, Valentin Vasjanovic, sets up fairly broad angle master shots where you have to decide where to look. And there's a lot to look at. Because they're composed essentially like paintings.

And are there any links, any echoes, any similarities between this film and what's happening in Ukraine now?

The film was shot in 2018 in and near Mariupol, which is in eastern Ukraine on the Black Sea, which is currently under a pretty intense siege from Russian forces, and much of the city's been flattened. The director's idea was that he wanted people to be doing things in the movie that they have done in real life, and he called that the tuning fork of truth. He didn't want there to be any fakery, any overacting, anything that would come across as being too contrived or cinematic, if you will. The actors are actually all amateur actors, and he wanted there to be almost kind of a documentary aspect or a cinema verite aspect to it, that this is really true to the reality of what it's like to live in a country that's suffered from war.

Ben, it must be odd to watch a film in which Ukraine has won a war while a war in Ukraine is in fact ongoing.

Yes, absolutely. And in fact, when I spoke with the director and producer, one of the things that they said was the film was essentially conceived a few years ago as what the director called an anti utopia. And by that he meant it was a film about an impossible future. At that time, no one felt that Russia was going to be dislodged from the occupied territories in the east of the country. Now that the outpouring of support and will to fight, in short of the Ukrainian people, which we're seeing play out every day, is so incredible, he felt that now the feeling that he has and is starting to become predominant in Ukraine is that they will actually win at enormous cost, but that Russia is not going to manage to destroy the statehood and fully subjugate the country.

And so are the filmmakers still in Ukraine? And if so, do you know how or what they're doing?

Both the producer and director have bravely stayed in Kyiv and they are both filming documentaries and they're essentially wanting to document the atrocities of the targeting of civilians, efforts to prepare defenses. Both of them are armed. They say they'll fight to the death if Russian troops make it into the city. That's the place they want to be. That's the place they feel they have to be. They, as Mr. Yatsenko put it to me, we can't lose. This is our only country.

Ben, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, John.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Marguerite Howell, Kim Gitelson and Chris Impey. And our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are John, Joe Devlin and Sam Westrin. Our U.S. audio correspondent is Stevie Hertz. Our producers are Rory Galloway, William Warren and Alize Jean Baptiste. And assistant producer, Abesoye Ocendairo. With extra production help this week from Kevin Kaynors. We'll all see you back here on Monday, Sam.