Tamas Kolosi on Lex Mol and the unfinished regime change

The law known as Lex Mol, whose declared aim is to protect Hungary's strategic companies, has stirred up a hornet's nest. Some believe the law presages the advent of the Russian capitalist model. We asked the sociologist Tamas Kolosi, who researches the Hungarian social elite, to discuss whether Hungarian oligarchs exist. His answer has implications for people on the lower rungs of society and for party financing.

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Lajos Bokros, the former finance minister, said of Lex Mol that it protects Hungarian business oligarchs and the politicians whom the oligarchs support. Mihaly Kupa, another former finance minister rejected the allegations as president of Mol's supervisory board in an open letter. Paul Lendvai, the famous Austrian public intellectual of Hungarian descent also expressed a view on Bokros's statement. Why is there such intense argument, and what caused it?
There is no oligarchy - in fact, we have the opposite in certain senses. Civic societies are constructed of two key strata - the owners and the intellectuals. It seems to me that one of the fundamental problems of the Hungarian regime change is that there was no property-owning class before 1990. The regime change was brought about by the intellectuals, under their leadership and active participation. I'm thinking not just of those who played a prominent role, but of a much broader spectrum of people, because the intellectuals furnished the real basis for the regime change, and the intellectuals ruled politics in that period. This is shown by the composition of parliament at the beginning of the 1990s - and by the fact that the then prime minister was a historian. This was rule by the intellectuals.

I said then that if we want to build a modern civic society, then we have to change this one-sidedness. This means not just building up capital, making greenfield investments and carrying out privatisations, but  also preparing ourselves for the property-owning class wielding influence.

It wasn't hard to predict the emergence of a property-owning class in Hungary, following the west European model of political generations. We followed the German-Austrian model, but also the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek models to some extent. In modern civic societies, the property-owning class's influence is stronger than the intellectuals'. Elsewhere, a kind of consensus emerged between the entrepreneurs and the intellectuals, but the intellectuals did not have the kind of excessive power they held in Hungary in the 1990s.