Bela Buda

hvg.hu: Where do our fears come from?
 
Bela Buda: It's clear that they have historical origins, but science doesn't know much about it. The public knows even less. Social psychology has much work to do in the field. It could analyse the content of these fears, using surveys to determine how widespread they are. There may have been such surveys, but the results never became widely known - or perhaps individual parties and media organs interpreted them after their own fashion. So it was a surprise even for me when the president addressed this issue. I share the view that both political camps are stoking fears, which is the result of the truly horrifying events of the 20th century. One is the holocaust, which is still a source of anxiety for the entire Hungarian population, regardless of their ethnicity. The other is the Rakosi era, the communist terror, which nobody in Hungary was expecting after 1945. There's something as else, which also has past antecedents: we are scared of street violence, while we are confronting an economic crisis that threatens our lives with collapse at any moment. Our anxieties also result from the collapse of our illusions about the regime change. There was great optimism in Hungarian society at the end of the 1980s, with many believing in the promise of a civic existence comparable to that in western Europe. Communication experts manipulate us using all three kinds of fear during their political campaigns.

hvg.hu: It's worth distinguishing between fears we inherit from the past, fears linked to traumas, and the current existential anxiety. It's as if a middle class that got used to a degree of security in the Kadar era is now confronting the loss of its safety net.
 
Bela Buda: For decades, politics cultivated the illusion that it could protect the interests of social groups, that its main task was raising or at least maintaining the quality of life. This feeling lived on in people's minds after the regime change. Now, however, many are starting to think the state has abandoned them. The party that won the 2002 elections promised to improve quality of life.Then, however, mutual trust between the governors and the governed collapsed, which undermined people's faith in the future.

The government parties and the opposition say completely different things about future prospects. The situation is reminiscent of the time when an elderly Kadar started to panic, incoherently telling the Party's Political Committee, "there is no crisis. Nothing is wrong." It's true that government communication is very bad at the moment, meaning they cannot credibly justify their planned savings packages. Cuts follow cuts, making people feel there is no light at the end of the tunnel - and this is the cause of their anxiety. Leaks in the press just strengthen this impression. The newest example is the cuts suggested by Tibor Draskovics, the "fourth Gyurcsany package," which would involve more redundancies and an end to discounted mortgages. Few believed the prime minister when he denied these reports. It's clear that the team in charge of communicating the prime minister's message is becoming less and less effective.

hvg.hu: Maybe people are exploiting fears from the past, but some of those fears continue to live on independently of any manipulation.

Bela Buda: Fear of anti-semitism is realistic if only because anti-semitism is present in much of the world. In East Germany, which was a model of 'existing socialism', the local neo-Nazis reappeared immediately after the wall came down. They are on the march in Ukraine and in Russia, and we haven't even started addressing the conflict between militant Islam and Israel. Given all this, the Hungarian political elite was very incautious in dealing with this issue after the regime change. Many on the Right made mistakes back then. One was the psychiatrist Ferenc Grezsa, a former student of mine, who wrote a pamphlet in poor taste entitled Fathers and Sons. Writings like these polarised Hungarian society, one half of which is still unable to forgive the wounds inflicted by the other half. That's why many right-wingers regard a left-wing government as a catastrophe and vice versa. The stoking of fear is mutual, the press is divided down the middle, with the pages of one paper endlessly condemning another paper, all the while looking for hidden motivations behind politicians' gestures.

And meanwhile, society has tired of politics. That's shown by a recent survey which found that historically low numbers would vote if a parliamentary election were held now. Laszlo Solyom's attempt to deal with these fears is unlikely to work miracles under these circumstances. But perhaps he can persuade political players to focus less on evoking fears regarding the other side, and not to cement party unity by the use of fear tactics. Fear could even play a positive role in today's Hungarian politics. If people feel threatened by the crisis, the political elites may be forced to seek the minimal consensus that looks at the moment to be out of reach.

János Pelle