IT is unfortunately virtually inevitable that at some point, all politicians lie to voters. Sometimes, as in the case of Bush and Blair, even when unmasked, they insist the falsehoods were peddled in the honest belief that they were in fact true. They may also contrive to hint that, against all the available evidence, there was nevertheless still some grain of truth in what they said. The behavior of Hungary’s socialist prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, is, however, extremely rare. He admitted in May at a private meeting of his party’s MPs that his government had lied and lied in order to win April’s general election.
Somebody at the gathering recorded Gyurcsany’s extraordinary admissions and the tape was played Sunday on state radio. The result has been a series of ugly riots in Budapest and widespread calls for the premier’s resignation. Though the demonstrators’ extensive violence must be condemned, it is hard not to agree with the demand that for Gyurcsany to quit is right and proper. While spin and falsehood may be part and parcel of politics, when a politician is found out, the correct response is resignation. And this is exactly what Hungary’s leader has refused to do.
The matter, nonetheless, bears closer examination. Gyurcsany is not a career politician. He is a self-made millionaire who entered politics four years ago as an adviser to the then socialist prime minister, Peter Medgyessy. Just two years later he succeeded when Medgyessy was forced to resign. Gyurcsany had briefly been sports minister and, on taking that job, had apparently opened all his business affairs to public inspection in order to prove he had no skeletons in his closet. This openness is characteristic.
There are thus strong suspicions that Gyurcsany himself may have made and leaked the recording of his “lies” speech. Originally intended as a wake-up call to his MPs about the tough economic realities that face them, he may have thought it time to broadcast the warning. With yawning budget and current account deficits, his message was that after the failures of its first period in power, a second-term socialist government had to focus on hard economic policies in order to prepare Hungary for eurozone membership by 2012. Since the April election, taxes have already been raised. Now Gyurcsany’s administration must slash state expenditure, including the generous welfare net that has largely survived the end of communism.
Gyurcsany may have reasoned, in his no-nonsense businessman’s style, that leaking the taped speech and even afterward publishing the full text on his own website, he was preparing the country for radical change which only he could lead. Unfortunately democratic politics does not usually work this way. Electorates the world over may fully expect to be given half-truths by political parties campaigning for their votes, but they also have a right to be presented with a fair idea of the direction in which their country will be taken. By his own admission, Gyurcsany’s socialists did no such thing. It is in that admission that he shows both his political immaturity and the reason why he should resign.
