István Deák on Orban: Free speech under threat in the Magyar Republic?

Historian István Deák casts a gimlet eye on the relatively new political administration in Hungary, the land of his birth, in a recent essay in The New York Review. I was struck by the threat Prime Minister's Viktor Orban's government is posing to a free press and to free speech rights:

Now attention is here [in Hungary] again, although only temporarily and mainly in  Europe, and it has much to do with Hungary’s assumption of the presidency of the Council of the European Union against a backdrop of  recently enacted domestic policies that are said to violate the  principles and practices of the European Union. Among other things, Hungary’s right-wing government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has set up a National Media and Communications Authority consisting of five members of Orbán’s party, Fidesz, with the authority to fine journalists and media organizations up to $1 million for “immoral reporting.”
…
Public criticism of the Orbán government took an astonishing turn during the introduction in Strasbourg, on January 19, 2011, of Viktor Orbán as president of the European Union’s second legislative body, the European Parliament…some deputies sat with Band-Aids covering their mouths in protest against the new Hungarian media law. Others held up blank issues of  potentially censored Hungarian dailies. The leaders of the liberal and socialist groups of deputies declared Orbán unworthy of the presidency, and the leader of the Greens, the former student anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, shouted that Orbán was turning Hungary into a “Communist
surveillance dictatorship.”
…
One of the more serious international attempts to publicly denounce Orbán’s politics in Hungary has been an “Appeal to the European Institutions” by European intellectuals and leaders, dated January 7, 2011, in which the authors deplore the development of “a full-fledged illiberal democracy” and the dismantling of “democracy’s checks and balances” in Hungary. They demand that the European governments and parties “build clear standards of compliance with the values of democracy” and that violators of these standards be punished.
…
For the last few months, the government and its absolute parliamentary majority have been feverishly active, already bringing about substantial changes in politics and society. The most famous and most controversial of the innovations is the already mentioned media law giving extensive powers to the five Fidesz members who run the media authority. Appointed for nine years, they can impose a heavy fine on journalists and media outlets for reporting considered “immoral” or “unbalanced.”

Still, at the moment the media remain entirely free, and in view of the publication of the far right’s hysterical calls for violence against the Roma and the Jewish population, one might even argue that some of the media in Hungary are a little too free. Also, on February 16, 2011, the Hungarian government agreed to amend the media law to comply with changes proposed by the European Commission. The right-of-center coalition in the European Parliament has declared its satisfaction with the technical changes in the law but, in a recent development, the European Parliament as a whole called for more changes. The problem is less with the law than with the chilling effect that the rumor of censorship has had on some journalists and writers, and with the haste of some publishers and other media bosses to exercise self-censorship in order to please the new leaders of Hungary.

…

No less serious is the government’s systematic weakening of the powers of the Constitutional Court, the National Elections Commission, the National Bank, and the independent Fiscal Council while also putting party loyalists in the top position of each body. The government has already expressed its right to control the Hungarian Telegraph Agency, government-owned television and radio, some state-owned theaters and museums, and a few research institutions. The government, moreover, has the newly enacted right to dismiss public servants without cause.