>>2706808Orbán wants national capitalism, he created his own businessmen that back him and depend on him. This is preferable to Western capitalism, because even if they still exploit you, at least their investments are tied up in their own country and have no interest in turning them into dust in a war with Russia or any other country.
>a tax rate policy where the richer you are, the lower your tax rates areProgressive income tax has nothing to with socialism if it groups skilled workers and actual big capitalists into the same group (just as bourgeois sociologists would want it). This is how it works usually, including under governments preceding Fidesz.
>>family first policies>baby loansFunded by special taxes on banks. Not a bad thing per se.
>car purchase subsidies with a focus on SUVS and minivansThat's like all new cars. The average Hungarian can't afford a new car anyways and doesn't really need to when it's so easy to import used cars from Western Europe.
>preserving "Christian culture" and "ethnic hegemony">LGBT families excluded from benefits by design through technitalities in the legal definition of marriage.Who cares? If it's popular, a politician will say it. Nothing to do with socialism.
>benefits requiring employment history, disproportionately excluding minoritiesI see, this bit is about gypsies. First of all as a foreigner you need to understand that almost every Hungarian hates gypsies and almost every gypsy votes for Fidesz. Only a liberal activist (like the author of the first article who is member of a party that peddles identity politics to the urban youth, their only identifiable policy being the legalization of marijuana) would (pretend) not (to) know this in Hungary.
When privatization created massive unemployment, gypsies came to be the people that primarily constituted the newly created lumpenproletariat. Fidesz actually expanded benefits under the guise of public work programmes, which in some cases literally meant digging holes and filling them back (in exchange for votes which makes liberals mad). They also placed special taxes on non-productive corporations in banking, energy, telecommunication, the media, retail and insurance while giving subsidies to productive investment, fitting into the already existing trend of Western European corporations outsourcing production to Eastern Europe. Is this exploitative? Yes. Does this meaningfully increase the sovereignty of Hungary? Obviously no. But they identified a positive trend, stuck with it and mobilized the people who benefited from it to secure votes. Under the current government it was the lowest 10% which saw the largest proportional increase in income, even bigger than the richest 10%.
Orbán is an extremely competent manager of capitalism who doesn't just think in terms of election cycles or short-term profit and won't bankrupt his own nation just because this is what Western finance capital desires at the moment and he is independent enough to be able to pick and choose between which faction of capital from which nation to support.
He won't be removed anytime soon because he knows what workers are like and how to talk to them. Hungary has the most arrogant petit-bourgeois and petit-bourgeois-minded workers (PMCs) in Eastern Europe and when they see that Orbán doesn't pander to them and even intentionally antagonizes them (not the heckin' LGBTerinos!!!!), they go mad and support whatever is against him. Workers in turn see this and opt to support Fidesz. It's always like this. NGOs start talking about how poor gypsies are, and the liberal commentariat answers "I fucking hate gypsies they all vote for Fidesz". Opposition politicians promise that they will increase funding this or that public service (without explaining how will they achieve this in an economy that is extremely dependent on foreign countries), and then one of their arch-neoliberal advisors crawls out of a hole and says that "We. Should. Privatize. EVERYTHING.". This is when Fidesz points to one of their few social programmes like subsidized electricity so that can claim that they are against "Western capital".
The groups that benefit from Fidesz hate Fidesz so much that the current liberal opposition is actually made up of former members of Fidesz who were kicked out because they were too pro-Western or too corrupt. The only people who seem to care about workers in this country are in Fidesz or in the far-right opposition, unfortunately. Even hoping that Fidesz will slowly reform itself is more probable than the liberal opposition getting anything done at all. In fact anything good about Fidesz comes from them coopting the actually anti-capitalist far-right. That is probably where their (very Hudsonian) policy of taxing natural monopolies comes from.
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