Since I’m splitting my time between the Schengen and non-Schengen countries, I decided to spend most of the month in the Balkans, and scheduled that trip to start in Sarajevo. Getting there proved a little tricky, but I found a very cheap flight to Budapest and another very cheap flight to Sarajevo,¹ with the only proviso that there are just a few flights every week to Sarajevo. So I spent a few days in Budapest.

I was uncomfortable the whole time. I’ve generally avoided commenting much on the politics of places I visit,² mostly because I’m well aware of how little I know about what’s really going on, and I don’t trust what I’ve learned through the media to paint an accurate picture. But that’s not to say I’m not paying attention, or I think there’s basically a kind of moral equivalence to everywhere I visit.

So here I am in Budapest, widely regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. I was only here for a few days, so I walked across the Chain Bridge and rode up to the Castle Hill, had some pastries in an overstuffed café and found myself wandering home along the Danube. But it’s hard to enjoy it. Hungary simply isn’t a democracy anymore.

There’s an ongoing debate whether, for apartheid or totalitarian countries, it’s better to boycott them or engage them. Tourist dollars can provide a much needed lifeline for dictators, but at the same time visiting and talking to locals can help prevent the closing off of the world that governments use to reinforce their power. I read a book by a North Korean defector that kind of changed my thinking on this; I think boycott movements only work if the country cares about its position on the world stage. South Africa cared about its image. So does Israel, today. Those were and are places where organized international pressure can do a lot.

But a lot of countries simply don’t care about their image on the world stage. North Korea doesn’t care what the average citizen in the United States thinks of them. We can inflict massive economic harm on them — we have done so — but it’s not going to change the stranglehold that Kim Jong-un has on the country. Dictators who don’t care what happens to their people have a tendency to stay in power.

So I’m trying engagement and understanding, here. And Budapest is very charming, clean and organized and brightly lit. But that’s the part I find disturbing. The ruling party controls over 90% of the media in the country. They’ve gerrymandered districts to ensure electoral success and successfully packed the courts to prevent judicial losses. Opposition parties can’t get airtime to mount effective campaigns, and businesspeople are forced to sell to cronies or get hit with enough audits and tax penalties as to destroy their worth.

And … you can’t tell. Not from wandering around on the streets. We want the rot to be obvious — garbage laying out on the street because the sanitation workers are no-show jobs, or barren shops because the economy’s collapsed. But it doesn’t work like that anymore. Money’s still flowing from the EU into shady no-bid construction projects. Restaurants are open. The businesspeople who haven’t been forced to sell or take on silent partners are just keeping their heads down and raking in money, unwilling to rock the boat and make themselves a target.

I’ve been recommending Years and Years since it was first broadcast on the BBC. It’s a near-future projection of a world descending into dystopia, and the real revelation is that the world looks pretty much the same as it used to. Jobs get more precarious, the poor and minorities find themselves increasingly targeted and mistreated, but technology keeps getting better and you still have television and movies and nights out with friends. You don’t see the ground falling away from under you, and when you finally do notice it it’s easy to imagine it was inevitable, a natural process, not the result of thousands of small choices made by millions of your fellow citizens.

Steve Bannon has called Victor Orbán “the most significant guy on the scene right now.” Everything Orbán has done is being attempted right now in the United States by Republicans. I was glad to leave Hungary after just two days.

Next: Sarajevo (SSJ) to Düsseldorf (DUS)
Prev: Eindhoven (EIN) to Budapest (BUD)

Footnotes

¹ Although having missed the cutoff for online check in by 10 minutes, my 25€ trip to Bosnia required paying a 60€ fee for airport check in. Because Wizz Air is one of those companies that makes up for lost revenue by making everything really confusing and then screwing you over when you get confused.

² The United States being an obvious exception