ANOTHER VOICE
The Hungarians might have a word or two in Mr Major's ear
AUBERON WAUGH
he Hungarian language is so impossi- bly difficult that you can communicate only with those Hungarians who are able to talk English, and you have no particular reason to suppose they are telling the truth. As in so many formerly communist countries, a lot of people have a lot to hide. In order to count up to ten in Hungarian you must make noises which have no reciprocal forms in any known language, and sound strange enough in any Christian throat: egy, ketth, harom, negy, Ot, hat, ha nyole, kilene, tiz. If by any strange freak you can remember that list, you still have to master the pronunciation. It is easy enough to accept that six sounds like hut, while seven sounds like hate, but by what possible rule does 'one' — egy — rhyme with adieu?
If it is impossible to converse with Hun- garians in their own language and tempting to disbelieve them when they talk in any known European tongue, we might be relieved to learn that they seldom seem to believe each other when they talk among themselves. The young simply do not wish to know about the sufferings of the commu- nist era — the labour camps, the corrup- tion, the thuggery. When told about these things by their parents (or so their parents tell me), they say 'boring' in exactly the same dismissive tone that our own children adopt when confronted with any historical fact outside their own experience.
The result of all this is that although many of the young won't vote at all, being commendably uninterested in politics, those who do vote in next Sunday's election (8 May) will almost certainly vote for Mr Gyula Horn's socialist party, representing itself as the reform wing of the old Com- munist monolith. Add to them the 2 million pensioners (in a total population of 10 mil- lion), who have seen their standard of living decline by half in the past four years, and the 700,000 unemployed — Mr Horn, needless to say, promises a return to full employment, as well as a return to the pen- sion levels which distinguished the last days of the Kadar regime — and it seems more probable than not that after the votes have been counted in the second round of elec- tions on 29 May, and after all the coalition argy-bargy is completed, Hungary will have followed Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine in electing a left-wing welfarist government in the pathetic belief that it will be able to sort out the problems creat- ed by the grafting of a free market system on a socialist economy. 'Not everything about the old days should have been so quickly destroyed,' says Mr Horn, to gener- al applause.
It was to confront what must surely be the most depressing development of our time that I joined a small but noisy party of English intellectuals and social observers in Budapest for the weekend. Much of my time here seems to have been spent asleep in a field about 60 miles outside Budapest, but I feel that allowing for language diffi- culties this may be the best way to confront the Hungarian reality. The peasants, I should add, who are almost unbelievably poor — those who can't afford a horse or an ox break up the clods of earth with a pick — are also very friendly. Their male oxen are rather more aggressive.
Hungary, despite the extraordinary cheerfulness and energy of the younger population, seems to be in almost as bad a position as any country can be. The suicide rate is the world's highest, the divorce rate is the second highest, and at least half a million of the inhabitants are alcoholics. In the last years of the Kadar regime, when the government seemed anxious to intro- duce a mixed economy, foreign investors pumped in billions of dollars in loans. Unfortunately, this money was spent not on industrial or agricultural investment, but on preserving a wasteful full employment and subsidising food prices. This leaves Hungary with an enormous foreign debt, currently some $28 billion (in a country of 10 million where the average wage is about £1,200, and pensioners receive half that), and bad, if not yet run-away inflation.
The parallels between the last years of Kadar and our own John Major's regime should not go unremarked. Last year's £.50 billion deficit was not spent in investment for the future. It was spent propping up the health and social security apparat, most particularly maintaining 5 million people in public employment of whom many, if not most, have very little to do except make nuisances of themselves.
Mr Gyula Horn, who pooh-poohs any suggestion that he would reimpose a one- party system with central committee rule, cut his teeth as a Communist apparatchik when he joined the 'Workers' Militia' to fight against the anti-communist uprising of 1956. Now, at 62, he claims to offer a mar- ket economy with strong social security guarantees, just like Mr Major and Mr Clarke, and guaranteed full employment, which neither Major nor Clarke seems to have thought of yet.
I say that John 'Now We Have Take-Off Major has not yet guaranteed full employ- ment, but it looks as if Mr Clarke has laid his neck on the line in promising no mean- ingful cuts in public employment outside defence. Even our beloved MI6 is due to lose only 260 employees, from a payroll of 10,760, in the next three years, all from nat- ural wastage and retirement. If they won't cut public employment in the invisible sec- tor, it is obvious where their hearts lie, despite their announced 'massive cuts' in defence.
It would be easy to weep for Hungary's prime minister, Peter Boross, a catering manager before joining the Hungarian Democratic Forum two years ago and becoming prime minister last year. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Europe last week, he said Hungary needs a calm, conservative and strong-willed leader whose steady hand can finish the job of rebuilding the country after decades of ruinous communist rule. Mutatis mutandis that is exactly what we want in Britain, of course. Both of them have a problem — to be re-elected by a feckless, indifferent electorate. Here we have a leader who is neither calm, conservative nor strong-willed, who is rebuilding nothing and isn't going to be re-elected either.
The trouble with any attempt to convert a penurious socialist system into a prosper- ous, free, competitive economy by demo- cratic means is that the 'middle way' rhetoric always seems the most convincing. Look at Sweden, everybody says, or used to say. My own feeling is that the problem is much worse than anybody dares admit. So long as the mendacious 'middle way' is dan- gled, it will appeal even to a sophisticated, sceptical electorate like our own. The Hun- garians don't stand a chance. Democracy is not competent to effect the change. Only the Chinese have the answer, retaining all the oppressive apparatus of an authoritari- an system until the change is complete. In Britain, nobody has the first idea how to set about it, and few even want to try.
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