Thousands-strong demonstrations have taken place several times in Budapest in the last two weeks, ignited by the government’s plan to introduce a tax on Internet usage.
Fidesz has to be congratulated: it takes a special effort to annoy both the left and the right so much at the same time. ‘Internet tax’ as a phrase is like ‘fossil fuel subsidy’ or ‘consumerism benefit’: remarkably elegant in its ability to spread disgust so equally across the whole political spectrum.
The plan, as it was originally conceived, was to impose a charge of 150 forint on each Gigabyte of data downloaded, which could amount to as much as 900 forint for a single HD movie. But downloading films wasn’t the right the protesters were defending. The demonstrations were about Internet freedom - freedom of expression, of access to information – the new grounding of our civil society in this digital age. The mechanisms of democracy, they say, are not the sort of thing that should be taxed.
And if Hungarians are wary about that sort of thing right now, it’s with good reason. In a speech in July, after praising the political systems of Russia and China, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared, “the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.” In that context, this tax appears to its critics as symbolic of a larger effort to undermine the democratic process in Hungary. The protesters were determined to win at least this small victory over Orbán’s grim project.
The battle on that front seems to be going well. The government initially proposed a compromise: a cap on the tax at 700 forint per month for private citizens, and then finally took the issue completely off the immediate agenda last week. The issue hasn’t disappeared completely, and the government is now talking about a possible tax on Internet Service Provider profits, to be introduced at some vague future opportunity. Back home, we’d call the issue ‘kicked into the long grass’: hopefully somewhere nobody will find it again.
But the protesters haven’t backed down. The opposition to this policy was so predictable, the climbdown so complete and rapid, it’s prompted many to wonder if the whole plan was an exercise in misdirection. A chance to unite opposition groups in achieving one small victory, in the hope they’ll lose sight of the larger plan. It’s certainly true that while all this has been going on, the government has been involved in co-operative negotiations with Russia over the construction of a new gas pipeline: a means for Vladimir Putin to maintain his grip on Europe’s energy supply, which is alarming policymakers in both Brussels and Washington. The protesters, in maintaining their organised opposition, are not letting the broader question go, and are beginning to see themselves as a platform to voice dissent against the whole of Fidesz’s project.
Whether this attempt to establish the group as a new opposition force will succeed remains to be seen. Orbán has divided, and ruled, successfully for some time now. Finding a uniform platform for the breadth of dissenting voices against Fidesz’s platform - liberals, socialists, and libertarians are all among them – will be no small task, and nor will be turning a single issue protest group into a fully established opposition, which is the only thing that can hope to challenge Fidesz now. But the determination of the protesters is certainly admirable, and we should expect this story to continue on for the foreseeable future.
Daniel Hartas, Philosophy, United Kingdom
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