Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

In Poland the nationalists were in opposition. In Hungary they were the government. In the April 2010 election, the ruling Socialist Party paid the price for its corrupt and duplicitous handling of economic policy and the financial disaster of 2008. Promising to protect the Hungarian nation and Hungarian pensioners from the depredations of the IMF, a coalition headed by the nationalist Fidesz party and the Christian Democrats won 53 percent of the vote. Even more startlingly, the Jobbik movement, which toyed openly with neofascism, scored 17 percent, bringing the total nationalist vote to 70 percent. Among Fidesz’s heresies was its refusal to separate the questions of political sovereignty and financial dependence. Ignoring protests from the IMF and the EU, it justified its taxes on foreign banks and a raid on private pension funds in terms of harsh historical necessity.26 Since freeing itself from the Soviet yoke, over the past twenty years Hungary “had to bitterly experience the validity and truth of the old wisdom that a nation can be subjugated in two ways—with the sword or with debt.”27 As Greece was submitting itself to the troika in April 2010, a defiant Prime Minister Orban told a news conference: “In my view, neither the IMF nor the EU’s financial bodies are our bosses. We are not subordinate to them.” Hungary would negotiate but it would not accept “diktats.”28 Orban’s aggressive nationalism and Fidesz’s campaign to curtail civil liberties and political pluralism...