Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

The first and most desperate application for assistance from within the EU was Hungary’s.35 On October 27, 2008, Budapest reached agreement with the IMF and the EU (as opposed to the ECB) on a $25 billion loan package. At 20 percent of Hungarian precrisis GDP, it was a very substantial commitment and an unusually generous multiple of Hungary’s IMF capital quota.36 The IMF considered the program to be unusually lenient. Unsurprisingly, the Hungarians did not see it in such favorable terms. Hungarian politics polarized as the austerity program bit. The nationalist daily Magyar Hírlap described Hungary as being slowly garroted by a “credit noose around our necks.”37 For the extremists of Hungary’s Far Right it was a short step back in time from the “neocolonialism” of the EU and the IMF to the Treaty of Trianon, which had eviscerated Hungary after World War I. In 2010 the right-wing Fidesz party would reap the benefits with a crushing electoral victory, setting Hungary on the path to a self-declared illiberal democracy.