István Stumpf and the Origins of Fidesz
Franz Pokorny
It is not unknown in the annals of history for a revolutionary elite to retain one or two old ornaments from the ancien regime, whose presence is so anachronistic as to suggest a great ruse has been played. As in the old cryptographic method of searching for strings of text that repeat over separate passages, one might sift through these men’s pre- and post-revolutionary lives to figure out the punchline.
Take, for example, Molotov and Kaganovich, who survived Stalin’s purges only to spend their last days up in the gods of the state library in Moscow, in an off-limits reading room where the books had spines in every colour, and you could bump into Oxford historians milling about just as the Cold War was kicking back up into gear. Or Hjalmar Schacht, the grand old man of the Bank of International Settlements who built Hitler’s war economy and somehow lived long enough to play a minor role in founding the precursor to the Green Party. The pantheons of the ancient near east invariably included a set of „old gods“, long displaced by younger, more vital specimens, but still lurking around somewhere just out of sight. In Hungary, there is István Stumpf.
I never found it untoward that communist party veterans should be so plentifully represented among the great and the good of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. You can trust a Karl Marx University of Economics man to get the job done. Socialism may not have provided much opportunity for individual talent to express itself, but it knew how to identify and promote it, and the fact that the top business graduates of the workers’ state flourished under the new system is not in itself evidence of darker forces at work, for no government could realistically have dispensed with their expertise, and, in a country where the burden of maintaining sclerotic economic institutions was historically balanced out by a tacitly sanctioned shadow realm of informal activity, it was almost impossible to organise the „open society“ as anything but a great chain of handshakes.
Orbán was not a Karl Marx University man, but still he too was marked out for something more than his modest rural upbringing, receiving a place to study law at the ELTE — a somewhat odd choice of subject in a state whose express purpose was to wither away. Going off his graduate thesis on the trade union movement in Poland, law school under socialism meant humanities bluffing, much as it does in America, where it was considered perfectly respectable for J.D. Vance to hand in rambling personal essays about his childhood in Appalachia as contract law coursework, or here in Britain, where Keir Starmer was able to graduate despite never having read anything weightier than a Roy of the Rovers comic. If you bluffed well, and made a good impression on some dark broker within the party apparatus, you went to a szakkollégium, which is what Orbán did.
A szakkollégium is a uniquely Hungarian institution that — like so many of these uniquely Hungarian institutions — finds a rough parallel in a quintessentially British organisational form: the Oxbridge college system. These colleges were essentially student dormitories that organised extra-curricular lectures and seminars for their residents, who were expected to steep themselves in the life of the mind. In the 1980s they had a strong political orientation, and their participants generally seem to recall them as islands of free thought amidst the languid waters of socialist orthodoxy. It was at the István Bibó szakkollégium at the foot of the Gellért Hill in Buda that Orbán first became acquainted with the other later founding members of Fidesz, together with whom he edited the college’s in-house samizdat magazine Századvég („fin-de-siecle“), which featured long, „Daniel Hannan on the legacy of the Reform Bill“-esque articles on Spengler, the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, the true meaning of Mitteleuropa, and other such weighty themes. Századvég was printed on a photocopier donated by George Soros, who visited the college in 1986, and whose role in the gypsy king’s career is the stuff of general knowledge. The man responsible for this serendipitous meeting of minds was the college’s director; the young reform communist functionary István Stumpf.
To give Stumpf sole credit for Orbán’s CV would be an unaccountable parapolitical excess, but it would be no exaggeration to say that his presence at the college was necessary for things to work out as they did. The reason Orbán and his schoolmates enjoyed what intellectual liberties they had was that Stumpf’s wife Anita was the daughter of party bigwig István Horváth, then in the first of two spells as minister of the interior — a post which put him in charge of the country’s sprawling domestic intelligence apparatus. Horváth left the ministry in 1985 for two years as secretary of the party central committee, only to return for socialism’s big finale between 1987 and 1990. The ministry’s men in grey suits were fully aware of what Stumpf and Horváth pater et filia were up to. We have intrepid newshound Csaba Ilkei to thank for digging up an old report from the counterintelligence department, dated August 12th, 1986, that records a conversation between an informant and Orbán now-wife Anikó Lévai (a marriage of convenience, according to the files) describing the atmosphere of soirées at Stumpf’s villa in Budapest’s tasteful hilltop Rózsadomb neighbourhood, where confidential information flowed like the disgusting socialist wine people used to drink in those days and the future of the country was plotted out beneath a starry sky. Those unable to read the original should toss it into google translate; it is a fascinating, immensely sinister black chaika of a document, you can see the cogs of history turning.
To place Stumpf’s activities in their context, democratisation in Hungary was a top-down affair, laid well in advance and under little grassroots pressure of the kind that existed in Poland. The two largest parties at the 1990 elections, the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) and the liberal Free Democrats (SzDSz), emerged from literary patronage networks cultivated by foresighted reformists in the party’s upper echelons. The MDF had its roots in the circle of agrarian populist writers that the regime had kept hanging around for decades as a loyal opposition. These found an energetic political patron in former deputy culture minister Imre Pozsgay, who favoured a Tory social protectionism basically indistinguishable from Theresa May. The SzDSz drew its cadres from the ranks of disgruntled junior researchers at the web of think tanks under the umbrella of the notoriously shadowy (also) former deputy culture minister György Aczél, whom most conspiracy theories on the regime change in Hungary centre around in some way (most importantly that propounded by Orbán’s late advisor Gyula Tellér, who traced in the inner-party battles of the Kádár era a vast Jewish conspiracy against world communism stretching back to the 1950s).[i] These prefab dissidents cut their teeth in printing samizdat for disillusioned party apparatchiks in the leafy inner-city neighbourhoods of Budapest in the 1980s and were first rolled out to the general public as „the dissident opposition“ during roundtable talks convened in 1989, with Fidesz tacked onto the program as a surprise late addition.[ii]
What was the point of Fidesz? While the party’s founders were an ideologically heterogenous group, Fidesz was perceived by most political commentators at the time as a market liberal party with a bohemian ethos indistinguishable from the SzDSz, although it was lost on no one that the latter group was composed of urbane Jewish intellectuals, while Fidesz’ members were for the most part provincial nobodies. The idea sometimes does the rounds on in coronaboomer facebook groups, which have swung decisively against Orbán, that Horváth, a Pozsgay ally, envisioned Fidesz as a goyishe counterweight to Aczél’s sway over the urban intelligentsia. Plausible as this theory seems, it should be taken cum grano salis. The Horváth-Pozsgay connection is somewhat overstated; Horváth maintained Aczélniks on his staff well after the schism with Pozsgay, while Aczél was also the man who brought Soros to Hungary in 1986, the first time he met Orbán. But there is no clear answer to this riddle, it is impossible to determine who exactly was using whom to what ends in those days. It may be that Horváth, seeing how Pozsgay and Aczél had used the intelligentsia to build up a power base just as Hungary was repositioning itself towards the West (IMF accession in 1982 being the watershed moment), believed that having his own gang of dissident intellectuals could make him a broker in the party’s brewing factional struggle regardless of which way the cards fell, while Soros cultivated the proto-Fidesz as a hedge against Aczél and the Jewish liberals’ possible defeat. But let us not make the crass error of assuming that just because, in the jargon of parapolitics, Fidesz was an „op“ meant that it was a particularly good one, for personnel is policy, and Orbán turned out to be a rather slippery character indeed.
In any event, it is hardly a secret that Pozsgay’s grand design was to set himself up as a proto-Yeltsin in a semi-presidential system in which he, as a party reformer with the broad public recognition that no oppositional figure possessed, could expect to handily win the top job. The parliament he would steer, in a somewhat more plausibly democratic version of the old Stalinist popular front strategy, by means of a United Russia-esque coalition between the reconstructed communist party and the Democratic Forum. If Fidesz had been intended to play a role in this scheme by coopting „liberal“ dissent, it evidently backfired. Orbán swung his party’s organisational weight behind an SzDSz petition to settle the question of whether the presidency would be elected directly or by parliament through a referendum, which was accepted by the government and whose conclusion in November 1989 put an end to Pozsgay’s ambitions. The socialists were trounced at the following year’s parliamentary elections, and the MDF, freed from its overburdening patron, unexpectedly found itself in a position to govern from the right. Its struggles to implement its program under the pressure of economic transition and the skullduggery of „post-communists“ in the bureaucracy form the core of the contemporary Hungarian centre-right’s tragic narrative of its own history, but this is a story for another time.
Fortuitous, or perhaps only obfuscatory, for the new democracy was the fact that the protagonists of the 1980s all vanished around the turn of the decade. Aczél died in 1991, Pozsgay would never again play a front-facing role in politics after the referendum debacle, although he resurfaced occasionally in various advisory roles to Fidesz. Horváth, for his part, gracefully took the blame for an espionage scandal that emerged in 1990 and resigned into obscurity. The Free Democrats moved in and out of government for the following two decades, but the Jewish intellectuals at the core of the party proved to have little knack for politics, and were largely marginalised by dour Karl Marx University men. The party system bifurcated between Fidesz and a post-communist party run by grey apparatchiks, each setting out their stalls to a Potemkin civil society and a handful of oligarchs interested above all in exploiting the commercial opportunities offered by the contemporaneous Putin Boom in Russia, and looking for a government that would provide them the diplomatic cover with Moscow to do so.
And what of István Stumpf? With Fidesz safely in parliament, Stumpf, who had carried on stacking up meaningless party sinecures until the end, apparently oblivious to the regime looming collapse, eased into a new role as inaugural director of the Századvég Political Academy, a Fidesz-aligned „party school“ (like the one the communists had) funded by the Soros Foundation that later became Fidesz’s main think tank. This gong lasted until 1998, when our hero became Orbán’s chief of staff in his first government, where his most important contribution was to create the system of „mirror departments“; i.e. administrative divisions within the Prime Minister’s Office corresponding to the state ministries, which they would be tasked with overseeing. The rough template for this was the duplication of party and state authorities under communism, itself a pastiche of the British system of permanent secretaries parachuted into the ministries by the civil service, and it is interesting that, for all the talk amongst Anglosphere conservatives of „learning from Orbán“ on bureaucratic reform, this institution most crucial for the day-to-day functioning of government in Hungary, pioneered by Orbán, is seldom mentioned. When the Social Democrats were swept back into power in 2002, Stumpf went back to Századvég and stayed there until 2010, when — not having ever once had to dust off his old Kádár era law degree in the near-three decades since graduating — he was offered a constitutional court judgeship upon Orbán’s return to power.
In truth, this was a demotion for Stumpf, whose cursus dishonorum ground to a sudden halt. In the midst of the party that he had built’s unmitigated triumph, a triumph that he scarcely could have imagined while sipping Rotkäppchensekt on the terrace in Rózsadomb, he found himself shunted off into the nondescript office block in the grimy Buda side street that houses Hungary’s much-abused constitutional court, to spend the next nine years rubber stamping legislation that, if he and his fellow judges were ever to raise ruckus, could simply be written into the constitution the next day thanks to Fidesz’s wallowing two-thirds majority. For the man who had laid out before Orbán the vision of a total constitutional transformation to expel his old comrades from the bureaucracy, this was an ignominious dénouement. How could it have come to this?
Stumpf’s demise began in 2006, after Orbán narrowly lost his second election on the trot and the knives came out inside Fidesz. Like a pox, the morbid symptoms of a vibrant civic culture spread across the body politic — murderous whispers on the backbenches, papers briefed, late night meetings in smoky backrooms, questioned about Orbán’s leadership raised by stern party grandees, the ominous ticking of blackberries. The plotters knew their art, for they were the anglophile wing of Fidesz; the old guard who had attended a szakkollégium, received Soros scholarships, studied in Oxford, or otherwise enjoyed ties with These Isles, and had spent a lifetime waiting for their moment to play rumours in the Red Lion. They included, among others, the current parliamentary speaker László Kövér, a Bibó szakkollégium old boy and militant communist; Mária Schmidt, a Soros-funded historian who had come to moderate prominence within her field as one of the generation of post-Cold War researchers who sought to refocus the academic study of the Holocaust towards local collaboration with the German authorities; and Lajos Kósa, who spoke behind closed doors of „replacing Orban as John Major replaced Margaret Thatcher“. Stumpf joined their number, and his position as a senior Fidesz-aligned figure technically outside the party fold allowed him to be more indiscreet in the media than others dared.
Let it not be said that the plotters lacked ballast. In on it, too, was János Martonyi, the communist government’s old foreign trade hand and a seasoned guelphine operator able to stand on his own two feet without a hand up from the alchemist of finance. Martonyi, who served as foreign minister in the first two Orbán governments eight years apart, introduced the „eastern opening“ towards Russia and China as the Orbán government’s foreign policy doctrine, although here he was only continuing the work of the previous government. In the doldrums of opposition, Martonyi sat on the committees that drafted the failed Constitution for Europe and the Lisbon Treaty, and ran a Chatham House-esque „democracy promotion“ NGO in Budapest whose advisory board contained the usual suspects. He brought with him Anita Orbán, now Péter Magyar’s shadow foreign minister. An altogether more sinister figure was young Antal Rogán, too young to remember the heady days of dissidence and altogether lacking in nostalgia for those dreaming spires. Along with Martonyi, Rogán was the only one of the plotters to retain any real power after 2010; namely as the minister responsible for the Hungarian Verfassungsschutz, whose conflicts with the post-communist Interior Ministry mafia J’accuse has covered elsewhere. I will not bore whatever readers have somehow ventured this far with further rigmarole; I think this gives a sense of the forces aligned against Orbán in 2006.
Parallels here to the Republican Party’s ill-fated machinations against Trump in 2024 will readily suggest themselves to the reader. The plotters may have had those immersed in the everyday life of the party onside, but it could not persuade the base to desert a leader whose apparent dissident past made him a larger-than-life figure out in the boondocks where no one had ever heard of George Soros. Fidesz’ small donor class was wavering; Magyar Nemzet, a respectable centre-right daily, reported in January, 2007, that Mária Schmidt had assembled a formidable coalition of capitalists behind the coming coup; the U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks cite a Fidesz MP as having privately assured the American ambassador in April that the donors had since lined up behind Orbán. The ace up the gypsy king’s sleeve seems to have a mysterious German patron, whose largesse went so far as to kit the embattled chieftain out with an armour-plated SUV. Checkmate, Venice, Ghibellines win again? Perhaps not, but from that moment on the German influence apparently preponderated at Orbán’s court, although it seems to have been on the ebb since around the time that CPAC was launched and MCC became a clearing house for thwarted Truss spads and down-and-out ‘LLM, KU Leuven’s to reinvent themselves as conservative intellectuals.
But Stumpf’s story was not over yet. The rumours had it that he would become ambassador to America after the 2010 election; the post instead went to a distant in-law of Prince Michael of Kent. But Lady Fortuna had great plans for gens Stumpf on the shores of the Potomac, and it fell to the daughter of the house, Anna, to pick up the fallen thread of prophecy. Stumpf filia has had an abiding interest in the United States, writing a thesis on American foreign policy at what used to be the Karl Marx University (only the best and brightest) and working at the Washington embassy as a political attaché during Orbán’s second government. At some point along the way she married a DC swamp creature called Marion Smith, who graduated from the Soros-funded CEU in 2009 into a plum job in Washington „promoting principles of liberty, prosperity, and beauty“ on the Hungarian dime. The former Ms. Stumpf now runs something called the Hungary Foundation, which provides generous fellowships for American trads to spend a period of time in the country and take in its vibrant, pulsating conservative intellectual life. I do not write mean any of this as an attack on this fascinating woman or a shocking disclosure of information that is publicly available, I am a friend of the life of the mind no matter how trivial, and a few Roger Scruton symposia or bit of Burke on the terrace over a glass of tokay are closer to eternity than a functional state healthcare system will ever be.
Abstracted from their contents, one can appreciate the formal elegance in Stumpf pater and filia’s parallel biographies; the sense of a life coming full circle. To these Americans, Stumpf paints a picture of Hungary not too different from her father’s freethinking college beneath the Gellért Hill — a conservative Tusculum far from the wacky woke world of Washington, where a man might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the morning, and criticise in the evening… or was that somewhere else? In any event, it has been quite the journey for the line of István Horváth. From Moscow to Washington; Com, Inc to Con, Inc. The names, the players, and the ideologies change, but the game runs in the blood.
[i] Who or what Aczél actually represented is somewhat murky; the most suggestive detail is that his right-hand man András Knopp, a literary scholar with no commercial background, resurfaced in the 2000s as director of a natural gas distribution company owned by Dmytro Firtash, almost certainly acting as a straw man for Semyon Mogilevich, who operated out of Hungary in the early 1990s.
[ii] While the many photographs of these talks show tables with visible corners, a circular table had in fact featured at the Polish talks. That the Hungarian table be identified as round was of utmost importance, since imitation of the Polish model — with its actually existing civil society, recognisable dissidents, and samizdat publishers who didn’t get their printers through connections at the Ministry of the Interior — was perceived by the Hungarian authorities to confer a sort of democratic legitimacy on the proceedings.