ROBBERY IN PROGRESS, AT PLAIN SIGHT: PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC PROPERTY ONGOING IN HUNGARY

HUNGARY's current neoliberal-fascist government is setting the stage for yet another round of mass privatization of public assets. The way this has been done--a textbook case, really--is willful letting-to-go-to-rot / collapse of public services. Once they sink to a level that is patently intolerable, the time will be ripe, politically, for those services to be privatized to both foreign and domestic clients of the government, plus of course corrupt high government officials themselves, through proxies (in Hungary pretty much everyone can by now name the biggest and most obvious cronies and proxies of the ruling Prime Minister and his group of fascist thugs--they even have nicknames by now). So, come the next round of elections, predicted to be won, again, by the currently ruling group of extreme-right-wing / neoliberal political entrepreneurs, with an over 2/3 supermajority of seats, those assets will be privatized "in order to be saved". Thatcher redux. Current cases include:

- the National Gallery (the former royal castle building, you can see it if you look across the Danube from the Pest promenade, right above Chain Bridge, overlooking both the Buda and the Pest sides. Control of this, highly symbolic and ceremonial area of the city by government and its cronies is nearly complete with the recent eviction of the National Library, about 50 m from the Gallery, and of course the placement of the prime minister's office in a former monastery, serving during the socialist times as a theater. . . plus outrageously ostentatious new construction, in truly bad, faux-historicist / neo-neoclassicist "style", to dominate the landscape of the castle area. . . with visitors being restricted to an approximately 3 meter wide walk path, everything else is dominated by construction activity, erecting private condominium buildings, or high-security protected central government buildings). As of today, the news has been that the other day the roof of the National Gallery started LEAKING.

The National Gallery.

Leaking.

BTW, this is a building that had been badly ruined during World War 2 (this area was under a severe siege and bombardment in late 1944-early 1945), generously restored for public use by the state socialist government in the 1970s and 80s, a truly excellent, widely applauded cultural policy, the reconstruction and the re-purposing won accolades, etc., that's how it is still the National Gallery,

- the State Railways, a system in a cascading collapse, last week there were thirty-five trains that didn't leave the station for reasons owing to the bad disrepair of the rolling stock, two news items about spontaneous train fires (!) and the stoppage / temporary closure of the Vienna-Budapest line (!!) (this is particularly significant since VIE-BUD is the line that serves both a large part of Budapest's current, astounding tourist traffic and the escalating outflows of labor, a symbolic line that is widely expected to be the last one to collapse . . . -- well, it has collapsed),

- the National Health System--the Hungarian social media space is awash with photographs of the outrageous, astoundingly bad state of the building stock of the national health system--here are a few photographs of St. John's Hospital, the regional specialty health center for the elite Buda Hills Region -- I. II. and XII. districts (below please see an excellent-quality picture of a common rat taken on the grounds of St. John's Hospital).

BTW, this is exactly what was done to MALÉV, the national airline, which had been, in its size category, among the world's most profitable airlines before 1989 when I was doing my dissertation fieldwork on tourism in this part of the world. MALÉV as a state-owned company was, essentially, left to die by repeated post-state-socialist governments, simply by refusal to invest in its flying stock and various, awfully bad decisions leading to gross mismanagement. MALÉV's privatization didn't succeed as the EU nixed not one . . . not two . . . but three buyout schemes, each worked out by successive governments, ostensibly on anti-cartel grounds (the EU is a political cartel that had nothing against the merger of Air France with KLM or with Lufthansa's repeated purchases of the airlines of its German-speaking neighbors) . . . the final straw came when Lufthansa, the uncontested regional hegemone, decided it would just build a cheap logistics center near BUD airport and raid MALÉV's personnel but refused to take over the entire Hungarian Airline, something that would have been an addition to Swiss and Austrian already under Lufthansa's "belt" at the time. . . so, after considerable agony, MALÉV was eventually shut down, with its most valuable asset categories having been taken out--privatized--to various discount airlines set up by former MALÉV management . . .

Then there was the slide, slide, downward slide of Budapest Airport that was finally, after much trepidation and geopolitical calculation, privatized by the Hungarian government to a set of private owners--owners that, then, promptly proceeded to pass it on, with major profits, to several successive owners. Currently BUD airport is majority owned by a subsidiary of the successor company to what was called, when it bought BUD, "Hochtief", a German company, basically a construction firm, plus a Canadian retirement pension fund.

Anyway, the scheme is very similar to the urban property corruption scheme called gentrification. There is a fairly large literature on all this. What is in common among the above examples--including the ongoing letting-rot/privatizing-to-cronies-and-proxies-at-outrageously-below-market-prices schemes is that economic and cultural assets, built up under the state socialist regime with the unrestricted value input provided by the population at large are transferred to select groups of individual private owners, in Hungary and outside. In other words, it is very large scale plunder and thievery, using historical time as a foil to make it less immediately visible. I am writing this in August 2023, i.e., 34 years after the beginning of the collapse of state socialism in Hungary. And the post-state-socialist plunder is absolutely, positively ongoing. It will continue until even the air, the drinking water and all human bodies in these godforsaken societies are fully stolen, to be possessed, profited from, disposed of, enjoyed directly and exclusively by, private owners with zero, none, nil creative input or moral justification for that ownership.

Why this is happening? Because those most adversely affected THINK they don't care. They exist in a state of learned ignorance and lack-of-interest. It can happen to an entire country. It has, here.