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By Michael Roddy
January 15, 2012 11:14 AM EST
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has played soccer at a near-professional level and prides himself as a sportsman, but his respect for the rules of democracy increasingly is being called into question, at home and abroad.
A player since childhood who advanced to the domestic league level, Orban, 48, founded a soccer academy in his home village west of Budapest, built a country house here, just beyond the goal line of one of its nine soccer pitches, and still comes out from the capital to work with his "personal trainer."
"He played midfield or forward, but he was somebody who was a playmaker, somebody who organised the play, and always went forward -- mainly on the right side," said Gyorgy Szollosi, the spokesman for the Puskas Academy, named for the late soccer legend Ferenc Puskas, who led the national team that famously defeated England in 1953 and later played for Real Madrid.
Orban is a fierce competitor, but some of his growing legions of critics, inside and outside Hungary, say that in politics, he's taken that competitive spirit too far.
They say he and his centre-right Fidesz party, which won an overwhelming two-thirds majority in parliament in 2010, are undermining democratic institutions and checks and balances.
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"The way I see him, since 2002, 2003, is that he is the biggest adversary and enemy of democracy in Hungary," said author Jozsef Debreczeni, who has written two books about Orban, only the first of them with his cooperation.
The dates he refers to are those of a crushing defeat for Orban, who was elected prime minister for the first time in 1998, the youngest in Hungary's history, only to be thrown out when his term was up in 2002.
"It is not power that destroyed him, but losing power," said Debreczeni, who once was part of an Orban "braintrust" but now is vice president of a new party formed by Ferenc Gyurcsany.
The former Socialist prime minister was shunned by Orban and Fidesz after remarks he made to a 2006 party gathering, saying he had lied to the people about the state of the economy, were made public. The Socialists were crushed in the 2010 vote.
Debreczeni's criticisms could be -- and in some quarters are -- dismissed as partisan, but he is not the only one to issue Orban the political and economic equivalent of a yellow penalty card. Orban and his team are manoeuvring to avoid getting the equivalent of a red one, which might force Orban to step aside, or trigger early elections.
DOWNGRADE TO JUNK
It's a close-run thing. Hungary's debt has been downgraded to junk status by three major credit-rating agencies and the European Commission is contemplating sanctions because of what some Western powers see as an anti-democratic bent to a new constitution that took effect this month.
The IMF, as a precondition for giving Hungary a badly needed financial lifeline, is demanding changes to laws it says could undermine the independence of the central bank.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, after talks with Orban last June, expressed concern about democratic freedoms in Hungary, and followed up with a letter in December.
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