Summary

Albright discusses Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic in Chapter 13. The new, post-1989 Hungary followed a democratic course for its first 15 years, joining NATO and the EU. In 2006, Ferenc Gyurcsány, the Socialist prime minister, made comments at a party conference that were secretly recorded and broadcast nationwide; he admitted to lying “morning, noon and night” (171) and ruining the economy. Gyurcsány confessed that “ ... we have screwed up. Not a little but a lot. No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have. ... I had to pretend for 18 months that we were governing.” (BBC News, September 19, 2006) This gaffe led to the electoral victory of Victor Orbán, the head of Fidesz, in the 2010 election. His current goal is to make Hungary an “illiberal democracy” similar to Putin's Russia and Erdoğan's Turkey. In Poland the pro-democracy movement was split between...