The advantage of having no political biography in times of rapid change

The Green-oriented Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung broadcast a Facebook video on Sunday (today) featuring a discussion between political scientist Ivan Krastev historian Holly Case on the topic "Europe ’89: The promise recalled." At one point, Krastev talks about how in a time of drastic change like 1989 in eastern Europe is that there is an advantage in not having a biography. Because that means that one is not constrained in the political sphere by statements made over the last 20, 20, 30 years. (An advantage that Joe Biden would love to have in the 2020 US Presidential election.)

This sheds some light on the phenomenon that after the 1989 changes in several countries, people who had been active for years in the opposition to the previous regimes often did not play prominent roles in national politics in their countries after the change. Part of the reason is that oppositionists themselves were often committed socialists who looked to reform and democratize the existing Communist systems, and in the new environment their politics were suspect for many. And, of course, there were exceptions like Lech Wałęsa in Poland and Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia (now the two countries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia).

But the advantage of having a limited public political biography gives a person the freedom to adopt positions that are popular at the moment without having to backtrack from previous positions. Angela Merkel, who was a chemist in East Germany in 1989, made full use of this advantage. As did Viktor Orbán, the current authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, who became famous and popular in the early 1990s as a prominent democratic reformer.

Orbán, born in 1963, was a founding member of Fidesz, which began as an independent youth organization in 1988 when Hungary was already experiencing some liberalization as a result of the perestroika period in the Soviet Union. Fidesz became a political party in 1989 and is Orbán's ruling party today. Fidesz was seen as a moderately left liberal party when it first won seats in Parliament in 1990. Orbán himself achieved his first national fame with a speech in June 1989 before a large demonstration in Budapest, in which he criticized the ruling Communist Party and called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. (Béla Rásky, Wie das System Orbán Ungarn seine Zukunft raubt Die Presse 13.06.2019)