Love in the time of plague
Trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, transphobia, homophobia
He still managed to find the time to sit his eighth grade exam, and even got through with a score of 98 percent. He shared the good news with mum and then went straight from school to throw himself in front of a metro train.
April 17, 2019
Centrum underground station, Warsaw. Security cameras register every move of the passengers.
The video shows the boy carefully tying his laces, first one shoe, then the other, looking around, and finally, with the train approaching, casually jumping under the rushing carriages.
The wheels broke his cervical backbone, pelvis, lower jawbone, burst his spleen and lungs.
A crowd of onlookers gathered, an ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital, then the police and other emergency services. Two hours later the situation at the station was under control. At the hospital, the boy was fighting for survival.
His name was Wiktor.
May 14, 2019
Less than a month later, security cameras registered the strange behaviour of another young boy.
Kacper kept strolling along the Wilanowska metro station in his socks. Train drivers had been instructed to be vigilant and to enter all stations in Warsaw at minimal speed. It was known that this boy had also known Wiktor and could throw himself under a train as well.
In the end, the boy was found by police officers. They ran up to him and quickly left the underground together.
“How did they meet, those two?”
“At the ‘Żwirki’, a few months back,” says Kacper’s mum. “They got very close there. And once out, they were inseparable.”
The ‘Żwirki’ is the children’s hospital on Żwirki i Wigury street in Warsaw.
September 2017, Wiktoria
Two years earlier, Wiktor was still called Wiktoria. At 13, she was just starting in a new school. She had to move; following school reform, her own primary no longer supported years 7 and 8.
Wiktoria was a sensitive type, she had an artist’s soul. At playtime, she wouldn’t take video clips or fool around with other kids, she’d read books. In class, she drew manga. In her free time, she edited anime videos. In a classroom context, people like her are toast in a matter of weeks. She would often hear other kids ask her: “Wassup, manga nut?” Derisive sneers followed her every step of the way.
She reassured mum that she did not wish to change school again, she would survive somehow. But by the end of the school year, she confided in another girl that she wanted to kill herself.
September 2017, Kacper
Kacper displayed the same traits as Wiktor: gentle and sensitive, certainly not for our time. That’s what his mother, Agnieszka would later say.
He also adored manga, disliked soccer, preferred art classes. He wore his hair long, had long eye-lashes, blue eyes, and moved differently to most boys. To other kids, he was ideal material for a class fall guy. Especially as their class teacher was his complete opposite: strong, fit, forthcoming, given to mocking his pupils’ weakness. This was no place for a boy who did not go for sport.
Agnieszka remembers well when she noticed changes in his behaviour. She was scared. When asked what was going on at school, he was evasive. He said his mates would laugh at him and tease him. But he would only tell her the whole truth months later.
At that time, she was regularly visiting the teacher, asking him to react. He was surprised, complained that Kacper did not like to kick ball with his mates. Once, he asked her directly: “Why won’t your son simply conform?”
June 2018, Wiktoria
Józefów near Warsaw. Bed linen bears the mark of a previous patient. It is dirty, smells of sweat, but it is the dried blood stains that make the worst impression. They will not allow you to forget where you are, even for a moment.
You will have to lie down, fall asleep, and wake up in this bedding somehow, and hold back revulsion.
Just after awakening, new daylight reveals the walls of the room. They are scribbled over with all manner of felt tips. Inscriptions proclaim: “I will kill myself tomorrow,” “Fuck life.” There are drawings, too, mostly of penises and gallows. And there are traces of blood everywhere, old, smudged, reaching up to the ceiling.
Bed in Józefów hospital
Warning: these images contain graphic content that some viewers may find disturbing
Iron rods stick out of several beds, which can be easily used to self-harm. They are dirty, full of microbes. Many patients use them to tear the skin on their arms, legs, calves. Hence the blood-stained bed linen and walls.
First thing, you pass the nurses’ room. It is a kind of a mini-admission. Here, parents fill in the forms, children deposit their belongings. Wiktoria left her shoelaces there, a pendant chain, and a watch. From there, you proceed down the corridor to your room.
But it is not always so. The ward is often overcrowded. At times, there are two or even three patients per bed. Then, children admitted freshly after attempting suicide are bedded on mattresses. Those are placed in the corridors – they are old, dirty, patched up here and there with grey wrapping tape, where they have been cut or torn. Some are too short for children, whose legs stick out onto the floor.
As you continue, you will notice peeling walls, broken furniture, and sideboards with doors missing. A stale smell prevails. Children potter around aimlessly, often with fresh cuts on their arms and elsewhere.
Walls in Józefów hospital
Warning: these images contain graphic content that some viewers may find disturbing
At the end of the corridor there is a bathroom, common for boys and girls alike. It is approached via a niche with open shower cubicles barely covered by torn curtains. In order to use the toilets, you need to walk past the showers. Even if children do not intend to peep, they sometimes do so unwittingly. In order to wash herself, Wiktoria always waited for her mum’s visit. Mother stood on the lookout to prevent other children peeping at her in the shower.
This is what it is like at the Childhood Psychiatry ward in Józefów near Warsaw.
It was Wiktoria’s first time there. She had confided in her school friend that she had suicidal thoughts, and the friend, Julka, told the class teacher. The teacher let Wiktoria’s mother know, while the school psychologist advised a psychiatric consultation. That was why Wiktoria ended up in Józefów.
“I remember the first night. I was so shattered that I had to leave her there that I returned to the car and started to cry,” says Justyna, Wiktoria’s mum.
June 2018, Kacper
The class dubbed Kacper a “poofter,” a “mental fuck-up,” “manga ponce,” “Japanese gay.” Once, boys surrounded him, dragged him to the loo and pushed his head down the toilet. Another time, they pulled down his trousers in front of other children. He endured hell daily.
On one occasion, classmates called him a “bi.” He did not understand. Back at home he asked mum what they meant.
Over time, he would understand better and rebel more. He would pick white and pink clothes from the wardrobe, use hair clips with his long fringe, put on pink necklaces. Once, he brought rainbow flags home. He began to identify with the LGBT movement. But he did not know if he was gay or not.
June 2018, Wiktoria
When confronted head-on with Józefów, parents often worry that time spent there will only aggravate the situation. But they bring their children anyway, they see no alternative.
Justyna discharged her daughter from Józefów after four days.
Earlier, Wiktoria confessed to her that she was scared of one of the boys. He would run around the ward, beat his head against the walls, shout obscenities. He hit other children aiming his fist at their shoulders, kicked, swore at patients and nurses. No one seemed to react. Wiktoria was afraid to go to the bathroom alone, even to the common room.
“Those were inhuman conditions. Like in a horror movie,” says Justyna. “Doctors didn’t find time so I couldn’t learn anything from them. It was all left to the nurses who didn’t pay any attention. Children were running down the corridor, fighting and spitting at one another,” she recalls.
Wiktoria was seen by a psychologist only once. Overworked doctors did not have time for more consultations. In the end, the girl implored her mum to take her back home. The doctor agreed and recommended psychotherapy as an outpatient.
September 2018, Kacper
At the start of the seventh grade, Kacper self-inflicted his first cuts, but only where no one would notice. He cut the skin in the groin with a razor blade, then washed off the wounds with water, pulled up his trousers and carried on.
Then he cut himself with a pencil sharpener blade during a school break. The teachers called an ambulance. Mother took him to the psychiatric ward at the Żwirki i Wigury hospital for the first time.
They arrived at mid-day, but waited eight hours to be seen. Kacper self-harmed again in the hospital bathroom. Agnieszka ended up forcing her way to the woman doctor on duty. But she threw up her hands: she had no time to see them. They returned home. Two days later, a private psychiatrist discovered that the boy had been nursing active suicidal thoughts. He issued an immediate referral to Józefów.
“When I walked in there, my first thought was that it could double up as a set for a movie about Belarussian or Ukrainian mental asylums in the ‘60s,” remembers Agnieszka. She saw what Justyna and Wiktor had seen before her: beds and furniture falling apart, dirty linen. She noticed bedbugs in many places.
A boy of nine or so kept running down the corridor in a straightjacket with a padded helmet on his head. He yelled and occasionally squealed like a cat. Then he would bang his head against the wall. The nurses stood nearby, unmoved.
“It is a double shock for a mother. You see how dreadful this place is, but then you remind yourself that all this time your child wants to kill himself. You swallow, you fight the tears,” says Agnieszka. “Kacper spent six weeks there. I will regret that to the end of my days.”
She can talk for hours about what she saw there. Once, she entered the ward and saw children collectively cutting themselves with sharp objects. No one was in charge in the common room, blood was dripping from their arms. She went to the nurses but heard: “Well, you can’t watch them all the time, they are like that, those punks.”
It is common in Józefów to refer to boys and girls alike as ‘punks.’ Threats are commonplace, too. Agnieszka remembers this scene: a girl standing by the nurses’ cubicle and crying: she wanted to call her mum. They kept ignoring her, but in the end one of them had enough and asked her irritably: “You want to go in the harness?”
“You’ll go in the harness” is the most common threat at the children’s ward.
Drawings in Józefów hospital
Warning: these images contain graphic content that some viewers may find disturbing
Another time, a male medic was going about his business on the ward. A strange looking type, he set his sights on a 15-year old and kept complimenting her incessantly, all in front of the nurses and other children. Kacper recalled that the girl constantly heard from him what a beauty she was, and that she was always favoured in every respect. The other children kept whispering that something was afoot between those two.
Yet another time, in the showers, the same that Wiktor was so ashamed to use during his stay at Józefów, a girl got a brutal beating from two other patients. Police arrived and an ambulance, but no one had reacted early enough.
November 2018, Wiktoria
In November, Wiktoria told mum that she wants a sex-change. Her mother recalls:
“She just came to me and told me that she did not feel like a girl but a boy. I hugged her. I assured her that what counted to me was only her happiness. But in reality I was worried all the time. Not about her decision but about how much suffering awaited her yet.”
The first stage in a metamorphosis from girl to boy unfolds on two planes.
To start with, Wiktoria asked her mum to buy her male clothes and underwear. She went to a hairdresser and ordered a short crop. Immediately, she dyed her hair dark. In a flash she looked like a boy.
And then she asked to be addressed by a masculine variant of her name. She became Wiktor.
Earlier, she had read about corrective gender surgery. She kept thinking of it for a long time. She felt alien in a female body. She knew that she was still too young for the surgery, but no matter, she would wait.
When he learned of his daughter’s decision, Wiktor’s father, who abandoned the family shortly after the baby’s arrival, said “she must be well fucked-up.”
Wiktor
November 2018, Wiktor
Wiktor is already in eighth grade. He arrives at school in his new format.
To his mates, he is still the same ‘manga nutter,’ but from now on also a ‘ponce’ and a ‘poofter.’ The class Facebook group is largely preoccupied with jeering at him. Soon, the prosecutor’s office would attempt to gain access to the account to search for evidence of persistent bullying of the boy. Eventually, Wiktor left the group on his own initiative, but before he did, he dramatically asked his school mates: would they wish for the treatment they were meting out to him?
Julka remained in the Facebook group. She for once was not particularly thrown by Wiktoria’s change into Wiktor. She implored him not to take other kids to heart, they were stupid and understood nothing. But Julka did show him the growing number of horrible posts. It was all getting to him. He asked to be addressed as Wiktor at school, but teachers stubbornly continued to call him out by his old name. He had enough.
He tried to kill himself on New Year’s Eve by cutting his veins. An ambulance was called in and took him and his mother to the Szaserów hospital to stitch-up his arm, and from there to the psychiatric ward at Żwirki i Wigury.
It was there that he met Kacper.
November 2018, Kacper
Kacper was discharged from Józefów with a diagnosis of an “improperly developing personality.” He returned home, but five days later tried to kill himself again. He swallowed the whole lot of his prescription antidepressants combined with a months’-worth of diabetic medication he found at home. An ambulance rushed him to Żwirki i Wigury. The initial prognosis was bad, but he was saved by a whisker.
December 2018, Wiktor
Wiktor was exhausted by constant humiliation at school.
Before he ended up at the ‘Żwirki’ and met Kacper, he had visited several doctors. He really came to like one psychologist and quickly found a common language with her. But she called Justyna one day and told her that her son contemplated suicide during their meetings. Under the circumstances, she explained, Wiktor ought to go for an assessment at the hospital over several months before she could start his therapy.
Right from the start, they had reservations to the psychiatrist, Dr Andrzej Towalski. At the first appointment he diagnosed depression and ordered medication. The visit was short and went tolerably well.
During the second appointment, when Wiktor looked already very much like a boy, Dr Towalski gawked at him like at a freak. He remarked that she could not go for sex change surgery anyway, because she was still a minor. And that she should better try snuggling-up to a man because it is “well pleasing.” Before parting, he also expressed hope that she might yet change her mind because she was such a beautiful and delicate girl.
He added a hand-written diagnosis on the patient’s record: “(Wiktoria) prefers girls.” He pressed his stamp under the diagnosis and prescribed another batch of medication.
December 2018 – January 2019, Wiktor and Kacper
Following his overdose of prescription drugs, Kacper remained at the ‘Żwirki’, the same place where no one had attended to him for eight hours after his previous suicide attempt. He was sent to the psychiatric ward in a state of utter exhaustion.
On New Year’s Eve, Wiktor joined him, soon after cutting his veins. That is when they met, in January 2019, four months before the incident in the underground.
January 2019, Wiktor and Kacper
Wiktor’s consultant at the ‘Żwirki’ hospital questioned Dr Towalski’s diagnosis. She did not think Wiktor suffered from depression. Instead, he presented with adjustment disorder and signs of personality development disorder.
Nevertheless, she prescribed seronil, an antidepressant, and in higher dose, too. Wiktor’s mum was not aware of that, she would learn only a few weeks later, when her son was discharged from hospital. Why was he given an antidepressant if he did not suffer from depression? She would never come to learn that.
Kacper was also on seronil during his stay at Józefów. And apart from that, also on ketrel. He was prescribed both drugs by a doctor. Five days after leaving the ward, the boy tried to kill himself. Wiktor, too, would be prescribed ketrel in a private clinic, before the attempt in the underground.
Both would be stuffed with the two drugs for a good few weeks.
Ketrel is a strong medication for adults only. It is used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder. Administer it to children, contrary to the European Medicines Agency’s advice, and it can bring about woeful effects for life: robotic behaviour and attention problems even with most mundane tasks.
Seronil can be only administered for depression. Wiktor did not have it diagnosed. Research has shown that treatment of non-depressive adults with this drug doubles the risk of suicide. And what of children!
“The doctor told me only that he would sleep better after ketrel,” Justyna recalls.
Ketrel and seronil are routinely prescribed to children both on psychiatric wards and in private clinics in Warsaw. To give them to undiagnosed young patients or those not troubled by depression, and without proper monitoring, too, is to play with death.
January 2019, Wiktor
Wiktor did not have it easy on the ward. The nurses refused to address him as a male. They said they were too busy to be bothered with such nonsense. He got fed up again.
Agnieszka, who would often visit the ward at the same time as Justyna, remembers the following scene: she left her son’s room and went down the corridor. It was so crowded with children on mattresses that one could trip over them. One of them was Wiktor. Suddenly, Agnieszka heard a nurse shout: “Wiktoria, come here!” She looked at Wiktor and saw that the boy was irritated. Then she turned to the nurse and remarked confused: “It’s not Wiktoria, it’s Wiktor!” And the irritated nurse responded: “Wiktor, Wiktoria, you are all crazy.”
And she parted with: “This punk is a girl, I’m telling you!”
January – March 2019, Wiktor and Kacper
Early in the new year, both boys were discharged from the ward. They embarked on a new chapter in their lives, together.
Not a day passed where they would not be with each other. Wiktor fell in love with Kacper. Kacper was still too young to comprehend it fully. For the time being, Wiktor was his best mate, and that was fine.
A Warsaw cinema, Świt, ran a season of anime films, which they could finally enjoy together. They also went skating, or for walks along the banks of the Vistula with Justyna and Agnieszka. They met mostly at Kacper’s. They would mess around, watch video clips together. Once, they came across a doll of a fairytale character, which they called Zenek and giggled that it was their son. They were inseparable and laughed all the time. Just as kids would.
While visiting psychologists, Wiktor referred to Kacper as his boyfriend. He remarked that he had stopped self-harming for him. He also spoke of his most cherished dream: to marry Kacper one day, somewhere abroad.
February 2019, Wiktor
The toughest bit was the school. After leaving hospital, Wiktor appeared there only twice. Then he entreated his mum to let him skip it and not to be sent there ever again. Every time he returned from school, he thought of suicide.
Justyna arranged for individual tuition. At his first geography lesson, the teacher asked him if he should address him by his male name. Wiktor confirmed, grateful and in shock; it was the first time anyone from the outside world respected his choice.
It was different on the ward. Even the psychologist addressed him as Wiktoria. The same with doctors and nurses. But the geography tutor was a lone exception, to all the other teachers Wiktor remained a girl.
On Valentine’s Day, he could not restrain himself any longer . He cut his forearm and was taken to the Żwirki i Wigury hospital once again. But there were no beds available and he was not admitted. On his arrival, the ward was 180 percent full.
Justyna panicked. She took her son to the same psychologist with whom Wiktor had hit it off a few months earlier. She was surprised to see them again. She repeated it was too early for therapy and Wiktor had to go to hospital for assessment. The sooner the better, because he was in such a state that even a slight crisis, an argument with mum or Kacper, could lead to tragedy.
But there was no psychiatric ward in Warsaw prepared to admit Wiktor.
March 2019, Wiktor and Kacper
One day, late in the evening, Kacper went out to see Wiktor off to the metro station. He was not returning a long while and Agnieszka began to worry. She called his mobile, but heard only that he had to see Wiktor all the way home after all. Then he switched off his phone. Wiktor did the same. They were incommunicado.
Agnieszka and Justyna were petrified. They both jumped in their cars and drove to the same bus stop, close to Wiktor’s home. They found them there at last. Kacper was shaken, crying. He said that Wiktor wanted to jump under the train.
“It’s a nightmare for a mother to hear her child wants to kill himself. This is always shocking,” says Justyna.
It was at the end of March, and they went to Józefów once again. Justyna told the doctors her son wanted to throw himself under a metro train. But once again admission was refused.
In their written reasoning, the doctors stressed that Wiktor “had only one suicidal thought” and that during a consultation he denied that he nursed any plans to kill himself in the future. Besides, hitherto, he had managed suicidal thoughts “in a constructive manner,” while his latest self-harm cutting had taken place back in February, nearly a month earlier.
So, there was no reason to admit him for assessment.
Justyna desperately begged for her son to be admitted. She mentioned that Wiktor’s psychologist refused to continue with the therapy and advised hospitalisation. The doctor suggested changing the psychologist, since “this one could not handle the problem.”
She wrote on the patient’s card: “no threat to life or health,” signed her name, impressed her seal, and thanked them for the visit. She recommended further psychotherapy.
If only a doctor could be found to conduct it.
Justyna had a sense of foreboding. It is not possible to negotiate a prompt public health service psychotherapy appointment in Poland. But it is practically impossible to do so privately either.
Finally, they ended up in a private clinic in Warsaw. The doctor examined Wiktor and called in Justyna. He said he was helpless; during the consultation Wiktor had turned into stone. He refused to talk, did not answer any questions. Under the circumstances the doctor had to refuse undertaking psychotherapy.
Wiktor told Justyna that he would either go to the previous psychologist or none, because he trusted only her.
April 2019, Wiktor
Three weeks later he cut his throat with a razor blade. He reassured hospital doctors that he was in control of the situation.
He explained it had not been a suicidal attempt, he knew very well where the blood vessels were situated, biology was his favourite subject. He just did it because he had quarrelled with his boyfriend and was sad when Kacper would not reply to his texts for a while. But he had calmed down, because he knew that Kacper would soon forget the grudge. “I am sorry. I am long done with suicidal thoughts,” he told the doctors.
Justyna remembered the psychologist’s words: “Even the slightest argument may lead to tragedy.”
The throat-cutting incident happened in Kacper’s house, on the stairs, immediately after Wiktor had left his apartment. Indeed, they had quarrelled over something earlier. But Kacper suddenly had a new worry: his aunt, Agnieszka’s sister, died suddenly. He went to the hospital with his mother. The doctors confirmed his aunt’s death at the very moment when surgeons were stitching together a large wound on Wiktor’s neck.
“The hospital referred Wiktor to Józefów,” says Justyna. “But first they asked me: ‘Why wasn’t he admitted long ago?’”
They got there the third and last time. After a short interview with Wiktor, the doctors concluded that his self-harming was the result of an argument with a boyfriend. They saw no reason to take him in.
“I was desperate,” says Justyna. “I knew that Józefów was a terrible place to be in, but the main thing was to keep him safe until some other solution could be found. I was scared for him, so scared that something bad would happen.”
“And did they finally agree to admit him?” I ask.
“No. The doctor pronounced that I was being oversensitive and I should find more time for myself, join a fitness class or a gym. And that I should stop fussing so much over my daughter.”
April 2019, Wiktor’s mum, Justyna
“How would you describe the fear one experiences when one’s child is thinking of suicide?” I am asking Justyna.
“There is such a thing as a mother’s intuition. I was scared for him every hour, every second,” she says.
By April, she was even afraid to leave for work. She hid all the knives, pills and sharp tools around the house. She called Wiktor every half hour, on any pretext: would he check if there was milk in the fridge or just to chat. She was getting up in the night to peep into his room, checking for breath: was he asleep? She looked out for cuts on his arms.
April 17, 2019, Wiktor and Kacper
That day could not have been easy, either for Wiktor, or Kacper. Wiktor was sitting an English final exam at his primary, Kacper was going with mum to his aunt’s funeral.
Exams started at 9 am. Wiktor’s mum had driven him to school. Immediately after it ended, he texted her that he passed his English “likely with 100 percent.” He erred, but only slightly. Later, when the results were published, they showed Wiktor checking in at 98 percent.
At that hour, Kacper and his mum were already on their way to the funeral. Suddenly, the boy’s eyes welled up. A message from Wiktor appeared on his mobile. He wrote that he was “going somewhere to jump.” Kacper tried to call him, but Wiktor’s phone was not responding. He pulled mum’s sleeve, told her quietly he had to call Wiktor’s mum as soon as possible.
Agnieszka called Justyna, and Justyna called the police.
April 17, 2019, Wiktor
The officers went to Justyna’s, asked for Wiktor’s photo and sent out an alert all over Warsaw. They were to man all the metro stations, hoping to locate him before the tragedy would strike.
Justyna kept calling Wiktor. No signal.
They drove her to the Młociny metro station and suggested that she should take a train down town and try looking for her son as well. She agreed, it was a good idea. She wept.
On the metro train she suddenly heard an announcement: “Due to an accident at Centrum station, the train will terminate at the Dworzec Gdański railway station.” She was shaking, choking, closed her eyes.
She left the crowded train at Stare Bielany, ran to Kacper’s apartment block. Police came there as well to check whether Wiktor had not changed his plans and gone there instead. She saw the officers by the entrance, told them about the announcement on the underground.
They confirmed that “a young woman had fallen under a train” a while ago and was taken by ambulance to the Szaserów hospital. Justyna was required to go there immediately.
Kacper was at his aunt’s funeral, still unaware of what had happened. He could not concentrate in the church, expecting the worst.
Many people arrived late for the service. They apologised, explained they were late because there had been some accident in Warsaw and the underground came to a halt. Agnieszka received a text message during the mass. She could not hear the ringtone and would read it only later. It was from Wiktor: “Please, don’t worry about me anymore. Good bye :)”
Wiktor
April 19, 2019, Wiktor
Wiktor leapt in front of the train on April 17, 2019.
At 10:06 he wrote another text message, to Kaia, an online friend whom he had never met, but with whom he was very closed. He wrote: “I am going to kill myself. I am sorry. Thank you for everything, but I am not coping.”
At 10:52 he sent her a photo of the metro rail track. He jumped a short while later.
Despite extensive injuries, the boy fought for his life for two more days.
A surgeon who operated on him immediately after the incident said it was hard to explain how Wiktor could have survived his suicide attempt. They put him on a respirator in the hospital, operated on his spleen, made preparations to stabilize him. Justyna believed in a miracle.
In the course of a follow-up surgery, Wiktor succumbed to a vast haemorrhage. He died on April 19, a fortnight before his fifteenth birthday.
April 2019, Justyna, Wiktor’s mum
At the end of the month, Justyna received a letter from the District Court. She opened it and could not believe her eyes: it was a decision that, following Wiktor’s suicide attempt, she would be put under supervision. An official would visit her home and periodically check on her to see if she was taking good care of her son.
Justyna read the letter and wept. For several months she was fighting for anyone to take her son’s fate to heart. And when she lost him, this letter suddenly arrived.
She went to the court with Wiktor’s death certificate. Soon, a decision to close the proceedings was announced.
In June, another letter arrived from the court. This time it was more detailed, with personal data of the appointed supervisor and his visiting days to check how Justyna coped with bringing up her child.
She had no strength left to explain. Screw them.
May – December 2019, Kacper
“I was afraid to tell Kacper,” says Agnieszka. “I was horrified he could do the same. That stroll to the metro station, a month after Wiktor’s death, it was a sign of his longing.”
Kacper has not been at Wiktor’s grave yet. He is blocking out his death and usually cuts off any talk of it. But recently, he has had moments when he would start talking about him. Agnieszka still cannot tell whether these are moments of weakness, or the opposite. Then Kacper confides in his mum that he misses him a lot and thinks of him all the time. Once, he said that it was because of him that Wiktor killed himself.
Another time, he admitted that he did not like to be left alone at home. Because he then takes out all Wiktor’s drawings from the cupboard. He cannot stop himself when he is alone. He looks through them and cries. He is suffering, as you would suffer after the loss of the most treasured person.
July 2019, Dr Towalski
That summer, an investigation into Wiktor’s death started. The prosecutor called in Dr Towalski, the same doctor who had written earlier that Wiktor preferred girls, and who recommended sampling snuggling up with a man before sex change surgery.
He said Wiktor’s suicide was the result of introducing ‘gender ideology’ into schools.
In the Autumn, Justyna called the clinic to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. She needed tranquillisers. A nice-sounding receptionist explained that her old doctor had left the practice and all her patients were being taken over by a new psychiatrist.
She offered Justyna an appointment for March 2020.
With Dr Andrzej Towalski.
Prosecutor
Prosecutor Jerzy Mierzewski was chain smoking when we met the last time before this article appeared in print. As soon as he put out one, he pulled another from the packet, as if worried that his lungs would lose contact with tobacco.
Journalists know him as a true expert on evil. He was the one who locked up the Pruszków mafia, looked for the killers of Gen. Marek Papała, and it was he who discovered the establishment in Poland of US-sponsored rendering prisons where people were tortured. Now, he was in charge of an investigation into Wiktor’s death.
We meet in one of Warsaw’s coffee bars. There were no free tables in the smokers’ zone. The prosecutor shrugged, he would have to grin and bear.
“I cannot remember a case which would move me more on a human level,” he said for starters. “We are responsible for what has happened. We, adults. We are incapable of recognizing a young human in a child. We have no system of child care. We cannot even initiate a discussion on this! And even the greatest devotion will remain meaningless when hospitals run out of corridor places and, in the end, of doctors, too.”
He would probably have to drop the case. The law gave him no recourse to accuse doctors who refused to admit Wiktor to hospital. They did not because there were no places on the ward. The prosecution would have to extend to the whole of Poland’s psychiatry, or even the state itself. Also, homophobia would have to become a criminal offence.
“Our intolerance, lack of respect for other people’s peculiarities, and the growing cult of force – at some stage all of this adds up into a frightening technological sequence capable even of driving a young person to death,” said the prosecutor.
And added: “We are all guilty.”
Plague
In 2019, one of Poland’s newspapers appeared with stickers for readers to peruse, proclaiming a “LGBT Free Zone”. Agnieszka and Justyna watched these developments with an increasingly heavy heart. While Justyna was in mourning, Archbishop Marek Jędraszewski, one of the leaders of the Polish Catholic Church, kept repeating a mantra of a “rainbow plague.”
Wiktor is gone. Justyna lost her child. Kacper is 14 and has already come to know life’s darkest side, he met love in a time of plague.
Poland comes second in European rankings of childhood suicide. We are slightly behind Germany, but only because that country is twice as big as ours.
Data indicates that almost 70 per cent of LGBT teenagers in Poland think of suicide.
“We need to shout out about the state of Poland’s childhood psychiatry,” said the civil rights Ombudsman Adam Bodnar a month before Wiktor’s death.
Dr Andrzej Towalski refused to talk to the author of article. Hospital authorities in Józefów did not reply to our e-mail with questions.
How Orbán played Germany, Europe’s great power
In October 2017, important figures of German and international business and political life gathered at a reception in a glass-walled hall on one of the upper floors of Frankfurt’s tallest skyscraper. At the event, one of the top executives of a German automobile manufacturing group, warmed and loosened up by some glasses of wine, started entertaining those around him with anecdotes. After some time, the conversation was directed to Hungary.
The senior automotive manager bragged about the fact that the executives of his company could call Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó at any time if they had any requests regarding their factories in Hungary. He then added that if necessary, they could even speak directly to Viktor Orbán – in fact, he said, the Hungarian Prime Minister had already helped them with a specific case.
Two years earlier, in September 2015, Germany’s automotive industry was hit by its biggest scandal ever. It was found that Volkswagen Group’s (VW) diesel cars used software manipulation to cheat on emission tests for many years (later several other German and non-German companies were found to have manipulated their data in a similar way). As a result of the scandal, the price of VW shares began to plummet and it looked like several companies could be seriously endangered, forcing them to close factories and cut jobs.
At the reception in Frankfurt, the German automotive executive claimed that the diesel emissions scandal had become so embarrassing for the federal government after a while that they felt the German state was starting to back out from behind them. Executives of his group of companies then turned directly to Viktor Orbán, asking him to represent the interests of car manufacturers in the European Council that was currently discussing the matter. Viktor Orbán agreed to help and kept his promise, the German automotive executive said with satisfaction.
Since the beginning of 2016, the European Council, which represents governments of European Union member states, has repeatedly addressed the reform of vehicle emission rules. However, Germany has been trying to soften stricter regulations in alliance with Italy and Eastern European member states with significant German automotive investments. In September 2017, a new regulation finally came into force but it was full of loopholes, applied only to new cars not yet on the roads, and made many other concessions to automakers.
A German business source present at the Frankfurt reception told Direkt36 about the lobbying and the role of Orbán, adding that there was nothing glaring about it. “Representatives of every important company say they have Szijjártó and others’ phone numbers,” the source said, adding that top executives of several German carmakers told similar stories, and that “they all absolutely feel that the Hungarian government is in their pockets.”
“They all absolutely feel that the Hungarian government is in their pockets.”
The spokesperson of Viktor Orbán and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade headed by Szijjártó did not respond to our request.
However, a former senior official in the Orbán government confirmed that “Viktor Orbán defends the interests of German car manufacturers in the European Council”. Nevertheless, according to the source, there is nothing surprising in this, as Hungarian governments have always been accommodating to German carmakers. Following the outbreak of the diesel emissions scandal, Mihály Varga, Minister of Finance of the Orbán government, said that 2-2.5 million of the Volkswagen Group’s 11 million diesel cars with cheating engines were manufactured at the Audi plant in the city of Győr and that “the government’s most important goal is maintaining jobs in the automotive industry and preserving the stability that the automotive industry provides in Hungary”.
The above story is a good example of how a relationship based on mutual benefits and dependence has developed between German policy makers, influential companies in German industry and the Hungarian government over the years and decades. German carmakers are the number one engine of Hungarian economic growth and, through this, of the Orbán government’s political successes. According to data by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, car manufacturing accounts for 4.5% of Hungary’s GDP and suppliers working for large car manufacturers account for another 5-8%. This means that every eighth to tenth forint produced in Hungary has to do something with the Germany-dominated car industry.
Now is a particularly sensitive period in Hungarian-German relations. In the coming months, political issues determining the long-term European bargaining power of the Orbán government and Hungary will be settled in the European Union. In these debates, Viktor Orbán’s German allies will have the final say, and although they have repeatedly criticized decisions of the Hungarian government, they have so far refrained from acting really hard.
Direkt36 uncovered details of this intricate system of relationships, the interests that drive it, and the key players in a months-long investigation. We found how decades of personal relationships control Orbán’s maneuvers in Germany; how German companies give up much-talked-about democratic values if it is in their business interests; and, for example, that the Hungarian government was able to prevent Jewish leaders in Budapest from sharing their concerns with Angela Merkel.
In our research, we had in-depth background conversations with two dozen sources — current and former government officials, diplomats, political intermediaries, business executives, and analysts. Most of them shared information about behind-the-scenes events if we did not write down their names.
I. Orbán’s German patrons
Source: kormany.hu
“Call the Count and tell him we’d like to visit him!” This is the task Viktor Orbán gave Gergely Prőhle on the night of his first election victory, on May 24, 1998. Prőhle was the head of the Budapest office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (ie the party foundation of the German Free Democratic Party, the FDP). Four days later, the new prime minister-elect was already in Bonn, where executives of German industrial giants like Audi, Bosch or Siemens were waiting to meet him. Orbán reassured them, according to the Hungarian state news agency’s report, that a predictable economic environment awaits them, moreover, his government wants to increase foreign investment, primarily in manufacturing.
The meeting, which was organized in only matter of few days, was thanks to to Otto Graf Lambsdorff, the influential liberal politician and honorary president of the FDP, who was most often referred to by his acquaintances only as “the Count”. Lambsdorff had known Orbán for a long time, he led the Liberal International when Fidesz became a member in 1992. During Orbán’s visit, Lambsdorff proudly talked to the German press about the future prime minister and boasted that he “has been watching Orbán’s political career since the regime change in Hungary and is very happy to support him”. Gergely Prőhle, who later also served as ambassador to Berlin and deputy secretary of state for foreign affairs under the Orbán government, told Direkt36 that “Lambsdorff had already started traveling to Eastern Europe before 1989 and had become Orbán’s first German patron. He was an infinitely smart person from whom much could be learned. The count saw the economic-political ties in light of a full historical context, he was a formidable personality”.
The relationship between Orbán and Lambsdorff was so close that it even survived when Fidesz broke ties with the European political family the Count represented. Prőhle also wrote an article on Lambsdorff for Valasz Online. According to him, the Count watched Orbán’s politics turn conservative in the mid-1990s with some disappointment, but accepted the political realities. He also observed, how over time, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Helmut Kohl became the most important point of reference for Orbán. At one point, Orbán explained to Lambsdorff that “in order for him to maximize votes in Hungary, the liberal slogan is not good, and the Count understood that.”
“In order for him to maximize votes in Hungary, the liberal slogan is not good, and the Count understood that.”
However, the two politicians remained close friends, and later in 2009 Orbán was the only foreign guest at Lambsdorff’s private funeral.
During his visit to Germany in May 1998, Orbán not only spoke to company executives, but also spent an hour and a half meeting with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, then head of government for 16 years, who was facing a really close election a few months later. At that time, officials from the Hungarian foreign ministry, which was still under socialist leadership, advised Orbán to also meet Kohl’s challenger, Gerhard Schröder, because he seemed more likely to win the election. However, because of his loyalty to Kohl, “Orbán rejected this idea, while for example, the Polish Prime Minister did meet with Schröder. Schröder and his people didn’t forget this later, neither for the Poles, nor for us,” a former Hungarian foreign ministry official told Direkt36.
It was a tight race, but Schröder eventually defeated Kohl. According to Sándor Peisch, who served as Hungarian ambassador to Berlin under the Socialist MSZP governments between 2003 and 2010, this was also the end of an era when the German leadership still looked at Hungary with gratitude for its role in the country’s reunification. An important milestone in the process leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall, was the opening of the Hungarian-Austrian border. It started in the summer of 1989 and was officially announced in September, paving the way for East German refugees to travel via Austria to West Germany. But “the SPD was never enthusiastic about reunification. At one of our meetings, for example, Chancellor Schröder began to complain about how much money it had costed,” Peisch told Direkt36.
Viktor Orbán and Helmut Kohl thus ruled simultaneously for only a few months. While Lambsdorff was a true mentor and teacher to a young Orbán, Kohl, who had just fallen out of power, was more of a “living legend, a role model” for him with his political career spanning many decades, another former diplomat who served under the Orbán government said. By the time his relationship with Orbán became closer, “Kohl had already become a human wreck by then and had lost his political influence,” the source said. After Kohl’s defeat, the first Orbán government had to rethink its German relations after failing to forge a close relationship with Schröder’s Social Democratic-Green coalition in Berlin. “We had to go down to the state level and build an alliance there, especially with the two conservative southern states,” a former diplomat from the Orbán government recalled the strategy of building ties at a lower level rather than a federal one.
The Southern Germany connection dates back to old times. Along the Danube, the economically and historically closely linked states and countries of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Austria and Hungary form a bloc. A former diplomat from the Orbán government said Kohl also spoke to Orbán about this geostrategic cohesion. “These two southern provinces account for more than half of Hungarian-German economic relations, the first consulate general of Hungary has opened in Münich, and most of the ethnic Germans deported from Hungary live in Baden-Württemberg,” Sándor Peisch said.
Among the major German companies who invest in Hungary, Mercedes and Bosch are headquartered in Baden-Württemberg, while Audi and BMW are based in Bavaria, where several significant figures in the local economic and political elite have ties to Hungary. One example is the former Volkswagen Group CEO and one of the protagonists of the diesel emissions scandal, Martin Winterkorn. He was born in Baden-Württemberg, but his parents were Swabians displaced from Zsámbék, Hungary, a former diplomat from the Orbán government emphasized. Winterkorn played an important role in the development of the Audi project in Győr and also received Hungarian state awards.
During his first term as prime minister, Orbán established a close relationship with this conservative South German elite. In politics, he found important allies in Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber of the Christian Socialist Union (CSU) and Prime Minister Erwin Teufel of the CDU in Baden-Württemberg. In 2000, they all eventually became part of the same party family after Fidesz left the Liberal International and joined the European People’s Party (EPP).
This good relationship was not only based on personal connections. According to several sources who previously worked for Orbán or were in contact with his people from the German side, the Hungarian Prime Minister considers Hungary’s political, economic and military dependence on Germany to be a geopolitical necessity. It is a recurring idea in Orbán’s public speeches that Hungary exists in a “Berlin-Moscow-Istanbul triangle”. In addition to these, he sometimes mentions Washington and Beijing. In private conversations, however, Orbán narrows this further. According to a former high-ranking American government official, Orbán explained to him that Hungary has only two really important points of reference, Russia and Germany. Hungary gets its energy from one and jobs from the other.
Orbán also added that the United States only has values, but “we have our values too.” In a material sense, Hungarian politics depends only on Berlin and Moscow.
“With German patronage, Orbán grew up and became an important politician, he has great respect for Germany,” a German expert who has a close relationship with several members of the Orbán government and is well acquainted with Hungarian affairs told Direkt36. “Helmut Kohl became the number one political father figure for Orbán, Kohl was the one who told him how to do politics,” the source explained, adding that although many compare Orbán to Miklós Horthy or János Kádár, he is actually more “like Kohl, who was otherwise accused of corruption and everything else too”.
The source was referring to the CDU donations scandal that erupted in 1999 and ended Kohl’s career. It turned out, for example, that throughout the years, Kohl had secretly accepted cash of 2 million German marks as party donations from private donors. Kohl refused to disclose the donors’ identities even after the case made headlines. This scandal eventually led to Kohl and his supporters being sidelined by Angela Merkel, who took over the leadership of the CDU in 2000, and became Chancellor in 2005.
Although Orbán met her several times also and they developed a well-functioning working relationship, it was much less based on personal sympathy or friendship. And when Orbán returned to power in 2010 and took over managing the crisis-hit Hungarian economy, a new phase in German-Hungarian relations began.
II. The new deal
Source: kormany.hu
In the spring of 2012, Deutsche Telekom’s Hungarian subsidiary, Magyar Telekom, was in crisis mode trying to gather support in their fight against the Hungarian government’s latest plan. The Orbán government wanted to impose a telecommunications tax on text messages and voice services, which would have hit market leader Telekom the hardest.
In the German-Hungarian Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Telekom executives tried to garner support for their cause from German car manufacturing companies, knowing that their presence in Hungary was extremely important to the Orbán government. While in most countries, lobbying is carried out by, commercial attachés of the embassies, in the case of Germany, it is primarily the chamber of commerce that is tasked with representing the interests of German investors. But Telekom’s initiative failed. “Senior personnel from Audi, Mercedes and other companies didn’t even show up at the meetings, and they didn’t join a conference calls.. They never supported us when we had a dispute with the government, neither then, nor any other time”, one of Telekom’s executives at the time complained about the lack of solidarity between German companies. “It was not only about us, German energy companies that were also targeted with special taxes, had similar experiences with them,” the source added.
The special tax on Telekom was not the first economic conflict in Hungarian-German relations. After his election win in 2010 following an economic crisis, Orbán wanted to revive the stagnant Hungarian economy in a way that would have led to an increase in the already large budget deficit, which was actually not that dramatic compared to that of other countries. However, after the economic crisis, it was important for the European Union and the German government that smaller member states, including Hungary, manage their budgets prudently. Germany was preoccupied with the Greek crisis and with trying to keep the troubled eurozone together. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Angela Merkel did not agree with Orbán’s plan, so the Hungarian government was forced to balance their budget and reduce public debt.
Despite the controversies, Orbán gained recognition in Germany for eventually shaping his economic policy to Germany’s taste. A former Hungarian senior government official described this situation to Direkt36 as follows: “Who adheres to the Maastricht criteria [ensuring the stability of the eurozone]? The Italians do not, the small Hungarians and the Poles do”. The most influential member of the then German government after Chancellor Angela Merkel, Minister of Finance between 2009 and 2017 “Wolfgang Schäuble has always been our important ally, he appreciated Hungary’s compliance with economic norms and austerity,” the source said.
However, this compliance came at a serious cost: as the EU and Merkel did not allow a larger deficit, the Orbán government tried to raise money through imposing a crisis tax and sector-specific special taxes. German-owned banks, telecommunications and energy companies as well as retail chains were also affected. This decisive action surprised German economic players, as they were not used to it before. “After 1989, Hungarian governments always pampered the Germans. The cracks at the beginning of the second Orbán government, and then in 2015 (during the refugee crisis), stemmed from the fact that the Germans did not understand when the Hungarians suddenly began to advocate their own interests,” a German expert helping the Hungarian government said.
According to the source, the government’s aspirations can be summarized as “there should be a strong Hungarian presence where it’s possible, but let the Germans dominate where it isn’t. Audi, Mercedes, BMW all know that they can count on Hungary’s stable, long-term support”. After imposing taxes which mostly targeted foreign companies in the early 2010s, Viktor Orbán later declared that his goal was to increase Hungarian ownership in areas dependent on state regulations, such as energy, media or the banking sector. Here, previously strong German players have been replaced by Hungarians with close ties to the Orbán government. For example, as a recent Tagesspiegel article on Hungary’s media situation points out, Axel Springer and Deutsche Telekom sold their interests in Hungarian companies, including county newspapers and news site Origo.hu, to buyers with close ties to Fidesz. However, in export-driven sectors that require technological know-how, foreign investors did not have to worry.
In addition to rigorous budget management, the Orbán government balanced the burden of special taxes mainly in the automotive industry and began pouring state subsidies into German automotive companies. “Large German car manufacturers received all the help and subsidies and benefited extremely well,” a Telekom executive at the time recalled, adding that companies like Telekom were coming under increasing pressure in the meantime. “There were the evil multinational corporations, and there were the good multinational corporations,” the source noted, referring to the fact that they thought they belonged to the first group.
Car manufacturers have indeed done extremely well, thanks to the economic strategy of the Orbán government. The oldest German car factory in Hungary, Opel – which now only produces engines in Szentgotthárd – received 5.5 billion forints (15.3 million euros) in state support in 2011. Mercedes already received 22 billion forints (61 million euros) for its first plant in Kecskemét in 2009, 13 billion forints (36 million euros) for the second factory in 2016, and more than an additional 600 million forints (1,7 million euros) in 2017. Audi has been supported by the Hungarian government with a similar amount in the last ten years, 36 billion forints (100 million euros). However, these amounts do not include local subsidies and infrastructure developments serving the factories. For example, while the BMW plant under construction in the city of Debrecen will receive 12.4 billion forints (34.4 million euros) in direct state support, including the related infrastructure developments, the actual support will be around 130 billion forints (361 million euros).
In addition to larger, more famous German corporations, countless large or medium-sized German suppliers less known by the public have also benefited fromm significant tax cuts and state subsidies. Viktor Orbán himself spoke at a conference of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung about the fact that Germany’s trade with the Visegrad region countries is already much larger than, for example, with France, Italy or Great Britain.
“Germans and other member states are making good money on us, they should not complain and neither should we,” the Prime Minister said.
Over time, key players in German politics also understood the logic behind Hungary’s special taxes. A German source working for the CDU said he believed it was reasonable for the Orbán government to crack down on energy, retail and telecommunications companies and banks that had “made good money in Hungary in the previous decade” and thus were able to pay extra taxes. In addition, the government’s goal was to create new jobs, while the financial sector or the energy sector, for example, were not really capable of doing so, according to the source. Meanwhile, car factories still provide 2.6% of Hungarian jobs and their suppliers another 3-5%, according to CSO data.
The special relationship between large German companies and the Orbán government is well illustrated by the fact that the Hungarian state returned to them as direct subsidy 44 billion forints (122 million euros) of a total of 303 billion forints (840 million euros) which was collected in corporate tax last year, while Hungarian companies received only 26 billion forints (72 million euros) in subsidies. During the ten years of Fidesz’s rule, Audi, for example, has received four times as much support in proportion of jobs in Hungary as in Germany, according to an article by Hungarian economic site G7. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade did not reply to our questions regarding justification of the above financial support rates.
According to a CDU source, large German investors in Hungary did not build relationships on a party basis, they just wanted to be on good terms with whoever was currently in decision-making positions. “If Gergely Karácsony becomes the next Prime Minister, he too will have to maintain a good relationship with Audi or BMW. Of course, these companies build and use political relationships, but they don’t need to be involved in party politics. Big German corporations are not dependent on the goodwill of German politics either. These companies are big enough on their own, you don’t need a German ambassador to contact Viktor Orbán,” the source said.
At the same time, several stories reveal that the relationship between the Hungarian government and German companies is delicate. And in return for a close relationship, many German business executives simply accept the rules dictated by the Orbán government and adapt even if they otherwise disagree with them.
III. Values and interests
Source: kormany.hu
Senior editors of Magyar Hang (‘Hungarian Voice’), one of the few independent Hungarian newspapers that still exist, have been unsuccessfully hustling for advertisements from large foreign corporations for a long time, being turned away everywhere. “Usually we didn’t even get to a face-to-face meeting until we were finally welcomed by one of the big German car manufacturers,” newspaper director Csaba Lukács told Direkt36, refusing to name the corporation because of the private nature of the discussion.
The German carmaker participated at Hungexpo in the first half of 2018. Lukács sat down with a German representative of the company in a meeting room behind their exhibition stand. “I showed him readership statistics and surveys of our readers. They really liked it and also said that we would fit their profile completely,” Lukács said. But the conversation then took a turn:
“On the way out in the hallway, the representative told me frankly: please understand, they can’t advertise in our paper because they don’t want to risk the state subsidy given to their factory.”
Not long before this episode, Csaba Lukács and editor-in-chief Zsombor György were still working for the then largest daily newspaper, Magyar Nemzet (‘Hungarian Nation’), but the paper was closed immediately after Fidesz’s election victory in April 2018. Magyar Nemzet was owned by Lajos Simicska, who had been at war with Viktor Orbán since 2015. After Fidesz achieved another two-thirds majority in the election, Simicska capitulated by handing over his business interests to owners close to the government. Soon after this happened, former journalists of Magyar Nemzet founded their own paper, Magyar Hang, which quickly became the number two public affairs weekly in Hungary. However, advertisements of large companies kept avoiding them.
According to György and Lukács, most foreign companies simply did not even respond to their request, but they also had worse experiences. Back in 2015, after the conflict between Simicska and Orbán escalated in public, German-owned retail chain Aldi took Magyar Nemzet off the shelves of its shops and started selling pro-government Magyar Idők (‘Hungarian Times’) instead, a newly created daily meant to replace the other paper. It took a lot of effort from György and Lukács to somehow manage to get their papers back on Aldi’s shelves. However, the whole story was repeated with Magyar Hang, and they had to threaten Aldi with a lawsuit to finally get them to start selling their newspaper.
In the autumn of 2019, the German Embassy in Budapest invited Hungarian journalists working for several independent outlets for an off-the-record discussion to talk honestly about the media situation in Hungary. After several journalists complained about the attitude of German corporations doing business with the government toward Hungarian media freedom, a high-ranking German diplomat reacted by saying that he is fully aware of this and ashamed of himself. “But please understand that this is Germany, which is a democracy where the Federal Foreign Office cannot put pressure on German companies,” the diplomat responded, according to a participant. Separately, a diplomat from the German embassy later visited the editorial staff of Magyar Hang. “He sat with us for two hours, listening carefully,” recalled Zsombor György, who said that their guest understood the gravity of the situation. The next day, the German embassy subscribed to one copy of the paper.
In reply to our questions about this episode, the German Embassy in Budapest wrote that the German government “is bound to respect freedom of speech and freedom of press. The constant dialogue with press representatives regardless their possible party affiliation is part of our day-to-day business. The federal government of the republic of Germany has no influence on the advertising policy of companies.”
Those who know him say that Viktor Orbán is exactly aware of the interest-driven nature of large German corporations. “According to Orbán, Germans are too rational to decide against their interests. One can always count on the rationality of the Germans,” a German expert with ties to the Hungarian government said when asked about the ideas the Hungarian government’s leadership holds about Germany. According to the source, tensions between the Hungarian and German governments are also explained by this assumption.
“When they see German criticism, the Hungarian government thinks: what do they want? If we gave a few billions for the Mercedes factory, why are they complaining about ‘dictatorship’? What do they want to achieve? After all, they are rational people, they must definitely have a purpose!” the expert said.
The Orbán government has been doing much more beyond tax breaks and pouring out state subsidies to fix cooperation, especially since the end of 2014, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. According to a lobbyist working for German and other large foreign companies, doing business with foreigners has since become “even more centralized. Already during preliminary talks in the ministry they suggest working with local companies close to Fidesz, using phrases like such and such subcontractor is the guarantee of quality in Hungary,” the lobbyist said.
According to a former Orbán government official, Hungary’s system to lure in investors “has been crafted deliberately, but the Germans are not stupid or innocent either”. He recalled when on a joint trip, for example, German businessmen had already switched to a more informal tone and started praising the Orbán government to the skies. “After a bottle of wine, you will also be told that Hungary is a wonderful place, for example, because you don’t have to let Turkish workers go to the prayer mat at noon,” he said. During the private conversation, the same German businessmen also agreed with Hungary’s pro-Russian foreign policy and criticized EU sanctions imposed on Russia due to the conflict in Ukraine, because they believe sanctions did a lot of harm to German companies.
After 2010, the Orbán government has developed such an intimate relationship with many German companies that it managed to resolve disagreements and possible conflicts directly with the senior management of German parent companies, according to business and foreign ministry sources talking to Direkt36. According to a Telekom executive at the time, János Lázár, who was one of the most influential members of the Orbán government between 2012 and 2018, negotiated directly with the German parent company, Deutsche Telekom. Local executives at Magyar Telekom were only following decisions made at a higher level.
One of the most important intermediaries between the Hungarian government and German corporations is a man named Klaus Mangold, a former top manager at Daimler AG, who is often referred to in German press simply as Mr. Russia (Direkt36 wrote about him earlier several times). According to a former diplomat of the Orbán government, Mangold was already active under the Socialist MSZP governments as a “man beyond party lines”. “Mangold has always represented German big capital in Hungary and in Russia. He is primarily in the service of German industry,” former ambassador Sándor Peisch said about the lobbyist.
Mangold’s activities in Hungary also provided an example of how business and politics are intertwined in Hungarian-German relations, and how there are no purely business or purely political issues between the two parties. In 2016, 444.hu found out that the lobbyist had flown his good friend, German EU Commissioner Günther Oettinger to Budapest on his private jet. However, commissioners were not allowed to accept private gifts worth more than 150 euros. Oettinger, a CDU member, played a key role in authorizing the Russian-led Paks II nuclear power plant project in Hungary. He has known Viktor Orbán for a long time. Oettinger, who also has an extensive network of contacts in the German political and business world, was officially employed by the Hungarian government after he retired from the European Commission. He became co-chair of Hungary’s new National Science Policy Council, established in February.
Although German press frequently reports on corruption cases in Hungary, according to a source affiliated with the CDU, many German investors simply do not feel that the Orbán government is particularly corrupt. “If Orbán himself led a completely different lifestyle with girlfriends and luxury cars, Hungary would be a completely different story in Germany,” the source added.
IV. Not a love story, a working relationship
Source: kormany.hu
The Hungarian government was anxiously awaiting the last stop of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Budapest on 2 February 2015. Merkel, accepting the invitation of the largest Hungarian Jewish organization, the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (Mazsihisz), wanted to visit the Dohány Street Synagogue before returning home. The Orbán government considers Mazsihisz to be a critical organization, not least because they frequently raised the issue of anti-Semitism appearing in pro-government circles. (We wrote about the Hungarian-Israeli relationship and the role of the Hungarian Jewish community in an earlier article.)
To keep the situation under control, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán tried to get Merkel to let him accompany her to the synagogue, they asked Frank Spengler, one of the most important liaisons in Hungarian-German relations, to convey the request to the Chancellor’s staff. Spengler is sympathetic to the Orbán government, and he is the head of the Budapest office of the CDU party foundation, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS). According to a source familiar with the German version of the story, Spengler agreed to convey the message despite knowing that the answer would be a rigid rejection. That is exactly what the reply was, according to reports shared with Direkt36 by sources familiar with the details of the visit five years ago.
Meanwhile, Mazsihisz leaders were also nervous about the visit, according to sources familiar with the internal affairs of the Jewish organization. Mazsihisz president András Heisler wanted to tell the German Chancellor something that no one else could hear. “We were still before the anti-Soros campaign, the crackdown on NGOs and the persecution of the Central European University, but even then we already felt in our bones that something was being prepared and that it could have a negative impact on the Jewish community. András wanted to express these fears to the Chancellor,” a source familiar with Mazsihisz’s internal affairs recalled.
The problem was that the main buildings of Mazsihisz were under national security protection if leading foreign politicians and other influential figures came to visit them, meaning they could eavesdrop on their talks as well. Moreover, since Merkel is one of the most protected people in the world, leaders of Mazsihisz accepted the heightened attention of the Hungarian intelligence services as an unavoidable fact. Therefore, they tried to create a situation in which Heisler could talk to Merkel in a way that no one else could hear.
Heisler and his staff finally came to the conclusion that the appropriate location for the private exchange, would be the corridor that would open from the ceremonial hall where the meeting with several other Jewish leaders was planned. After that official meeting, when entering the corridor, there would be only the two of them. Moreover, they saw the corridor as technically very difficult to be eavesdropped on.
Because every such visit has a minute-by-minute scenario and the high-ranking visitor’s route is tested with a stopwatch in hand, Heisler and his people knew they would have about three minutes to talk from the door of the meeting room until they reached Merkel’s car parked on the street.
Eventually, the Chancellor’s visit to Dohány Street went well, and after Heisler concluded the meeting, he stepped to the door on Merkel’s side to finally share with her the concerns of the Jewish community.
But when the door opened, to their surprise, Levente Magyar, a senior official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, stood there and said with a big smile, “Chancellor Merkel, let me escort you down to your car!”
Levente Magyar, András Heisler and Angela Merkel Source: Mária Krasznainé-Nehrebeczky / Facebook page of MAZSIHISZ
“It was shocking. It’s like a rabbi sneaking into a government building and stealing Viktor Orbán’s guest,” a source familiar with the details of the visit added. Mazsihisz leaders were convinced that they had been careless and that their plan had been leaked to the government. However, the story reveals not only distrust and caution between the government and Mazsihisz, but also between the Hungarian and German governments and Viktor Orbán and Angela Merkel.
According to several sources who were close to Prime Minister Orbán, he believed Merkel was not only driven by political interests and her own career goals when she turned against Helmut Kohl, but that she also waged a political-ideological campaign within the CDU against Kohl’s legacy. “Kohl is not respected by the Germans enough, you have to come all the way to Budapest to hear something nice about him. The CDU and later its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, have shifted to the political center, Kohl is no longer a point of reference for them,” the German expert with ties to the Hungarian government told Direkt36. The source also recalled it being an important event, when in 2017, the former chancellor’s widow cited Kohl’s will and wanted Orbán to speak at the funeral instead of Merkel, but the German government eventually prevented this from happening.
Several sources agreed that Orbán and Merkel could never have become close confidants because “Orbán is a masculine man and deep down in his soul he really thinks that politics is not for women,” the German expert said. “There is full respect between Merkel and Orbán. It’s not a love story, it’s a pragmatic working relationship,” a source affiliated with the CDU said.
The relationship between Orbán and Merkel is well characterized by how it unfolded during the 2015 refugee crisis. “According to Orbán, Merkel represented a kind of ideological imperialism. They are the protagonists of two opposing sides of our civilization’s struggle,” a former diplomat of the Orbán government said about this period. They saw that Merkel practically wanted to force multiculturalism on Europe, and only those were considered good Europeans who supported immigration. According to the former diplomat, the Orbán government also strongly attacked Germany’s refugee policy because the idea of migrant quotas – to distribute refugees among all EU member states based on their economic strength and size – came from Berlin, and therefore the German government had to be “politically crippled in public to make them understand that this is dangerous”.
But Orbán’s criticisms and harsh stance on immigration did not hurt Merkel at all, for example in German domestic politics. A former official of the Orbán government recalled that in the televised debate of the 2017 German elections, for example, Merkel and her challenger, Martin Schultz, mentioned Orbán many times, showing that the Hungarian Prime Minister became an important figure in German public discourse. According to him, in the case of immigration, Orbán and Merkel “bashed each other in public just because they both benefited from making the other an enemy.”
Orbán and Merkel “bashed each other in public just because they both benefited from making the other an enemy.”
Meanwhile, the Orbán government has been heavily criticized by the German press from early on, and because of this, made lots of efforts behind the scenes to improve its image. After the extremely negative German response to the new Hungarian media law, the Orbán government began to translate new laws into German in advance, and they even sat down regularly with senior editors of major German newspapers. These were proposed by Frank Spengler, head of KAS, according to several sources familiar with the communications strategy at the time.
However, criticism has intensified once again in 2015 when a European debate started on immigration. The Hungarian government also tried to win over the German public through the tabloid press, with the help of Leslie Mandoki, a German musician of Hungarian origin who received Hungarian and Bavarian state awards. According to a former Orbán government official, Mandoki “is an important event organizer in the CDU […], for example, through his contacts, he helped ensure that the German tabloids would write beautiful things about Hungary, Budapest and Orbán at the most critical moments”. Meanwhile, the musician received two billion forints (5,5 million euros) of Hungarian state support for various projects. Mandoki has also worked as a music director for Volkswagen and Audi for a long time.
Moreover, following the refugee crisis, while the Orbán government’s own media continued to criticize Merkel and glorify the rising anti-immigration party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), in confidential talks, the CDU liaisons of Fidesz (Zoltán Balog, Gergely Gulyás and Katalin Novák who speak fluent German and know German politics very well) hit a different tone. “We know that the AfD will never be in power and for us, the CDU will always be the guiding star, that’s what Orbán’s people told me,” a German foreign policy expert recalled one of their conversations. A source affiliated with the CDU spoke of the same thing: Fidesz has abandoned not only the AfD but also the far-right FPÖ in Austria and Marine Le Pen in France since the 2019 EP elections, “because they see that they won’t be in power”. “The problem is that it will never be possible to form an alliance with the AfD, so the CDU will always be very important,” an Orbán government official acknowledged the same from the other side.
The way the Hungarian Prime Minister maneuvered among recent developments in German politics was a good example of the pragmatic relationship between Orbán and Merkel. Although the Bavarian CSU used to be Fidesz and the Orbán government’s the closest ally among German conservative parties, in 2019 Orbán turned against and withdrew support from CSU member Manfred Weber, the European People’s Party candidate for president of the European Commission. After the European parliamentary elections and the negotiations that followed, the top position was eventually filled by CDU politician Ursula von der Leyen, one of Merkel’s closest confidants. Weber failed because French president Emmanuel Macron rejected the entire Spitzenkandidat system (where parties in the European Parliament campaigned with pre-selected candidates for Commission president), and in the ensuing conflict, Merkel did not hold on to Weber and sacrificed him instead. According to a former Orbán government official, since the anti-Weber campaign was publicly led by Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister skillfully maneuvered and gained leverage.
V. Orbán’s prospects
Source: kormany.hu
These friendly gestures were also returned by the German Chancellor. During her visit to Sopron on 19 August 2019, Angela Merkel praised how EU funds were being spent in Hungary. “If we look at Hungarian economic growth rates, we can see that this money has been well invested by the country, that it benefits the people, and Germany is happy to be able to participate in this growth by creating jobs in Hungary,” the chancellor said.
“When Merkel says that EU money is well spent in Hungary, maybe she didn’t pick the right words, but she was trying to say that fiscal and economic policies are going well according to Germany’s liking,” a former Orbán government official said, labeling the Chancellor’s visit last year a turning point.
Indeed, tensions between the leadership of the two countries have visibly eased recently. In addition to political gestures, the Hungarian side also tried to work on resolving problems through business deals. One of the most spectacular examples of this was that last year Hungary became Germany’s number one arms buyer. “We bought more weapons from the Germans than the Bundeswehr itself,” the former government official said. The largest Hungarian orders were the purchase of 44 new and 12 used Leopard 2 tanks and 24 Panzerhaubitze 2000 self-propelled guns, which are predominantly manufactured in Bavaria. Since then, an agreement on the joint production of German Lynx infantry fighting vehicles has been announced too. Those Airbus helicopters purchased in 2018 also came in part from the Bavarian factory of the multinational European company.
When deals on helicopter and tank purchases were closed, Germany’s Minister of Defense was Ursula von der Leyen, who later took over as President of the European Commission. She had a thin majority in the European Parliament dependent on – among others – Fidesz’s votes. According to a German source affiliated with the CDU, “buying German weapons is a long-term commitment. Von der Leyen was aware of this and also regarded Hungary as a reliable ally”.
But in addition to the German military industry, the Orbán government has also reaffirmed its commitment to the crisis-stricken German car industry. In June, during a visit to Audi’s factory in Győr , Viktor Orbán promised another state subsidy, this time citing the economic downturn due to the coronavirus. In early July in Stuttgart, Péter Szijjártó advertised the latest Hungarian employer tax cuts to German company executives .
These agreements, deals and the close relationships that have developed in the past will be of great importance in the coming months. There are two heated issues that will determine the Hungarian government’s European advocacy power.
The first is about the EU’s budget for the next seven years from 2021 to 2027 and how EU funds should be spent. One of the most important debates around the budget is that certain member states as well as the main party groups of the European Parliament want to link the allocation of EU money to compliance with certain rule of law criteria. This is an explicit attempt to put pressure on Hungary and Poland, because they think that rule of law institutions in these countries have been weakened. The other issue is Fidesz’s membership in the European People’s Party, which has been suspended since March 2019. The political family should have decided in the autumn whether to exclude or readmit Viktor Orbán’s party. 14 other member parties have initiated the expulsion of Fidesz, citing that the party has been consistently violating the EPP’s values.
According to a CDU source, it is completely unrealistic to link EU funds to the rule of law during Germany’s EU presidency in the second half of 2020. The negotiations of member state leaders over the summer resulted in a deal that would make it rather complicated to actually withhold EU funds from member states disregarding the EU’s core values. However, the European Parliament wants tougher action, which has supporters in the German government as well: Social Democrats heading the Federal Foreign Office, Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas and Minister of State for Europe Michael Roth strongly support rule of law stipulations.
German players also have a decisive role in Fidesz’s membership in the European People’s Party, as CDU and CSU have the most votes in the party family. However, according to a source affiliated with the CDU, the German party is “divided on the issue of Fidesz because the CDU is also divided on what direction they themselves should follow. The question is, how broad should the European People’s Party be?” Moreover, according to a German expert working for the European People’s Party, while the more liberal CDU party organizations and politicians of West Germany are typically critical of the Orbán government, the Hungarian Prime Minister is often seen as a hero by the East German CDU.
There have been several high-level meetings in recent months to reconcile on contentious issues. In the summer of 2020, Orbán’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyás visited Berlin to meet CDU and CSU leaders, and then in mid-July, CDU party chairwoman and German Minister of Defense Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer traveled to Budapest. Direkt36 was informed by multiple Hungarian and German sources that these negotiations have been successful for both parties., The Orbán government is confidently looking forward to developments in the autumn in regards to the EU budget, the Article 7 procedure initiated due to rule of law problems, and Fidesz’s EPP membership. According to a former Hungarian government official, following recent talks on new arms deals which were discussed in Budapest in July, the main problem for the Orbán government regarding the EPP membership is just Polish EPP chairman Donald Tusk, who repeatedly attacked the Hungarian Prime Minister. However, Tusk has announced that the EPP will yet again not hold a vote on expelling Fidesz at the end of September.
“One should understand that the CDU, the largest member of the EPP, has an interest in keeping the EPP together and sees that the political family is extremely divided on the Fidesz issue,” a German expert with the EPP said. “They are afraid of a split, afraid of losing relative influence in the European Parliament and think that they still have some influence over Orbán” – the source added. According to a source affiliated with the CDU, it is simply not a priority for his party to take a stand and finalize the question of Fidesz’s EPP membership.
“Everyone expects the Germans to show the way, but it’s a myth that the Germans should lead. We have better things to do, why should we deal with the Fidesz problem? These struggles within the EPP have to be decided by the party chairman and the leadership,” the source argued why they are not engaging in more conflicts with Orbán.
“One of their arguments is what Fidesz would be capable of doing if they were expelled. […] They are afraid that the expulsion from the EPP would radicalize Fidesz,” the German expert working for the EPP said. “They no longer have any influence over what Orbán does in Hungary, but they are not interested in it either. They say that the EPP is still able to influence Orbán in Strasbourg and Brussels, and that’s what matters to them,” the source added.
The conflict avoidance of German politics and the difficult, but always pragmatic working relationship with Merkel over the past decade has been so convenient for the Hungarian government, that only a shift in power in German politics can pose an actual risk. Orbán himself has publicly indicated that, despite all their previous conflicts, he would really be happy if Merkel changed her decision and did not retire from politics.
At a conference a few months ago, for example, the Hungarian prime minister said that he tried to persuade Merkel to stay: “If you look at the politicians of the European Union today there are only a very few active politicians who were active and who contributed at the time of the downfall of the Soviet Union and the changes of the history of the continent, but we were there. The only Western European politician who made a major contribution and is still active is Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is just about to leave“ Orbán said, adding that “in brackets, I tried to convince her not to do so, but I was always rejected.”