In ‘Democracy Noir,’ a Reminder of the Power in People

Democracy has been in peril since its earliest days.

And one of the most pernicious threats to our current democratic institutions isn’t outright fascism. It’s something that might be termed “democracy lite.” On the surface, things may appear familiar: there are still elections, politicians making promises, the appearance of democratic processes. But that’s about as far as it goes.

No example is clearer than the democratic concerns facing contemporary Hungary.

Democracy Noir is a new documentary screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival this month. It’s an eye-opening investigation told through the experiences of three women, each struggling in their own way to fight back against the current state of affairs.

Here, “state” is the operative word, as the present government under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has infiltrated almost every part of daily life.

Director Connie Field peels back the layers of personal and political history to reveal the underlying cause and repercussions of the Hungarian model of faux democracy, or “democracy lite.”

Controlling the media, controlling the people

Orbán came to power in 2010, promising to be a different kind of politician. As many of those interviewed in the film note, they were initially hopeful that he might offer something different. But once in power, Orbán and his Fidesz party set about systematically undermining everything from the courts to the media in order to exert near-total control over the Hungarian people.

Journalist Babett Oroszi saw it all go down on the frontlines. Oroszi started her career as a television reporter, winning an award for best young investigative journalist in 2013. But as independent media contracted, then almost entirely disappeared, she was forced to take whatever work she could find.

In Hungary, almost every media outlet in the country is under the direct control of Orbán and his party. As Oroszi explains, it’s as if Donald Trump owned CNN, CNBC and Fox.

Fed a diet of political propaganda on every network, the Hungarian people begin to believe what authorities want them to. Falsehoods like the idea that refugees are coming to steal citizens’ jobs, assault them and take over the country. Or that LGBTQ2S+ people are persuading elementary school students to change their sex.

As the government ramps up its focus on the queer community, Oroszi and her same-sex partner find themselves increasingly in its crosshairs.

Conspiracy in the mainstream

Tímea Szabó was elected to public office as a member of Hungary’s National Assembly in 2010. Over her career, she has held various roles including co-leader of Dialogue for Hungary, a green political party that stands in direct opposition to the current administration.

When she sought re-election, her opponents maintained that she was a CIA agent and that her campaign was funded by drug money. As she explains in the film, this bit of outlandish fiction was concocted by the fact she had worked for Harvard University as a researcher and spent some time in Afghanistan working for a non-governmental organization. “Therefore, what else could I possibly be?” she dryly asks the filmmaking team.

But the darkly comic aspects take a sinister turn when Szabó discovers she’s being illegally followed by secret service agents. Even more troubling is the media’s coverage of the charges made against her, including that her political campaign was funded by profits from drug trafficking and that she was, in fact, a traitor. Word-for-word reiterations of the article that contained these allegations were repeated in lockstep across multiple networks.

The other prominent woman in the documentary is Niko Antal, who worked as a nurse until Hungary’s collapsing health-care system, where doctors and nurses are paid minimum wage, forced her to take a job in an assisted living facility.

As she acts as a caretaker for her elderly mother, who is a staunch defender of the current administration, Antal explains that she and her partner are trapped in a country that they no longer recognize.

Parallels in North America

The documentary shows how the Republican platform in the current American electoral race shouldn’t come as a surprise. Hungary’s Orbán was a guest speaker at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Houston, Texas, where he offered a speech to right-wingers like former newscaster and politician Kari Lake and her ilk.

Orbán stated that the only way to fight the so-called “woke mind” was for conservatives to combine forces. “Victory will never be found by taking the path of least resistance. We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels. We must find friends and allies in one another. We must co-ordinate the movements of our troops because we face the same challenge,” he told the crowd in Houston.

The most terrible fact is that this works.

Drawing support largely from the rural and impoverished parts of Hungary, Orbán has won a series of electoral victories, albeit with the help of some serious gerrymandering.

As Oroszi explains, if people have nothing and someone gives them a bag of potatoes, they will love them. Cut to a scene of Orbán delivering bags of groceries to desperately poor people. This strategy, blunt and simple as it is, is effective. And the path to power is clear, particularly when these strategies are paired with fear mongering and a tendency to vilify anyone outside the mainstream (refugees, Roma, LGBTQ2S+ people). It’s a familiar pattern.

The parallels between Hungary and the current political direction in the United States are not accidental.

In an earlier interview, Democracy Noir’s director Field explained her motivation as an American filmmaker: “Who I made it for was people like me, to scare them to death, so that in my country specifically we will work like mad to make sure that Trump doesn’t get into the White House. We have a very difficult situation facing us and I want the film to make people have a good look at what will happen if we don’t prevent it.”

The task has largely fallen to women, both on the political field and in activism.

A descent into corruption

As the narrative cuts between the daily lives of the three women to footage of heated debates where Hungarian leadership clashes with other representatives from the European Union, the true scope of the country’s descent into corruption becomes apparent.

Oroszi, fuelled by eight to nine cups of coffee per day, is a dogged reporter, ferreting out stories about malfeasance and grift, including the fact that the current Hungarian leadership used EU funds to essentially rebuild the country while lining their own pockets and building estates and mansions for themselves and their families.

While there are political movements to divest Orbán from complete control over the nation, a coalition party doesn’t budge the dial very much. Although the EU decided to cut off funding to Hungary, the EU is ultimately limited in its capacity to help ordinary Hungarian people. Other international organizations, such as the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, oversee the election, but also have little impact.

One of the most startling comments occurs late in the film, when an EU official from Germany explains the problem with anti-democratic forces and the threat they pose. “I think I have identified the real threat to humanity: it’s unhinged, uncontrolled men,” he says. “We’ve seen it with Donald Trump in the U.S. and with Putin in Ukraine. Uncontrolled men can be deadly.”

Add in a few more men like Benjamin Netanyahu, and Orbán himself, and the stakes, not only for people but for the planet itself, are even more dire.

One EU representative pointedly asks Orbán if he plans to start burning books, with the inference that this is one milestone on the road to outright dictatorship.

But as Szabó explains, the current version of fascism is much more insidious than its predecessors. It moves stealthily, in the form of trollish commentators, dark money, lies and secrecy.

The film arrives on the eve of the U.S. election and B.C.’s provincial election. Democracy Noir could not be more relevant or timely. It does not end on a note of darkness or despair, however, but the opposite.

The film’s final moment focuses on a crowd of protesters, young and old, singing in the streets about hope. It’s a powerful image. And a reminder that democracy may be down, but never out.

‘Democracy Noir’ screens at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.