In mid-June, when the Hungarian ministry of justice was working on the seventh amendment to the constitution, aimed primarily at civic organizations, the Orbán government in the last minute added a new amendment (Article XXII[3]), which in its final form reads: “In order to protect public order, public security, public health and cultural values, an Act or a local government decree may, with respect to a specific part of public space, provide that staying in public space as a habitual dwelling shall be illegal.” The new law was to take effect on October 15. Since then, 101 people have received warnings and three were arrested.

The real horror of the law becomes obvious only in the directives accompanying it. Here are some of the details. After three warnings within 90 days, the homeless person will be arrested and jailed while waiting for his sentencing, but if the homeless person is not cooperative, he can be jailed immediately. When can the police intervene? If the homeless person “is seen often and regularly within a limited time washing, dressing himself, or keeping a dog.” If arrested, he will spend a maximum of 72 hours in preliminary detention until the case is decided in court. In the first instance, the person can be reprimanded, sentenced to public work, or, in the case of a recidivist, given a jail term. The person will be responsible for all or part of the court costs.

So, let’s see the stories of the three homeless people who ended up in court so far. The first was a man arrested in Gödöllő, a town about 30 km from Budapest. The homeless man, who once upon a time was an engineer, is in bad physical shape and lost his apartment a few years ago. The police found him sitting on a bench. He was immediately taken in because he told the police he didn’t want to go to the shelter; he would rather sleep in the nearby park. That indicates “obstinacy,” which is reason enough for an arrest without any warning. In this case the police asked for an accelerated procedure. They asked for a jail term, but the law clerk (bírósági titkár) decided merely “to reprimand” the man. He was supposed to pay 20,000 forints (€62), which his pro bono lawyer paid.

The second case was an alcoholic who was asleep on the square in front of the Western Station in Budapest. He was apparently drunk. He was warned three times, all in one day, on October 16. He was immediately taken to jail.

From this second arrest we can see how these cases are dealt with in Budapest. The actual trial takes place at the Metropolitan Court of Budapest, but the arrested homeless people are not allowed in the courtroom. They sit on translucent chairs in one of two whitewashed rooms some distance away in the infamous Gyorskocsi Police Station, where, for example, Imre Nagy was executed. Communication between the two locations is done electronically. Our alcoholic, a practically incoherent man, eventually also received only a reprimand. He had to pay 6,300 forints. He promised to go to the shelter, but I’m almost certain that he will be back in the jail in Gyorskocsi utca in no time.

The third case is perhaps the saddest. Mrs. Kálmán Oláh (62) has been homeless for the last five months after her partner of 14 years died. Their apartment was on his name, and the man’s relatives after a year wouldn’t let her stay on. Soon she will be eligible for a pension. Since she has cancer, she can work only part time, mostly cleaning houses. She is well dressed, and if she just sat on a park bench no one would ever think she was homeless. But unfortunately, she had a blanket, a pillow, and a dog. She was warned three times during the course of October 17. After the fourth warning, the police took all her belongings and her dog.

Mrs. Oláh was once a stenographer and typist in the ministry of interior and later secretary to one of the middle managers of a private firm. In 1995 she left for the United States where she spent a few years, but, to her regret, she returned to Hungary. She said that her homelessness is temporary because she is in the middle of a law suit over her claim to the apartment. Her lawyer argued that the law is unconstitutional, and she decided to appeal the reprimand she received.

Given the outcry and outrage over these cases, the government felt it was time to defend the new anti-homeless law. Political Undersecretary Bence Rétvári, who is the face of the otherwise faceless ministry of human resources, whose minister, Miklós Kásler, judiciously avoids the public, explained that “the objective of the regulation is greater assistance to the needy.” These people can break out of their present situation if they take advantage of the temporary shelters provided for them by the authorities. Others claim that there are only about 9,000 available places in Budapest when the number of homeless is between 15,000 and 30,000.

Magyar Idők’s op-ed page couldn’t possibly stay away from the issue. Szilvia Polgári, a young journalist who writes extensively for right-wing publications like Pesti Srácok, published an article titled “Anti-Homeless Demagoguery.” She accuses the activists who protest against the criminalization of homelessness of wanting to prevent the government from providing life-saving heated shelters and “driving them into the forests so they can freeze to death in the open.” The activists would like to see legislation declaring that everybody has a right to a roof over their heads. However, claims Szilvia Polgári, “the government or the local government will not provide free housing on liberal demand.” As far as she is concerned, helping the needy, the old, the disabled, people who cannot provide for themselves is simply unfair to those hard-working families whose tax forints are spent on them. “There is no such government, no such local government that can give anything to anyone without taking it from somebody else…. We should keep this in mind before we begin building the so successful socialism.”

All this reminded me of a recent interview with Francis Fukuyama in The New Statesman. Fukuyama, in The End of History, rebuked Marxists who regarded communism as humanity’s final ideological stage. The interviewer asked what he thought of the resurgence of the socialist left in the U.K. and the U.S. Here is his answer: “It all depends on what you mean by socialism. Ownership of the means of production—except in areas where it’s clearly called for, like public utilities—I don’t think that’s going to work. If you mean redistributive programmes that try to redress this big imbalance in both incomes and wealth that has emerged then, yes, I think not only can it come back, it ought to come back.” In a country like Hungary where, like so many other places, there is such a gap between the haves and have-nots, the government should try to minimize the difference between them. But this government has been assiduously working to make the well-to-do richer and the impoverished poorer. Szilvia Polgári in fact incites those hard-working families not just against the homeless but also against families who have lost their homes as a result of the Forex crisis and now are being evicted. No pity there. No compassion.

The churches remained quiet in Hungary. In Slovakia, however, 13 Christian civic groups wrote a letter to the Slovak foreign minister, asking him to speak out against the criminalization of the homeless in Hungary. Otherwise, Canadian Timothy Schmalz’s 2013 statue “Homeless Jesus” has made its rounds in Hungary too, thanks to the generosity of The Malteses. The photo in this post was taken in Budapest, showing Cardinal Péter Erdő consecrating the statue. But this Christian message made no impression on Viktor Orbán, the leader of the most Christian Democratic state in the European Union.

October 19, 2018