Eastern Europe Goes South

Disappearing Democracy in the EU’s Newest Members

Regression to the mean: unveiling a bust of Hungary’s one-time ruler Miklos Horthy, 2013. (Laszlo Balogh / Courtesy Reuters)

(…) Hungary has led the trend. In 2010, after the disastrous reign of a “reform socialist” government that combined the worst of all possible worlds — the ruthless promotion of capitalism, rampant corruption, and ballooning deficits — Viktor Orban and his right-wing party, Fidesz, returned to power (Orban had been prime minister from 1998 to 2002), winning almost 53 percent of the national vote. Due to the peculiarities of Hungary’s electoral system, this number translated into a two-thirds majority in parliament, allowing Fidesz to adopt a new constitution in January 2012 without the involvement of any other party, civic groups, or the public at large. Instead, Fidesz declared the 2010 victory to have been a “revolution in the polling booths” and pushed through a highly partisan charter created in its nationalist and populist image. Under the Orwellian label “System of National Cooperation,” it also attempted to purge the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and the media of nonloyalists. The party’s underlying moral justification was that Fidesz and only Fidesz truly represented the Hungarian nation. As Orban, whose first tenure as prime minister began in 1998, put it after his government was ousted in the 2002 parliamentary elections, the “nation cannot be in opposition.” The implication, of course, was that any opposition to Fidesz was illegitimate and not truly Hungarian.(…)

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