In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, András Bozóki – author of the new collection Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy) – reflects on what has made the anti-democratic turn in Hungary so effective and discusses what has surprised him the most about the evolution of the Orbán regime; comments on the regime’s attempted remaking of Hungarian elite groups and its uses of ideology to legitimate its rule; evaluates his thesis on the Orbán regime being an “externally constrained hybrid regime” in light of more recent developments; and assesses the role of his own generation, the 1989ers, in the longer arc of history.
András Bozóki is Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Central European University and a research affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute. His main fields of research include democratization, de-democratization, political regimes, ideologies, Central European politics, and the role of intellectuals.
Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy) has been published by Gondolat Kiadó.
Ferenc Laczó: You have just released a large and exciting collection in Hungarian under the title Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról, which might be translated as Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy. This new volume of some 500 pages collects sixteen important articles that you have authored or co-authored since 2013 and presents them in a largely chronological fashion.
The Orbán regime has clearly been a central concern of yours. How this regime has emerged, how it operates, how it may be classified, and what can be said about its international embeddedness—these are all questions that are repeatedly raised and considered on these pages. You have evidently been studying a moving target since the early 2010s. I wanted to start our conversation there: How has your understanding of the Orbán regime evolved over the years? What was foreseeable to you already back in the early 2010s about where this regime would be heading, and what came rather as a surprise to you in more recent years?
András Bozóki: There was already a de-consolidation of democracy, in the form of increasing political polarization, between 2006 and 2010. However, according to all international democracy-measuring institutes, Hungary was still a liberal democracy up until 2010, despite all the troubles. People were disappointed with the government of the time; they found it ineffective, and they wanted a more decisive turn towards what was supposed to be a more democratic system. It was interesting to see that, while Viktor Orbán started his de-democratization project quite early on, it was propagated as making the system more democratic.
Forget about the rule of law and all these legal nuances, or what the Constitutional Court defends, or the ombudsman, all these legal brakes on the regime. Let the people govern, let the will of the people rule without any brakes. Autocratization was sold as democratization.
As a political scientist I was surprised by three phenomena in the process of de-democratization: weak popular identification with democracy, the effectiveness of political propaganda, and, third, the radical change in Hungarian foreign policy.
As someone who used to be a member of Fidesz at the change of the regime, but left it early, I had no illusions about Orbán. My surprise is not so much about his behavior as a leader, but about the passive behavior of Hungarian society. I did not expect that the democratic backsliding process would go so swiftly, and without much social resistance, I would say. That was a major disappointment: that people didn’t see the existent democracy as something worth fighting for, worth defending. They said that democracy is just about a multiparty system and nothing more. It is not about the spirit of the people, it is only about weak institutions and corrupt party machineries. They didn’t want to defend that system. It was easy, retrospectively speaking, for Orbán to change the regime because the social resistance was surprisingly weak.
My second surprise concerns the effectiveness of propaganda. I did not believe that propaganda after the 1950s can again be used for direct political purposes in Hungary, that a country which survived Communism can go back to daily propaganda. But that happened in 2015 with the migration crisis and the 2016 referendum afterwards. It was just intolerable. In the late Communist period, the regime was not propagandistic at all. They had neither ideology, nor propaganda; it was just based on traditional mentalities. It was striking to see that propaganda can again be effective, together with the manipulation of social media, and make citizens change their opinion concerning foreign migrants. Before 2015, there was no Islamophobia in Hungary at all, unlike some traditional anti-Semitism. However, the Orbán regime propagated Islamophobia and mixed it up with anti-Roma sentiments.
And, finally, I did not expect Orbán to become a pro-Putin politician. I mean, I do not have to tell you that back in the 19th century, the Russian army destroyed the Hungarian Revolution and struggle for freedom; then, during the Second World War, they came to Hungary, and there are now accounts about their activity beyond the fronts, like not only killing people, but raping hundreds of thousands of women; then crushing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956; and stationing troops in Hungary for decades. Hungary was not as anti-communist a country as Poland, but there were strong anti-Soviet sentiments. “Russians, go home” was a leading slogan of the 1956 Revolution. That Orbán could change this and make Fidesz supporters pro-Russian, anti-EU, pro-war—that was something truly unexpected. They may now present themselves as the “party of peace,” but they actually support Russia’s war against Ukraine and have some invisible but easily detectable relationship with Putin such as economic and political collaboration. That has been genuinely surprising.
Orbán currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU and is working on the deconstruction of the Union. The Trojan horse has arrived.
FL: Several pieces included in this new collection address the regime debate that has been raging concerning Orbán’s rule. As part of that, you discuss its illiberal and antidemocratic features, and critique the widely used concept of ‘illiberal democracy’ in particular. You write about ‘electoral autocracy’ instead, and some years ago even formulated the thesis of a ‘liberal autocracy.’ Which key conclusions would you draw today from those regime debates? What might be key points of consensus among scholars despite their different emphases and terminological choices?
AB: The first few years after 2010 were a shock. What should we call this regime? It was the constitutional lawyers, plus economist János Kornai, who claimed that the regime is moving fast towards autocracy. It was the constitutional lawyers—Gábor Halmai, Kim Lane Scheppele, Imre Vörös, and others—who claimed that there was an unconstitutional putsch when the new constitution started to be used for anti-constitutional purposes, when it was used to change the legal system and undermine the rule of law by 2013. In contrast, political scientists were rather quiet in those early years. They said: Let’s wait for the elections in 2014 to see whether these early warnings have been well-substantiated or not.
Political scientists started to speak about electoral autocracy, or hybrid regimes, only after 2014, when the constitutional lawyers were already sounding the alarm that this was the end of the rule of law. Political scientists responded basically by saying, “Fine, but the rule of law is just one side of the story. What about free elections and the will of the people?” But, as it turned out, we could not consider the 2014 elections honest elections. It was free, but unfair. And that opened the way to the regime debates, which dominated the mid-2010s in Hungarian political science.
There were several interesting approaches, such as the concepts of ‘mafia state’, neo-Bolshevism, re-feudalization, prebendalism, illiberal democratic capitalism, plebiscitary leader democracy, transmuted fascism, party-state, post-fascism, populist electoral autocracy and the likes. Also a distinction has been made between regime and rendszer – ‘regime’ and ‘system’, though the meaning of the Hungarian distinction does not translate well into English – or concerning the practices of the political formula vis-à-vis the formalities of institutional order. There were a lot of different approaches.
At this point Orbán proudly came up with the notion of ‘illiberal democracy.’ In English, ‘illiberal’ sounds pretty derogatory. I do not think Orbán felt that it was that way. He wanted to state that “We want to keep democracy but make a break with liberalism.” But illiberal democracy means something else: it is not a democracy but a sort of hybrid regime. Still, not only Orbán but some political scientists in Hungary also wanted to argue that ‘illiberal democracy’ is just a form of democracy: there is a Western liberal democracy and there is a non-Western democracy which might be illiberal but is equally legitimate. I did not like those attempts. I did not think they were scholarly.
I realized that being in the EU, there is a stronger defense of the rule of law from European Union institutions than from domestic elements.
When people were prevented from initiating a referendum in Hungary in early 2016, I clearly felt that this meant the end of any sort of democracy. But maybe there is a new form of autocracy which keeps some sort of remnants of liberalism due to the constraints of the European Union.
So, I was venturing with the concept of ‘liberal autocracy’ around the time. It is not my invention, Fareed Zakaria and Larry Diamond were debating it back around the turn of the millennium. Hong Kong was called a liberal autocracy, even the ideal type of a liberal autocracy when human rights were respected, but there was no democracy because the government was not elected by the people—though Diamond thought that having a liberal autocracy was illusionary.
Around 2015, I met Dániel Hegedűs, a younger colleague of mine. As an expert of EU politics, he pointed out the dubious role of the EU toward Hungary. We realized that the unparalleled specificity of this regime is indeed that it is located within the EU, and we have to focus on the interplay between Hungary and the European Union. Since EU legislation has domestic impact in Hungary, we cannot fully separate these two entities: following the principle of subsidiarity, some parts of sovereignty are given up by each Member State. So let us see what the consequences of EU membership are. Concerning Hungary, we came up with the proposition of an externally constrained – but also supported and legitimized – hybrid regime.
There was a huge debate about the latter notion too, whether ‘hybrid regime’ makes sense or not. It is a bit too broad of a category, but it was suitable for covering those years when Hungary was no longer a democracy, but not yet an autocracy. We can still use it today: if the Hungarian state is an electoral autocracy, it is still part of the hybrid regime category on the authoritarian end of the spectrum. Our article gained remarkable international attention and it came to be seen as our statement.
In the years since 2018, these regime debates have slowly lost significance and lost their importance. Everything has been said, I think. The new consensus may be that nobody calls Hungary a modern democracy anymore. People realize that there was de-democratization, democratic erosion, backsliding – whatever you want to call it. More recently, academics have been talking about autocratization, not democratic backsliding, which can be a backsliding within democracy whereas autocratization trespasses the line between democracy and autocracy.
I should add that this volume just collects some of the articles I wrote at different moments in time between 2013 and 2023. I see how naïve I was at certain points. I tried to correct myself later and was correcting myself again after that. Of course, I did not want to change what I wrote ten years ago, so this collection also shows how my thinking has changed.
The lesson I learned from the debate on the nature of the regime is that a purely political science approach and the use of purely political science concepts are not enough to understand the Orbán regime. You need to have historical and sociological knowledge, and an interdisciplinary approach is needed.
In Embedded Autocracy: Hungary in the European Union, the book I have just co-authored with Zoltán Fleck, we combine political science concepts with sociological approaches to conclude that the Orbán regime might be an electoral autocracy politically speaking, however it can be called an embedded autocracy from the social point of view.
FL: The collection focuses extensively on how Hungary’s antidemocratic turn has unfolded in the early twenty-first century. The decline of democracy in the country has been conspicuous, making Hungary a rather notorious case even in global comparison. What do you view as critical junctures during this process of de-democratization? And what might explain the overall effectiveness of such an anti-democratic turn in Hungary?
AB: On the one hand, it was a smooth change. On the other, there were some critical junctures, some breaking points. I think that, as I said, many people did not value democracy, or better to say, they had different understandings of democracy. I think that the twenty years between 1990 and 2010 were a shining moment in the history of Hungary – in a history stretching over a thousand years, we had two decades of liberal democracy, and I feel fortunate to have been part of this story.
Having said that, part of the answer is that this democracy was not without problems. To put it this way, the government lost credibility right after 2006 and they lost the 2008 referendum. People really wanted a change of government, or maybe an early election which the government refused to hold. They just did not feel the danger; they felt that there was just a normal crisis within democracy. I already sensed that this could become a systemic crisis. Social problems emerged due to the economic crisis of 2008–09, which made me think that we are dealing with more than just a political problem. The crisis had a devastating effect on society and allowed for the rise of the far right. In the absence of a credible left, people wanted to express themselves as members of a collectivity with a strong identity. In this quest, they found the far right. This led to the rise of the Jobbik party, as well as the killings of some Roma people, including a child – the low point in the last thirty years or so.
The government has been changing things gradually and has always kept society under control. The critical junctures that made de-democratization much easier include the constitutional change, the migration crisis, and the state of exception.
The latter one was originally introduced as a response to the migration crisis but reinforced in a much stronger mode during the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of parliamentary legislation, the government started to rule by decree. Afterwards the state of exception became normalized. Giorgio Agamben has written about the state of exception and how it legitimizes a regime, and I could also refer to Carl Schmitt here. The government normalized the state of emergency in a way that some exceptional legislation even made it into the constitution – and it is very hard to find another society where a minister is responsible for both the secret services and propaganda.
Finally, I would say that the European Union was slow to act up until 2015. They basically said that Hungary is a rather insignificant country in the European backyard and we do not really need to tackle this issue directly – Angela Merkel will take care of it anyway. But after the victory of the far-right Law and Justice Party in Poland in 2015, then the Brexit referendum in the UK, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Orbán suddenly became a player on the global stage, not just a Hungarian outlier. He managed to become one of the global leaders of a new illiberal, neo-authoritarian, or authoritarian populist tendency. So, I think the danger in Hungary was recognized at least five years later than it could have been.
FL: You mentioned the widely discussed article you have co-authored with Dániel Hegedűs where you two speak of the Orbán regime as an “externally constrained hybrid regime.” You write of a hybrid regime that is, somewhat paradoxically, a member of the European Union and thus part of a quite tightly integrated club of liberal democracies. The article in question was originally published some six years ago. How do you relate to its key theses today? What can we say about the external constraints the EU has posed in the light of the past nearly decade and a half?
AB: I found our cooperation with Dániel exceptionally fruitful. We even had the idea that we should address this topic in a book format, but circumstances have intervened. Having said that, I think the article is still valid.
We were criticized at the time for speaking about the constraining role of the EU, rather than stating that the EU is actually supporting the Orbán regime. As I said, the EU was very slow to react, and it deserves a lot of criticism on this issue.
However, if you look at any public opinion survey, you can see that Hungarians invest a lot of hope and faith in the European Union as the last guarantee of their relative freedom vis-à-vis the Orbán regime. The EU has been increasingly seen as a counterbalancing force to the regime.
There have been different waves. At one point, the EU was more supportive of the regime by giving out a lot of uncontrolled money, making it possible for the Orbán regime and its informal mafia state to enrich itself. Still, the fact that Hungary belongs to the EU is the last guarantee that it does not function like Belarus.
I have to admit that at the time of writing six years ago we were worried that Orbán may leave the European Union at one point, that he may decide that there is too much constraint and it is better for him to be outside. He also mentioned this possibility in one of his speeches. However, I am less worried about this possibility now.
It became clear that Orbán rather wants to change the European Union from inside: he wants to “occupy Brussels” rather than leave the EU. He has become more ambitious. He wants to expand his powers within the EU, even if that is, I think, not a realistic goal.
It may be that his special relationship with Vladimir Putin has also prompted him to stay within the European Union because the real value of Hungary is that he can sell it as the gate to the EU; this way, he can make Hungary attractive for authoritarian leaders like Erdoğan, Putin, or the Chinese leaders. In that sense, he is trading the country.
The outcome of this will be problematic, however, at least formally, Hungary would not leave the Union. There is a joke in Hungary these days that Orbán wants to leave the European Union, but Putin does not let him because its membership makes it possible to sell Russian gas and then maybe resell it under a Hungarian logo, and so on. There are indeed a lot of opportunities for semi-legal collaborations.
That is the key difference between how we saw the situation six years ago and how we view it today.
FL: Another key issue concerns the relationship between politics and the economy under Orbán’s rule. How do you view that relationship? In what ways and to what extent has Fidesz managed to transform Hungary’s elites in different spheres?
AB: I did not do systematic research on the economic elite, but I can observe, and I also had the chance to read articles and books by Miklós Sebők, Gábor Scheiring, Erzsébet Szalai, and Mária Csanádi, who have argued that the regime favors a new group of capitalists who are loyal to its nationalistic agenda over neoliberal ones. That was an important slogan for the regime: “Let’s break with the neo-liberal economic class, which has strong ties to Western investors, and let’s try to make domestic capitalists more patriotic.” Later, it turned out that Orbán believed they should be loyal to him both politically and economically. As long as he was not strong enough, he wanted to make peace with some influential actors in the economy, like Sándor Csányi. He wanted to domesticate him that he indeed managed successfully. Later on, he tried to buy the firms of successful people like György Wáberer and others and create a single hierarchy.
Centralization was a major development. It can be seen everywhere, not only in the economy, but also in the cultural sphere – there is no autonomy for cultural or economic institutions or state bureaucracies anymore. In the cultural institutions, there are some four or five people who control several areas at once.
There is a duplication and even duplicity of power: there is a formal structure consisting of ministers and secretaries of state, but there is also an informal, hierarchical control exercised by feudalistic lords who act outside the formal structures. The latter are not even necessarily members of Fidesz.
The party is no longer important anyway. Bosses like Lőrinc Mészáros and other people close to the Orbán family try to control ever larger segments of the Hungarian economy. It seems that Orbán wants to run the country like a holding company, as in Singapore. You may know that there the ruling family literally owns the country. He could not quite achieve that, but that was, I think, his goal. In short, the key to the relationship is that strong political entrepreneurs try to capture the economy and try to colonize it.
FL: Numerous recent interpretations of the Orbán regime have emphasized the role of ideology, viewing this regime as an avid proponent of right-wing ideas, of what we might call reactionary forms of conservatism. You sound somewhat skeptical towards this thesis and underline instead that it is a rather cynical, propagandistic, and opportunistic regime. How would you comment on the uses of ideology by the regime? And would you expect its current heavy investment in reactionary conservatism to be continued?
AB: Every ruling power has to develop a political formula, has to legitimize itself; a ruling party needs some messages to the people. We can call this ideology, we can call this dominant discourse, or dominant messaging. We expect some sort of coherence from ideology. Of course, it may not be as coherent in practice as ideology was say sixty years ago: ideology moved away from a doctrinal understanding to a more discursive understanding.
Having said that, Fidesz started out as a classic liberal party, or even as a neoliberal party: it was liberal in social policy and liberal or neoliberal in its economic policy, or one might say neoconservative in the spirit of naturalism. Later on, it credibly acted like a conservative party, attracting a lot of votes as a civic, bourgeois party. Then it moved on to become a plebian party. It was not interested in building civic Hungary anymore but wanted to reach Kádárist voters as a more plebeian, populist party, and then as a more ethnopopulist or ethnonationalist one. There have always been shifts, there may be a small, hard ideological core, but it looks to me much more like opportunism. And Orbán has been masterful in his use of opportunities. He realized that people’s memories are very short, and therefore he can contradict himself – self-contradiction has been part of his politics.
Nobody can expect a contemporary politician, even if the person is of a democratic kind, to follow a powerful ideological guideline.
Politicians are expected to be pragmatic and flexible. But I think Orbán is too flexible. He consciously contradicts himself. Concerning Putin and the role of Russia or the role of the West, he has moved far from his original position. His distances have been large, so I think there is a lot of cynicism in all this.
He was playing with the idea of illiberal democracy and then received a lot of criticism and then moved to “old school Christian democracy.” Now he calls his European group Patriots for Europe. Patriotism sounds just fine – everybody can be a patriot. It seems innovative; at the same time, it is done according to the opportunities.
One may argue that there is some ideological core in these fluctuations, even in his opportunism and cynicism.
What I find more interesting though is that Orbán tends to be more ideological in the international arena and much less ideological in the domestic playground.
In the international arena, he steps up and says that things like “I am a big friend of the Republican Party in the US, of Donald Trump, and the identitarian Christian movement”; “we are the friends of Netanyahu and support the State of Israel”; “we support strong leaders, strong illiberal leaders from Trump to Putin, and we can be the friends of Netanyahu and Erdoğan at the same time, we can even be friends with the Iranian leaders.” This sounds strange, but the justification is ideological: it is that Hungary belongs to an international neoconservative trend, which wants to save Christendom or the bastion of Christianity against liberal democratic, Brussels-based cosmopolitan, ‘woke,’ international elites who do not value Christian culture. That is the narrative he prefers to present on the international stage.
At home, Orbán acts as a nationalist, and he also supports mainstream churches and politically loyal religious institutions. However, if you look at the poorest people, his regime is social Darwinist or neoliberal. If you look at the flat tax system, it is also neoliberal. They treat Western investors differently from domestic entrepreneurs.
In the domestic arena, Orbán does not have a clear ideological profile at all, except for saying that they are right-wing, and his opposition is left-wing. From Péter Magyar through Ákos Hadházy to Gergely Karácsony, everybody who opposes him is called left-wing these days, even those who do not identify themselves as left-wing at all. It is a very basic, if not downright primitive use of the distinction.
It is interesting to observe that somebody can have the ambition to be an ideological leader of the world, while at home he is so opportunistic and cynical concerning ideologies. I see a sharp contrast here, but hardly anybody seems to notice because Western leaders and observers do not really care what is going on in Hungary and the ordinary Hungarian voter does not know what is happening in the world.
FL: I should mention that you happen to be rather close in age to several of the political leaders of the current regime. Would you perhaps say there is something special about members of your generation, people who were young adults around 1989? Could the current regime be said to be the product of a specific generational cohort in politics?
AB: I think we need to differentiate between politics and culture. If I may identify myself as a member of the 1989 generation, the generation before us, the 1968ers, were politically not so successful, but culturally they changed the world. Cosmopolitanism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-authoritarianism, multiculturalism gained ground after ‘68. That generation turned against the traditional structures of society and was open to innovations, to new ideas and experiments. I was only a little boy back in 1968, but I still remember the older boys playing guitar at Lake Balaton, and I remember the liberating feeling of those moments.
1989 was a fundamental political transition with a revolutionary outcome. The generation who ran this transition was much more pragmatic. It was much more driven by political goals and much less by cultural ones. In the contemporary Zeitgeist, Thatcherism replaced Marxism. Although it is true that the more urban parts of the 1989 generation were heavily influenced by the ‘68ers, particularly by the Free Democrats who belonged to that age cohort.
That is why the early Fidesz could appear like the younger brothers of the ‘68ers. But that was a bit misleading, because that concerned only the cultural part. The larger part of Fidesz consisted of the political-pragmatist core of the 1989er generation.
If I want to symbolize this, I will say it was the breakup in 1992 between Magyar Narancs, the biweekly magazine of Fidesz, and Fidesz as a political party. Magyar Narancs represented a mix of the spirit of ’68 and ‘89 it had a critical line and even criticized its own party in a sort of radical, post-anarchist, culturally alternative oriented way. The political-pragmatist core of the party, led by Viktor Orbán and László Kövér, followed a radical version of the mainstream political orientation, just like a lot of other people in Fidesz who came from small towns. We can say that they proved to be the winners.
The pragmatic part of the generation of 1989 now has a rather negative image in Hungary: it connotes those people who are just interested in grabbing as much power as possible. These 1989ers were not anti-hierarchical, but just wanted to climb up the hierarchy and occupy the top positions.
They did not have any problem with hierarchy, they had a problem with the fact that they were not on the top of it. That is also reflected in the new capitalism in Hungary and in the rise of the new economic elites. Those who had nothing to do with the ‘68ers became opportunistic. They can use ideas more easily according to their own interests. They saw no inherent value in ideas and ideologies, however they proved very effective in politics. That’s the key difference I see. This generational issue will be a huge topic, and maybe one for members of your generation to elaborate in the future.
There is a new generation after 1989: I would say this is the 2006 generation. It consists of people who, together with others, were very hopeful when Hungary joined the European Union in 2004 but became very disappointed after Ferenc Gyurcsány’s speech in May 2006, which was leaked a few months later and then used propagandistically by Fidesz. This is the Péter Magyar generation, who are in their forties now. For them, 2006 is something like a formative moment: the idea here is that the socialists and the liberals are just lying, dishonest people, and they must be swept away by a new, much more directly democratic movement of the right. In 2011-12, university students in Hungary were pro-Fidesz or even pro-Jobbik: when they became disappointed with Orbán, they moved to the far right.
With Covid and increasing propaganda and clientelism and favoritism, what I see today is that there is the formation of a new generation again – we may call them the generation of the pandemic – which is liberal. They have a negative attitude toward the Orbán regime, and they wish to change the political climate. The rise of Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party really tells a lot about Hungarian society’s need for somebody who is not seen as corrupt, who talks straight, and uses a sort of semi-revolutionary discourse. This is welcome because people are so fed up.
Members of the younger generation are leaving the country and going abroad to study. We do not yet see what this youngest generation will want politically. What is clear is that Fidesz is seen as an old party now – Orbán is viewed the way János Kádár was in the early 1980s. So, I can imagine that people from the younger generations within Fidesz are just waiting for the opportunity to change sides.
The transcript has been edited for length and clarity. In cooperation with Cody Inglis. The audio file was edited by Lilit Hakobyan.
