by Ferenc Laczó
Just like Hungary’s post-communist liberal democracy, Viktor Orbán’s regime ended abruptly. In both cases, seismic changes quickly undermined what had looked like firmly established rules. Why was Hungary’s liberal democratic transition of the late 20th century followed by sharp de-democratization in the early 21st century, and why has illiberal regime-building crumbled unexpectedly too? How do the country’s prospects of democratization look now compared to 1989?
In memory of Richard Giragosian
Hungarian post-communist democracy emerged rather gradually and, paradoxically enough, largely behind closed doors back in the late 1980s. There was limited social mobilization and significant institutional and personnel continuity. What made this worse was that the attempt at democratization, unlike in postwar Western Europe, went hand in hand with a deep economic crisis.
A key aim of the new democratic system at the time was to establish proper checks and balances and achieve a new form of stability, with West Germany as the main model. Accordingly, the Constitutional Court had extensive powers, and governments were nearly impossible to remove. Post-communist democracy at first seemed stable indeed, but it did not really prove open to new people, new ideas, and new arrangements—and it had an Achilles’ heel since it could be undermined via a constitutional supermajority (or at least two-thirds of the seats in Parliament).
Just when the international reorientation of Hungary was symbolically completed with EU membership achieved in 2004, the transition narrative with its normative core of liberalism lost much of its influence, with no new normative and consensual vision of the future emerging in its place. The post-communist Hungarian Socialist Party that powerfully co-shaped the transition and had a well-deserved image of being a pragmatic reformer entered a serious crisis of reproduction around that time: Its second neoliberal phase failed to deliver economically while it hurt many of its own core supporters. However, no new leftist challenger arose.
Among younger members of the electorate, a new form of anti-Western nationalism became quite popular instead. For the first time since 1989, the far right was on the rise starting around 2006. That rise soon coincided with the global financial and economic crisis, which severely hurt the country and handed Orbán’s right-wing Fidesz party a constitutional supermajority in the spring of 2010. A skilled and highly experienced politician still only in his late 40s at the time, Orbán saw in this a unique opportunity to centralize power and establish his hegemony.
This combination of a newly powerful far right, a grave socioeconomic crisis, the collapse of the post-communist left, and a cunning illiberal politician with a master plan amounted to a perfect storm, leading to what many now view as the worst instance of de-democratization in an EU member state’s history.
The performance of this centralized, anti-meritocratic, radicalizing regime predictably declined over time—and sharply so in recent years. However, when and why such centralized regimes get destabilized remains poorly understood—and unpredictable triggers often seem to play a key role in such processes. What is easier to assert is that after 16 years in power, Orbán’s regime left behind a hollowed-out state and a wayward foreign policy that isolated the country from its most important allies. It also left behind a rather impoverished and underskilled populace, an economy in deep structural crisis with powerful networks of corruption, as well as a heavily controlled public sphere that proudly spread disinformation. It is the conspicuous negative consequences of such arbitrary rule that have motivated the overwhelming recent turn against Orbán’s regime—and that now motivate, in dialectical fashion, a powerful attempt at democratic reopening.
Despite the severity of the current crisis, the country’s democratic prospects indeed look more promising than they did back in 1989. While a key aim is once again to establish proper checks and balances, re-democratization is now not driven by an impulse to imitate an external model, but rather by an avid desire to establish something more equitable, not least via new forms of accountability and transparency.
While there is a deep economic crisis now too, pro-democratic mobilization, channeled primarily by Péter Magyar’s Tisza but also going well beyond it, has been much more impressive this time around. It is the reawakening of that ambitious—if quarrelsome and sometimes admittedly rather adversarial—spirit of democracy that has become a source of so much hope across Europe concerning Hungary at a time when there are few hopeful stories to report.
When it comes to the specific goal of re-democratizing state institutions, this process has progressed remarkably rapidly in the early months of the Magyar government. Tensions between rapid changes from above and more traditional conceptions of the rule of law seem inevitable at this point.
How far a pro-democratic government can proceed when introducing new measures of accountability in the interest of rapidly dismantling an illiberal state is admittedly not a question EU law has been centered on until now.
With Magyar’s governing party overwhelmingly popular at the moment and clearly on track to emerge as a new dominant force, a clearer institutionalization of political pluralism is likely to constitute another notable challenge. The exact shape Hungary’s democracy will take in the coming years thus has to be qualified as rather uncertain—and much will depend on the new constitutional arrangements and how they shall be introduced.
After 16 years of decline, Hungarians in favor of re-democratization as well as their international supporters would be well advised to think more about how to invest continuously in a more democratic country than about the narrower goal of institutional consolidation.
That is exactly where the EU and the country’s European partners may be able to make the most difference at limited cost to themselves—through intensified cooperation in areas such as education or the media but also in perhaps less obvious ones, such as infrastructure development in impoverished regions and potentially also new European deals concerning health care (which has visibly been crumbling across much of the EU’s periphery).
As for the new government, it needs to use its constitutional supermajority to dismantle Orbán’s illiberal state while constraining the future reach of such potentially anti-democratic supermajorities. Having to be forceful and self-limiting at the same time amounts to a tightrope walk. But the fact that the need for such an acrobatic act has been identified in advance provides hope that Hungary’s new government can succeed at what no one in the EU has tried before. Both the country and the Union stand to benefit substantially from such a skilled and creative exercise.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
