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Journal of Democracy, Volume 23, Number 3, July 2012, pp. 132-137

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DOI: 10.1353/jod.2012.0051

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Hungary’s Illiberal Turn

How things went wrong

Jacques Rupnik

Jacques Rupnik, a leading expert on Central and Eastern Europe, is

senior research fellow at the Centre for International Studies and Re-
search (Sciences-Po) in Paris and professor at the College of Europe
in Bruges. His newest book is 1989: Europe and the World Trans-
formed (forthcoming).

After decades spent studying the postcommunist transitions to democ-

racy in Central and Eastern Europe, scholars of democratization in the
region have recently found themselves needing to consider the possibil-
ity of the opposite process: transitions away from democracy. The rea-
son—or at least the emblematic case—is Hungary. That country’s April
2010 parliamentary balloting, in which Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party won
53 percent of the vote and a seat bonus big enough to give it powers of
constitutional amendment, touched off what Orbán himself has called
an “electoral revolution.” The speed and the scale of the changes have
indeed been revolutionary. In the last two years, Hungary has seen the
adoption of a new constitution as well as the passage of some 350 bills
that have profoundly affected the very foundations of the rule of law and
raised doubts about whether the country can still be considered a liberal
democracy.
How can we account for this illiberal turn? How should the current
regime be classified in comparative perspective? What has been the role
of external influences and constraints, especially those that emanate
from the European Union?
One way to approach these questions is to note that Hungary has
produced three striking reversals of widespread expectations. Students
of the region long saw it as a leading post-1989 “success story”—both
because its exit from communism was smoothly negotiated and because
it appeared to have consolidated its democracy so quickly. Its posttransi-
tion elections were about the political color of the government, not the
nature of the regime. Yet it was precisely through an ordinary “free and

Journal of Democracy Volume 23, Number 3 July 2012

© 2012 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Jacques Rupnik 133

fair” election that Fidesz gained the two-thirds seat majority needed for
its far-reaching constitutional changes.
The second reversal concerns the economy. Two decades ago, Hun-
gary made itself a leader in adopting market-friendly reforms built atop
the “goulash socialism” of long-ruling First Secretary János Kádár
(1956–88) of Hungary’s communist party, the predecessor of today’s
Socialists. As Central and Eastern Europe’s most open and market-
friendly economy, Hungary became in the early 1990s the region’s most
attractive place for foreign investment. Today, however, the country’s
economic and financial situation is dire, and Fidesz is acting as if it
wishes to lead a turn from the market to the state, complete with rhetoric
about the need for freedom from dependence on “international capital.”
The third reversal has to do with Europe. Hungary’s transition com-
bined democracy, the rule of law, and economic reform with the aim of
gaining full EU membership. Even the issue of the roughly five-million
ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries took a back seat to
that goal. Yet the country’s recent illiberal turn is giving rise to tensions
between Budapest and Brussels. In May 2010, the new Fidesz govern-
ment worried neighbors and the EU by making it easier for ethnic Hun-
garians living abroad to claim Hungarian citizenship. More generally,
today the EU unexpectedly finds itself facing what the Bulgarian politi-
cal scientist Venelin Ganev (writing about Romania and Bulgaria) calls
“postaccession hooliganism,” and Brussels is unsure what to do about it.
The thrust of Orbán’s “legislative storm” (his phrase) is fundamentally
illiberal. The new constitution and laws do not represent a consensual
framework broadly accepted by all political actors, but instead are highly
divisive. As a justification for its changes, Fidesz argues that Hungary,
unlike other postcommunist countries, never formally adopted a new con-
stitution after 1989, and thus remained burdened by the legacy of the com-
munist past. Yet the 1949 Constitution had been amended so extensively
since the late 1980s that little of its original substance was left.
The amendment process itself held great value, moreover, for it in-
volved ongoing debates that helped both the elites and the public to
internalize the idea of constitutional constraints. In this sense, “con-
stitutionalism,” by fostering a liberal-democratic political culture, was
arguably more important than the specifics of the constitution. The new
constitution, by contrast, is almost entirely the handiwork of Fidesz, and
has fueled deep suspicion among the opposition parties, which remain
in a state of near-collapse. Despite the document’s appeals to the nation
and “national unity,” its consequences have been division and distrust.
The suspicion is well founded, for the new basic law and its enabling
acts have turned what are supposed to be politically neutral bodies such
as the Constitutional Court, the Central Bank, and the offices of the Om-
budsman and the Public Prosecutor into arms of the ruling party.
In short, Orbán and his lieutenants have downgraded or done away
134 Journal of Democracy

with the checks and balances that are widely considered essential for the
rule of law. If you add to this an act that creates a state agency meant
to ensure “media objectivity,” you have the main ingredients of the au-
thoritarian drift that Hungarian novelist and essayist György Konrád
recently called democradura, a mixture of Putin and Berlusconi.1 The
jury is still out as to whether this is what Steven Levitsky and Lucan
Way would call a “diminished form of authoritarianism,” or merely a
“diminished form of democracy.”2
Hungary is not Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s Belarus or Ilham Aliyev’s
Azerbaijan, to name two full-blown authoritarian regimes. But it is a
cautionary tale illustrating what the “tyranny of the majority” can do
to undermine the post-1989 achievements of liberal democracy and the
rule of law in Central and Eastern Europe.

The Evolution of Fidesz

An important thread in the story is the transformation of Fidesz from
its liberal origins into a conservative-nationalist party that has now cap-
tured and indeed refashioned the main levers of state power. In seeking
to explain the reasons for this, we must consider not only political op-
portunism but also a deep fissure in Hungarian political culture that has
resurfaced once again.
Back in 1989, Fidesz belonged firmly to the liberal tradition in the
political, economic, and cultural spheres alike. Its name was an acronym
for Federation of Young Democrats. Its motto was “Don’t trust anybody
over 35,” and it actually retained that age as a limit on membership
until 1993. It drew its support from young, urban, educated voters. In
addition to discovering that its age limit was problematic for its found-
ers, however, it also realized that the left-liberal side of the political
spectrum was crowded. There was already a liberal party, the Alliance
of Free Democrats (SzDSz). The ex-communist Socialists, meanwhile,
had reinvented themselves as unabashed endorsers of the free market,
democracy, NATO, and the EU.
Opportunity lay on the other side of the aisle. The leading party to
emerge from 1989, the right-of-center Hungarian Democratic Forum
(MDF), had begun to crumble. By the late 1990s, the rightward portion
of the Hungarian political spectrum was mostly empty. That is when Fi-
desz’s young leader Viktor Orbán (b. 1963) decided to move into the
vacant space. Within a few years, he had reconfigured a liberal party
for upwardly mobile young professionals into a conservative-nationalist
party catering to those who saw themselves as the losers of the transition.
Orbán had made a name for himself in June 1989 when he spoke in
Budapest’s Heroes’ Square at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the symbol of
the 1956 Revolution. Orbán called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops
from Hungary. Later that summer, he took part in the roundtable talks
Jacques Rupnik 135

with the communists that led to the first free elections. A decade later,
he would denounce that pacted transition as a corrupt bargain and make
his criticism of it a key to his assault on the post-1989 transition and the
elites associated with it. At a 1999 conference held by Vienna’s Insti-
tute for Human Sciences, Orbán explained with considerable aplomb to
Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, and a roomful of bemused listeners that
1989 offered little to celebrate: It had been a deal among nonelected ac-
tors involving an insufficiently decisive break with the communist past.
One cannot understand Orbán, Fidesz, and the new constitution that they
have hatched without paying heed to their critique of 1989 and the “le-
gitimacy crisis” that they claim overshadows its achievements.
What could have remained a mere rhetorical posture useful for a party
undergoing rapid ideological change turned into something else, reopen-
ing a deeper divide in Hungarian political culture. The radicalization
of Fidesz came in two stages: In April 2002, it lost the parliamentary
election to the Socialists by an agonizingly narrow margin and never
quite accepted the defeat. Language hardened; the new government’s
“illegitimacy” became a recurrent theme. Then came April 2006 and
an even harder-to-swallow outcome: Fidesz won more votes than the
Socialists, but wound up with fewer seats. In most European countries,
a leader who loses two elections in a row resigns. In Hungary, Orbán
made it his goal to lead a “revolution.”
As fate would have it, October 2006 marked the fiftieth anniversary
of the Hungarian Revolution. Fidesz raised the call to “resume the Revo-
lution” against the rebranded “Communists” then running the govern-
ment. A week of riots, organized mainly by far-right nationalist groups
(with Fidesz in the background), was a dubious way to commemorate
a great cause. Four years later, the overheated nationalist rhetoric that
greeted the ninetieth anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon (which turned
the pre-1914 Kingdom of Hungary into the much smaller Hungary that
we know today) was a grandiose celebration of a dubious cause.
Both the riots and the rhetoric point to the reclaiming of a political
tradition that goes back to the authoritarian regime of Admiral Miklós
Horthy, the former Habsburg naval officer who ruled Hungary as its self-
styled “regent” from 1920 to 1944. The Horthy regime had two obses-
sions. One was its opposition to Bolshevism: Horthy had taken over fol-
lowing the collapse of Béla Kun’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic
in August 1919. The other was irredentism: Trianon had cost Hungary
more than two-thirds of its land area and about a third of its people.
This is the point where “transitology” becomes “traumatology.”3 In
claiming to break (at last) from the communist past, Orbán is connecting
with the precommunist past. What we are seeing in Hungary today is not
merely the revival or reinvention of a tradition, but also the reopening of
an old divide in Hungarian political culture between urbanists and popu-
lists. The former, liberals or socialists, saw Western liberal democracy
136 Journal of Democracy

as a model of economic and social change. The latter saw the peasantry
as the source of true national values and “authentic” democracy.4 Dur-
ing the period between the two world wars, the “culture war” became
political and acquired an anti-Semitic component. Under communism,
that war remained mostly hidden, trapped beneath the Soviet glacier.
The late 1980s brought hope that the divide might be healed. Opposi-
tion intellectuals from both traditions converged around the legacy of
the great Hungarian thinker István Bibó (1911–79), who came from the
populist tradition and served as a minister of state in the 1956 Revolu-
tion. Just as it seemed that the advent of democracy would close the old
divide, it has been deliberately reopened. In his masterpiece on “the
misery of Eastern Europe’s small states,” Bibó warned that democracy
is threatened when “as a result of a cataclysm or an illusion, the cause of
the nation separates from that of freedom.”5
So are we back to two Hungaries? Some of the protagonists seem
to think so. The nationalist wave, particularly the extreme right-wing
movement known as Jobbik, carries with it anti-Semitic and anti-Roma
overtones.6 The disciples of the “urbanists,” meanwhile, have their own
stereotypes. Imre Kertész, the 2002 Nobel laureate in literature, draws
the divide as sharply as ever: “I am wondering if the country [Hungary]
has made a choice between Asia and western Europe.” He sees ominous
parallels between the present situation and the 1930s. “Hungary is a
fatality,” says a writer whose most famous book is called Fatelessness.7

The European Crisis

Is this really a return to the authoritarianism of the 1930s, or are the
protagonists playing new parts with old partitions, complete with a lan-
guage and a “culture of hatred” (as Kertész calls it) drawn from times
past? Or should we instead see things through the lens of Hungary’s
relationship to present-day Europe, and in particular the contemporary
economic crisis that is raising questions about the nature of democratic
institutions across the whole continent?
The EU’s response to Fidesz’s power grab has been tardy and politi-
cally rather mild. Most official European protests have focused on ac-
tions that undermine the rule of law, such as the forced early retirements
of judges and the politicization of the Central Bank. The less-than-force-
ful character of all this can partly be explained by Orbán’s friends in
European institutions. After Hungary joined the EU, Orbán became a
prominent figure in the European People’s Party, which currently holds
the largest single bloc of seats (271) in the 754-seat European Parlia-
ment. This has given him an almost perfect shield.
If anything humbles Orbán, it may be the limits on his ability to pur-
sue the cause of economic and fiscal nationalism. The EU seems to have
more steel in its spine when the interests of Austrian and German banks
Jacques Rupnik 137

come under challenge, as they did when Orbán tried to nationalize pen-
sion savings. The bid to disentangle Hungary from international lenders’
constraints failed, and Orbán has since had to resume loan negotiations
with the IMF and the EU despite his denunciations of the IMF loan that
his predecessor obtained. Orbán may be a statist and a proud nationalist
who wants to reclaim Hungary’s sovereignty vis-`a-vis Western financial
institutions, but the country’s recent experiences with near bankruptcy,
massive capital flight, and the devaluation of the forint have brought
him to a humbler place.
Hungary’s illiberal turn comes at a time when Europe itself is fac-
ing a major financial and economic crisis with far-reaching implications
for the quality of democratic rule throughout the continent. The crisis is
challenging democracy from both a technocratic and a populist direction.
In Greece and Italy, democratically elected but insolvent governments
have already ceded vast policy-making powers to unelected experts. At
the same time, European societies under stress are witnessing the resur-
gence of populist, anti-immigrant, and anti-European forces. It is in this
context that the EU—preoccupied with efforts to rescue the common Eu-
ropean currency—finds itself forced to wrestle with the Hungarian ques-
tion. Is Orbán merely a symptom of this crisis in its populist dimension,
or is he part of a large-scale drift toward authoritarianism that affects
the continent’s eastern portion including Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia?
Beyond the worrisome geopolitical implications of this latter possibility,
Orbán’s Hungary provides an insight into two different patterns of the
crisis of democracy on both sides of the old European divide.

NOTES

1. György Konrád said this in a panel discussion organized by the journal La R`egle
du Jeu in Paris on 19 February 2012. The term democradura, or, literally, “hard democ-
racy,” was coined by Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter to describe certain
Latin American regimes of the 1970s and 1980s.

2. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,”

Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 52.

3. This formulation comes from Stephen Holmes, who offered it at a symposium on

“Liberal Democracy in Hard Times” held in honor of Claus Offe at the Hertie School of
Government, Berlin, 22 March 2012.

4. François (Ferenc) Fejtö, “Hungarian Populism Then and Now,” paper presented at a
symposium at Sciences Po (CERI), Paris, 9 January 2007.

5. István Bibó, Mis`ere des petits états d’Europe de l’est (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 115.

6. See Frank Bruni, “In Hungary, the Usual Scapegoats,” New York Times, 25 April
2012. See also Joëlle Stolz, “L’^extreme droite magyare rouvre les plaies de l’‘affaire
Dreyfus’ hongroise,” Le Monde (Paris), 7 April 2012.

7. Imre Kertész, “La Hongrie est une fatalité,” Le Monde, 10 February 2012.