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Ellen Bos · Astrid Lorenz Editors
Politics and
Society in
Hungary
(De-)Democratization, Orbán and
the EU
Politics and Society in Hungary
Ellen Bos · Astrid Lorenz
Editors
Politics and Society in

Hungary
(De-)Democratization,
Orbán and the EU
Editors
Ellen Bos Astrid Lorenz
Chair of Comparative Politics with a Faculty of Social Sciences and
Focus on Central and Eastern Europe in Philosophy, Leipzig University
the EU, Andrássy University Budapest Leipzig, Germany
Budapest, Hungary
ISBN 978-3-658-39825-5 ISBN 978-3-658-39826-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39826-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachme-
dien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
GmbH, part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany
Contents
(De-)Democratization, Party Competition and Structural

Constraints in Hungary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Astrid Lorenz and Ellen Bos
Functional Deficiencies of Democracy and Instrumentalization
of Democratic Procedures in Hungary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Ellen Bos
The Agony of a Young Constitutional Democracy. The
Hungarian Constitution 1989 to 2019. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
András Jakab and Eszter Bodnár
Judicial Review and Politics in Hungary 1990–2018. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Kálmán Pócza
Traditional Social Cleavages and their Impact on the Hungarian
Party System. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Melani Barlai
Referendums and ‘National Consultations’ in Hungary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Zoltán Tibor Pállinger
Civil Society, Social Movements and Political Participation in
Hungary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Dániel Mikecz
The Political Economy of Hungary: Managing Structural
Dependency on the West. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Zoltán Pogátsa
V
VI Contents
Hungarian Foreign Policy 1990 to 2018: Europeanization without

Conviction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
András Hettyey
Hungary’s Self-Peripheralization in the European Union:
Background and Prospects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Dániel Hegedűs
Hungary’s Asylum and Migration Policy: Change in Three Stages. . . . . . 189
Paula Beger
Right-wing Populism and Freedom of Science in Viktor Orbán’s
Hungary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Márk Várszegi
Regional Policy in Hungary: Effects of EU Membership and
National Priorities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Györgyi Nyikos
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Prof. Dr. Ellen Bos is Vice-Rector for Research and Young Academics and Chair
of Comparative Politics with a Focus on Central and Eastern Europe in the EU at
Andrássy University Budapest.
Contact: ellen.bos@andrassyuni.hu
Prof. Dr. Astrid Lorenz is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philoso-
phy and Professor of the Political System of Germany and Politics in Europe at
Leipzig University.
Contact: astrid.lorenz@uni-leipzig.de
Contributors
Dr. Melani Barlai Andrássy University Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

Paula Beger Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
Dr. habil. Eszter Bodnár Ph.D. Eötvös-Loránd-University (ELTE), Budapest,
Hungary
Prof. Dr. Ellen Bos Andrássy University Budapest, Budapest, Hungary
Dr. Dániel Hegedűs German Marshall Fund of the United States, Berlin, Germany
Dr. habil. András Hettyey Ph.D. University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary
Prof. Dr. András Jakab University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
VII
VIII Editors and Contributors
Prof. Dr. Astrid Lorenz Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

Dr. Dániel Mikecz Republikon Institute Budapest and Hungarian Academy of
Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Dr. habil. Györgyi Nyikos Ph.D. University of Public Service, Budapest, Hun-
gary
Prof. Dr. habil. Zoltán Tibor Pállinger Andrássy University Budapest, Buda-
pest, Hungary
Dr. habil. Zoltán Pogátsa Ph.D. University of Sopron, Sopron, Hungary
Dr. habil. Kálmán Pócza Ph.D. Mathias Corvinus Collegium, University of
Public Service, Budapest, Hungary
Márk Várszegi Police Academy Hamburg/University of Applied Sciences,
Hamburg, Germany
(De-)Democratization, Party
Competition and Structural Constraints
in Hungary
Astrid Lorenz and Ellen Bos
1 Introduction
Hungary was one of the first socialist states to make a complete break with the
old system in 1989. In the 1970s and 1980s, the reform policy of the Hungarian
Socialist Workers’ Party had already led to a soft economic and political liberali-
zation. Later on, the political system underwent three major waves of institutional
reform, which are presented below.
Democratization started in 1989 with the Round Table negotiations. In con-
trast to almost all neighboring countries this was done without the adoption of a
new constitution, which often symbolically marks a new political beginning. The
Socialist Constitution of 1949 remained in force, but was subject to a total revi-
sion in several rounds. In fact, its content was almost completely changed. This
institutional rebuilding was based on perceived historical traditions and included
the import of foreign legal constructs. Its product was a parliamentary system of
government with a single-chamber parliament (Országgyűlés) and a dual execu-
tive, with executive power largely vested in the government responsible to the
parliament.
A. Lorenz (*) · E. Bos

Chair of Comparative Politics, Andrássy University Budapest, Budapest, Hungary
e-mail: astrid.lorenz@uni-leipzig.de
E. Bos
e-mail: ellen.bos@andrassyuni.hu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 1

GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023
E. Bos and A. Lorenz (eds.), Politics and Society in Hungary,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39826-2_1
2 A. Lorenz and E. Bos
In order to ensure the separation of powers, a Constitutional Court based on

the German model was introduced and given extensive powers. The background
of the decision was the desire of the opposition to secure the reforms negotiated
at the Round Table even in the event of the Socialist Party eventually winning
the first democratic elections (Bos 2004, p. 239ff.). After its founding, the court
immediately took a self-confident stance, interpreting the constitutional text on
many issues that were merely vaguely regulated and also playing an important,
sometimes even activist role in shaping the new democratic system through its
jurisdiction. This was the case, for instance, when interpreting the powers of the
President of the Republic in the conflicts during the first democratic legislative
period from 1990 to 1994 between then President Árpád Göncz and the govern-
ment of József Antall. The conflicts were directed at the powers of the President
as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in the foreign policy representation of
Hungary and in the appointment of important state offices.1 The Constitutional
Court was called upon by the government several times in the course of the dis-
putes. In its decisions on September 23, 1991 and June 8, 1992 it argued that the
constitution enshrined a parliamentary system and interpreted the presidential
competences restrictively (Brunner and Sólyom 1995, pp. 55ff., 107ff.; Majoros
1994). The decisions are examples of the fact that the Court’s rulings did not
always distinguish clearly between constitutional interpretation and constitution-
building.
The second major wave of institutional reforms followed in preparation of
accession to the European Union, which was completed in 2004. Hundreds
of pages of European law, the acquis communautaire, were incorporated into
national law. Since acceptance of the EU legal framework was a precondition for
accession, this is usually referred to as the EU conditionality policy. However, not
all details of the national policy were actually prescribed. The fact that there was
room for maneuver can be recognized from the fact that the constitutions of the
candidate countries and later EU Member States differ(ed) significantly, and that
the new arrangements for policy areas were not identical either. Which European
country provided administrative assistance via the twinning procedure and who
documented the progress on the EU side left a footprint as well. Typical, however,
were the particular role of the administration in this process and the pronounced
1 Specifically,it was about the possible use of the army in the so-called taxi drivers’ strike
in October 1990 and the representation of Hungary at a summit of the Visegrád states in
February 1991 as well as the appointment of the directors of public radio and television sta-
tions during the so-called “media war” (see Majoros 1994; O’Neil 1997, p. 209ff.).
(De-)Democratization, Party Competition and Structural … 3
will to join the EU, which pushed party-political differences about the content of
EU policy and its institutions into the background. This also promoted a rather
apolitical character of the national institutional reforms.
The third major wave of reforms was triggered by the “conservative revolu-
tion” under Fidesz-KDNP and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. This reconstruction
of the system has been taking place since 2010 and was directed at dismantling
democratic control mechanisms within the government system (especially curtail-
ing the independence of the judiciary as well as filling high positions with people
close to Fidesz) and outside the government system (limiting independent media
and civil society organizations). This illiberalism was not so much the result of a
coherent ideology on the part of the governing parties, but rather arose from their
desire for power and their ability to use their electoral supermajority to secure
and expand their influence in the long term. The dismantling of liberal liberties
and of the rule of law contradicts the values of the EU and thus resulted in the
well-known conflicts with the EU Commission and the EU Parliament as well as
in infringement proceedings before the European Court of Justice. The conflicts
culminated for the time being in the initiation of the Article 7 procedure in Sep-
tember 2018. This procedure can be started if there is “a clear risk of a serious
breach of the values referred to in Article 2 of the EU Treaty” in a Member State.
The character and sequence of these waves of institutional reform in Hungary
is not in line with the main assumptions of research on democratization in East
and Central Europe, which focus very strongly on the effect of formal institu-
tions. Corresponding theoretical considerations and models assumed more or
less explicitly a linear development towards a democracy that consolidates itself
in several steps. According to this theorizing, the initial institutional transforma-
tion influences the actors’ options for action, followed by the consolidation of the
actors of representative democracy – particularly the parties – who must abide
by the new law in order to govern and shape policies. The next stage is the con-
solidation of behavior of informal political actors as well. Finally, the attitudes
of society as a whole towards politics and the state, i.e. the political culture, but
also the actual behavior consolidate. It was also assumed that the accession to the
European Union as a community of values of democratic states supports and pro-
motes democratization.
In practice, institutions obviously had a much less determinant effect (see also
Krastev and Holmes 2020). Although the three stages of increased institutional
change in Hungary differed in their content, objectives and extent (changes in
the context of EU accession, for example, affected certain policies rather than the
system itself), they were all based on an instrumental, voluntaristic approach to
the constitution and legislation. Law has always been regarded as an instrument
of political action and has been amended or supplemented without extensive

political deliberation. In this understanding, coming to power through elections is
the central act of legitimation of democracy, the binding force of law a secondary
one. Reaching agreement across parties or government–opposition lines was also
hardly possible or not a priority.
After 1989, the political camps have alternated regularly in government, and
domestic politics has been highly polarized rhetorically. In the immediate democ-
ratization phase, the MSZP, which emerged in October 1989 as a reform-oriented
successor party from the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, ruled temporarily.
After the first free elections in the spring of 1990, it was replaced by a Christian
conservative coalition of MDF, FKGP and KDNP. It was followed in 1994 by a
social-democratic-liberal government consisting of MSZP and SZDSZ. Starting
in 1998, the government was formed by a conservative coalition of Fidesz, FKGP
and MDF. After that, a social-democratic-liberal coalition of MSZP and SZDSZ
was reelected for two terms. Since 2010, the Christian-conservative coalition of
Fidesz and KDNP has been in office, winning four general elections with a two-
thirds majority.
Contrary to key assumptions of comparative policy studies and party research,
these changes in the party composition of governments did not result in dif-
ferent outputs in some core areas of policy. Economic, foreign and European
policy in particular are characterized by remarkable constants. Thus the basic
lines of Hungarian foreign policy formulated under the first democratic govern-
ment (accession to the EU and NATO, representing minority rights of Hungar-
ians living abroad, good relations with neighboring states) are undisputed across
camp boundaries; differences exist mainly with regard to the hierarchy of these
goals. The differences in government action and rhetorical conflicts instead have
focused on institutional issues of maintaining power in domestic politics as well
as on media policy and the relationship between politics and society.
The Hungarian population has supported these developments in different
ways. Since 1990, voter turnout has ranged from 61.7 (2014) to 70.5% (2002),
with an outlier of 56.3% in 1998, when Fidesz won a majority of direct man-
dates for the first time and gained government responsibility. While this provides
legitimacy to the parties in power (despite the high disproportion between votes
and mandates, as created by the electoral system), confidence in the national gov-
ernment has been very low. According to representative Eurobarometer surveys
conducted since 2004, its lowest points were from 2006 to 2009, when only 13
(2008) to a maximum of 27% (spring 2007) of respondents expressed confidence
in the Hungarian government. Amongst other factors, this was caused by the
“Őszöd speech” of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány to his Hungarian Socialist
Trust in...
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
01-10-2004
01-06-2005
01-02-2006
01-10-2006
01-06-2007
01-02-2008
01-10-2008
01-06-2009
01-02-2010
01-10-2010
01-06-2011
01-02-2012
01-10-2012
01-06-2013
01-02-2014
01-10-2014
01-06-2015
01-02-2016
01-10-2016
01-06-2017
01-02-2018
01-10-2018
01-06-2019
naonal gvt. - EU-wide naonal gvt. - Hungary
EU - EU-wide EU - Hungary
nat. judiciary - EU-wide nat. judiciary - Hungary
Fig. 1 Trust in national government, judiciary and the EU in Hungary and EU-wide, 2004
to 2019. Source of data Directorate-General for Communication (ed.), Eurobarometer
62–91, EU Open Data Portal. https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/home (retrieved April 15,
2020)
Party at its 2006 party congress as well as by a financial crisis. Confidence in

the national judiciary has long been continuously about ten to over twenty points
above trust in government, but correlated strongly with it overall.2 The Pearson
correlation coefficient for the period 2004 to 2019 was 0.88. It is only in recent
years that confidence in the government has recovered and almost reached the
level of confidence in the judiciary (Fig. 1).
For a long time, trust in the European Union has been much higher than
trust in national institutions. The highest level was reached in 2006, when 70%
of those interviewed in the Eurobarometer survey said they trusted the EU.
After that, scores fell, but even in 2019, about half of respondents still trusted
the EU institutions – slightly more than the proportion who trusted the national
government and the national judiciary. This is despite the fact that the Fidesz-
KDNP government had been extremely critical of the EU institutions for several
years. For example, in the context of regular public conflicts with the European
2 Confidencein the judiciary is not always surveyed in Eurobarometer surveys. Therefore,

some data points are missing here.
ommission and the European Parliament on the rule of law in Hungary and EU
C
asylum policy, the government had launched a large-scale “Stop Brussels!” cam-
paign.
All the phenomena described above show that Hungary as a deviant case is
a particularly promising object of study for theory-building regarding democ-
racy and democratization, regarding the effect of institutions on political action,
as well as regarding the actual impact of EU integration on EU member states,
i.e. the phenomenon of Europeanization or de-Europeanization. As an EU mem-
ber state in the heart of Europe, the country is also relevant for understanding
the functioning and range of political systems in Europe and for contextualizing
studies of other political systems. Not least of all, Hungary has been the focus
of critical political observation and media coverage since Viktor Orbán came to
power, due to its domestic political development and EU-skeptical attitude, as
well as its new foreign policy interest in the East. This edited volume contributes
to research in all three areas by conveying a deeper knowledge of politics and
society in Hungary: to the analysis and evaluation of developments in the country
itself and Hungary’s position in the EU, to comparative studies, and to the empiri-
cal foundation of theory formation.
2 Hungary in Research
Interestingly enough, despite the theoretically unexpected deterioration in the

quality of Hungary’s democracy, fewer English-language publications on its
political system have been published since 2013 than before (Fig. 2).
In terms of content, research on the political system of Hungary has followed
the general trend of political science research on Eastern and Central Europe and
reflects the sketched phases of political development since 1989. In the 1990s, the
focus was on the processes of breaking with the socialist system and of democra-
tization. Numerous studies were published on the negotiated change of the system
(e.g. Tölgyessy 1992) as well as on the genesis and structure of the new constitu-
tional basis (e.g. Bos 2004; Halmai 1996; Szoboszlai 1991) and the electoral sys-
tem (Benoit 1996). In this context, interest was also focused on the role of the
elites in the system change and the remaining of the former elites in the new sys-
tem (e.g. Pállinger 1997).3 This was supplemented by work on the formation of
3A good overview is given by Bozóki 2002.

45000
40000
35000
30000
25000
20000
15000
10000
5000
0
1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018
Fig. 2 Number of academic publications on the Hungarian political system in English,

1990 to 2019. Indicated is the number of Google Scholar hits for “political system Hun-
gary”, international.4
the party system (e.g. Ágh 1994; Segert and Machos 1995) and the establishment
of new values and norms (Szelényi et al. 1996; Rose 1997). In addition, the estab-
lishment and consolidation of the central political institutions, such as Parliament
(Ágh 1995), Government, President of the Republic (Ágh 1996) and the Consti-
tutional Court (Halmai 1995; Schwartz 1998) were examined. Hungary has also
regularly been included in comparative studies (Linz and Stepan 1996; White et al.
1993; Rüb 1994; Grotz 2000) in this area. The country was regarded as a model of
successful democratization at that time, and its political and representative institu-
tions appeared to be particularly stable compared to other countries in the region.
Before and after Hungary’s accession to the EU in 2004, the necessary pro-
cesses of adaptation to the EU legal acquis (acquis communautaire) and the
Europeanization of the political system became another central research topic
(cf. e.g. Schimmelfennig and Sedelmayer 2005; Andor 2000). Studies on
the Europeanization of the governmental apparatus (Lippert et al. 2001), the
4 According to Google, each is an “approximate number.”

administration (Goetz 2001), the regions (Sturm and Dieringer 2005; Hughes
et al. 2005), the political process (Ágh 1999) and other elements of the political
system were produced.
From the mid-2000s onwards, interest turned more strongly to questions of
democratic quality. The background to this were the increasingly obvious func-
tional deficits in the supposedly consolidated democratic system. Accordingly,
such deficits were highlighted and the factors responsible for the incomplete
unfolding and implementation of democracy discussed (Rupnik 2007; Mungiu-
Pippidi 2007; Krastev 2007; Ilonszki and Lengyel 2009, Schöpflin 2009). The
“deficits” that were uncovered have often been analyzed under the headline of the
“post-accession crisis” (e.g. Dieringer 2009). As a cause of the functional deficits,
legacies from the communist era were identified (e.g. Seleny 2007), which led
to a greater involvement with the “legacies” of socialism and previous historical
characteristics. In addition, the long-term effectiveness of EU accession condi-
tionality was viewed more skeptically (e.g. Schimmelfennig and Scholtz 2001).
After the 2010 elections and the beginning of systemic restructuring under the
Orbán government, processes of deconsolidation of Hungarian democracy have
been in the spotlight (Rupnik 2012; Kréko and Enyedi 2018; Bogaards 2018;
Sapper and Weichsel 2011). Particular attention is paid to constitutional policy –
in particular to the adoption and content of the new Basic Law and the numerous
constitutional amendments – as well as the restriction of the Constitutional Court
(Bánkuti et al. 2012; Scheppele 2013; Bos and Pócza 2014; Tóth 2017; Drinóczi
and Bień-Kacała 2019). In addition, an intensive examination of the conceptual
foundations of the “Orbán system” has been taking place (Pap 2018; Kovács and
Trencsényi 2019). Many authors try to classify the type of government that has
arisen. On the one hand, they resort to established concepts – such as “illiberal”
or “defect” democracy, populism (Pappas 2014; Antal 2017) or “hybrid” regimes
(Gyulai 2017) – and on the other hand, many new terms have been created (cf.
the overview by Bos in this volume).
A current comprehensive presentation of the Hungarian political system in
English is lacking. While there was a significant temporary increase in the num-
ber of articles on Hungary after 2010, each of these focused on specific aspects of
the system. This is also the case for the most recent volumes published in English
by Pap (2018) and Körösényi, Illés and Gyulai (2020). An overview of various
aspects of the systemic transformation pursued under the Orbán government is
provided by a volume published by Kovács and Trencsényi (2019).
The situation is different in Hungarian. In this context, particular reference
should be made to the 2015 publication “The Hungarian Political System – A
Quarter of a Century On” (A magyar politikai rendszer - negyedszázad után),
published by András Körösényi, in which all the central areas of the political sys-
tem are covered in detail. The volume on trends in Hungarian politics by Boda
and Szabó in 2017 also contains contributions on the political system, the main
parties, participation and governance. Finally, the journal Politiktudományi Sze-
mle (“Political Science Review”) also features regular articles on the development
of the political system. Due to the language barrier, these publications are only
accessible to a few international readers. The present volume therefore fills an
important gap.
3 Structure and Key Findings of the Volume
This volume provides a profound insight into the political system and the devel-
opment of democracy in Hungary since 1989. The focus is on the system of gov-
ernment and constitutional policy, society (the party system, civil society and
social movements), foreign and European policy, and other selected policy areas
(economic policy, regional policy, asylum and refugee policy, science policy).
The contributions explain key characteristics and their connection to the EU, they
trace important lines of development over the past decades, and they classify the
findings in comparison with other states.
Together, the contributions paint a picture of a country polarized by domes-
tic politics and characterized by illiberal policies since 2010, with a weak civil
society. A country whose foreign and economic policies are far less influenced
by party competition and conflict than domestic policies. The reasons for this
include structural constraints (being a small country, strong dependence on for-
eign investment). Rhetorically, the Orbán governments since 2010 have sought
to distance themselves from the entire post-1989 phase, advocating conservative,
sovereignty- and community-oriented policies, but in practice, they have been
deviating less from the policies of previous governments than suggested. In many
policy areas, an instrumental use of power and structural constraints dominate
over consistent ideology or socialization as potential factors of explanation.
In her contribution, Ellen Bos shows in more detail that the fundamental
restructuring of the political system pursued by the Orbán government since 2010
does not – as is often assumed – represent a complete break with previous devel-
opments, but rather reinforces preexisting functional problems. After 1990, the
new democratic system in Hungary was quickly formally consolidated, but there
were functional deficits in the democratic institutional structure and in the behav-
ior of the political elites. This included the increasing polarization of political
competition and consequently denying political opponents’ legitimacy. Secondly,
there has been a gradual shift of power in favor of the executive. It was supported
by the high disproportionality as produced by the electoral system, which encour-
aged the formation of a parliamentary majority and the emergence of a bipolar
party system. The functional deficits took on a new, dramatic quality with the
two-thirds majority achieved by the Fidesz-KDNP government in 2010, because
this landslide victory created the basis for a largely unrestrained centralization of
power in the executive, the unimpeded enforcement of the majority principle, and
the monopolization of political representation by Fidesz-KDNP.
In their contribution to constitutional policy, András Jakab and Eszter Bodnár
underline the voluntarist approach to the law and the importance of taking over for-
eign elements of law. Already the first written constitution of Hungary of 1949 pre-
sented a transfer of law (in this case forced) and an instrumental use of law. It tied
the access to rights to the fulfilling of duties. After 1989, the newly founded Consti-
tutional Court often adopted Western European, especially German, interpretations
of law. Although formally new, the constitution adopted in 2011 with the votes of
the governing coalition retained much of the text of the previous constitution. It also
includes a liberal catalogue of fundamental rights. Fidesz and KDNP partly neutral-
ized the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court by making legal provisions that
had failed before the Court part of the constitution itself. Fixing important decisions
in the constitution or in the “cardinal laws”, which can only be changed by a two-
thirds majority, generally helps to provide them a permanent status.
In his contribution on the Constitutional Court, Kálmán Pócza refutes com-
mon narratives about its role in the political system. This refers to the positive
assessment that the court, endowed with extensive competences, effectively coun-
terweighted the governing majorities as a courageous and activist actor and a
guardian and further developer of Hungarian democracy. This assessment is wide-
spread in Hungarian legal studies. The author also rejects the critical assessment by
the Fidesz-KDNP governments that the court had overused its formal competences
and had restricted the leeway of the democratically elected governing majority
too much. Rather, empirical data showed that the performance of the Hungarian
Constitutional Court was rather average in a regional comparison. Moreover, until
2010, the court had predominantly sought dialogue with the legislature in the case
of laws found to be unconstitutional and had relied on milder forms of sanctions
than annulment of the legal norm. Furthermore, the court had already been a thor-
oughly politicized body before 2010. The difference lies in the extent to which the
practice of constitutional jurisdiction has become politicized, which has increased
significantly since 2010. Adding to that, party logics had become the dominant pat-
tern of judicial decisions. According to the author, this tendency was reinforced by
the right-wing conservative majority achieved in the court.
In his contribution on direct democracy, Zoltán Pállinger illuminates how

Hungary’s representative political system with its strong inclination to a majori-
tarian system and the increasing polarization between political forces affected the
design and practice of referendums. Both factors have led to the failure to create a
political sphere in which political issues can be discussed independently of party
politics. Therefore, the referendum campaigns further exacerbated the existing
division of political forces. This environment contributed to the instrumentalizing
of direct democracy by the (governing) political elites, who used referendums pri-
marily to mobilize their supporters. The dominance of the Fidesz-KDNP govern-
ments since 2010 has further accentuated this tendency in an increasingly illiberal
environment.
In her contribution, Melani Barlai shows how strongly the Hungarian party
system is shaped by historical cleavages that emerged in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries already as a result of industrialization and the national revolution.
Since then, the contrasts between urbanists and agrarian populists or between tra-
ditionalists and “Westernizers” have structured the political conflicts. While the
traditionalists and agrarian populists represented Christian national values and
promised to preserve national traditions and values, the urbanists and “Westerniz-
ers” advocated liberal and Western values and, consequently, Europeanization and
globalization. After 1989, party competition was initially determined by the trans-
formation conflict between supporters and opponents of the old socialist regime.
However, since the 1994 parliamentary elections the traditional antagonisms
between advocates of national-particularist or international-cosmopolitan values
and norms have proven to be the defining cleavage. Both the newly founded lib-
eral parties, such as SZDSZ and Fidesz, and the historical parties, such as MSZP,
FKGP and KDNP, fitted into the bipolar conflict structure. After the upheaval of
the party system in 2010, the new parties, such as Jobbik, LMP and DK, also
positioned themselves along the existing main lines of conflict.
Dániel Mikecz points out that the low level of formal organization of Hungar-
ian civil society and its fragmentation into actors with very different concerns,
understanding of roles and financing are important context conditions for politi-
cal development. Nonpolitical leisure activities and informal nonprofit work domi-
nate. NGOs dealing with environmental protection, feminism, minority rights and
peace issues work in an expert and project-oriented manner and have professional-
ized fundraising rather than membership recruitment. Under Fidesz-KDNP, social
activities are supported by the state if they serve the realization of the common
good. Their national unity and the partnership and division of labor with the gov-
ernment are other important funding concerns. Since NGOs see themselves as
watchdogs that are critical of the government and are often supported by foreign
countries or the EU, their relationship with the government is marked by tensions.
It finally resulted in a law prescribing that foreign funding above a certain level
has to be made public. Government and opposition parties, which all have a rather
low membership rate, seek to establish good contacts with organizations that have
similar objectives to strengthen their ties to the society. A protest culture emerged
which includes radical right-wing actors, who were especially present in the 2000s,
as well as burgeoning and then rapidly disappearing single-issue movements.
More concrete structuring effects on the governments’ policy options result
from Hungary’s dependence on foreign direct investment. According to Zol-
tán Pogátsa, governments since 1986 have responded to this situation with a
strong liberalization, deregulation and opening towards the West. They were
in direct competition with their East Central European neighbors for the lowest
labor costs and taxes, the weakest rights for trade unions to have a say, the low-
est environmental requirements and the highest levels of state aid. Despite these
efforts, employment rates, wages and upward social mobility, among other things,
remained at very low levels compared to Western economies. Particularly under
the socialist-liberal governments, this contrasted with their social program. All the
while, the national debt rate was rising. Dissatisfaction with this situation paved
the way for the election of Fidesz in 2010 and the collapse of the former ruling
parties. The party had previously announced a new economic model, but then devi-
ated little from the strategy of previous governments. A novelty in certain sectors
was the granting of state licenses and public contracts to Hungarian entrepreneurs
in the Prime Minister’s entourage, which, according to Pogátsa, contributed to the
emergence of a “national bourgeoisie.” Major EU-funded infrastructure projects,
tax relief for high- and middle-income groups and increases in the minimum wage
were added. Favorable economic development contributed to higher wages and
a falling unemployment rate. Although convergence with the West has not been
achieved yet and a middle class has not emerged, these improvements have helped
to mobilize support for the government despite its policies in other domains.
András Hettyey illustrates the many serious uncertainties that arose for Hun-
gary after 1989 as a result of the disintegration of three of its previously five
neighboring states (Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia) as well
as of wars and domestic crises in its immediate regional environment. After the
negotiation of the Soviet troop withdrawal and the dissolution of the Warsaw
Pact, accession to the EU and NATO and developing good relations with the
new neighboring states were important concerns. Unlike in certain constitutional
issues, there was cross-party consensus on this, according to Hettyey. Western
integration in particular, apart from the right-wing spectrum, was perceived as
having no alternative in historical and economic terms and was also promoted
by the successor party to the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, the MSZP –
including participation in NATO operations in Yugoslavia. This shows a parallel
to the weak effects of party competition on economic policy. Only with regard
to the treatment of the 2.7 million Hungarians living abroad did the post-1989
governments take different positions. Otherwise, the dominant mode was that
of “downloading” EU or NATO policy without great domestic controversy, but
also without the possibility of influencing policy by “uploading” one’s own posi-
tions. After its accession to NATO and the EU, Hungary remained largely passive
in these organizations and rarely expressed dissenting positions. However, as a
recipient country it profited considerably from EU membership and participated
in NATO missions (again also under socialist-liberal governments). The Orbán
governments after 2010 tried to distance themselves from this whole post-1989
phase. In an environment of diminishing integration euphoria (see above), they
pursued a sovereign, non-normative foreign policy, which combined a continued,
often smooth implementation of EU policies with public conflicts in areas such as
EU asylum policy and intensified Visegrád cooperation in East Central Europe.
The “opening to the East” in addition to Western integration was also new.
In his in-depth analysis of Hungary’s European policy, Dániel Hegedűs
speaks of the change from the role of a “euphoric policy taker” to a “pragmatic
disruptor” characterized by post-accession fatigue. After a period of passivity,
which Hettyey observed, the country was becoming increasingly isolated under
the Orbán governments. This is not so much due to purely EU issues, in which
Hungary more often than not cooperates and contributes – e.g. with the adoption
of a Danube Strategy, the policy towards the Balkans and the European Roma
Strategy. Instead, the problems are caused mainly by the government’s illiberal
domestic politics. In a European Union which defines itself as a community of
values composed by democratic Member States, Hungary is increasingly being
criticized, having sanctions imposed, and causing infringement proceedings. Evi-
dently, domestic and foreign policy can no longer be clearly separated in the EU’s
multilevel system. There has been an escalation of rhetoric, including the “Stop
Brussels!” anti-EU campaigns in Hungary mentioned above.
Dániel Hegedűs also shows how Hungary pursues specific interests, which do
not vary greatly from one government to another, in different policy areas that
are intensively regulated at EU level. It is opposed to joining and deepening the
eurozone in order to maintain national fiscal and economic policies. In cohesion
policy, it is interested in maintaining the high transfer payments, which are also
important for securing the support of relevant stakeholder groups at the domes-
tic level through the licensing and contracting activities mentioned above. In the
Common Foreign and Security Policy, it is committed to the Western Balkans, but
also to Eastern neighboring countries and Asia. The Hungarian governments were
critical of the EU’s Russia sanctions, mainly because of energy policy considera-
tions, but did not veto them in the Council. In asylum policy, on the other hand,
they have refused any compromise or further EU integration in recent years.
In her contribution to asylum and migration policy, Paula Beger states that the
position taken by the Orbán governments since 2015 against a common European
asylum and migration policy represented a break. Initially, the majority of respec-
tive EU framework regulations had been adopted. The Comprehensive Migration
Strategy, adopted almost ten years after EU accession, shaped Hungary’s national
policy as part of the Common Asylum and Migration System of the EU. As a result
of the 2015 European migrant crisis, the Hungarian government then carried out a
fundamental reorientation of its policy. In rapid succession, it enacted restrictive
laws and decrees, thus taking a position against the European Commission and, in
particular, against a Europe-wide distribution of migrants. However, regardless of
this change, the issue of migration had already been debated and regulated before
with regard to security concerns. While the initial focus was on reducing illegal
immigration and combating organized crime, since 2015 the priority has been on
combating terrorism and protecting Hungarian identity and culture, as well as safe-
guarding jobs. Even though the Hungarian government successfully instrumental-
ized the issue of migration to mobilize support for its policies, this only led to a
partial politicization of the policy area, since the other parties hardly reacted to it
with alternative positions. This is also because the Fidesz-KDNP policy is in line
with attitudes towards migration in the population (cf. Pickel and Öztürk 2021).
In his contribution on science policy in Hungary, Márk Várszegi shows how
the right-wing populist ideology and the illiberal concept of the state under Orbán
affect the practice of science. He stresses that the government and the parliamen-
tary majority of Fidesz and KDNP have also expanded their control and influ-
ence in this area. On the one hand, the government fundamentally intervened in
the structure of higher education institutions by modifying the Higher Education
Act; on the other hand, it eliminated the autonomy of academic institutions. The
latter particularly concerned the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In addition,
case-by-case actions were taken against individual elements of the science sys-
tem that were critical to government policy or were incompatible with Fidesz’s
world view. This primarily affected the private Central European University and
gender studies. In addition, the preference for applied sciences with “measurable”
benefits to society has led to a redistribution of resources. In this context, sciences
and courses of study with allegedly low “market value” – such as humanities and
social sciences – have been systematically deprived of funding.
György Nyikos describes the development of Hungarian regional policy

before and after EU accession, which is characterized by significant institutional
changes in the approach to governance and the management of EU funds. During
the comprehensive economic, political and social transformation that began after
the collapse of the socialist political system and in preparation for integration into
the structures of the EU, state intervention to overcome regional disparities was
not on the transformation agenda. There was also no comprehensive public-law
planning basis. As regional disparities widened in the early 1990s, regional policy
focused mainly on crisis management. In Hungary, regionalization and decentral-
ization as triggered by EU regional policy in other countries failed to materialize.
The attempt to establish a territorially decentralized planning and development
administration system failed and a centralized system was established. In the
early EU planning periods, Hungary was characterized by a high absorption rate
and a low level of irregularities and corrections. Over time, however, the perfor-
mance and quality of the EU fund management system has declined significantly.
Therefore, Hungarian regional policy will probably continue to be marked by
centralized solutions in the future.
4 Conclusion, Open Questions and Research

Perspectives
For almost two decades after the system change, Hungary was regarded as a
model example of successful democratization and rapid integration into the West-
ern system of values and organizations by academics, politicians and the media.
Since 2010, this assessment has changed fundamentally. On the contrary, under
the governments led by Viktor Orbán, Hungary has since become a particularly
striking example of illiberal policies and the erosion of a democratic institutional
system. The chapters in this volume contribute to an understanding of this contra-
dictory development. They show that 2010 marked a less dramatic turning point
than often depicted – firstly, because the relevant framework conditions and fea-
tures of the policy were already in place and, secondly, because certain character-
istics and positions of the opposition and NGOs are sometimes less different from
those of the ruling parties than is sometimes assumed.
Party competition, for example, was already characterized by a strong polari-
zation before 2010, which not only prevented the formation of compromises
across the party camps, but also called into question the legitimacy of the politi-
cal opponent per se. Thus, regardless of their political orientation, actors exhibit
constants in attitudes and behavior. In addition to anti-pluralist ideas, this
also includes, as many contributions show, a tendency towards an instrumental

approach to law, including the constitution. The two-thirds majority of Orbán’s
government, which is already in its third consecutive legislative term, has dra-
matically exacerbated these existing functional deficits of the democratic system.
However, what international observers often underestimate is that despite polari-
zation and mutual delegitimization of the opponents, central foreign and eco-
nomic policy principles are undisputed across the camps.
The speed and manner of the rapid deconsolidation of the previously suppos-
edly consolidated democracy in Hungary fundamentally call into question the
widespread assessments of the 1990s and early 2000s. Obviously, they painted an
overly optimistic picture of the Hungarian transformation. The reported processes
of change in the behavior and value orientations of political actors and the popu-
lation proved to be at least to some extent shallow and not sustainable. Perhaps
an overly deterministic perspective of transformation research, which sees the
democratization of authoritarian systems primarily as an adaptation to a stylized
Western model of liberal democracy, also contributed to this misjudgment. It led
also to a belated recognition of the domestic changes that Hungary has undergone
following its accession to the EU.
In general, the approach of viewing democratization processes as a catch-up
transfer or copy-and-paste of Western institutions and procedures has proven to
be inadequate. In this perspective, functional problems were interpreted primarily
as defects of the young democracies that still had to be overcome. However, in
order to understand the deconsolidation of Hungarian democracy, it is not enough
to take account of the deviations from the Western model. Research is faced with
the task of better understanding the functioning of the political system – in par-
ticular the patterns of legitimation and representation – and of defining the regime
more precisely in typological terms. This may also require further theoretical-
conceptual adjustments, which have been intensively discussed against the back-
drop of global system development since the turn of the millennium.
The question of the long-term stability of the regime that emerged under the
Orbán government is also unresolved. After more than a decade in government,
Fidesz-KDNP continues to dominate the political contest in Hungary virtually
unchallenged. The opposition has not yet succeeded in presenting itself as an
effective alternative that is attractive to broad sections of society. Why has the
opposition not developed (stable) joint forms of action, programmatic alternatives
and argumentation vis-à-vis Fidesz-KDNP over the years, despite positions that
sometimes overlap in content?
In addition, the discrepancy between the government’s anti-EU stance and the
pro-EU stance of the Hungarian people is puzzling and needs to be explored even
more intensively in the future. How does the enduring confirmation of Orbán in the
elections fit in with the voters’ positive attitude towards Hungary’s EU member-
ship and their high confidence in the EU institutions?5 More in-depth comparisons
with other East Central European states that show similar unexpected de-democra-
tization tendencies – such as the Czech Republic (Lorenz and Formánková 2020) –
could provide additional insights to answer the open questions.
However, it is also clear that the conditions for future research on politics
and society in Hungary may deteriorate: restrictions do not seem to be out of the
question. Should the pressure on critical social scientists continue to increase,
they might find themselves forced to not even put certain topics on their research
agenda for career or political reasons. Analyses carried out exclusively by for-
eign researchers are not a viable alternative, but they may also face problems in
obtaining independent information if there are further restrictions on independent
media in Hungary.
A look at the worldwide debate on problems and the future of liberal democ-
racy reveals that the analysis of the Hungarian political system from a political
science perspective is not only relevant for Hungarian and Eastern European
studies. Illiberal tendencies, such as the erosion of checks and balances and the
restriction of minority rights, but also personalization and populism, as well as
the emergence, functioning and stability of hybrid regimes and those that defy
adequate description by current scholarly typologies, should be of the greatest
interest to democracy research and comparative politics as a whole.
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slowakei und der ehemaligen DDR, Eds. U. Thaysen and H. M. Kloth, 33–45. Baden-
Baden: Nomos.
Tóth, Gábor A. 2017. Illiberal Rule of Law? Changing Features of Hungarian Constitu-
tionalism. In Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law: Bridging Idealism and Realism,
Eds. M. Adams, A. Meuwese and E. Hirsch Ballin, 386–415. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
White, S., J. Batt, and P.G. Lewis. 1993. Developments in East European Politics. London:
Palgrave.
Prof. Dr. Astrid Lorenz is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy and
Professor of the Political System of Germany and Politics in Europe at Leipzig University
Contact: astrid.lorenz@uni-leipzig.de
Prof. Dr. Ellen Bos is Vice-Rector for Research and Young Academics and Professor of
Comparative Politics with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe in the EU at Andrássy
University Budapest.
Contact: ellen.bos@andrassyuni.hu
Functional Deficiencies of Democracy
and Instrumentalization of Democratic
Procedures in Hungary
Ellen Bos
1 Introduction
Hungary was considered the liberal exception among socialist countries and,
together with Poland, was one of the pioneers of democratic reform in the Eastern
Bloc. After the collapse of the socialist system, the country acquired the reputa-
tion of being a model of a successful political transition and a rapid democratic
consolidation. Hungary's accession to the European Union in 2004 appeared to
be the final proof of the successful transition to democracy and a market economy
and the integration into the Western system.
After the parliamentary elections of 2010, in which the conservative Alli-
ance of Young Democrats (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, Fidesz1) under Vik-
tor Orbán in an electoral alliance with the small Christian Democratic People's
Party (Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt, KDNP) had achieved a landslide victory,
the assessment of Hungary fundamentally changed. The restructuring of the polit-
ical system that was initiated by the Orbán government at high speed after the
1 Since 2003, the party name has been supplemented by the abbreviation MPP (Magyar
Polgári Szövetség, Hungarian Civic Union).
E. Bos (*)
Professor of Comparative Politics with a Focus an Central and Eastern Europe
in the EU, Andrássy University Budapest, Budapest, Hungary
e-mail: ellen.bos@andrassyuni.hu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 21

GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023
E. Bos and A. Lorenz (eds.), Politics and Society in Hungary,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39826-2_2
22 E. Bos
election victory met with fierce criticism both in Hungary and in Western media
coverage (see, for example, Kahlweit 2010; Tenbrock 2011). Since then, it is
being argued that the reforms implemented by the Hungarian government violate
the fundamental principles of democracy and the rule of law and lead to a loss
of democratic quality. The well-known Hungarian writer György Konrád already
said in December 2010 that there could “no longer be any talk of democracy” in
Hungary and that Orbán would destroy democracy (Kolb 2010). Quite similarly,
the Hungarian Prime Minister was already accused in a debate in the European
Parliament in January 2011 of leading Hungary from democracy to totalitarian-
ism (Truttmann 2011).
The critical assessment of the Orbán government’s transformation of the polit-
ical system was also reflected negatively in the rankings of the relevant democ-
racy indices.2 And also in scientific analyses, the voices prevail that observe a
blatant decline in democratic quality in Hungary. These analysis carried out in
political and legal sciences unanimously identify an erosion or undermining of
democratic institutions and procedures. Hungary is no longer considered as a
model of successful democratization, but as an example of democratic “backslid-
ing” or a return to authoritarianism (cf. e.g. Herman 2016; Uitz 2019).
The following article will shed light on the contradictory development of Hun-
garian democracy after the regime change. Based on an analysis of the transfor-
mation of Hungary’s political system after 1989, it is shown that 2010 does not
represent a complete break in the development, but rather that the already existing
functional problems of Hungarian democracy have been exacerbated due to the
changed majority situation. Subsequently, the restructuring of the political sys-
tem since 2010 will be examined and the essential elements of the“Orbán system”
will be identified, in particular the instruments of governance and the ideological
basis. The third part shows how differently the politics under Orbán are evaluated
by political science, followed by a summary of the central findings.
2 Cf.e.g. the Freedom in the World Index (https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world)

and the Nations in Transit Index (https://freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit) by Free-
dom House or the Bertelsmann Transformations Index (https://bti-project.org/en/home.
html?&cb=00000).
Functional Deficiencies of Democracy and Instrumentalization … 23
2 The Political Development Before 2010—

Pioneer of Democratization, But Deficits
in Implementation
2.1 The Negotiated Regime Change in 1989
In the 1980s, Hungary was known as the “funniest barrack” in the socialist camp,
and its system was also referred to as“goulash communism.” These metaphors
emphasize that after the bloody suppression of the national uprising against the
communist regime by Soviet troops in 1956 and a subsequent period of retalia-
tion, a more pragmatic domestic policy with milder forms of rule gradually pre-
vailed in Hungary. Under the leader of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party
(Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt, MSZMP), János Kádár, the slogan “Whoever is
not against us is for us” became the maxim of governance. Not only was the with-
drawal into private life and political abstinence allowed to citizens, but they also
received a number of so-called “little freedoms” over time, such as the opportu-
nity to travel regularly to (Western) countries. This was added to by a liberal cul-
tural policy (see Swain 1993, p. 67; Brunner 1981, p. 223).
Against the background of this “repressive tolerance” of the Kádár era, a
“latent pluralism” arose from which later a regime opposition emerged (Szabó
1991, p. 63). Kádár's reform policy were initially limited to experiments with
economic and social reforms that were intended to help the regime gain legiti-
macy through better fulfillment of consumer desires. These policies were supple-
mented by political reforms in the early 1980s. Even before the regime change of
1989, a strong reform wing within the MSZMP set in motion a liberalization of
the political system. As part of this policy, for example, a Council for Constitu-
tional Law was introduced in 1983, and competitive elements were integrated into
the electoral system (cf. Bos 2004, p. 228 ff.).
As the economic situation deteriorated in the mid-1980s, the legitimacy of the
Kádár regime was increasingly called into question. This was the background for
the emergence of a variety of opposition movements that gradually transformed into
parties. Historic parties such as the Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP)
and the Party of Independent Small Farmers (Független Kisgazdapárt, FKGP) were
also re-established. At the same time, the reformers in the socialist MSZMP became
stronger. They set in motion a liberalization of the political system, which also
included intensive work on a draft of a new constitution (ibid., p. 230 ff.)
The second phase of the regime change began in the spring of 1989, when
the MSZMP gave up its monopoly on power and began talks with representatives
24 E. Bos
of the opposition. The political reforms were no longer decided in circles of the
Communist Party, but were negotiated between representatives of the MSZMP
and the opposition at the so-called “National Round Table”. The reforms were to
be based on a broad societal consensus (ibid., p. 239 ff.).
With regard to the design of the new government system, the introduction of
a democratic parliamentary system was undisputed. The head of state was to be
a president (previously president of the presidential council), although the ques-
tion of how the state president should be appointed and with which competences
the office should be equipped became a central conflict in the negotiations. The
basis for the agreement finally reached on 18 September 1989, was the cooperation
between the moderate representatives of the opposition and the reformers of the
MSZMP. The Hungarian Democratic Forum (Magyar Demokrata Fórum; MDF),
which brought together moderate members of the opposition, had assumed the role
of a mediator between the radical opposition and the MSZMP (ibid., p. 244 ff.).
The negotiated “democracy package”, which contained a comprehensive
revision of the constitution, was passed by Parliament with an overwhelming
majority in October 1989. The constitutional revision came into force on the anni-
versary of the 1956 national uprising, on 23 October 1989. Although it was for-
mally only a modification of the existing socialist constitution from 1949, more
than 90% of the constitutional text was changed and, in addition, a clear break
with the socialist system of the past was made by enshrining the basic principles
of liberal democracy, such as the separation of powers, the rule of law and party
pluralism, in the constitution (ibid., p. 252 ff.).
There had been consensus at the “National Round Table”, that the constitu-
tional revision of 1989 had created only a “transitional constitution” for the
regime change, which was to have a provisional character. However, the adoption
of a new constitution did not receive special priority on the agenda of the Chris-
tian-conservative government formed after the founding elections in May 1990.
Instead of starting the preparation of a new constitution, the revision of the exist-
ing constitution was continued. In order to be able to initiate these despite the
lack of a two-thirds majority of the Christian-conservative coalition, a political
pact was concluded between the MDF and the then largest opposition party, the
Alliance of Free Democrats (Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége; SZDSZ).3 The con-
stitutional amendments made possible in this way resulted in essential changes
3 Inreturn for their consent to the desired constitutional amendments, the government fac-
tions supported the SZDSZ candidate for the office of President of the Republic, Árpád
Göncz.
in the relationship between Parliament and government in 1990. The government

was particularly strengthened by the fact that the simple vote of no confidence
was replaced by a constructive one and the possibility of expressing lack of confi-
dence in individual ministers was abolished (ibid., p. 253 ff.).
The adoption of an entirely new constitution was put on the agenda only
after the parliamentary elections of 1994 by the new coalition government of the
Hungarian Socialist Party (Magyar Szocialista Párt, MSZP) and SZDSZ, which
had the required two-thirds majority. In order to establish the new constitution
on a broader consensus beyond the government coalition, the coalition agreed
with the representatives of the opposition to increase the quorum for the adop-
tion of the constitution to four-fifths. Work on the new constitution began in June
1995, but ended in June 1996 without results, as the necessary majority was not
reached in a decisive vote. This had been missed because part of the socialist fac-
tion, including ministers and members of the party presidium, had refused to give
their consent. Work on the new constitution could not be completed by the end of
the legislative period. Instead, the polarization of the political camps increased,
which prevented the overcoming of differences. It therefore looked as if the tran-
sitional constitution would become the permanent constitutional basis of the Hun-
garian democracy due to the lack of willingness to compromise (ibid., p. 263 ff.).
2.2 The Political System from 1990 to 2010: Formal

Consolidation with Functional Deficits
The stepwise and gradual adaptation of the constitution to the changing politi-
cal conditions, which took place in a process of “permanent constitution-making”
(Halmai 1996, p. 354), did not stand in the way of a rapid stabilization and con-
solidation of the new democratic institutions. The “Constitution of the Transition”
created in several rounds of constitutional revision enshrined a parliamentary sys-
tem of government with an unicameral legislature and a “medium-strong” head of
state (Majoros 1994). Following the example of the German chancellor democ-
racy, the Prime Minister was given a prominent position in the government struc-
ture. Moreover, a Constitutional Court with extensive competences was created,
which was able to establish itself as an effective counterweight to the executive
branch in the centralized system of government (Bos 2004, p. 259 ff.; regarding
the Constitutional Court see Pócza in this volume).
In addition to the constitution, the actors at the “National Round Table” also
had agreed on a parallel election system that combines elements of proportional
26 E. Bos
and majority voting and also containes compensatory elements (cf. Bos 2004,
p. 250 ff.). 176 of the 386 parliamentary mandates were awarded in single-mem-
ber constituencies by absolute majority vote and 152 via territorial party lists by
proportional vote with a four- or five-percent threshold.4 A further 58 mandates
were distributed via a national list.5 Voters had two votes. With the first, they
voted for a direct candidate in the respective constituency; with the second, they
voted for a regional party list. The compensatory element consisted in combining
first and second votes that either went to the defeated candidates in the constitu-
encies or were left over when the the second votes were counted and using these
votes to decide on the allocation of the national list mandates. The election law
was primarily aimed at ensuring Hungary’s governability (Tölgyessy 1992, p. 41).
In fact, the system had a majority-forming effect, which resulted in a high degree
of disproportionality between the share of votes and the share of mandates, which
was disadvantageous for smaller parties.
Unlike in most other states in Central Eastern Europe, in Hungary the parlia-
mentary majority situations and governments proved to be stable. So all parlia-
mentary elections took place as scheduled at the end of the four-year legislative
term. In addition, until 2010 there were only three government reshuffles during a
legislative term (see Grotz and Weber 2011, p. 206 ff.).6
Already in the course of the first democratic legislative term, a development
began that strengthened the government's position vis-à-vis Parliament. There
was a gradual transfer of power in favor of the executive branch, to which the
expansion of the office of the Prime Minister contributed, in addition to the
majority-promoting effect of the electoral system—the government factions
considered the government they supported as their steering body —and the con-
structive vote of no confidence. This tendency was further reinforced by the
4 The four-percent threshold was replaced by a five-percent threshold in the run-up to the
1994 elections (Dieringer 2009b, p. 97).
5 Candidates wishing to stand in a constituency had to submit at least 750 signatures from
supporters. Only parties that had nominated candidates in at least 25% of a territorial con-
stituency and in addition at least two candidates in other territorial constituencies were enti-
tled to stand in a constituency with a territorial list. Finally, parties had to be represented in
at least seven of the 20 territorial constituencies via territorial lists in order to submit a list
for the allocation of mandates at national level.
6 In 1993, after the death of Prime Minister József Antall, a new government head had to be
elected. In 2004 and 2009, political conflicts within the ruling MSZP led to changes in the
office of the Prime Minister.
emergence of a bipolar party system, which led to a decreasing fragmentation of

government coalitions (see Schiemann 2004; Müller 2010).
However, the stabilization of the party system went hand in hand with its
increasing polarization, which was only superficially covered up during the EU
accession negotiations, due to the pressure to fulfill the accesion criteria. As soon
as the compulsion to self-discipline fell away with the achieved accession, the
conflicts broke out again and were fought out more and more sharply (Bos 2011,
p. 47). The increasing hardness of the confrontation between the two political
camps prompted the current President of Parliament and then Minister without
Portfolio László Kövér to make the following statement in April 2000: “Today
there is no consensus between the parties in Hungary. And where there is no con-
sensus, there is also no real discussion. There is only a dialogue of the deaf, or a
fight. I dare to claim: In Hungary today a cold civil war is taking place in public
life.” (Origo 2000).
When the first Fidesz government was voted out of office in the 2002 parlia-
mentary elections and a coalition of MSZP and SZDSZ took over the reins of
government, the polarization further intensified and the two camps became even
more irreconcilable. Tamás Fricz, a political scientist close to Fidesz, stated at
the beginning of 2004 that both camps did not accept the legitimacy of the other
within the democratic system. He accused the government of having carried out
a “very massive purge” in the “state bodies and institutions, in the foundations,
in the ministries, in the banks”. According to him, the government was pursue-
ing the goal of “retroactively criminalizing” the opposition and “assessing and
qualifying” the four years of Fidesz government “with criminal categories”. The
government ultimately wanted to make the opposition “superfluous” (quoted
according to Bos 2011, p. 48).
The disputes came to a head again after the 2006 elections, in which the
MSZP-SZDSZ government under Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány had been
confirmed. The trigger was the publication of the secretly recorded recording of
a non-public speech of Gyurcsány, which he had held in front of members of the
MSZP faction in the spring of 2006. The recording had been leaked to the media
in the run-up to the local elections in the fall of 2006 (Bos 2011, p. 48). Among
other things, the Prime Minister admitted in the speech that he had deliberately
lied to voters during the election campaign: “We have obviously lied throughout
the last one and a half, two years. It was quite clear that what we were saying was
not true. That we are so far beyond the possibilities of the country as we could
never have imagined from the joint government of the Hungarian Socialist Party
and the Liberals. And what else have we done during the four years? Nothing.
You can’t name a single significant government decision that we can be proud of”
(Gyurcsány 2006).
28 E. Bos
The publication of the speech triggered a wave of demonstrations and protest

actions, some of which resulted in violent clashes between protesters and police.
Against this background, Viktor Orbán declared the local elections to be a vote
on the legitimacy of the Gyurcsány government and, after the victory of Fidesz,
called for the resignation of the government within 72 hours. After the expiry of
the ultimatum, Fidesz not only organized daily protest rallies, but also boycotted
parliamentary sessions until the end of the legislative term as soon as Gyurcsány
entered the plenary hall (cf. Ahn 2006).
The increasing polarization had far-reaching consequences for the politi-
cal system. Although it was formally a consolidated democracy, it showed defi-
ciencies. On the one hand, there was a growing politicization of the ministerial
bureaucracy. After each change of government, the exchange of staff, carried out
on the basis of party political considerations, reached lower ranks. In this way,
the respective government parties wanted to increase their control over the formu-
lation and implementation of political decisions. Regardless of which camp the
government could take over, the “inherited personnel” of the political opponent
was replaced by trustworthy own personnel after the election victory (Meyer-
Sahling 2006). On the other hand, the polarization resulted also in a politiciza-
tion of other areas of the social system. Thus, for research institutes, think tanks,
cultural institutions, newspapers and broadcasting stations it became increasingly
impossible to take a neutral position (Schöpflin 2009).
In political disputes, both sides fundamentally questioned the legitimacy
of their opponents, not just their respective goals and programs. Fidesz and its
allies considered MSZP illegitimate because, as he successor party of MSZMP,
it derived directly from the communist system. On the other hand, MSZP and the
Liberals denied the legitimacy of Fidesz because they considered it undemocratic.
From the perspective of the left-wing camp, elections were about the survival of
democracy, while from the perspective of the right-wing camp, the survival of the
nation was at stake. In the disputes between the “defenders of democracy” and
the “saviors of the nation”, the political opponent was no longer seen as a legiti-
mate player in the pluralistic contest, but as a “total enemy”. This is also reflected
in the language that aimed at the demonization and moral destruction of the polit-
ical opponent on both sides (Miszlivetz 2009). This is hardly compatible with the
basic principles of democratic systems, for which a pluralistic competition based
on a democratic consensus on values and procedures is essential.
György Schöpflin (2009) attributes the extremely deep cleavage between the
camps to “mutually exclusive notions of justice, of good and evil, of the coun-
try's past, and, ultimately of the ‘good life’” (Schöpflin 2009, p. 32–33). Ferenc
Miszlivetz highlights the deep contrast between proponents of a neoliberal policy
on the one hand and representatives of an “archaic vision of Hungariness” on the

other. While the former assumed that the market regulates everything, the latter
claimed that “there exists a single, correct, homogeneous, white and Christian
European value system” that “focuses on the national community and the family”
(Miszlivetz 2009, p. 634).
The behavior of the Prime Ministers also contributed to a weakening of the
democratic institutions. For example, under Orbán and Gyurcsány, political
decision-making processes were outsourced from the constitutionally legitimate
institutions and parliamentary rights were disregarded. Gyurcsány, for example,
transferred the “central policy formulation” to external reform committees and
advisers and reduced the ministries to “purely administrative bodies” (Dieringer
2009a, p. 9, b, p. 137). In addition, he used the parliamentary right to recall the
government in at least questionable ways when he initiated a constructive vote
of no confidence against himself in order to exclude the head of state from the
process of re-electing the head of government (Müller, 2010; Dieringer 2009a,
p. 9). In his first term in office, Orbán weakened the Parliament by introducing a
three-week cycle for parliamentary sessions, in which the Parliament only met in
plenary sessions every third week. In addition, in the fall of 2006 he “shifted large
parts of his policy from Parliament to the street” (Ilonszki 2007, p. 54).
In this context, Gabriella Ilonszki and György Lengyel (2009, p. 8) noted a
disturbance in the functioning of democratic institutions and in political behavior
even before the 2010 elections. Because large parts of the elites and society only
imitated the acceptance of democratic rules, a simulated democracy had emerged.
Although, according to the authors it was still a democracy, it was falling behind
consolidated democracies in terms of democratic quality.
3 The Restructuring of the Political System After

2010: Steps and Instruments
The parliamentary elections in April 2010 marked a fundamental upheaval in the

development of Hungarian democracy. From the perspective of the newly elected
Prime Minister, not simply the sixth democratic elections since the regime
change had taken place, but a “revolution in the voting booths”. Only with this
had the national uprising of 1956 and the regime change of 1989 been completed.
While Orbán had announced after his first election victory in 1998 that he wanted
less than a regime change, but more than a change of government (Bozóki 2008,
p. 199), he now proclaimed a complete change of the political system. With the
elections, he said, the nation had agreed that in the country “everything must be
30 E. Bos
changed. The constitution, the laws, public morality, taboos, commandments,

goals, relationships and values. The media and environmental protection, schools
and public administration” (Orbán 2010).
In fact, the Orbán government immediately began pushing through far-
reaching reforms of the political system after its election victory (see Bos 2011,
2018a).7 In addition to extensive institutional changes, these included a com-
prehensive change of personnel in all important state and societal positions, the
restructuring of the media system, and the creation of a new ideological founda-
tion. Since 2015, these measures have been supplemented by the creation of a
permanent state of emergency. The reforms massively accelerated the previously
observed trends towards centralization of power in the executive branch while
weakening institutional checks and balances and relied on new patterns of repre-
sentation and legitimation.
The great pace of reform was reflected in intense legislative activity, which
made adequate democratic consultation and control of the government impossible.
A total of 859 laws were passed between 2010 and 2014 - almost twice as many
as in Orbán's first term between 1998 and 2002 and about 150% more than in the
immediately preceding legislative period. In the first 20 months after taking office,
49 cardinal laws were amended, for which a two-thirds majority is necessary. The
majority of the laws were introduced as Private Members' Bills by individual depu-
ties, for which a shortened legislative procedure is used without extensive debates
and consultations with the relevant stakeholders. Ten of the twelve amendments to
the old constitution that came into force during this period were initiated by individ-
ual deputies. As a result, the procedure, which was originally concieved as a means
for the parliamentary minority, became an instrument for fortifying the governing
majority (Pap 2018, p. 15 ff.). The “radical instrumentalization of parliamentary
legislation” (Kazai 2019) reduces Parliament to the function of rubber-stamp-
ing and formally enshrining the government's wishes. In addition, the distinction
between constitutional and legislative amendments is systematically undermined.
3.1 Institutional Reforms
The enforced changes were not only about codifying divergent policy views,
but also about reforming the political institutions and procedures of the political
7 The extensive reforms of the economic system are largely left out of the following consid-
erations. See Pogátsa's contribution in this volume.
p rocess. One example of this was an amendment to Parliament's Standing Orders.

These were modified to the effect that an extraordinary legislative procedure, in
which a bill can be brought directly from the first draft to the final vote without
debate, no longer requires a four-fifths majority, as was previously the case, but
only a two-thirds majority. In addition, in legislative procedures in which the draft
law was submitted by the government and therefore – as required – a consulta-
tion process was carried out, the deadlines for stakeholder' comments were set so
short-term – in some cases they were only one day – that a deliberation process
could not even come about (Pap 2018, p. 16).8
The most important step, however, was the adoption of a new constitution in
2011 (see the chapter of Jakab and Bodnár in this volume). The new Hungarian
“Basic Law” (Alaptörvény) took over the basic structure of the system of govern-
ment enshrined in the constitution of the transition, but it strengthened the position
of the government by weakening checks and balances - in particular the Consti-
tutional Court. In addition, it created the new institution of the Budget Council,
which limited the central budgetary competence of the Parliament (Bos 2011).
Even after the adoption of the new Basic Law, there were regular constitutional
amendments. These were usually motivated by the fact that decisions of the Con-
stitutional Court declaring laws unconstitutional could be “overruled” in this way.
The constitution was adjusted by the revision in such a way that the laws could be
passed again and put into force. It is significant that one year after the Basic Law
came into force, 20 percent of the constitutional text had already been changed
(Tóth 2013, p. 25). In July 2022, the eleventh amendment to the constitution was
already adopted. The frequent amendments to the constitution and the way in
which the judgments of the Constitutional Court are dealt with point to a political
instrumentalization of constitutional law-making for day-to-day political goals.
Among the government's key reform initiatives was the adoption of a new
election law9, which took place in December 2011.10 This retains the basic
structure of the previous system (combination of majority and proportional vot-
ing, compensatory elements) but at the same time includes far-reaching changes.
8 Between 2010 and 2014, the adoption of a draft law took an average of 34 days, 104 laws
were passed in less than 10 days, without extraordinary procedures being used (Kazai
2019, p. 8).
9 Cf. the 2011 Election Act 2015, 2017; Renwick 2012; Bos 2018b.
10 2011. évi CCIII. Törvény az országgyűlési képviselők választásáról, in: Magyar Közlöny,
165/2011, pp. 41.095–41.181.

32 E. Bos
On the one hand, the number of MPs was reduced from 386 to 199.11 On the
other hand, the ratio between direct and list mandates was modified in favor of
the direct mandates so that 106 of the 199 mandates are allocated in single-mem-
ber constituencies. Another important innovation is that the election of the direct
candidates is no longer carried out with an absolute, but with a relative majority,
so that only one ballot is necessary. In addition, the regional lists were abolished
and replaced by national party lists, for which the voters cast their second vote.
The five percent threshold was maintained. List alliances from two parties have to
overcome a ten percent threshold, alliances from three and more parties a thresh-
old of 15% (Bos 2018b, p. 216 ff.).
There was also a innovation in the compensation system. In the distribution of
the list mandates, not only the votes cast for the party lists continue to be taken
into account, but also the so-called “fractional votes” (töredék szavazat), which is
intended to ensure that as few as possible of the votes cast in the single-member
constituencies remain unaccounted for. However, not only- as before - the votes
for the losing candidates are included (loser compensation), but also the votes of
the successful candidates that would not have been necessary to win the mandate
(winner compensation). The compensation votes together with the second votes
of the voters decide the distribution of the list mandates.12
Finally, the group of those entitled to vote was extended to include Hungarians
who have Hungarian citizenship but do not have a Hungarian residence. This reg-
ulation applies in particular to Hungarians living in the territories of neighboring
states that were separated from Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon after the First
World War and transferred to these states by redrawing Hungary's borders. Hun-
garian citizens without Hungarian residence must register before the elections and
can cast their votes only for the the parties’ national lists. They can participate in
the elections by absentee ballot. In contrast, Hungarians who have a Hungarian
address but are temporarily residing abroad must also register before the election,
but may only cast their vote at Hungarian embassies and consulates.13
11 In 2010, the deputies had already decided to reduce the size of Parliament.
12 In the compensation only parties are considered, which were able to overcome the 5 or
10 or 15% threshold.
13 In addition, special rules were introduced for the thirteen national minorities recognized
in Hungary, which, like the parties, can submit candidate lists. Voters who have registered
as members of a minority vote with their second vote not for a party list, but for the list
of their minority. Reduced quotas apply to the deputies of the minorities. If the number
of votes necessary to win a mandate is not reached, the top candidate of the list enters the
national assembly as a so-called spokesperson (nemzetiségi szószóló). This person has the
right to speak, but not the right to vote (Bos 2018b, p. 217).
By modifying the voting system, its majority-forming and disproportionate

effect was strengthened. On the one hand, this is due to the increase in the propor-
tion of mandates allocated by relative majority vote; on the other hand, the modi-
fied compensation system contributes to this.
Another important goal of the reform was a restructuring of the media sys-
tem. In 2011, a new media law was passed that brought the state media under
one roof and placed them under the control of the government with the help of
new supervisory boards. The newly created National Media and Communications
Authority (Nemzeti Média- és Hírközlési Hátoság; NMHH) and the Media Coun-
cil were also given licensing and control rights with regard to the other media.
The NMHH awards broadcasting frequencies and is responsible for consumer and
competition protection. The Media Council’s duties include monitoring the “bal-
anced” reporting of the media. In addition, the state news agency MIT has had a
monopoly on news coverage for the state broadcasters since the law came into
effect (Bos 2011, p. 55 ff.).
The restructuring of the media system by the new media law was supplemented
by a system of financial support for media close to the government through the
allocation of government advertising. In addition to state media, this also benefits
media of entreprneurs closely associated with Fidesz. The aim of these changes
was to control and restrict the flow of information and to “flood” society with
unchallenged “government information” (see Haraszti 2019). After the govern-
ment's confirmation in the elections of 2014, state-backed takeovers of opposition
media by government-related entrepreneurs began. Also after Fidesz's next elec-
tion victory in 2018, a fundamental change followed, when a centralization of
pro-government media was initiated with the “Central European Press and Media
Foundation” (Közép Európai Sajtó és Média Alapítvány, KESMA). The owners of
the media handed them over to the foundation free of charge (see ibid.). Officially,
the foundation is intended to “counteract fake news and disinformation from pro-
gressive sources; to take action against political correctness, and to strengthen the
national-civic side, so that truly conservative-Christian thinking can be present in
the public discourse with the same force as its left-liberal counterpart.”14
By buying up previously independent media and selectively awarding state
advertising contracts to government-friendly media, it has been possible to push
important opposition media into the background or out of the market altogether.
14 Cf.
the mission and goals of the Central European Press and Media Foundation
(KESMA), 06.02.2019, https://cepmf.hu/#sectionAnnouncement.
34 E. Bos
This has enabled Fidesz to also secure a dominant position in the private media
sector. As a result, there are only a few independent media left. With the exception
of Népszava (Volksstimme), all other national or regional daily newspapers have
fallen into the hands of government-friendly businessmen, who have handed them
over to KESMA in 2019. After the takeover of the second largest commercial tel-
evision station (TV 2) by a person close to Fidesz, only RTL Klub remains inde-
pendent among the important private television channels. The broadcaster was
only able to preserve its independence through the resistance of the foreign owner
Bertelsmann and the support of the German federal government. Among the state
and private radio programs, only Klubrádio remained independent. However, this
station could only be received in the Hungarian capital and finally lost its licence
in 2021. The market for online media has also been re-divided. Thus, in 2016,
Origo.hu, one of the two most important independent news portals at that time,
was integrated into the government-friendly media system (Haraszti 2019; Bos
2018a, p. 22 ff.). In 2020, the remaining, very popular independent news portal
index.hu also lost its independence. However, the former journalists of index man-
aged to set up the new internet portal Telex.hu, which is financed by crowdfundig
and quickly gained great popularity. Investigative journalism is also be carried out
by smaller internet-based platforms such as Átlátszó (Transparent) and Direkt36.
After the foundations of the political system had been redesigned between
2010 and 2014, several laws during the following legislative term aimed at
restricting the room for maneuver of previously autonomous state institutions and
certain social actors. This mainly affected Hungarian higher education institutions
and the scientific system (see the chapter of Várszegi in this volume.), NGOs sup-
ported from abroad and opposition parties (see Bos 2018a, p. 20 ff.).
For example, the law on the “Transparency of NGOs Supported from Abroad”,
passed by Parliament on 13 June 2017, required NGOs that receive more than
HUF 7.2 million (about EUR 23,500) from foreign donors in a year to register
with a court and to name their donors from an individual grant of HUF 500,000
(about EUR 1,650) onwards. They also have to declare themselves as “organisa-
tions supported from abroad” on their website and in all publications. A clause in
the law on the “protection of general appearance of towns and villages” stipulated
that parties and public institutions may only rent advertising space at the current
list price for their advertising. In addition, the contracts must be submitted to the
competent authorities immediately. If this does not happen, the authorities may
have the posters removed.
The objecive the Hungarian government gave as a reason to justify the new
regulations - creating fair competition, or fighting against money laundering,
financing of terrorism and hidden party financing - are undoubtedly legitimate,
but often the intention to harm certain political opponents and actors critical
of the government can hardly be denied.15 The corresponding laws were again
passed at great speed and without prior consultation of those affected in a fast-
track procedure. Overall, the course of action speaks for an instrumental under-
standing of law, which can hardly be reconciled with the principle of procedural
fairness. In addition, it gives the impression that the Hungarian government
intended to restrict the room for maneuver of opposition parties and critical civil
society organizations.
3.2 Comprehensive Exchange of Elites
The transformation of the system was not only achieved through institutional
reforms, but also through a comprehensive exchange of personnel. Since the elec-
tion victory in 2010, the government has systematically filled all important posi-
tions in the state apparatus, in the judiciary, in the state media and in the cultural
sector with loyal supporters, thus following a trend that had already been observed
previously. However, in contrast to previous governments, its own advantage in
power gave it more opportunities to exert influence (Bos 2018a, p. 23).
In order to be able to bring the desired people into the intended positions, it
was sometimes necessary to change legal regulations first, because they contained
certain exclusion criteria with regard to the necessary qualifications. If designated
persons did not meet these criteria, these were eliminated by amending the law.
For example, the age limit for ambassadors was lowered or the requirement that
university presidents must have at least a Ph.D. was dropped (Pap 2018, p. 16
f.). On the other hand, changes in the law were also used to remove non-govern-
ment appointed officeholders from their positions, for example by lowering age
limits or restructuring institutions. At the same time, the terms of office of the
new office holders were extended so that they would remain in office even after a
possible change of government. Another regulation, according to which the office
15 The new regulations target two specific individuals. The NGO law is primarily directed
against Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, who finances NGOs with his Open
Society Foundation that are committed to open and democratic societies. He is also the
founder of CEU. The Poster Act was directed against Hungarian businessman Lájos Simic-
ska, who had made his poster space available to Jobbik's campaign against the government
at a price far below list price. Simicska had been a close ally of Viktor Orbán for a long
time, but had separated from him in 2015 in a dispute. See Bos 2018, p. 21 ff. for this.
36 E. Bos
holder was to remain in office until the Parliament had elected a successor, which
is often only possible with a two-thirds majority, was also meant to surve this pur-
pose (Pap 2018, p. 17).
By this method of staffing policy, the independence of the judiciary was
restricted as well as the autonomy of state media, museums, theaters, and uni-
versities. For the latter, for example, the institution of the chancellor responsible
for finance was created, with the chancellors not being elected by the universities
themselves, but by the competent ministry. The filling of management positions
in state institutions with loyal persons has led to a fundamental change in their
function. They do no longer serve to control the government, but rather function
as instruments of the government.
In addition, the network of government-affiliated persons also includes entre-
preneurs and owners of private media, to whom the government awards public
contracts or places advertisements in their media. This network of politicians and
business and media actors escapes democratic control (Martin 2017, p. 275 ff.).
This part of the reconstruction of the political system had been prepared by
Orbán long-term since his election defeat in 2002. Fidesz used the time in opposi-
tion to systematically expand the party's organizational structures in the country-
side. This was complemented by the founding of organizations close to the party,
with which local elites from business and culture could be tied to the party. An
important part of these measures to expand the network was the annual exclu-
sive meeting in the village of Kötcse, to which Orbán invited his loyal follow-
ers. Orbán also used the meetings to inform his followers about his strategies
and plans (Kristóf 2017, p. 130). Finally, the party built its own media empire
with the help of close businessmen. The government of Orbán was able to rely
on these structures and persons when it came to the personnel restructuring of the
political, cultural and social system (Bos 2018a, p. 23).
3.3 Ideological Foundations and Understanding

of Representation
The ideological foundations of the reconstruction of the system were already

apparent in a speech Orbán gave on May 9, 2002, at the castle in Budapest. In
this speech, he he made strong references to the concept of the homeland (“The
homeland is not simply politics, but our lives.”) and presented Fidesz and its allies
as the true representatives of the interests of the Hungarian nation (Orbán 2002).
In a much-noticed speech in Kötcse in 2009, he formulated the building of a new
“civic” Hungary as his central strategic goal. In place of the previous “dual power
field,” there should be Fidesz as a “single governing party, a central political

power field” (centrális erőtér) that is “capable of adressing the national issues.”
This would require the replacement of the post-communist elite with a new civic
elite, as well as a moral renewal based on Hungary’s national identity (Orbán
2009). These statements showed, on the one hand, that Orbán does not view the
events of 1989 as a regime change and considers the „National Round Table“ par-
ticipants as “preservers” of the system (Bozóki 2008, p. 213). On the other hand,
he advocates a majoritarian view of politics and does not seek compromises, but
rather hegemony of the conservative-Christian-national value system he promotes.
After the 2010 election victory, these ideas can be found again in the Dec-
laration adopted by Parliament on 14 June 2010, entitled “Let There Be Peace,
Freedom and Unity” (Országgyűlés 2010). This “Declaration of National Coop-
eration” (Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere, NER) claimes that the Hungarian
nation has “in the spring of 2010 […] carried out a revolution at the ballot box”.
With the elections, a new social contract has been concluded and a “new system
of national cooperation” was adopted, on the basis of which a new political com-
munity is to be created. Its foundation is formed by conservative values, in par-
ticular work, home, family, health and order. Those who want to belong to the
nation are expected to share these values; a “proper” Hungarian is supposed to be
“a God-fearing (preferably Christian) married individual who is willing to make
sacrifices for family [...] and country” according to this idea (Uitz 2019). This
Christian-conservative ideology with a clear preference for conservative family
values and a paternalistic, patriarchal concept of the political community is also
reflected in the new Constitution and in cultural and educational policy. The Con-
stitution accordingly declared the conservative values to be the core of national
identity in the preamble (cf. Bos 2011, p. 52; Pap 2018).
The government program of 2010 emphasized that with the elections, citizens
had regained their ability to self-determination and the opportunity to unite their
forces in order to steer the country in a new direction in the interest of the com-
mon good. After the regime change, the elites had controlled the transformation
by invisible contracts. Thus, the upward development of the country had been
prevented by fruitless debates. The system of national cooperation created by the
elections in 2010, on the other hand, was based on unity instead of exclusion,
on political responsibility instead of political irresponsibility, on the rejection and
elimination of extremes instead of their tolerance, on the possibility of self-deter-
mination instead of its limitation, and on the restoration of the balance between
rights and duties (Pap 2018, p. 52 ff.; Programme of National Cooperation 2010).
The ideological justification for the system was further developed by Viktor
Orbán in a speech at the Free Summer University in Tusnádfürdő (Băile Tușnad/
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and learn to know you, and feed tamely out of your hand, would you
not desire to have some food to give it?”
“O yes: I would give it part of my dinner.”
“But if you had very little dinner, scarcely enough to satisfy your
own hunger, you would buy more bread for your rat if you could. If
your jailer asked you much more than the bread would be worth out
of prison, you would give it him rather than your rat should not come
and play with you. You would pay him first all your copper, and then
all your silver, and then all your gold.”
“Yes, because I could not play with money so pleasantly as with a
live animal, and there would be nothing else that I could buy in such
a place. I had rather have the company of my rat than a pocket full of
gold.”
“So White thought,” observed Marguerite, “and he gave the
turnkey every thing he had left for bread, till his buttons, and his
pencil case, and even his watch were all gone. It was a long time
before he could bring himself to part with his watch; for the moving of
the wheels was something to look at, and the ticking kept his ears
awake, and made him feel less desolate: but when it came to giving
up his watch or his rat, he thought he could least spare his live
companion: so he carefully observed for some time the shifting of the
glimmering light upon the wall, as the morning passed into noon, and
noon into afternoon and evening, and then he thought this sort of dial
might serve him instead of a watch, and he gave it to the turnkey on
condition of having an ounce more bread every day for a year.”
“He must have been pleased to have made his bargain for a whole
year.”
“His pleasure lasted a very short while. The turnkey came earlier
than usual one day when the rat was there, and twisted its neck
before White could stop him.”
Julien stamped with grief and anger when he heard this; but
presently supposed the turnkey was honest enough to restore the
watch. Charles shook his head in answer, and told his little son that
poor White had been quite crazy since that day, and had talked
about nothing but a rat, and shown no desire for any thing but bread
and water since, though it was six years ago that his misfortune had
happened.
“Did you ever hear of paying for water, Julien; or for air?”
No: Julien thought that God had given both so freely that it would
be a sin to sell them. His father thought this not a good reason; for it
seemed to him fair that men should buy and sell whenever one
wanted something that another person had too much of; as much air
and water as corn and flax, which were also given by God.
“Ah, but, papa, it costs men a great deal of trouble to prepare corn
and flax.”
“True; and now you have hit upon the right reason. If corn and flax
grew of themselves on land which belonged to nobody, would you
pay for them, or just gather them without paying?”
“I should be very silly to pay when I might have them without.”
“So I think: but would corn and flax be less valuable then than
now, when we have to pay very dear for them?”
“The corn would be just as good to eat, and the flax to make linen
of: but they would not to change away.”
“No more than the air, which is very useful in breathing, or water
which we could not do without, and which yet would be a very poor
thing to carry to market. Now, would you call water a valuable thing
or not, Julien?”
“No, not at all, because it will buy nothing——O yes, but it is
though; because we could not do without it.—Mamma, is water
valuable or not?”
“Very valuable in use, but not usually in exchange. When things
are valuable in exchange, it is either because they cost labour before
they could be used, or because they are very scarce.”
“So,” observed Charles, “if a mine should ever be dug so deep that
the air is not fresh at the bottom where the miners work, the owner of
the mine would be very glad to buy air of any one who could convey
it down by a machine. Such an one would be wise to charge so
much a gallon for the fresh air he supplied, to pay for the labour and
expense of his machine, and for the trouble of working it.”
Marguerite then mentioned that she once staid in a small country
town during a drought. There was no reservoir of water, and all the
pumps and cisterns were dry. The poor people went out by night into
the neighbouring country, and watched the springs; and any one who
was fortunate enough to obtain a gallon of fresh water was well paid
for it. The price rose every day, till at last one woman gave a calf for
a pailfull of water, hoping to save her cow, it being certain that both
must die without this supply.
“And did she save her cow?”
“Yes. While the woman was anxiously sitting up in bed, planning
what she should change away next, she fancied there was a
different feel in the air; and on looking out of the window, she found
the sky covered with black clouds; and before morning, the trade in
water was over. There was nobody to give a doit for a cistern-full.”
“It was just so with me,” observed Charles, “when I was besieged
in the cellar. I was parched with thirst, and would have given a pipe
of my best wine to any one who would have let me down a quart of
water through the trap-door. Three hours after, I myself threw
hundreds of gallons on the fire at the guard houses, when the order
was given to take them down in an orderly way; and I did not
consider such use of the water any waste. So much for the value
which is given by scarcity.”
“But, papa, though things are more valuable to people when there
is a scarcity of them, the people are less rich than they were before.
That seems to me very odd.”
“Because you have been accustomed to consider value and
wealth as the same things, which they are not. Our wealth consists
in whatever is valuable in use as well as in exchange. Owing to the
storm of last year, I have less wealth in my possession now than I
had then, though what I have may, perhaps, exchange for more
wealth still. I have as much furniture, and as many clothes and
luxuries, and as much money; but I have fewer growing vines, and
much less wine. If I were to use up my own grapes and wine instead
of selling them, they would last a much shorter time than my stock of
the former year would have lasted. So I have less wealth in
possession. But the value of wine has risen so high, in consequence
of scarcity, that I can get as much now of other things in exchange
for a pint, as I could, fourteen months ago, in exchange for a gallon.”
“But that is partly because the wine is older. Mr. Steele is very
particular about the wine being old, and he pays you much more, he
told me, the longer it has been kept.”
“And it is very fair he should, for reasons which you can hardly
understand yet.”
“Try him,” said Marguerite.
“It is impossible, my dear. I refer to the charges I am at for the rent
of my cellar, the wear of my casks, and the loss of interest upon the
capital locked up in the wine. All this must be paid out of the
improvement in the quality of the article; and all this, Julien must wait
a few years to understand.
“Now tell me, my boy, whether you think it a good thing or not that
there should be a scarcity of wine?”
“Why, papa, as we do not want to drink all you have ourselves,
and as people will give you as much for it as they would for twice as
much, I do not think it signifies to you; but it must be a bad thing for
the people of Paris that there is so little wine to be had. At least you
said so about the bread.”
“But if my wine should be as dear next year, and I should have no
more losses from storms, and no more expense than in common
years, in growing my wine, would the high price be a good thing for
me or not?”
“It would be good for you, and bad for your customers; only I think
they would not give you so much for your wine. They would
remember that there had been no more storms, and they would find
people that had cheaper wine to sell, and then they would leave off
buying of you.”
“And they would be very right, if there was anybody to sell
cheaper; as there would be, if labourers had less wages, and so
made it less expensive to grow and prepare wine. But if some way
was found of making more wine than ever, in a cheaper way than
ever, who would be the better for that?”
“The people that buy of you, because I suppose you would let
them have it cheaper.”
“And papa too,” said Marguerite, “for many people would buy wine
who cannot afford it now.”
“Therefore,” concluded Charles, “a high exchangeable value is not
at all a good thing for everybody, though it may be for a time to some
few. And a low exchangeable value is a very good thing to
everybody, if it arises from the only cause which can render it
permanent,—a diminution of the cost of production.”
“But if this happened with every article,” pursued Marguerite,
“there would be an end of the cheapness, though not of the plenty.
As many of one thing would exchange for a certain number of other
things as before.”
“True; but less labour would purchase them all; and this is the
grand consideration. As less labour will now purchase a deal table
than was once necessary to procure a rough hewn log in its place,
less labour still may hereafter buy a mahogany one; and this is a
desirable thing for the purchasers of tables, and no less for the
makers, who will then sell a hundred times the number they can
dispose of now.”
Chapter VI.
NEW DEVICES.
The Parisians soon after showed that they knew little of the
resources on which the supply of the wants of the state should
depend, by having recourse to a measure which, however popular,
was one of great folly;—folly to be exceeded only by an act of the
populace which took place nearly at the same time.
The coffers of the government had long been empty. Loans of
almost every kind, and under every species of pretence, had been
raised upon the suffering nation, some of which proved failures in
their primary object, while others, however great the proceeds in
amount, seemed to be exhausted with somewhat the same speed as
water that is poured into a sieve. Never money went away so fast
before; and whilst the government was dismayed at its magic
property of disappearance, the people grew more and more angry at
what they thought the extravagance of their rulers. Neither of them
took into the account the scarcity of most of the necessaries of life,
and both regarded money as having the same value as ever,—as
being, in itself, the thing required to supply the necessities of the
state. To both it was equally inconceivable why, if so much had
defrayed such and such expenses in former years, double the sum
would go no way at all at present. The ministers and the court could
only tremble at the necessity of owning the truth, while the people
raged, and could be appeased only by court largesses for the relief
of the starving: which largesses went as little way when they had
changed hands as before. Neither party suspected that money,
although scarce, had become very cheap through the still greater
scarcity of other things; and in the absence of this necessary
knowledge, everybody was eager about gold and silver.
The National Assembly had tried all means, first by themselves,
and then with the assistance of Necker, to raise a supply, without
which the affairs of the state could not, they believed, proceed; and
all in vain. Then Necker had leave given him to pursue his own
methods; and, popular as he was, no one had a doubt that he would
succeed. But he failed, though he issued the most tempting
proposals; offered the highest interest that ever was heard of, even
in such an emergency; and exerted his utmost personal influence in
favour of the loan. The subscription was not half filled: the reason of
which was that many had no money, having spent it all in buying
necessaries; and as many in France as had taken their money
(much of it had gone into other countries) expected to want it
themselves for the same purposes, or had not confidence enough in
the stability of the government to take it for a creditor. So the king’s
horses went on to eat borrowed hay or to want it; and the king’s
servants to clamour for their wages; and the king’s tradesmen to
decline orders on one pretence or another; and the police threatened
to leave the home minister to keep order by himself; and state
couriers went unwillingly forth on their journies; and business lagged
in every department of the administration.
At this moment, it entered some wise head that, if people would
not lend money, they might lend or give something else; not corn or
hay, or any of the necessaries of life; for every one knew there was
still less of these things than of money; but gold and silver in any
form. It would have been hard to say what lasting good this could do
amidst the impossibility of procuring the necessaries of which gold
and silver are only the representatives: but no matter for that.
Nobody was asked to explain the affair, and apparently none
troubled themselves to think about it; so delighted were all with the
new notion of giving away trinkets to save the state. The idea of a
patriotic contribution was charming,—a contribution in which almost
everybody could join; women and children, and persons of many
degrees below the class of capitalists. The court joined: the
gentlemen sacrificing nearly half their watches and seals, and the
ladies adopting simplicity as a fashion, and sending away the
jewellery they could not wear as Arcadian shepherdesses and
Sicilian nymphs. The Assembly followed, every member thereof
stooping down at the same moment to strip his shoes of their
buckles, so that their act of patriotic devotion made really a very fine
show. This gave the signal to the whole country, and all France was
forthwith unbuckled in respect of the feet. She became also
quakerlike as to the hands, for not a maiden but took out her lover’s
hair from his parting gift, and flung the ring into the lap of the nation;
not a wife that did not part with the token of her wifehood in the
cause. Pecks of gold rings, bushels of silver buckles, with huge store
of other baubles, were at once in the possession of the state; and
the people no longer doubted that all would henceforth be well.
And what was really the event?—The gold answered the same
purpose as it does when a basin full of it coined stands on the
banker’s counter during a run. It satisfied the ignorant that all must
be safe where there is so much wealth actually before one’s eyes. It
hushed the clamours of the people for a little while; and made the
servants of the government willing to go on somewhat longer upon
credit; so that more industry and briskness prevailed for a time, at
the risk of ultimate disappointment, and an aggravation of popular
fury,—now diverted but not dispersed. A mob went about to levy
these voluntary offerings, an act ludicrously inconsistent with their
next proceeding; if, indeed, any of the events of this extraordinary
time could be regarded as ludicrous.
They called at Charles’s house among others, whence, as it
happened, no such offerings had yet gone forth. Charles had
resisted Pauline’s wish to lend the queen her thimble, and Julien’s
offer to pay his first tax with the silver-tipped riding-whip grandpapa
had given him. Neither would he allow Marguerite’s few ornaments,
all keepsakes, to be thrown away in any such manner. He would give
the coat off his back to the state, he said, when it could do any
service; but the proposed gifts could only help to make jewellery a
drug, without supplying one more person with bread, or lessening by
so much as one scruple the burdens of the state. He was disposed
to be vexed when he came home one day, and found a short
allowance of spoons at the dinner-table, the clock on the mantel-
piece gone, and his wife as destitute of external ornament as any
Arcadian shepherdess at Versailles. He laughed, however, at his
wife’s apologies for having made a voluntary offering against her
own will as well as his, and hoped that she would be as little the
worse as the state would be the better for the sacrifice. Goldsmiths
and jewellers of enterprise and capital would profit by the fancy, he
observed, if nobody else did; and the many losers might find some
comfort in sympathy with the very few winners.
The people, meanwhile, were bitterly complaining of famine, and
the more gold was carried to the treasury, the more bread was
bought up before the eyes of those who were deprived of it from its
increased price. It mattered not that some was given away in charity
by the king, and more, to suit his own purposes, by the duke of
Orleans; the people were rendered unable to purchase it, and
furnished with the plea of want, wherewith to make the streets of
Paris echo. It would have been better to have let the exchange of
wedding rings for bread be made without the interposition of the king
or his ministers, even without taking into consideration the events
which followed. A report was soon industriously spread that the
bread furnished by court charity was of a bad quality. It was believed,
like everything that was then said against the court; and the
consequence was that an anomalous and melancholy sight was
seen by as many as walked in the city. Clamorous, starving crowds
besieged the bakers’ shops, and carried off all the bread from their
ovens, all the flour from their bins; while the discontented among the
mob politicians of the Orleans faction were on the way to snatch the
food from the mouths of the hungry and throw it into the river, and to
cut the sacks, and mix the flour with the puddles of the streets. Want
and waste, faction and delusion were here seen in their direct
extremes.
At this time, Charles and Marguerite did not allow their children to
go out under any guardianship but that of their father, as it was
impossible to foresee what might happen in the streets before they
could get home again. They were as safe as any could be at such a
time;—safer than the few who ventured abroad in carriages at the
risk of insult wherever they turned; safer than the sordidly fed and
clad, who were seized upon by the agents of faction to augment their
mobs, and be made the instruments of violence under the penalty of
suffering it themselves. The parents and children were also safer
together than separate; as a domestic party, abroad to take the air,
presented as unsuspicious a group, and one as likely to pass
unnoticed, as could well be imagined. Yet they had their occasional
alarms; and when there was no cause to fear for themselves, were
too often grieved and shocked at what they beheld inflicted on
others.
“O papa!” cried Julien, one day, as they were walking; “what are
they doing at Maigrot’s shop? I do believe the crowd is coming there
next.”
Maigrot was a baker, well known to Charles’s family, and much
beloved by the children, on account of the little hot cakes which
seemed to be always ready to pop out of the oven and into their
mouths, when they went with the servant to deliver orders or pay
bills.
Instead of his usual smiling face, Maigrot was now seen in a state
of desperate anxiety, as well as could be judged from the glimpse of
him at his door, trying first to slip out, and then to force his way
between the two men who were evidently placed at the entrance as
guards till the mob should come up. Foiled in his attempt, Maigrot
disappeared, and Charles thought that it might depend on whether
there was a way of exit at the back of the house, whether his head
would presently be carried on a pike, between two loaves of his own
bread, or whether he would be kneading and baking in peace ten
years hence. There seemed to be just time to run and give a word of
advice to whomsoever might be waiting in the shop, and Charles ran
forward to do so. He was prevented entering; but seeing Maigrot’s
wife sinking and trembling behind the counter, and looking absolutely
incapable of any resolution whatever, he called out to her to assist in
emptying the flour bins and distributing the bread, and to fear
nothing, and all would be well. The woman tossed off a glass of
water which stood beside her, and rallied for the effort. In such effort
lay the only resource of sufferers under violence in those days; for
the magistracy were unable to afford assistance; or, if able, were not
to be depended on. The shop was presently emptied and gutted, and
its stock carried away, without, however, being in this instance
preceded by the horrible display of a human head. Maigrot had
escaped and actually joined in with the mob in time to see his own
flour cast into the Seine. Nobody thought more of the baker, and he
took advantage of this disregard to learn a great deal of his own
doings which he did not know before. He now overheard that his
flour was mixed with hurtful ingredients by order of his customer, the
king; that an inferior kind was sold at high prices as the best; and
that there were stores of meal concealed somewhere about his
premises, to victual the soldiers who were to be brought to rule the
city, and give the king his own way. All this was news to Maigrot, who
was compelled to listen to these falsehoods in silence: more
fortunate than many who had lost their lives as well as their good
name under similar charges. A defender sprang up, however, when
he least expected it.
Charles and his little son could not help following to look on, when
the mob proceeded with the flour down to the river. They stood on
the outskirts of the crowd, watching sack after sack as, with hoarse
shouts, it was heaved into the water so as to make the heaviest
splash possible. A new amusement presently occurred to some of
the leaders; that of testing the political opinions of the passers by by
the judgment they should pronounce on the quality of the flour.
Those who declared it good must, of course, be parasites of the
court; those who made mouths at it were the friends of the people;
and the moment this point was settled, every gazer from a distance
was hauled to the water’s edge to undergo the test; every
approaching carriage was waylaid and stopped, and its inmates
brought on the shoulders of the mob. Of course, all gave judgment
on the same side;—a thing likely to happen without much
dishonesty, when the raw flour was crammed into the mouth by foul
and sometimes bloody hands. It would have been difficult to
pronounce it very good under such circumstances of administration.
Among the most piteous looking of those under test was the
marquis de Thou, who was taken from a non-descript sort of
carriage, on his way, as he vowed, to the duke of Orleans, but
certainly attended by more than one servant of the royal household.
While prosecuting his explanations with gesture and grimace,
uplifted as he was above the crowd, he looked so like a monkey
riding a bear that a universal shout of mockery arose. He was
lowered for a moment, out of sight; and the laugh rose louder than
ever when he reappeared, held at arms’ length by a hundred hands,
powdered all over like a miller. His position made the judgment he
had to give all the more difficult, for it enabled him to perceive the
royal servants watching him on one side, the duke of Orleans and
some of his fiercest followers on another, and the pitiless mob
around.
“Ah! it is very, very good food for the poor, without doubt,” he
declared, while in full view of the court party, and with his mouth
stuffed with a compound which had just been taken from a puddle
underfoot. “Very fine nourishment for a good king to buy dear, and
give away to a hungry people.—Ah! no more,—no more, I pray you! I
shall presently dine, and it is enough. I cannot praise it more than I
have done.—Ah! but” (seeing the duke frowning) “I do not say but it
may be a little sour,—and somewhat bitter,—yes, O yes, and gritty,—
and, O do not murder me, and I will also say hurtful.—And
poisonous? Yes, no doubt it is poisonous,—clearly poisonous.—But,
how bountiful of the king to think of how the poor should be fed!”
The marquis might think himself fortunate in getting off with a
ducking in the yeasty flood, into which he was let down astride on a
flour sack. While sneaking away through the crowd, after shaking his
dripping queue, and drawing a long breath, he encountered Charles,
whom he immediately recognised, and with inconsiderate
selfishness, exposed to the notice of the crowd by his appeal.
“Ah, my friend, here is a condition I am in! For our old friendship’s
sake,—for the sake of our vicinity in Guienne, aid me!”
“Do not answer him. Take no notice,” whispered Maigrot from
behind; “’tis as much as your life is worth.”
But Charles could not be inhuman. He gave the old man his arm to
conduct him to the carriage which he intended to order to his own
house. Before he had well turned his back, however, a piercing
shriek from Julien made him look round. The mob were about to
carry the boy towards the sacks.
“Do not be alarmed, my dear,” said he. “Taste the flour, and say
whether you think it good; and I will come to you in a moment to do
the same.”
Julien shrieked no more, but he looked ruefully in his father’s face,
when Charles returned. As soon as he had gulped down his share
and could speak, he said he had never tasted raw flour before, but it
was not so good as the hot cakes that were made of it sometimes.—
The boy escaped with being only laughed at.—His father’s turn
came next.
Charles stipulated, when laid hold of, to be allowed to feed
himself, and refused laughingly to taste what came out of the puddle
till his neighbours should have separated the mud from the flour.
With a very oracular look, he then proceeded from sack to sack,
tasting and pronouncing, apparently unmoved by the speculations he
heard going on all round him as to whether he was a royalist from
about the court, or a spy from Versailles, or only an ignorant stranger
from the provinces. When he had apparently made up his mind, he
began a sort of conversation with those nearest to him, which he
exalted by degrees into a speech.
“When I,” he observed, “I, the very first, opened a prisoner’s cell in
the Bastille——”
He was interrupted by loud cheers from all who heard; and this
drew the attention of more.
“——I found,” continued Charles, “a mess of wholesome food in
that horrible place. Every other kind of poison was there,—the
poison of damps and a close atmosphere; the poison of inactivity
which brings on disease and death; the poison of cruelty by which all
the kindly feelings are turned into bitterness in the soul of the
oppressed; and the poison of hopelessness, by which the currents of
life are chilled, and the heart of the captive is sunk within him till he
dies. All these poisons we found in every cell; but to all their inmates
was denied that quicker poison which would have been welcome to
end their woes. Some, we know, have lived thirty-five years under
this slow death, while a very small mixture of drugs with their bread
would have released them in fewer hours. That this quicker method
was ever used, we have no proof; that it was not used in the case of
those whom we released, we know, not by their state of health alone;
for that, alas! was not to be boasted of;—but by the experience of
some of us. When we were heated with toil and choked with dust, we
drank the draughts which the prisoners left untasted in their cells.
When a way was made among the ruins, women came to see what a
work their husbands had achieved; and when their children craved
food, rather than return home before all was finished, they gave their
little ones the bread which the captives had loathed. Many thus ate
and drank; and I appeal to you whether any evil came of that day;
whether the sleep of the next night was not sound as became the
rest which succeeds to an heroic effort. No one was poisoned with
the food then provided by the government; and yet that horrible
dungeon was the place, if there be any, for poison to do its work.
And if not attempted there, will it be here? Here, where there are a
million of eyes on the watch to detect treasons against the people?
Here, where there are hundreds of thousands of defenders of the
public safety? No, fellow citizens: this is not the kind of treason which
is meditated against us. There are none that dare practise so directly
on your lives. But there is a treason no less fatal, though more
disguised, which is even at this moment in operation against you.
You ask me two questions;—whether this food is of a bad quality;
and whether you are not half-starved; and both these evils you
ascribe to your rulers.—To the first I answer, that this food is, to the
best of my judgment, good; and, whether good or bad, that the
government has nothing to do with it, since it forms no part of the
stores that the king has bought up for distribution. It is flour of the
same harvest, the same field, the same mill, the same bin, that I and
mine have been supplied from; and it has nourished me well for the
work I have had to do; for letting in the light of day upon the foulest
dungeon that ever deformed the earth,—for watching over those who
have been released from it,—for attending to the proceedings of the
Assembly,—for meditating by night and consulting by day how the
rights of the people may best be attained and secured. Keep the
same food to strengthen you for the same purposes. Do not forget
your other complaint;—that you are starving: and remember that
however much this may be owing to the misrule and courtly
extravagance you denounce, the grievance will not be removed by
your feeding the fishes with that which your children are craving. I
spoke of another kind of treason than that which you suspect, and I
see about me too many tokens of its existence;—the treason which
would not poison but starve you.
“Of the motives of this treason I have nothing to say, for I am
wholly ignorant of them. I only insist that there can be no truly
patriotic aim under the project of depriving you of the food which is at
best but scantily supplied. Do you find in the most plentiful seasons
that we have corn enough to make sport with in the river? Are your
houses even then so filled with grain that, after feeding your children
and domestic animals, you have enough left for the eels of the
Seine? Is it to give you this over-supply that the peasantry of the
provinces live under roofs of rushes, and couch upon beds of straw?
Tell me,—is there in the happiest of times such a superfluity that no
Frenchman has a want or wish for more?”
Furious cries of denial rose from all sides, joined with curses upon
the government which year by year, by its extravagance, snatched
the hard-earned bread from the labourer’s hands.
“This is all true,” replied Charles, “and is in course of being
reformed: but when did even a tyrannical government inflict upon
you such evils as you are this day inflicting upon yourselves? When
has it robbed the shops of one of the most useful class of men
among you, and carried away boat-loads of the food for which
thousands are pining, and destroyed your means of life before your
eyes? A worse enemy than even a weak king and a licentious court
is making sport of your miseries, and overwhelming you with such as
cannot be repaired. Yes! let it not hurt your pride to hear of woes that
cannot be repaired; for even the power of the sovereign people is not
unlimited, great as you have proved it to be. You have abolished
servile parliaments, and obtained a virtuous assembly of
representatives. You have swept away the stronghold of oppression,
and can tread with free steps the turf from which its very foundations
have been extracted. You have rejected a constitution which was an
insufficient warrant for your liberties, and are in the way to obtain
universal assent to that noble Declaration of Rights which shall
become the social contract of every civilized nation.—All these
things, and others which would have been called impossibilities ten
years ago, you have achieved. But there are impossibilities
remaining which more truly deserve the name. You cannot prevent
multitudes dying when famine is in the land; you cannot call up a
new harvest before the seed has sprouted; you cannot insist upon
supplies from other lands which are already drained. You can waste
your resources, but you cannot recall them. With however much
pride or levity you may at this hour fling away the staff of your life,
you cannot retard the day when you will sink for want of it,—when
you will kneel in the mud by the brink of this very current, and crave
the waters to give up what you have buried in them, or to drown your
miseries with your life.—Will you suffer yourselves thus to be made
sport of? Will you permit yourselves to be goaded into madness, in
order that you may be ready for madmen’s deeds? Will you throw
away what is in your own hands, that others may reduce you to
crave the small pittance which will remain in theirs? Those who have
incited you to the deeds of this day take very good care that all our
granaries shall not be emptied. They reserve a few, that you may at
length,—when all their schemes are ripe,—be their tools through
your literal dependence on them for bread.—Disappoint this plot as
far as you can. It is now too late to keep plenty in your own hands;
but baffle the approaches of famine to the last moment; for with
hunger comes slavery; or, if you will not have slavery, death; and in
either case, your country must surrender your services at the very
moment when she wants them most.—Where is the patriotism of
bringing things to this pass?—Where also is the justice of
condemning unheard so useful a class of men as those from whom
you have taken their property without accusation, and, in many
cases, their lives, on nothing better than suspicion of their having
communicated with the court?—We must respect rights, as well as
frame a Declaration of them. We must cherish the innocent and
useful of society, if we wish to restrain those who are neither the one
nor the other. Let there be a contrast between the oppressors and
the friends of the people. Let tyrants tremble, while industrious
citizens dwell in peace.”
It was now easy to wind up the discourse to the point
contemplated. Charles proposed that Maigrot should be permitted,
under proper guardianship, to bake a provision of loaves out of this
very flour; and if they proved good, that all that remained of his
property should be restored to him. The crowd rather relished the
idea of waiting the operation, in full prospect of a batch of hot rolls
gratis as the result, and the proposal was received with
acclamations.—Charles immediately singled out Maigrot, as he
stood on the outskirts of the mob, requested him to lead the way
homewards, put a loaf into each arm of his little son, swung a sack of
flour on his own shoulders, and headed the most singular of all the
extraordinary processions which attracted the gaze of Paris in those
times.
The duke of Orleans made no opposition. He saw that the game
was up for this day, and departed in an opposite direction, having no
particular wish to hear the verdict which he knew would be passed
upon the bread, or to witness the exultation of the baker.—Before
night, Maigrot not only felt his head safe upon his shoulders, but was
the most eminent baker in Paris; and, if he had but had any flour
remaining, might have boasted such a business as he had till now
never thought of aspiring to.
Chapter VII.
MOB SOVEREIGNTY.
The endeavours of individuals like Charles to make the people wise

were of little avail, however successful at the moment, in opposition
to influences of a different character which were perpetually at work
upon the mob of Paris. The obstinacy of the king in refusing to sign
the declaration of rights, the imbecility of the ministry, the arts and
clamours of the leaders of different parties, and, above all, the
destitution of which they took advantage, overcame all principles of
subordination, all sentiments of loyalty, and filled the people with a
rage which rendered them as blind to their own interests as unjust
towards those of the ranks above them. Riot and waste spread and
grew from day to day, and the wise saw no more prospect of relief
than the foolish of danger.
The king had been told, on the day the Bastille was taken, that his
capital was in a state of revolution; but, nearly three months
afterwards, he was still wondering what the event might mean;
talking over with the queen the kindnesses he had always intended
showing to his people, and assuring the people’s parliament that the
best thing he could do for them was to preserve his dignity and
prerogative. He could still at Versailles ride abroad unmolested in the
mornings, feast his body-guard in the middle of the day, and look on
while the ladies of the court were dancing in the evening, and sleep
the whole night without hearing the drums and larums which kept all
Paris awake; and could not therefore believe that all would not come
right, when the people should have been persuaded of the atrocious
unreasonableness of the Declaration they wanted him to sign. When
he heard that they drowned their flour in hatred of him, he did all he
could think of in ordering that more should be given them; and when
the queen discovered that which every one would have kept from
her,—that she was hated,—she curled her proud lip, and reared her
graceful head, and thought that the citizens must be ignorant indeed
if they fancied they could understand her springs of action, or
believed that they could intimidate her. With the dauphin at her knee,
she expatiated to the ladies of her court on the misfortune of kings
and queens having any connexion at all with the people beneath
them, whom it was at all times difficult to manage, and who might, as
now, cause serious trouble, and interfere materially with the peace of
royalty. She had at that moment little idea how the peace of royalty
was to be invaded this very day.
A murmur of horror and looks of dismay penetrated even into the
presence of her majesty, when tidings arrived of the approach of an
army of women from Paris.
“Of women!” cried the gouvernante of the dauphin. “Is it because
they can crave bread with a shriller wail?”
“Of women!” exclaimed the lady Alice de Thou. “They come to
plead for the rights of their children. I remember when they brought
the little ones in their arms after the storm, and we gave them all we
had.”
“Of women!” said the queen, thoughtfully. Then, with fire in her
eyes, she continued, looking steadfastly on the trembling
chamberlain who brought the news, “Since they are women, it is my
head they want. Is it not so? Speak. Are they not come for me?”
As soon as the chamberlain could speak, he muttered that he
feared they were indeed not women, but ruffians in disguise.
“Aye, just so,” observed the queen. “Their womanhood is
emblematical; and the hint of their purpose is not lost upon me. I
hope they are indeed men, and can handle arms. I would take my
death more willingly, being shot at as a mark, than being torn to
pieces by the foul hands of the rabble. A death-blow from afar rather
than a touch from any one of them!”
All present, except the chamberlain, were loud in their
protestations against the possibility of any such danger. It was
inconceivable; it was barbarous; it was horrific; it was a thing
unheard of; in short, it was absolutely inconceivable. The
chamberlain mournfully admitted that the whole was indeed
inconceivable to all who had not witnessed the procession, like a
troop of furies from the regions below, taking their way through every
savage district on the earth, and swelling their ranks with all that
could be gathered up of hideous and corrupt. That her majesty’s
sacred person should fall into such hands——
All now began to urge flight, and the queen was for a moment
disposed to listen; but finding that the king was out shooting, had
been sent for, and was expected every instant, she resolved to wait
his arrival, and then it was too late. The poissardes, real and
pretended, had by that time rushed into the place, filled the streets,
stopped up the avenue, and taken up a position of control in the
Chamber of Assembly. The king reached the palace through a back
entrance, in safety, but it was in vain to think of leaving it again.
A hasty council was summoned, consisting of the royal family, and
a few confidential servants, whose attachment to the persons of
majesty might set against the enervating terror which had seized
upon the ministers, and prevented their exerting any influence over
these new and appalling circumstances. Within the circle, rapid
consultation went on in low voices, while some kept watch at the
doors. When discussing the necessity of signing the declaration of
rights,—which was one of the demands of the mob without,—the
queen’s manner and tone were perceived suddenly to change, and
she appeared to make light of the danger under which even her spirit
had quailed but just before.
“Be careful;” she whispered to the person next her. “There is a
creature of the duke of Orleans in the room. I wonder how he got in.”
The lady Alice, who was watching her, followed the glance of her
eye, and saw that it rested on one whom she little expected to see.
“Madam!” she exclaimed, “it is my father!”
“Yes, my child; come to share your loyalty, now that the women
below have made him afraid. If the palace is stormed, he must find a
refuge once more under the Orleans provision-carts, which are, I
suppose, in waiting, as usual. We must give him no news to carry;
and Alice, as soon as he is gone, I must have your head-dress to
wear, as the best protection while your father points the way to us. I
would not, however, be so cruel, my child, as to deck you with mine.
You would lose your pretty head in a trice, and then the marquis

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Politics and Society in Hungary De

Democratization Orbán and the EU 1st

Politics Democratization and Academia in Uganda The

Alexis de Tocqueville Selected Letters on Politics and

Far-Right Ecologism: Environmental Politics and the Far

Civil Society Democracy and Democratization Warsaw

Constitutional Crisis in the European Constitutional

Hungarian Psychiatry, Society and Politics in the Long

The Political Economy of Middle Class Politics and the

Politics and Society in India 1st Edition C. H. Philips

Politics and Society in

ISBN 978-3-658-39825-5 ISBN 978-3-658-39826-2 (eBook)

(De-)Democratization, Party Competition and Structural

Hungarian Foreign Policy 1990 to 2018: Europeanization without

About the Editors

Dr. Melani Barlai Andrássy University Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

Prof. Dr. Astrid Lorenz Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

Astrid Lorenz and Ellen Bos

A. Lorenz (*) · E. Bos

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 1

In order to ensure the separation of powers, a Constitutional Court based on

of political action and has been amended or supplemented without extensive

Party at its 2006 party congress as well as by a financial crisis. Confidence in

2 Confidencein the judiciary is not always surveyed in Eurobarometer surveys. Therefore,

Interestingly enough, despite the theoretically unexpected deterioration in the

3A good overview is given by Bozóki 2002.

Fig. 2 Number of academic publications on the Hungarian political system in English,

4 According to Google, each is an “approximate number.”

3 Structure and Key Findings of the Volume

In his contribution on direct democracy, Zoltán Pállinger illuminates how

György Nyikos describes the development of Hungarian regional policy

4 Conclusion, Open Questions and Research

also includes, as many contributions show, a tendency towards an instrumental

5 See also Lorenz and Anders 2020.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 21

2 Cf.e.g. the Freedom in the World Index (https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world)

2 The Political Development Before 2010—

2.1 The Negotiated Regime Change in 1989

in the relationship between Parliament and government in 1990. The government

2.2 The Political System from 1990 to 2010: Formal

emergence of a bipolar party system, which led to a decreasing fragmentation of

The publication of the speech triggered a wave of demonstrations and protest

on the one hand and representatives of an “archaic vision of Hungariness” on the

3 The Restructuring of the Political System After

The parliamentary elections in April 2010 marked a fundamental upheaval in the

changed. The constitution, the laws, public morality, taboos, commandments,

3.1 Institutional Reforms

p­ rocess. One example of this was an amendment to Parliament's Standing Orders.

165/2011, pp. 41.095–41.181.

By modifying the voting system, its majority-forming and disproportionate

3.2 Comprehensive Exchange of Elites

3.3 Ideological Foundations and Understanding

The ideological foundations of the reconstruction of the system were already

field,” there should be Fidesz as a “single governing party, a central political

The endeavours of individuals like Charles to make the people wise

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3 Structure and Key Findings of the Volume

4 Conclusion, Open Questions and Research

2 The Political Development Before 2010—

2.1 The Negotiated Regime Change in 1989

2.2 The Political System from 1990 to 2010: Formal

3 The Restructuring of the Political System After

3.1 Institutional Reforms

p rocess. One example of this was an amendment to Parliament's Standing Orders.

3.2 Comprehensive Exchange of Elites

3.3 Ideological Foundations and Understanding