Hungary’s Backward Slide

„After its decisive victory at the polls in mid-2010, the party seemed on top of the world. The 52.7 percent of the vote it received translated into a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Orban has since turned Hungarian politics and economics upside down. Appealing to age-old nationalist suspicions, government propaganda has come to compare Western banks to Soviet tanks and Brussels to Moscow, while rather lame and much too infrequent criticism from Washington or Berlin is angrily rejected as interference in domestic affairs.

Official Hungary is imagined to be an island surrounded by foreign enemies. Orban, though heading a country that is a member of both the E.U. and NATO, keeps assuring domestic audiences that the West is in terminal decline.

The new basic law, or constitution, entering into force Jan. 1 draws on a golden age of Hungarian history that never was, echoing the professed values of the old Kingdom of Hungary. More dangerously, Parliament has curtailed the power of the Constitutional Court while it has created several councils that could override Parliament in case the current government loses its majority; members of these councils are to serve nine-year terms. The new media law is not only restrictive; it has also reawakened the old self-censorship that helps reporters and editors stay employed and news outlets stay in business.

With no checks and balances left in the new basic law, Hungary is no longer a Western-style democracy. It is an illiberal or managed democracy in the sense that all important decisions are made by Orban. Hungary is similar to Slovakia under Vladimir Meciar and Poland under the rule of the Kaczynski twins.”