6 Lessons You Learn When You Are Living in an ‘Illiberal Democracy’

"Supermajority basically means that they can change any law, even the constitution if they want. The first attack on rule of law came in 2010. When the Constitutional Court annulled a 98% tax imposed on severance pays with a retroactive effect, the government simply prohibited the top court from making decisions affecting taxes. And that was just the beginning. The conservative party wrote a whole new constitution and media regulation while it appointed its people to positions that are supposed to be independent from the executive (president of the republic, president of the court of auditors, governor of the national bank, etc.). Step by step they dismantled the system of checks and balances while the parliament worked as a legislation-rewriting factory.

Viktor Orbán, the prime minister reasoned that these unorthodox measures are necessary if they want to beat “communism” for good. “Communism”, in Orbán’s terminology, is interchangeable with the socialist-liberal regime. The ex-communist socialist party and the anti-communist liberal intelligentsia have been in a strange marriage since 1992. Together they dominated the media since the fall of the communist regime and despised Orbán since he transformed his radical liberal party to a national conservative one between 1994 and 1998. But the authoritarian measures of the Fidesz government went well beyond the limits of any sane reasoning."