Hungary: One-party rule

„When he swept to power in April last year, Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, said voters had carried out a revolution by giving his rightwing Fidesz party more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament. Since then, he has stripped his country's constitutional court of the power to review the budget; he has attacked the Hungarian National Bank, the last major institution not under his party's control; and now he has turned on journalists. A national media board has the power to impose crippling fines for coverage deemed unbalanced, immoral or »offensive to human dignity«. People should judge for themselves what colour this revolution is.

Hungary's problems are now Europe's too. As holder of the EU rotating presidency for the next six months, Hungary has many responsibilities: to conclude an EU entry deal with Croatia, to bring Romania and Bulgaria into the Schengen area, to discuss the integration of the Roma community and to agree on better economic governance within the EU. As a rightwing populist who has already provoked the ire of Germany, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg and the OSCE over his media law, Mr Orban is the last person in Europe suited to oversee, let alone host, any of these negotiations. His one contribution to the central European debate has been to raise ghosts of the past by granting citizenship to 3.5m people of Magyar extraction in neighbouring countries, while stopping short of the incendiary proposal by the neo-fascist Jobbik party to give them voting rights.”