What’s Wrong with Hungary?

„I have, to put it mildly, been somewhat astonished at the heated reaction that my blog post »Do Institutions Matter?« has provoked, culminating in a letter from the Hungarian State Secretary for Communication, Zoltán Kovács, to The American Interest complaining about my piece and contesting various points in it. I’m now one of the few Americans to have a web site in Hungarian devoted to my mistakes! In many ways, the vehemence of the response and the extremely uncivil comments that Hungarians have made about each other is a disturbing confirmation that something has gone badly off track with Hungarian democracy.

Let me begin by responding to the criticisms of Mr. Kovács and other commenters about my misunderstanding of the new Hungarian constitution. I readily admit that I made some factual errors, for example that term limits apply to ordinary and not Constitutional Court judges, and for misspelling Fidesz. I’m sorry for this and will be more careful in future fact-checking (this was after all just an unedited blog post).

However, it seems to me that Minister Kovács and the others completely missed the point of my article. Its bottom line was to say that, on paper, the new constitution doesn’t look that bad. As I noted in the post, a classic British Westminster system centralizes far more power in a prime minister and the majority party in Parliament than does the new Hungarian basic law. The problem, I suggested, was not in the formal allocation of powers, but rather in the way that the Orbán government was using those powers. The threat to democracy in Hungary is thus not new institutions per se, but an old political culture that is re-emerging.”