Heineken beer, Helsinki Committee and the Central European University in Budapest have recently all been the object of the Hungarian government’s unfavourable attention. It tried to ban the beer on the pretext that the red star on the can was a totalitarian symbol, to restrict the workings of the well-known NGO, and passed a new law designed to close the renowned private university, whose fate still hangs in balance.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán embodies the reactionary populist politics gaining ground in many parts of the world. In a well-publicised speech in 2014 he had declared with pride that his country was an “illiberal state”, and asserted later that the Trump revolution happened in Hungary, the country that led the global backlash against liberalism. Extolling the virtues of the nation, church and family, Orbán has positioned himself as the defender of Christian Europe against hordes of Muslim migrants. With Orbán taking a leaf out of Putin’s authoritarian book, and Poland currently modelling itself on Hungary, one may well ask if illiberal democracies are there to stay in Central Europe.

Between 2010 and 2013 the government led by Orbán enacted some 700 laws that rolled back economic liberalisation: property rights were selectively whittled away and vast tracts of EU-subsidised agricultural land redistributed to party functionaries. Policies, which initiated a massive recentralisation of economic and political power, were devised to benefit domestic businesses with close ties to the ruling Fidesz Party. The systematic subversion of checks and balances followed a careful design of “lawfare”, i.e. legislation passed in ad hoc fashion without public scrutiny or proper legislative deliberation. First, a new constitution was enacted that weakened all checks on majoritarianism. Next, the system for nominating judges to the Constitutional Court was altered to subvert the independence of the judiciary. Then, the electoral framework was changed to make it impossible for any other party to win. The National Election Commission was brought under Fidesz control to curb civil society referenda. Further, by appointing only high party officials to the office of the President, Orbán ensured that presidential powers would not be used to block governmental initiatives. Finally, new laws were enacted to guarantee political control of all media through a regulatory agency exclusively manned by party loyalists. At their own peril can the European Union and European People’s Party (EPP) continue to turn a blind eye to this transformation of the “rule of law” into “rule by law”.

But whether illiberal democracies take root in Europe will depend in large measure on whether the EU continue to tolerate Orbán’s transformation of Hungary into a “mafia state”.

A new law assaulting academic freedom, passed in unseemly haste in April 2017, threatens the very existence of the Central European University (CEU), whose professors were called “officers of an occupying army” by former Fidesz Minister Péter Harrach. The discriminatory law targeting the CEU is of a piece with the systematic erosion of the autonomy of all universities in the country. Hungary has seen state expenditure on higher education systematically decline since 2010, with a reduction of 25% between 2010 and 2013. Large funding cuts at all Hungarian state universities have paved the way for the installation of government-nominated “chancellors” tasked with making managerial decisions but de facto determining academic appointments. The result is an alarming decline in student enrolment, which fell by 24% between 2010 and 2014 and a staggering 45% in 2016 alone.

Orbán’s government has embarked on a programme of nationalising science, founding, notably, the National University of Public Service, a training ground for the new cadres of the regime. The governor of the Hungarian National Bank has, tellingly, utilised the bank’s resources to establish a new economics university in his hometown, whose curriculum includes his own theories. With channels of social mobility within the country blocked, 600,000 of the better educated have exited in the past four years. Their voice is now missing from domestic politics. Emigration can thus become an avenue to eliminate unwelcome critics. But liberal democracy cannot survive in the absence of free public debate and spaces of dissent, which autonomous universities provide. It needs strong, financially independent counter-majoritarian institutions, which advocate diverse, even unpopular, positions. The 70,000 demonstrators marching through Budapest last April, chanting “Free country, free university” in support of the CEU, clearly recognised this, while the state television ignored them, broadcasting instead a programme praising fishing in Hungary.

Democratisation is evidently not the linear, teleological process that modernisation theory, and its reincarnation, the postcommunist transition paradigm, would have us believe. Nor is democracy inevitably coupled with liberalism. The EU may be in no position to influence the course of illiberal, majoritarian, elected regimes in Russia, India, Venezuela, or the United States. But whether illiberal democracies take root in Europe will depend in large measure on whether the EU and the EPP continue to tolerate with impunity Viktor Orbán’s undermining of separation of powers, erosion of civil and political liberties, transforming Hungary into a “mafia state” – a term coined by Bálint Magyar, a former Hungarian minister. Reactionary ideologies and authoritarian rule often take root as much due to their popular appeal as to the opportunism and hypocrisy of their liberal opponents.


Shalini Randeria
Professor of Anthropology and Sociology
Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy

This article was published in Globe, the Graduate Institute Review