April 12, 2018
Democracy is much more fragile than we thought. That's a lesson a lot of post-communist Europe (and heck, the rest of the world, too) is learning right now, none more so than Hungary. Things are so bad there, in fact, that it probably doesn't even make sense for them to talk about this in the present tense anymore. Which is to say that Hungary's democracy is pretty much dead. Sure, it still has free elections, but not fair ones. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has rigged the rules in his favor to such an extent — everything from turning the state broadcaster into a propaganda outlet to changing how elections are decided so they're easier for him to win to even some eyebrow-raising vote totals in a few districts — that his Fidesz party was just able to capture the two-thirds super-majority it needed to rule unimpeded with only 48 percent of the vote. At this point, Hungary might be best described as a dictocracy: a de facto one-party state where others are allowed to compete in elections only on such unequal terms that they basically have no chance of winning. The scariest part, though, is how quickly all this has happened. It was just a decade ago, after all, that Hungary looked like an end-of-history success story. There had been the inevitable bumps along the way, but it had nonetheless managed to move from communism to free-market democracy better than most.
Now, there are two things to understand here. The first is that Fidesz, which has always been just a vehicle for Orban's ambitions, was only one of many right-of-center parties during the country's first foray into multiparty democracy during the 1990s, and not even the most prominent among them. The second, as Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt has shown, is that democratic breakdowns are often preceded by conservative ones. That's because the absence of a strong party on the right makes it easier for anti-system politicians — those who evince little interest in democratic niceties such as minority rights, the rule of law or even elections themselves — to either take over the system for their own purposes or elbow it aside. Their new slogan is “Hungary First.” Hungary, in other words, is not fascist, but it's not not fascist either. It's somewhere in between, in a place we don't have a good word for yet but will need soon if things keep going this way.
