A demokrácia lebontása Magyarországon [The dismantling of democracy in Hungary]

Most scholarly accounts of the “System of National Cooperation” built since 2010 in Hungary by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán tend to focus on three partially overlapping levels: legal, economic, and geopolitical. Through the fast-track approval of a new Constitutional Charter, imposed by a two-thirds parliamentary majority in 2011 without the consent of the political opposition, the Orbán government has started to implement a legal appropriation responsible, according to critics, for the emptying of the rule of law or, according to a less radical interpretation, for the transformation of the rule of law into the “rule by law” typical of authoritarian constitutional regimes.Several years ago, Ágnes Bátory described post-2010 Hungary as a “gray area suspended between liberal democracy and full authoritarianism,” while Béla Greskovits described the painful stations of Hungarian “democratic backsliding” compared to other Central European states. Others theorized the adoption for Hungary of a “guided-democracy” political framework á la Putin’s Russia. Following the self-definition provided by Orbán himself in 2014, scholars of the populist phenomenon analyzed the transformation of the country into a “laboratory of illiberal democracy.” András Bozóki and Daniel Hegedüs have defined Orbán’s system as a “hybrid” subject, suspended between democracy and full-fledged authoritarianism and at least partly mitigated in its radicalization drive by external factors, such as EU and NATO membership. The conservative doyen of Hungarian political scientists, András Körösényi, who previously defined the Orbán government as a “regime” inextricably tied to the figure of the founding leader and therefore incapable of evolving into a “system,” in his latest book takes up Weberian sociology to describe Orbán's system as a “plebiscitary leader democracy,” a regime whose authoritarian elements are produced by an endogenous push to harness the mechanisms of modern mass democracy. After much reluctance, the conservative Körösényi has finally adhered to the anti-exceptional thesis, according to which Hungarian “plebiscitary” democracy based on the undisputed authority of the leader fits into a transnational tendency of manipulation of democratic mechanisms. Hungary then becomes a laboratory for global trends such as the extreme personalization of policy, the emergence of populist governance models (“pragmatic populism”), and the vanishing of the liberal-democratic order in the age of “post-truth.”Heino Nyyssönen’s book is part of the more general scholarly attempt to measure the emergence, the internal mechanisms, and the future perspectives of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary against Western democratic standards. The author is a professor of political science at the University of Turku and has been acquainted with Hungarian affairs since the mid-1980s, when he first visited the country on the eve of the transition from one-party system to Western-type liberal democracy. Although recollections, emotions, and personal feelings can be spotted throughout the two-hundred-page book, Nyyssönen’s ambition is to provide a scholarly account of Hungary’s democratic backsliding under Orbán by contributing an external (Finnish), albeit empathic, perspective to the global debate over why and how apparently consolidated democracies die.The book is divided into six large thematic chapters, covering the evolution of the Hungarian political system from 2010 onward (chapter 1), the politics of memory and the political instrumentalization of history (chapter 2, by far the best one), foreign and regional policy (chapter 3), economic life and the institutionalized corruption (chapter 4), the media system and the use of state propaganda (chapter 5), and the future perspectives of the Orbán system after the 2018 general elections (chapter 6, the author’s closing remarks). To build up his argument, Nyyssönen utilizes extensive bibliographic research. Although archival evidence from the last thirty years still remains largely inaccessible, the book relies on a wide range of published sources: parliamentary minutes, newspapers and periodicals, and Hungarian and international secondary literature. However, what the reader gets is neither a comprehensive historical account based on systematic research, for Nyyssönen chooses not to follow a chronological order of events, nor a political-science analysis of how the system actually works. Unfortunately, no background conversations or formally recorded interviews have been used, and press coverage is restricted to print editions: quite a tight self-limitation in a country where print media have been experiencing a fast and early decline to the benefit of online outlets. The book is rather a fuzzy combination of historical- and political-theory approaches, which makes it pleasantly legible but generates serious shortcomings.Nyyssönen’s book is about power (13–16)—or rather about the systematic abuse of power perpetrated by the political system of Prime Minister Orbán in the name of the nation. This long-term backsliding has placed Hungary into the unenviable position of being the first member of the European Union to be downgraded by Freedom House to “partly free” and “semi-consolidated democracy” status. Although the book is not a biography of Viktor Orbán, the author identifies the main source of the phenomenon in Orbán’s Machiavellian personality: he is a cleverly maverick adept of Machtpolitik who has taken advantage of the structural and contingent shortcomings of post-1989 Hungarian democracy to get rid of it and build up his own power system. The author makes extensive use of the global literature of democratic backsliding and neo-authoritarian regimes, but often underestimates and misinterprets the recent history of Hungary. The most striking example is the political, social, and democratic crisis of confidence following the September–October 2006 events. It is described (36–37) as solely the consequence of the nationalist riots sparked by the far right and secretly supported by Orbán’s Fidesz party. Here the author seems to follow the reductive narrative of the Hungarian liberal left on the long-lasting crisis of the postcommunist Hungarian democracy.Nyyssönen puts the blame on one political side and its main actors, failing to explain the worsening economic situation since 2003–04, compared to the rest of the region. Nor does he acknowledge the harsh fiscal consolidation implemented by Hungarian Socialist Party Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány after winning the 2006 elections on an entirely different set of promises. The left-liberal parliamentary majority between 2002 and 2010 was no mere bystander or innocent witness to the decline of the Hungarian political culture. As the governing force for almost a decade, it bears serious and concrete responsibility in propelling the events that led to the subsequent unmaking of postcommunist democracy. Critical literature on the economic and social policies of the pre-2010 decade is scanted here; he ignores relevant contributions from authors like József Böröcz, Zoltán Pogátsa, Péter Róna, and Gábor Scheiring, while his exposition of the manifold reasons for the rise of the far-right party Jobbik would have benefitted from the use of new field research (such as that by Dániel Róna).Other major inaccuracies occur in the chapter covering foreign and regional policy. I was surprised to read that Prime Minister József Antall’s famous remark about being spiritually responsible for “15 million Hungarians” triggered territorial revisionism and nationalism all around the region (102). Whatever our opinion of Antall’s performance might be, one must admit on the basis of archival evidence that in his capacity as a statesman Antall never made any attempts at border revision. This is even more remarkable as radical conservative circles within his own party had tried to push him to take advantage of the dissolution of multiethnic states bordering Hungary to regain Ukrainian Subcarpathia or parts of Serbian Vojvodina. This and several other interpretative errors could have been avoided by using international and domestic literature on kin-state policies. There is a huge expertise on this topic gathered around Attila Z. Papp, Nándor Bárdi, and the staff of the Institute for Minority Studies, formerly placed under the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, these international-level contributions have been overlooked, to the detriment of the quality of the analysis on key issues like policy vis-á-vis neighboring countries or the relation to global capitalism and Western investors.The closing remarks are among the most interesting of the book. Although Nyyssönen does not identify himself with this radical standpoint, he quotes Hungarian-born sociologist Frank Füredi and his fierce criticism of “postcolonial” EU conditionality on Eastern European states (169). Unsurprisingly, this theoretically crafted EU-critical perspective was taken up by young right-wing intellectuals and Fidesz ideologists like Márton Békés and Áron Czopf to legitimize the intellectual rebellion against the paradigm of “Europeanization” imposed on EU peripheries. A few lines below, the author echoes the complaint made by Polish historian Jan Zielonka that triumphant liberals after 1989 did not bother to defend their own democratic achievements and thus condemned themselves to fell victim to the cultural “counterrevolution” of globally spreading illiberalism. And according to Nyyssönen (170–71), the case of Hungary bears analyzing because of its prescience, both in 1989 and in 2010, setting general trends from the internal periphery of the European continent. This could be a good starting point for a comparative discussion of postcommunist trajectories in Central and Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, the analysis of the Hungarian deviation from the democratic path remains anchored to the barely hidden patronizing attitude of a Finnish scholar explaining to his Hungarian fellows what democracy should look like. Nyyssönen’s book depicts the discursive struggle between the nationalist, narrow-minded “Hungarian Europe” of Viktor Orbán and the irenic “European Hungary” that shall sooner or later replace it. This is beautiful rhetorical artifice indeed, but it does not hold the strong explanatory capacity we might expect from a book claiming to tell us how democracy could have been destroyed from within and with significant mass consent.

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