How to Build and Consolidate a Partly Free Pseudo Democracy by Constitutional Means in Three Steps: The ‘Hungarian Model’

Abstract

With Orbán’s autocratic constitutional revolution in mind, one may distinguish between three main legal steps when it comes to establishing and consolidating a partly free, pseudo democracy in a country where a democratic regime based on the rule of law was previously said to be consolidated: (i) Rewrite the constitution to make it ‘autocracy-compatible’; (ii) Organise a legislative blitzkrieg, allegedly in the name of implementing the new constitutional order, so as to conceal a process of capture (or dismantlement) of all national checks and balances; (iii) Make a strategic use (when necessary) of the constitution and/or the (captured) constitutional court to further consolidate and/or defend the new autocratic constitutional order. The lessons one may draw from Hungary’s descent into authoritarianism under Orbán may help designing more resilient systems so as to prevent additional countries from experiencing a similar deliberate process of democratic and rule of law backsliding, which in the Hungarian case, has resulted in the transformation of a previously consolidated democracy into a partly free, pseudo democracy.

Keywords: Authoritarianism, autocracy, constitutionalism, constitutional capture, constitutional court, democracy, liberal democracy, rule of law, rule of law backsliding