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...
