Contents
Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations
ix xiii xvii xix
Diagnosis 1 2 3
Broken Democracy, Predatory State, and Nationalist Populism András Bozóki Hungary’s Illiberal Turn: Disabling the Constitution Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai, and Kim Lane Scheppele Enhancing the Effectiveness of Basic Rights Protection in the Ombudsman’s Activity: Toward a European Type of Ombudsman System Máté Szabó
3 37
47
Symptoms 4 5 6 7 8
Party Colonization of the Media: The Case of Hungary Péter Bajomi-Lázár Captured by State and Church: Civil Society in Democratic Hungary Ágnes Kövér Political Empowerment or Political Incarceration of Romani? The Hungarian Version of the Politics of Dispossession Angéla Kóczé Timike and the Sweetie Pies: Fragmented Discourses about Women in Hungarian Public Life Ágnes Kövér The Rise of the Radical Right in Hungary András Tóth and István Grajczjár
59 81 91 111 133
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Contents
Immune Reaction 9
10 11 12 13 14
Social Responses to the “Hybridization” of the Political System: The Case of Hungary in the Central and Eastern European Context Péter Krasztev The Road of the Hungarian Solidarity Movement János Boris and György Vári Milla: A Suspended Experiment György Petőcz The Rise of the LMP Party and the Spirit of Ecological Movements András Tóth The Hungarian Student Network: A Counterculture in the Making Alexandra Zontea Increasingly Radical Interventions: The New Wave of Political Art in Hungary Gergely Nagy
167 181 207 231 263 291
Life Perspectives 15 16 17
From Belarus to Hungary: Lessons from a Traditionalist Revolution Balázs Jarábik Dark VikTory Joseph B. Juhász Democratic Resurgence in Hungary: Challenges to Oppositional Movement (An Open-Ended Conclusion) Jon Van Til Contributors Index
319 345 367 385 387
Preface
This volume is envisioned as a kind of a guidebook to the contemporary Hungarian political scene. The case of Hungary, the way this country has slowly deconstructed its democratic institutions, which it had gradually built up over the past two decades, makes it unique in the European context. Hungary is not the only country in the region that aborted its democratization processes—but in the other cases the “immune reaction” of the society was activated, and sooner or later these societies removed their authoritarian leaders from power. So, the idea behind this book is to lead the reader through the processes by which many groups of Hungarians have sought to strengthen the “immune reaction” of their society by developing new social movements, political parties, and other grassroots formations in reaction to shocks caused by the new regime. The editors of the collection aim to present the major aspects of the situation and to provide a wider context for it. We begin (Diagnosis) by tracing and analyzing the rise of the Fidesz party and its consolidation as the dominant force in Hungarian society. András Bozóki is a former minister of culture and now a leading political scientist at the Central European University. He sees the regime as having become enmeshed in crony capitalism, in which democratic structures have been hollowed out and replaced by authoritarian elites preaching a gospel of ethnonationalism. Constitutional lawyers Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai, and Kim Lane Scheppele, together on faculty at Princeton, describe the wild processes by which Fidesz cobbled together a jerry-built new constitution for Hungary in the months following its election win in 2010 with a secure parliamentary majority. This section concludes with a contribution by another prominent law professor, Máté Szabó, who reviews his eventful and remarkably successful term as Hungary’s ombudsman.
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In the second section (Symptoms), we look at the current state of several beleaguered groups in Hungarian society: the media, a favorite target for abuse by the regime, as shown by communications scholar Péter Bajomi-Lázár; women, who have increasingly been relegated to backbench roles in post-transition Hungary, as demonstrated by human rights lawyer and sociologist Ágnes Kövér; Romani, who have been given the cheap seats in recent Hungarian democratic policy and practice, as revealed by sociologist Angéla Kóczé (herself Roma); and those in need of social services, who have found themselves needing to turn increasingly to faithbased organizations for social services with the demise of many previously established nonprofit service providers, as noted by Ágnes Kövér in a second chapter. Finally in this section, András Tóth and István Grajczjár turn their attention to the Jobbik party, which has attracted a large group of Hungarians who find comfort and meaning in the ideology and program of the radical right in a time of crisis. The authors of the case studies in the third section (Immune Reaction) deal with a number of important oppositional movements, all flawed, that have arisen in Hungary. Social anthropologist Péter Krasztev opens the section with a chapter on the hybridization of the Hungarian political system and the social responses this has engendered. This is followed by two chapters on movements that flirted with becoming electoral participants: János Boris and György Vári trace the Solidarity movement from its emergence toward an uncertain alliance with the Together 2014 political effort, and György Petőcz writes of the Milla movement. András Tóth follows with an analysis of the political tragedy of LMP, the green movement that lost its way when it sought to become a political party above politics. Alexandra Zontea, a graduate student at the Central European University and a Romanian, examines student protest movements in an ethnographic study originally written for her master’s thesis. And in the final chapter of this section, journalist Gergely Nagy covers the lively scene of cultural expression of protest. Despite differences in professional background, the authors employ similar methodologies: their fieldworkbased research makes for sensitive and informative essays in which they interpret the real motivations behind particular movements and aims of their main actors. In the final section (Life Perspectives), we begin with political analyst Balázs Jarábik’s review of recent history in Belarus, and what this implies about the possibility of Hungary going down the same path. Psychologist Joseph B. Juhász follows with a review of two recent studies in which Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is perceived by his countrymen as father of
Preface
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his country and as political or even mafia boss. An open-ended concluding chapter by American sociologist Jon Van Til addresses the possible futures that lie before Hungary as it awaits its citizens’ decisions. We proudly present the volume in its lively diversity of styles, ranging from the academic tones of Bajomi-Lázár and Zontea through the journalistic strokes of Petőcz, Boris, and Vári to the lyrical and even avant-garde commentary of Juhász. The contributions of our authors reflect the intelligence, wit, creativity, passion, and diversity of intellect that have for centuries made Hungary a distinctive and significant member of the community of nations.
