Hungary

Does It Help to Call a Spade a Spade? Examining the Legal Bases and Effects of Rule of Law-Related Infringement Procedures Against Hungary

“…The government has centralised power within the executive, turned the National Assembly into a rubber-stamp parliament and considerably weakened the Constitutional Court. Besides, it adopted an electoral law designed to favour Fidesz and passed several laws to strengthen the government's influence over the media and to curb the activities of civil society organisations (Ágh 2018;Priebus 2016). As a result, the former democratisation frontrunner is considered a prime example of rule of law backsliding 1 or even autocratisation (see Chapter 12).…”

Examining Illiberal Trends and Anti-EU Politics in East Central Europe from a Domestic Perspective: State of Research and Outline of the Book

“…When the Fidesz-KDNP party alliance won a two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament in 2010, it named the elections a "revolution at the ballot box", mandating the new government to overhaul the constitutional order of the country. Since then, it has exploited its legislative dominance to undermine the independence of the judiciary, curbed the media and increasingly suppressed civil society actors (Bánkuti et al 2012;Batory 2015;Priebus 2016;Scheppele 2013Scheppele , 2015. As the Prime Minister explicitly stated in 2014, he aims to establish a new illiberal state (Orbán 2014) and he wants to break with the "dogmas" that have been adopted by the West as this will secure Christian values, cultural conservatism and a true Hungarian way of governing.…”