In this conversation at the Review of Democracy,
András Bozóki – author of the new collection Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia
kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy) – reflects
on what has made the anti-democratic turn in Hungary so effective and discusses
what has surprised him the most about the evolution of the Orbán regime; comments
on the regime’s attempted remaking of Hungarian elite groups and its uses of
ideology to legitimate its rule; evaluates his thesis on the Orbán regime being
an “externally constrained hybrid regime” in light of more recent developments;
and assesses the role of his own generation, the 1989ers, in the longer arc of
history.
 
András Bozóki is Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Central European University and a research affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute. His main
fields of research include democratization, de-democratization, political
regimes, ideologies, Central European politics, and the role of intellectuals.
 
Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of
Autocracy) has been published by Gondolat Kiadó.
 
Ferenc Laczó: You have just released a large and
exciting collection in Hungarian under the title Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról, which might be translated as Breaking Points.
Studies on the Formation of Autocracy. This new volume of some 500 pages collects sixteen important articles that you have authored or co-authored since
2013 and presents them in a largely chronological fashion.
The Orbán regime has clearly been a central concern of
yours. How this regime has emerged, how it operates, how it may be classified, and
what can be said about its international embeddedness—these are all questions
that are repeatedly raised and considered on these pages. You have evidently
been studying a moving target since the early 2010s. I wanted to start our
conversation there: How has your understanding of the Orbán regime evolved over
the years? What was foreseeable to you already back in the early 2010s about
where this regime would be heading, and what came rather as a surprise to you
in more recent years?
András Bozóki:
There was already a de-consolidation of democracy, in the form of increasing
political polarization, between 2006 and 2010. However, according to all
international democracy-measuring institutes, Hungary was still a liberal
democracy up until 2010, despite all the troubles. People were disappointed with
the government of the time; they found it ineffective, and they wanted a more
decisive turn towards what was supposed to be a more democratic system. It was
interesting to see that, while Viktor Orbán started his de-democratization
project quite early on, it was propagated as making the system more democratic.
Forget about the rule of law and all these legal
nuances, or what the Constitutional Court defends, or the ombudsman, all these
legal brakes on the regime. Let the people govern, let the will of the people rule
without any brakes. Autocratization was sold as democratization.
As a political scientist I was surprised by three
phenomena in the process of de-democratization: weak popular identification
with democracy, the effectiveness of political propaganda, and, third, the
radical change in Hungarian foreign policy. 

As someone who used to be a member of Fidesz at the
change of the regime, but left it early, I had no illusions about Orbán. My
surprise is not so much about his behavior as a leader, but about the passive
behavior of Hungarian society. I did not expect that the democratic backsliding
process would go so swiftly, and without much social resistance, I would say. That
was a major disappointment: that people didn’t see the existent democracy as something
worth fighting for, worth defending. They said that democracy is just about a
multiparty system and nothing more. It is not about the spirit of the people, it
is only about weak institutions and corrupt party machineries. They didn’t want
to defend that system. It was easy, retrospectively speaking, for Orbán to
change the regime because the social resistance was surprisingly weak.
My second surprise concerns the effectiveness of
propaganda. I did not believe that propaganda after the 1950s can again be used
for direct political purposes in Hungary, that a country which survived Communism
can go back to daily propaganda. But that happened in 2015 with the migration
crisis and the 2016 referendum afterwards. It was just intolerable. In the late
Communist period, the regime was not propagandistic at all. They had neither
ideology, nor propaganda; it was just based on traditional mentalities. It was striking
to see that propaganda can again be effective, together with the manipulation
of social media, and make citizens change their opinion concerning foreign migrants.
Before 2015, there was no Islamophobia in Hungary at all, unlike some traditional
anti-Semitism. However, the Orbán regime propagated Islamophobia and mixed it
up with anti-Roma sentiments.
And, finally, I did not expect Orbán to become a pro-Putin
politician. I mean, I do not have to tell you that back in the 19th century,
the Russian army destroyed the Hungarian Revolution and struggle for freedom; then,
during the Second World War, they came to Hungary, and there are now accounts
about their activity beyond the fronts, like not only killing people, but raping
hundreds of thousands of women; then crushing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956;
and stationing troops in Hungary for decades. Hungary was not as anti-communist
a country as Poland, but there were strong anti-Soviet sentiments. “Russians,
go home” was a leading slogan of the 1956 Revolution. That Orbán could change
this and make Fidesz supporters pro-Russian, anti-EU, pro-war—that was
something truly unexpected. They may now present themselves as the “party of
peace,” but they actually support Russia’s war against Ukraine and have some invisible
but easily detectable relationship with Putin such as economic and political
collaboration. That has been genuinely surprising.
Orbán currently holds the rotating
presidency of the Council of the EU and is working on the deconstruction of the
Union. The Trojan horse has arrived.
FL: Several pieces included in this new collection
address the regime debate that has been raging concerning Orbán’s rule. As part
of that, you discuss its illiberal and antidemocratic features, and critique
the widely used concept of ‘illiberal democracy’ in particular. You write about
‘electoral autocracy’ instead, and some years ago even formulated the thesis of
a ‘liberal autocracy.’ Which key conclusions would you draw today from those
regime debates? What might be key points of consensus among scholars despite
their different emphases and terminological choices?
AB: The first few
years after 2010 were a shock. What should we call this regime? It was the constitutional
lawyers, plus economist János Kornai, who claimed that the regime is moving
fast towards autocracy. It was the constitutional lawyers—Gábor Halmai, Kim
Lane Scheppele, Imre Vörös, and others—who claimed that there was an unconstitutional
putsch when the new constitution started to be used for anti-constitutional
purposes, when it was used to change the legal system and undermine the rule of
law by 2013. In contrast, political scientists were rather quiet in those early
years. They said: Let’s wait for the elections in 2014 to see whether these early
warnings have been well-substantiated or not.
Political scientists started to speak about electoral autocracy,
or hybrid regimes, only after 2014, when the constitutional lawyers were
already sounding the alarm that this was the end of the rule of law. Political
scientists responded basically by saying, “Fine, but the rule of law is just
one side of the story. What about free elections and the will of the people?” But,
as it turned out, we could not consider the 2014 elections honest elections. It
was free, but unfair. And that opened the way to the regime debates, which
dominated the mid-2010s in Hungarian political science.
There were several interesting approaches, such as the
concepts of ‘mafia state’, neo-Bolshevism, re-feudalization, prebendalism,
illiberal democratic capitalism, plebiscitary leader democracy, transmuted
fascism, party-state, post-fascism, populist electoral autocracy and the likes.
Also a distinction has been made between regime and rendszer – ‘regime’ and
‘system’, though the meaning of the Hungarian distinction does not translate
well into English – or concerning the practices of the political formula
vis-à-vis the formalities of institutional order. There were a lot of different
approaches.
At this point Orbán proudly came up with the notion of ‘illiberal democracy.’ In English,
‘illiberal’ sounds pretty derogatory. I do not think Orbán felt that it was
that way. He wanted to state that “We want to keep democracy but make a break
with liberalism.” But illiberal democracy means something else: it is not a democracy
but a sort of hybrid regime. Still, not only Orbán but some political scientists
in Hungary also wanted to argue that ‘illiberal democracy’ is just a form of
democracy: there is a Western liberal democracy and there is a non-Western
democracy which might be illiberal but is equally legitimate. I did not like those
attempts. I did not think they were scholarly.
I realized that being
in the EU, there is a stronger defense of the rule of law from European Union
institutions than from domestic elements. When people were prevented from initiating a referendum in Hungary in
early 2016, I clearly felt that this meant the end of any sort of democracy. But
maybe there is a new form of autocracy which keeps some sort of remnants of
liberalism due to the constraints of the European Union. So, I was venturing
with the concept of ‘liberal autocracy’ around the time. It is not my invention, Fareed Zakaria and Larry Diamond were debating it
back around the turn of the millennium. Hong Kong was called a liberal
autocracy, even the ideal type of a liberal autocracy when human rights were
respected, but there was no democracy because the government was not elected by
the people—though Diamond thought that having a liberal autocracy was
illusionary.
Around 2015, I met Dániel Hegedűs, a younger colleague
of mine. As an expert of EU politics, he pointed out the dubious role of the EU
toward Hungary. We realized that the unparalleled specificity of this regime is
indeed that it is located within the EU, and we have to focus on the interplay
between Hungary and the European Union. Since EU legislation has domestic
impact in Hungary, we cannot fully separate these two entities: following the
principle of subsidiarity, some parts of sovereignty are given up by each Member
State. So let us see what the consequences of EU membership are. Concerning
Hungary, we came up with the proposition of an externally constrained – but
also supported and legitimized – hybrid regime.
There was a huge debate about the latter notion too, whether
‘hybrid regime’ makes sense or not. It is a bit too broad of a category, but it
was suitable for covering those years when Hungary was no longer a democracy,
but not yet an autocracy. We can still use it today: if the Hungarian state is an
electoral autocracy, it is still part of the hybrid regime category on the
authoritarian end of the spectrum. Our article gained remarkable international
attention and it came to be seen as our statement.
In the years since 2018, these regime debates have
slowly lost significance and lost their importance. Everything has been said, I
think. The new consensus may be that nobody calls Hungary a modern democracy
anymore. People realize that there was de-democratization, democratic erosion,
backsliding – whatever you want to call it. More recently, academics have been
talking about autocratization, not democratic backsliding, which can be a
backsliding within democracy whereas autocratization trespasses the line
between democracy and autocracy.
I should add that this volume just collects some of
the articles I wrote at different moments in time between 2013 and 2023. I see
how naïve I was at certain points. I tried to correct myself later and was
correcting myself again after that. Of course, I did not want to change what I wrote
ten years ago, so this collection also shows how my thinking has changed.
The lesson I learned from the debate on the nature of
the regime is that a purely political science approach and the use of purely
political science concepts are not enough to understand the Orbán regime. You
need to have historical and sociological knowledge, and an interdisciplinary
approach is needed. In Embedded Autocracy: Hungary in the European Union, the book I have
just co-authored with Zoltán Fleck, we combine political science concepts with
sociological approaches to conclude that the Orbán regime might be an electoral
autocracy politically speaking, however it can be called an embedded autocracy from
the social point of view.
FL: The collection focuses extensively on how
Hungary’s antidemocratic turn has unfolded in the early twenty-first century.
The decline of democracy in the country has been conspicuous, making Hungary a
rather notorious case even in global comparison. What do you view as critical
junctures during this process of de-democratization? And what might explain the
overall effectiveness of such an anti-democratic turn in Hungary?
AB: On the one
hand, it was a smooth change. On the other, there were some critical junctures,
some breaking points. I think that, as I said, many people did not value
democracy, or better to say, they had different understandings of democracy. I
think that the twenty years between 1990 and 2010 were a shining moment in the
history of Hungary – in a history stretching over a thousand years, we had two
decades of liberal democracy, and I feel fortunate to have been part of this
story.
Having said that, part of the answer is that this
democracy was not without problems. To put it this way, the government lost
credibility right after 2006 and they lost the 2008 referendum. People really
wanted a change of government, or maybe an early election which the government
refused to hold. They just did not feel the danger; they felt that there was
just a normal crisi

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