Land grabbing and the making of an authoritarian populist regime in Hungary

ABSTRACT

How do authoritarian populist regimes emerge within the European Union in the twenty-first century? In Hungary, land grabbing by oligarchs have been one of the pillars maintaining Prime Minister Orbán’s regime. The phenomenon remains out of the public purview and meets little resistance as the regime-controlled media keeps Hungarians ‘distracted’ with ‘dangers’ inflicted by the ‘enemies of the Hungarian people’ such as refugees and the European Union. The Hungarian case calls for scholarly-activist attention to how authoritarian populism is maintained by, and affects rural areas, as well as how emancipation can be envisaged in such a context.     

The fragility of an independent judiciary: Lessons from Hungary and Poland–and the European Union

When the European Union was founded, it was assumed that all Member States admitted as consolidated democracies would maintain their constitutional commitments. In recent years, Hungary and Poland have challenged this premise as elected autocratic governments in those countries have captured independent institutions and threatened long-term democracy. The judiciaries of these countries have been hard hit. In this paper, we trace what has happened to the judiciaries in Hungary and Poland, showing how first the constitutional courts and then the ordinary judiciary have been brought under the control of political forces so that there is no longer a separation of law and politics. We also explore why the European Union has so far not been able to stop this process. In the end, the European judiciary, particularly the Court of Justice, is attempting a rescue of national judiciaries, but the results are so far unclear.     

‘The battlefield is in Brussels’: Islamophobia in the Visegrád Four in its global context

ABSTRACT

A common popular and scholarly opinion of Islamophobia in the so-called ‘Visegrád Four’ or ‘V4’ (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) sees it as caused by circumstances unique to Eastern Europe. Specifically to blame, it is alleged, is a distinctive local history of intolerance, especially antisemitism, and the fact that under socialism these countries were exempt from the post-war soul-searching that took place in Western Europe. Kalmar’s paper, instead, decentres Islamophobia in the V4 by considering it less as a limited regional phenomenon, and more in terms of how it is linked to Islamophobia in other European Union member states and the United States. As elsewhere, foremost among the conditions that encourage Islamophobia in the V4 is the alienation of certain publics on the periphery, which is an effect of global neoliberal policies. These have generated, along with Islamism and Islamophobia, a reinvented, essentializing discourse of difference between Eastern and Western Europe. In spite of that alleged difference, however, Islamophobic populism in the V4 is not just a regional threat to liberal democracy, but targets all of the European Union and the world.     

Political mobilization in East Central Europe

This article provides an introduction to the special thematic section on political mobilization in East Central Europe. Based on a brief presentation of the main arguments of the individual articles, the authors discuss the recent political volatility in East Central Europe. They highlight the tension between fierce political rhetoric and populist policies on the one hand, and low levels of voter turnout and overall political participation in the region on the other. The authors argue that recent cases of successful as well as unsuccessful political mobilization in East Central Europe point to structural re-alignments in the region’s political landscape. In particular, the parties that are successful are those that manage to communicate their visions in new ways and whose messages resonate with nested attitudes and preferences of the electorate. These parties typically rally against the so-called establishment and claim for themselves an anti-hegemonic agenda. The introductory essay also asserts that these developments in East Central Europe deserve attention for their potential Europe-wide repercussions – especially the idea of “illiberal democracy,” which combines populist mobilization and autocratic demobilization and finds adherents also in more established European democracies.     

An externally constrained hybrid regime: Hungary in the European Union

The paper focuses on the unique, role model characteristics of the Hungarian hybrid regime, the Hungarian political system’s new incarnation forged in the past years’ democratic backsliding process. Following the short review of the main hybrid regime literature and the key analyses putting the democratic quality of the Hungarian political system under the microscope, the paper argues that Hungary’s European Union (EU) membership, the competencies of EU institutions, and the scope of EU law have played a crucial role in the development of the system’s unique characteristics. Based on this argument, the paper qualifies Hungary as an “externally constrained hybrid regime”. However, the EU does not only fulfil system constraining functions regarding the Hungarian regime, but performs system support and system legitimation functions as well. Ultimately, the changing scope of these functions, determined by the European integration’s internal dynamics, influences first and foremost the Hungarian power elite’s strategic considerations about the country’s future EU membership.     

Choosing your own Boss: Variations of Representation Foci in Mixed Electoral Systems

Members of parliament are privileged agents. They can choose who to regard as their principal: the entire nation, a particular electoral district or a political party. Focusing on two countries with mixed electoral systems, Romania and Hungary, the article documents the dominance of the electoral logic of role-formation over the constraints of legislative organisation and the influence of socialisation. The focus of representation is found to be only modestly influenced by the degree of the embeddedness of MPs in political structures and hierarchies. The association of the seat with a particular territorial unit, on the other hand, has a robust effect even when this association originates in the political environment and not in formal rules. Finally, the psychological effect of losing a Single Member District is also found to influence how MPs perceive their representative role.     

István Széchenyi,the casino movement,and Hungarian nationalism, 1827–1848

The establishment of the Nemzeti Casino (National Casino) in Pest helped establish civil society in nineteenth-century Hungary. Count István Széchenyi, hoping to modernize Hungary on the English model, established the casino in 1827 as a public forum for the Hungarian nobility. By transcending caste divisions between nobles and bourgeois elites, Széchenyi's casino served as an unofficial parliament and stock exchange, and generally helped cultivate Hungarian patriotism. The Pest Casino inspired a nation-wide trend for casinos, which in turn formed a civil society in opposition to Habsburg absolutism. Yet when the casino movement spread to Hungary's minority nationalities, Jews, Slovaks, Romanians, and particularly Croats, the casino also contributed to national divisions in Hungary's ethnically diverse population that affected the course of the 1848 Revolution.     

Shadowing the elected: mixed-member incentives to locally oriented parliamentary questioning

It is often suggested in the case of mixed-member electoral systems that legislators with close ties to the single member districts (SMDs) are more constituency oriented than those with weaker ties. This article investigates the effect of three career-related variables (mandate type, tier of candidacy and the number of formerly held SMD mandates) on the constituency orientation of national representatives. The analysis relies on a comprehensive database containing MP-level career information and the number of locally relevant written questions submitted between 2010 and 2013 in the Hungarian parliament. Contrary to expectations, the results suggest that SMD candidates who were elected on party lists tend to ask a larger number of questions with local relevance than SMD MPs. Furthermore, MPs with considerable SMD experience are found to be more constituency oriented only among those who gained their mandates in an SMD.     

The German Parliament

ABSTRACT

In the words of Louis Marie de La Haye Cormenin (1788-1864), the French lawyer, politician and pamphleteer, in the Livre des orateurs (1843), ‘Four people know the secret of the weakness of the parliamentary orator: his doctor, his confessor, his lover and his stenographer’. Stenographers worked for the first time in 1840 in the Upper House of the Hungarian Parliament. The Bureau of Stenographers as a permanent office was established in 1868. For the Upper House and the House of Representatives, a joint Bureau of Stenographers was organized with two superiors, four auditors, twelve ordinary stenographers and two rotation guides. The stenographers worked at five-minute intervals with no backlog of work. The stenographic report of each session was published half an hour later after the last word had been spoken in the session room. The parliamentary stenographer was required to have a university degree and to take a shorthand exam. Journalists, lawyers, professors and also engineers were employed as stenographers. Reproductive intelligence, quick comprehension, responsiveness, and craftsmanship were some of the qualities that were required to be a qualified parliamentary stenographer.     

A disputed land: Italy,the military inter-allied commission and the plebiscite of Sopron

In the fall of 1918, after over four years of war, the cohesion of Austria-Hungary collapsed. In the aftermath of the Great War, Burgenland (Western Hungary) was part of a pattern of complex territorial issues, though it was actually the smallest disputed territory between Hungary and her successor states. The region became a disputed land after the Allied Supreme Council recommended the transfer of most of it to Austria. The internal crisis in Budapest, the Habsburg restoration attempts and the activities of many militia on the ground led to an extremely dangerous situation. Diplomatic and direct military involvement of the Powers eventually resolved the issue with an agreement providing for a plebiscite on the fate of Sopron and the other smaller towns of the region. At least until 1921 Western Hungary represented an element of destabilization in Europe, while its partition was a significant event in the evolution of relations between the two new states of Hungary and Austria, and a testing ground for European diplomacy. The purpose of this article is to highlight the role of Italy in these complex events and to elucidate the contribution of its military in the formulation of clearer political strategy.