The EconomistAugust 31st 2019 191“A
king”,Bruce Springsteen has pointed
out, “ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules every-
thing.” It was to thwart this route to royal
satisfaction that 18th-century thinkers
such as Montesquieu and James Madison
came to prize the separation of powers. If
the setting of policy, the writing of laws and
the administration of justice were the pre-
serve of different people, absolute power
could not end up in one set of hands. This
was especially true if the different
branches of government had some degree
of power over one another. Now it is ac-cepted that a certain amount of friction is
the guardian of freedom in a democracy.
Viktor Orban, the prime minister of
Hungary, has other ideas. In the place of
such strife, he and his colleagues in Fidesz,
the governing party, have over the past
nine years sought to align the executive,
legislative and judicial powers of the state.
Those branches now buttress each other
and Fidesz—sometimes unobtrusively,
sometimes blatantly. Mr Orban refers to
the result of these efforts as the “system of
national co-operation”. He used to speakmore openly of an “illiberal democracy”.
Through this systematic entanglement
of powers Mr Orban and his associates have
turned Hungary into something akin to a
one-party state. They have done so with no
violence at all and broad public support.
The achievement is bad for Hungarian lib-
erty and its long-term prospects—and an
object lesson in what is possible for auto-
crats and would-be autocrats elsewhere.
The subtle workings of the “system of
national co-operation” are testament to the
legal expertise of those who fashioned it,
including Mr Orban. In 1989, when Soviet
power collapsed, he was a law student at
Istvan Bibo College, an elite institution in
Budapest. He was “domineering” but “sin-
cere and likeable”, according to his room-
mate Gabor Fodor, later a political rival. His
daring speeches at the anti-communist de-
monstrations sweeping Hungary quickly
made him one of the leading lights of Fi-
desz, then a liberal student movement.
Mr Orban entered parliament in 1990,
and in 1998 he became prime minister. His
surprise defeat in the 2002 election accel-
erated Fidesz’s growing shift from liberal-
ism towards nationalism. Over the course
of the 2000s the party grew increasingly
jingoistic, and by the time it won again in
2010 its appeal was largely grounded in
Christian culture and ethnic identity. Dur-
ing the migrant crisis of 2015, Hungary be-
came the first country in Europe to build a
fence to keep out Middle Eastern refugees.
Fidesz’s image abroad is dominated by
such demonstrations of nationalist ideolo-
gy. But the legal and institutional creativity
unleashed at home are a more important
part of the story.
In 2010 a wave of anger at the previous
Socialist-led government allowed Fidesz to
win a two-thirds majority in parliament
with just 53% of the vote. This was possible
because of a peculiar electoral system set
up after 1989 in which all citizens had two
votes, one for a one-representative district
and another for a multi-member district.
There were also 64 non-constituency
seats which, as in Germany, are distributed
so as to ensure the make-up of parliament
was proportional to the national vote. In
2010 that topping-up proved unequal to the
task. With the Socialists and several other
parties dividing the rest of the vote, Fidesz
won all but three of the 176 single-member
districts and 84 of the 146 seats in the
multi-member ones. Even with 61 of the 64
top-up seats allocated elsewhere, Fidesz
ended up with 68% of the mps.
The party quickly set about using its
two-thirds supermajority to change the
constitution. It raised the number of jus-
tices on the constitutional court from 11 to
15, appointing four of its own to the new
places. It then lowered the compulsory re-
tirement age for judges and prosecutors,The entanglement of powers
BUDAPEST AND DEBRECEN
How the government of Viktor Orban hollowed out Hungary’s democracyBriefing Hungary