Category: Hungary

Hungary’s illiberal victimhood narrative stifling freedom, limiting dissent

     

A change in control at Budapest’s 1956 Institute, prompted by Hungary’s illiberal premier Viktor Orban, is part of a wider trend of stifling academic freedom and limiting public dissent, creating… Read more »

How Hungary’s bright-eyed Fidesz liberals became populist reactionaries

     

To say that Hungary is no longer a democracy is a stark claim and I have thought, read and looked hard before making it, notes Oxford University’s Timothy Garton Ash…. Read more »

The spell is broken: ‘Uberisation’ or renewal for Central Europe’s civil society?

     

After three decades of its functioning in a democracy, civil society in Central Europe has found itself in the need of contemplating its next direction, notes analyst Oľga Gyarfášová. There are… Read more »

How the EU can solve its authoritarian creep

     

A union built to protect democracy faces authoritarian creep. Its leaders are divided over the best response, The Financial Times reports. The anti-democratic tilt in some EU states is an… Read more »

Populist malpractice raises serious concerns about European elections’ integrity

     

For weeks, Europe’s far-right populists have been dashing across the Continent, joining arms and presenting themselves as a united front that will batter the political establishment and score a big… Read more »

What foreign policy approach toward backsliding liberal democracies?

     

Hungary’s illiberal premier Viktor Orban has rewritten Hungary’s constitution and dismantled judicial checks on power, stifled a once vibrant media, forced a top university out of the country, and criminalized the activities of some human rights organizations. Meanwhile, he… Read more »

Illiberal toolkit entails ‘a simulacrum of democracy’

     

Conventional wisdom has long held that democratic consolidation is a one-way street and that democratic states, once reaching a certain level of GDP per capita, are immune to democratic breakdown…. Read more »

Polarization a key factor in democracy’s ‘alarming’ decline

     

The latest Freedom in the World report – compiled by more than 100 experts and drawing on data from 209 countries – describes an “ominous” global erosion of democratic values… Read more »

Democracy & the Illiberal Temptation

     

The world offers more lessons about how democracies grow weak and brittle than how they can be revived, but it should at least be possible to figure out a systematic… Read more »