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The role of populist NGOs in building a populist democracy in Hungary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2024

Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz Open the ORCID record for Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz [Opens in a new window]  and
Zoltán Szente
Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz*
Affiliation:
Research Professor, Director, Institute for Legal Studies, HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences; Professor of Law, ELTE Law School, Budapest
Zoltán Szente
Affiliation:
Research Professor, Institute for Legal Studies, HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest; Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow, European University Institute, Firenze
*
Corresponding author: Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz; Email: orosz.fruzsina@tk.hun-ren.hu
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Abstract

What are the legal and political criteria that distinguish between ‘correct’ and ‘unacceptable’ legal mobilisation? How does populism facilitate legal mobilisation? The questions of the workshop organizers led us back in Hungary to the democratic transition from socialism to liberal democracy in 1989, when legal mobilisation for the rule of law, democracy and human rights was led first and primarily by non-state actors (National Round Table). Participants of the democratic transition prepared the complete revision of the 1949 Constitution, which was an emblematic element in addition to the many legislative drafts of the transitory nature of the creation of the new system. In 2010, after the successful political mobilisation, the populist party coalition (lead by Viktor Orban) gained a two-thirds constitution-making majority in Parliament (in the absence of two opposition parties), and the Parliament adopted the new Fundamental Law (new constitution). This was also an emblematic element of the new legal mobilisation conducted by the two-thirds populist Government majority. This article will describe how populism – through the instrumentalisation of the law (disregarding the inherent values in/of law based on value choice) and the destruction of institutional checks and balances – facilitated new legal mobilisation. Based on this experience of the outcome of the equally strong and effective legal mobilisation in Hungary of the liberal and the illiberal (democratic and autocratic, respectively) transitions, in this article we aim to make valid theoretical propositions on how to assess ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ legal mobilisation and what influences the relevance of non-state actors in populism.

Keywords

populist NGOspopulist democracyHungary
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 20 , Special Issue 3: Populism and Right-Wing Legal Mobilization in Europe , September 2024 , pp. 346 - 359
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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