This article addresses the concept of ‘constitutional moment’ in contemporary Israel, where an illiberal constitutionalisation process is in progress, and in Hungary, where the illiberal constitutional system has been in place since 2010. After discussing the judicial overhaul of the current Israeli government and the widespread protest movement against it, the article raises the question of whether the moment to adopt a written constitution has arrived. In Hungary, where a semi-electoral autocratic constitutional regime has been entrenched, the question is what are the perspectives on a return to a liberal democratic constitution.

Although all constitutional issues are political in essence, ‘political constitutionalism’ as a school is specifically critical of court-centred understandings. Such a school of political constitutionalism has emerged in Chinese constitutional debates since 2008. Its rapid development has both enriched and challenged Chinese constitutional studies, but it has also left certain impacts on the political reality of China. Is this school comparable to the Western political constitutionalism tradition and how is ‘the political’ defined? By discerning three political registers from the school’s main arguments as the ‘constitutional moment’, ‘polity’ and ‘governance’, this article aims to critically examine the aims and functions of political constitutionalism in China and to argue that while constitutional reflexivity requires contestability, the political registers of this wide-ranging school in fact deny it.