The Trojan Horse Has Arrived - András Bozóki on Autocratization, External Constraints, and the Role of His Own Generation

RevDem Podcast

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, András Bozóki – author of the new collection Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy) – reflects on what has made the anti-democratic turn in Hungary so effective and discusses what has surprised him the most about the evolution of the Orbán regime; comments on the regime’s attempted remaking of Hungarian elite groups and its uses of ideology to legitimate its rule; evaluates his thesis on the Orbán regime being an “externally constrained hybrid regime” in light of more recent developments; and assesses the role of his own generation, the 1989ers, in the longer arc of history.

András Bozóki is Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Central European University and a research affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute. His main fields of research include democratization, de-democratization, political regimes, ideologies, Central European politics, and the role of intellectuals.

Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy) has been published by Gondolat Kiadó.

Ferenc Laczó: You have just released a large and exciting collection in Hungarian under the title Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról, which might be translated as Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy. This new volume of some 500 pages collects sixteen important articles that you have authored or co-authored since 2013 and presents them in a largely chronological fashion.

The Orbán regime has clearly been a central concern of yours. How this regime has emerged, how it operates, how it may be classified, and what can be said about its international embeddedness—these are all questions that are repeatedly raised and considered on these pages. You have evidently been studying a moving target since the early 2010s. I wanted to start our conversation there: How has your understanding of the Orbán regime evolved over the years? What was foreseeable to you already back in the early 2010s about where this regime would be heading, and what came rather as a surprise to you in more recent years?

András Bozóki: There was already a de-consolidation of democracy, in the form of increasing political polarization, between 2006 and 2010. However, according to all international democracy-measuring institutes, Hungary was still a liberal democracy up until 2010, despite all the troubles. People were disappointed with the government of the time; they found it ineffective, and they wanted a more decisive turn towards what was supposed to be a more democratic system. It was interesting to see that, while Viktor Orbán started his de-democratization project quite early on, it was propagated as making the system more democratic. Forget about the rule of law and all these legal nuances, or what the Constitutional Court defends, or the ombudsman, all these legal brakes on the regime. Let the people govern, let the will of the people rule without any brakes. Autocratization was sold as democratization.

As a political scientist I was surprised by three phenomena in the process of de-democratization: weak popular identification with democracy, the effectiveness of political propaganda, and, third, the radical change in Hungarian foreign policy.

As someone who used to be a member of Fidesz at the change of the regime, but left it early, I had no illusions about Orbán. My surprise is not so much about his behavior as a leader, but about the passive behavior of Hungarian society. I did not expect that the democratic backsliding process would go so swiftly, and without much social resistance, I would say. That was a major disappointment: that people didn’t see the existent democracy as something worth fighting for, worth defending. They said that democracy is just about a multiparty system and nothing more. It is not about the spirit of the people, it is only about weak institutions and corrupt party machineries. They didn’t want to defend that system. It was easy, retrospectively speaking, for Orbán to change the regime because the social resistance was surprisingly weak.

My second surprise concerns the effectiveness of propaganda. I did not believe that propaganda after the 1950s can again be used for direct political purposes in Hungary, that a country which survived Communism can go back to daily propaganda. But that happened in 2015 with the migration crisis and the 2016 referendum afterwards. It was just intolerable. In the late Communist period, the regime was not propagandistic at all. They had neither ideology, nor propaganda; it was just based on traditional mentalities. It was striking to see that propaganda can again be effective, together with the manipulation of social media, and make citizens change their opinion concerning foreign migrants. Before 2015, there was no Islamophobia in Hungary at all, unlike some traditional anti-Semitism. However, the Orbán regime propagated Islamophobia and mixed it up with anti-Roma sentiments.

And, finally, I did not expect Orbán to become a pro-Putin politician. I mean, I do not have to tell you that back in the 19th century, the Russian army destroyed the Hungarian Revolution and struggle for freedom; then, during the Second World War, they came to Hungary, and there are now accounts about their activity beyond the fronts, like not only killing people, but raping hundreds of thousands of women; then crushing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956; and stationing troops in Hungary for decades. Hungary was not as anti-communist a country as Poland, but there were strong anti-Soviet sentiments. “Russians, go home” was a leading slogan of the 1956 Revolution. That Orbán could change this and make Fidesz supporters pro-Russian, anti-EU, pro-war—that was something truly unexpected. They may now present themselves as the “party of peace,” but they actually support Russia’s war against Ukraine and have some invisible but easily detectable relationship with Putin such as economic and political collaboration. That has been genuinely surprising.

Orbán currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU and is working on the deconstruction of the Union. The Trojan horse has arrived.

FL: Several pieces included in this new collection address the regime debate that has been raging concerning Orbán’s rule. As part of that, you discuss its illiberal and antidemocratic features, and critique the widely used concept of ‘illiberal democracy’ in particular. You write about ‘electoral autocracy’ instead, and some years ago even formulated the thesis of a ‘liberal autocracy.’ Which key conclusions would you draw today from those regime debates? What might be key points of consensus among scholars despite their different emphases and terminological choices?

AB: The first few years after 2010 were a shock. What should we call this regime? It was the constitutional lawyers, plus economist János Kornai, who claimed that the regime is moving fast towards autocracy. It was the constitutional lawyers—Gábor Halmai, Kim Lane Scheppele, Imre Vörös, and others—who claimed that there was an unconstitutional putsch when the new constitution started to be used for anti-constitutional purposes, when it was used to change the legal system and undermine the rule of law by 2013. In contrast, political scientists were rather quiet in those early years. They said: Let’s wait for the elections in 2014 to see whether these early warnings have been well-substantiated or not.

Political scientists started to speak about electoral autocracy, or hybrid regimes, only after 2014, when the constitutional lawyers were already sounding the alarm that this was the end of the rule of law. Political scientists responded basically by saying, “Fine, but the rule of law is just one side of the story. What about free elections and the will of the people?” But, as it turned out, we could not consider the 2014 elections honest elections. It was free, but unfair. And that opened the way to the regime debates, which dominated the mid-2010s in Hungarian political science.

There were several interesting approaches, such as the concepts of ‘mafia state’, neo-Bolshevism, re-feudalization, prebendalism, illiberal democratic capitalism, plebiscitary leader democracy, transmuted fascism, party-state, post-fascism, populist electoral autocracy and the likes. Also a distinction has been made between regime and rendszer – ‘regime’ and ‘system’, though the meaning of the Hungarian distinction does not translate well into English – or concerning the practices of the political formula vis-à-vis the formalities of institutional order. There were a lot of different approaches.

At this point Orbán proudly came up with the notion of ‘illiberal democracy.’ In English, ‘illiberal’ sounds pretty derogatory. I do not think Orbán felt that it was that way. He wanted to state that “We want to keep democracy but make a break with liberalism.” But illiberal democracy means something else: it is not a democracy but a sort of hybrid regime. Still, not only Orbán but some political scientists in Hungary also wanted to argue that ‘illiberal democracy’ is just a form of democracy: there is a Western liberal democracy and there is a non-Western democracy which might be illiberal but is equally legitimate. I did not like those attempts. I did not think they were scholarly.

I realized that being in the EU, there is a stronger defense of the rule of law from European Union institutions than from domestic elements. When people were prevented from initiating a referendum in Hungary in early 2016, I clearly felt that this meant the end of any sort of democracy. But maybe there is a new form of autocracy which keeps some sort of remnants of liberalism due to the constraints of the European Union. So, I was venturing with the concept of ‘liberal autocracy’ around the time. It is not my invention, Fareed Zakaria and Larry Diamond were debating it back around the turn of the millennium. Hong Kong was called a liberal autocracy, even the ideal type of a liberal autocracy when human rights were respected, but there was no democracy because the government was not elected by the people—though Diamond thought that having a liberal autocracy was illusionary.

Around 2015, I met Dániel Hegedűs, a younger colleague of mine. As an expert of EU politics, he pointed out the dubious role of the EU toward Hungary. We realized that the unparalleled specificity of this regime is indeed that it is located within the EU, and we have to focus on the interplay between Hungary and the European Union. Since EU legislation has domestic impact in Hungary, we cannot fully separate these two entities: following the principle of subsidiarity, some parts of sovereignty are given up by each Member State. So let us see what the consequences of EU membership are. Concerning Hungary, we came up with the proposition of an externally constrained – but also supported and legitimized – hybrid regime.

There was a huge debate about the latter notion too, whether ‘hybrid regime’ makes sense or not. It is a bit too broad of a category, but it was suitable for covering those years when Hungary was no longer a democracy, but not yet an autocracy. We can still use it today: if the Hungarian state is an electoral autocracy, it is still part of the hybrid regime category on the authoritarian end of the spectrum. Our article gained remarkable international attention and it came to be seen as our statement.

In the years since 2018, these regime debates have slowly lost significance and lost their importance. Everything has been said, I think. The new consensus may be that nobody calls Hungary a modern democracy anymore. People realize that there was de-democratization, democratic erosion, backsliding – whatever you want to call it. More recently, academics have been talking about autocratization, not democratic backsliding, which can be a backsliding within democracy whereas autocratization trespasses the line between democracy and autocracy.

I should add that this volume just collects some of the articles I wrote at different moments in time between 2013 and 2023. I see how naïve I was at certain points. I tried to correct myself later and was correcting myself again after that. Of course, I did not want to change what I wrote ten years ago, so this collection also shows how my thinking has changed.

The lesson I learned from the debate on the nature of the regime is that a purely political science approach and the use of purely political science concepts are not enough to understand the Orbán regime. You need to have historical and sociological knowledge, and an interdisciplinary approach is needed. In Embedded Autocracy: Hungary in the European Union, the book I have just co-authored with Zoltán Fleck, we combine political science concepts with sociological approaches to conclude that the Orbán regime might be an electoral autocracy politically speaking, however it can be called an embedded autocracy from the social point of view.

FL: The collection focuses extensively on how Hungary’s antidemocratic turn has unfolded in the early twenty-first century. The decline of democracy in the country has been conspicuous, making Hungary a rather notorious case even in global comparison. What do you view as critical junctures during this process of de-democratization? And what might explain the overall effectiveness of such an anti-democratic turn in Hungary?

AB: On the one hand, it was a smooth change. On the other, there were some critical junctures, some breaking points. I think that, as I said, many people did not value democracy, or better to say, they had different understandings of democracy. I think that the twenty years between 1990 and 2010 were a shining moment in the history of Hungary – in a history stretching over a thousand years, we had two decades of liberal democracy, and I feel fortunate to have been part of this story.

Having said that, part of the answer is that this democracy was not without problems. To put it this way, the government lost credibility right after 2006 and they lost the 2008 referendum. People really wanted a change of government, or maybe an early election which the government refused to hold. They just did not feel the danger; they felt that there was just a normal crisi