Changes in the constitution in Hungary?

As a political scientist who has studied Hungarian constitutional changes closely, I can assure anyone that, while Viktor Orban is hardly a "dictator" (an anachronistic term in the contemporary European context), the system of checks and balances between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government has been seriously compromised in Hungary.

The new Hungarian constitution removes extremely important state powers from the hands of the elected officials, and transfers those powers to political bodies which are placed out of reach of the democratically elected parliament - which is as serious a breach of democratic standards as can happen in a nominally parliamentary democracy of contemporary Europe.

For example - a new political body has been created with the purpose of appointing judges to the Constitutional Court - the highest court in Hungary and the only institution that can act as a control mechanism against the government that is virtually all-powerful by holding a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which is enough to scrap the entire Constitution and replace it with a new one (as has happened under Orban).

The head of that body is appointed for a nine-year term, and can be replaced only by a two-thirds majority in parliament. This means that, even if the voters sack the Orban government in next year's elections, the political body that appoints Constitutional Court justices will continue in its present form - because its term is nine years, while parliament's is four - and the democratically elected parliament will be powerless to do anything about Orban's appointees for the next five years if they do not obtain a two-thirds majority (which happens extremely rarely).

This is of course only one example. There have been many other massive constitutional changes that have seriously eroded the system of checks and balances, weakening the judiciary branch and giving inordinate amount of power to the executive branch.

Basically, the UK equivalent of the Hungarian political situation of 2010-2013 would be this. The Tories win two-thirds majority in parliament. This allows them to abolish all documents that form the British informal constitution (Bill of Rights, Act of Union, etc), just as Orban's party has abolished the old constitution, and then writing a completely new Constitution for the UK, completely tailor-made to Tory ideology, utterly ignoring all opposition parties.

Then, if there were a UK Constitutional Court that could be the only institution with the legal authority to contest this new all-powerful government and its tailor-made constitution, the government would tweak the Constitution further to strip the court of its powers, and create a body that would appoint new judges to the court who would be sympathetic to the government.

If anyone is interested, I remember an essay by a Princeton University professor of Constitutional Law and an expert on Hungary - so, hardly what Tibor Fischer would call "a former Hungarian communist who was as Marxist as Al Capone - exploring in detail the serious eroding of democratic standards instigated by the Orban government. Google "Hungary Princeton Constitution" or a similar combination of terms. Then you will likely get a more sober and unbiased, not to mention scholarly, version of this story, unlike this truly superficial and biased article.

LadyinSatin