The Orbán regime as the "perfect autocracy": The emergence of the "zombie democracy" in Hungary

Abstract

All ECE countries have covered the same historical trajectory of ‘the third­ ­generation autocracy’, but Hungary has been reaching its ‘perfection’, since the two­ ­thirds, constitutional supermajority in the Hungarian case has allowed for the Orbán regime to complete this ‘reverse wave’ in all fields of society and turning it into a zombie democracy. The conceptual frame of this paper is that the decline of democracy and the turn to autocratisation can be presented in ECE in the three big stages of the Easy Dream, Chaotic Democracy and Neoliberal Autocracy in the three corresponding decades. The paper concentrates on the third stage in its three shorter periods taking 3–4 years as the De­‑Democratisation, Autocratisation and De­‑Europeanisation. The Hungarian case has been presented in this paper in a comparative ECE view as its worst­‑case scenario that also sheds light on the parallel developments in the fellow ECE countries.