Some Additional Readings on Hungary (Tab Clearing)
For anyone who might be interested.
I had started compiling this list when writing my recent posts on US right-wing obsession with Orban and then added a few more for future reference.
Here they are for anyone who is interested:
- Matthew Shugart (2011) at his blog Fruits and Votes: Hungary’s new constitution and Hungary’s new electoral system
- Kim Lane Scheppele (February 2014) writing at Paul Krugman’s blog at the NYT: Hungary, An Election in Question, Part 2 (part of a five part series that starts here).
- Transparency International (April 2014): Hungary’s Elections: Free but not Fair
- The NYT in 2018: In Hungary, Disunity and Gerrymandering Frustrate Anti-Orban Voters
- Vox (2018): It happened there: how democracy died in Hungary
- Journal of Democracy (2018): Explaining Eastern Europe: Orbán’s Laboratory of Illiberalism
- The NYT in 2019: A Friend to Israel, and to Bigots: Viktor Orban’s ‘Double Game’ on Anti-Semitism
- Foreign Policy in 2020: Hungary’s Democracy Is Still Under Threat
- NYT (April, 2021): Hungary Transfers 11 Universities to Foundations Led by Orban Allies
- NYT (June, 2021): Hungary Adopts Child Sex Abuse Law That Also Targets L.G.B.T. Community
The manipulation of the electoral system as detailed in the first several links is really key to understanding how and why Hungary has moved out of the democratic column. Elections alone are not enough to make a democracy.
I will continue to note that those who are willing to praise Orban and his ilk because they fight the “woke” and protect preferred elements of “culture” are either willfully ignorant or (more likely) value their own specific cultural values over democratic governance (which is why I find them worthy of notice and of criticism).
Illiberal governance, even wrapped in electoralism, is still a system wherein discrimination and even persecution in given state sanction.
I suspect that people protecting preferred elements of culture because of valuing their specific cultural values over democratic governance aren’t all that rare. If they were, the “leopards eating my face” meme probably wouldn’t exist.
I still laugh whenever anyone says “X going woke” as though that’s some kind of a new thing.
“Going KKK” wasn’t a term in the 1800’s.. lynching Those People was just The Way It Was Done when blacks had the temerity to vote in Wilmington NC in 1898 or be not poor in Tulsa in 1921.
The only difference is that now the establishment’s crackdown is noticed and called out – and the alternative is presented, even if of course that alternative isn’t represented accurately.