https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/09/07/viktor-orbans-mandate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
The Hungarian prime minister has succeeded through democratic means
When Hungary declared a state of emergency in March to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, commentators in the West immediately spread the news that the European Union’s first dictatorship had arrived. Parliament was suspended. There would never be elections again. Hungary’s health-care system would collapse because its prime minister, Viktor Orban, had given the nation’s money away to cronies and squandered more of it in a doomed attempt to make soccer more popular. Criticism of the government was forbidden, forevermore. Political arrests would begin. A colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, Dalibor Rohac, wrote in the Washington Post that, absent a major pushback from Brussels and Washington, D.C., Hungary would emerge “a full-fledged dictatorship.” The U.S. political analyst Liz Mair — no fool, I think — confidently predicted of Orban, “He’s going to wind up putting Gypsies in permanent detention.”
Of course all of this was wrong. There was no diplomatic pushback. Brussels gave a preliminary ruling that the emergency law contained no threat to democracy; it was passed constitutionally. Hungary experienced its relatively small surge of cases and deaths, but its hospital system survived, even if it’s not up to Western European standards, and did just fine. Orban’s rule by decree included scoring some opportunistic points: He rushed through a park renovation opposed by a mayor of the opposition party and made it so that state-issued ID cards carry the birth sex of the holder. If these are abuses, they are more mild than the attempt by California governor Gavin Newsom to make rent-control schemes permanent through emergency powers. Two Hungarians were detained by police departments for criticizing the government, suspected of breaking laws against spreading misinformation during the pandemic. In each case it was determined that they had committed no crime, and they were released. By comparison, a law against online disinformation in Angela Merkel’s Germany is so broad and censorious that Russia and the Philippines cite it as a model they would imitate.
