From ‘illiberal democracy’ to autocracy : how Covid-19 helped to destroy the remnants of democracy in Hungary

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to describes how the illiberal government of Hungary introduced autocratic measures as a reaction to the Corona virus. Even the less destructive nature of the first wave of the COVID-19 in Hungary provided a pretext for the Orbán government to dismantle the remnants of democratic character of its already ‘illiberal’ state by introducing almost unlimited emergency power of the executive. The misuse of crisis situation again raise the question, whether ‘illiberal democracy’ is the proper conceptual frameworks to describe the perils of new authoritarianism, and also whether the transnational responses, for instance that of the European Union towards its backsliding Member States can adequately cope with them.