Has Fascism Landed in Hungary?

The UK’s New Statesman says Hungary, despite its location in the middle of Europe, is no longer a democracy.

I spent a few hours in Budapest once, interviewed no one, and only lingered long enough to get a sense of what the city looks like and how startlingly bizarre the language is, so I’m not even in the same time zone as an expert. But the internal goings-on there have been at the outer limits of my awareness for years, and the place really has been getting increasingly creepy.

The New Statesman can be a bit hysterical sometimes, and I wouldn’t yet call the government there a “regime,” but it’s not looking good.

President János Áder has just signed the implementation decrees for new constitutional reforms that wipe out what was left of opposition forces against the government.

More particularly, the Constitutional Court is no longer allowed to give its opinion about the content of laws and to refer to its own case-law – which results in the loss of almost all monitoring power on the legislature and the executive.

[…]

Only a few days ago, prime minister Viktor Orban officially decorated three extreme right-wing leading figures: journalist Ferenc Szaniszlo, known for his diatribes against the Jews and the Roma people, who he compares to “monkeys”; anti-Semitic archaeologist Kornel Bakav, who blames the Jews for having organized the slave trade in the Middle-Age; finally, “artist” Petras Janos, who proudly claims his proximity to the Jobbik and its paramilitary militia, responsible for several racist murders of Romani people and heiress of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party, that organised the extermination of Jews and Gypsies during the Second World War.

Democracy has shorter and thinner roots in most parts of Europe than it does in America, and it has existed for a much shorter period in post-Soviet Europe than it has in the west. The European Union ought to be able to stop “regimes” from rising up on the continent, but it’s more of a centralized bureaucratic apparatus than a liberal democratic institution.

I wouldn’t lose any sleep over this yet, but what novelist Tom Wolfe said in the 1970s may still be true: that fascism is forever descending on the United States and landing in Europe.