How to build and consolidate a partly free pseudo democracy by constitutional means in three steps: The ‘Hungarian model’

With Orbán’s autocratic constitutional revolution in mind, one may distinguish between three main legal
steps when it comes to establishing and consolidating a partly free, pseudo democracy in a country
where a democratic regime based on the rule of law was previously said to be consolidated: (i) Rewrite
the constitution to make it ‘autocracy-compatible’; (ii) Organise a legislative blitzkrieg, allegedly in the
name of implementing the new constitutional order, so as to conceal a process of capture (or
dismantlement) of all national checks and balances; (iii) Make a strategic use (when necessary) of the
constitution and/or the (captured) constitutional court to further consolidate and/or defend the new
autocratic constitutional order. The lessons one may draw from Hungary’s descent into authoritarianism
under Orbán may help designing more resilient systems so as to prevent additional countries from
experiencing a similar deliberate process of democratic and rule of law backsliding, which in the
Hungarian case, has resulted in the transformation of a previously consolidated democracy into a partly
free, pseudo democracy.