Hungary’s new prime minister has launched a formal campaign to dismantle what he describes as Viktor Orbán’s “mafia state” — a sweeping institutional reform programme targeting the media, judiciary, and public prosecutor’s office that Orbán’s Fidesz party spent fifteen years remoulding in its own image. The new government, which took office following Orbán’s surprise parliamentary defeat in April, has promised to restore judicial independence, unwind the media concentration that handed friendly oligarchs control of the information landscape, and return Hungary to what its leaders call the “rule-of-law track” required for full EU funding. The scale of the undertaking is genuinely enormous. Orbán did not merely win elections; he rebuilt Hungarian institutions so that a future government without a supermajority would struggle to undo what he had done with one.
The received wisdom
The liberal-democratic framing of Hungary’s post-Orbán transition is understandably euphoric. For those who have spent a decade arguing that Orbán represented a model of democratic backsliding that other European populists would imitate, his parliamentary defeat is vindication — proof that even consolidated illiberal democracies remain susceptible to electoral accountability when opposition forces organise effectively. The EU institutions that threatened, delayed, and conditionally released billions in cohesion funds on rule-of-law grounds can point to some leverage, even if the mechanism was slow and leaky. The mainstream commentary now focuses on how quickly the new government can restore the institutional preconditions for a normal democratic polity — competitive courts, plural media, independent prosecution — and how quickly European partners can reintegrate Hungary into the cooperative structures from which Orbán had partially withdrawn.
A different read
The euphoria is understandable but the challenges ahead should be stated plainly, because they test something important about whether liberal democracy in Central Europe has the institutional depth to recover from sustained assault — and the answer is genuinely uncertain.
The problem Orbán created is not primarily political. Political problems can be resolved politically: you win an election, you pass new laws, you appoint new ministers. The structural problem is that Orbán succeeded in making the institutions themselves partisan. Hungarian courts are not merely staffed with Fidesz sympathisers; they were expanded, restructured, and given lifetime appointments specifically to resist future reform. The public media system is not merely biased; it was transferred to legally independent foundations structured so that no future government can simply reverse the ownership without triggering drawn-out legal challenges. The constitutional court was packed, and the constitution itself was amended to require supermajorities — which the new government does not have — for many of the changes it wants to make.
This is the enduring problem of “autocratisation by increment”: because each step seemed manageable or reversible at the time, no single decisive moment demanded maximum resistance. Collectively, the fifteen-year accumulation of changes created a trap that a new government with a simple parliamentary majority cannot easily escape through normal legislative means.
There are precedents that cut both ways. Poland’s post-PiS recovery under Tusk has been instructive: a determined government can make meaningful progress on judicial independence despite legal obstacles, particularly when EU institutions provide political and financial leverage. But Poland’s recovery has also been slower, messier, and more constitutionally ambiguous than its enthusiasts initially promised — involving workarounds and executive manoeuvres that themselves raised rule-of-law concerns in some legal opinions. The lesson is that democratic restoration is not a clean process; it involves fighting institutional fire with institutional tools that may not always be pristine.
What Hungary’s new government must avoid is the temptation to fight state capture with mirror-image capture — replacing Fidesz loyalists with loyalists of the other kind, and justifying this on the grounds that the old occupants were illegitimate. That logic is seductive, politically convenient, and ultimately corrosive. The standard is not “better than Orbán” but “genuinely independent.” History is littered with reformers who dismantled one state capture apparatus only to install their own.
The EU’s role here is crucial but double-edged. European funding conditionality gave the opposition leverage during its campaign, but it also gives Brussels leverage over the new government — and that leverage will be exercised through a bureaucracy that has its own institutional preferences, which are not always identical with democratic pluralism as understood by Hungarians themselves. The renegotiation of Hungary’s relationship with EU institutions should be watched carefully for whether it produces genuine institutional independence or merely a different version of external dependency.
What to watch
- Constitutional court appointments: Whether the new government succeeds in filling vacant seats with genuinely independent jurists, or faces Fidesz-backed legal challenges to its appointment procedures, will determine the institutional trajectory.
- Media ownership reversals: The timeline for unwinding Orbán-era media foundation structures is a concrete test of whether legal obstacles are insuperable or merely difficult.
- Fidesz opposition tactics: Orbán will not disappear; he will lead an aggressive parliamentary opposition and contest every reform through every available legal channel. Watch whether he retains sufficient public support to make the new government’s position fragile.
- EU funding release: Whether Brussels releases frozen cohesion funds quickly — and on what specific conditions — will signal whether the EU views this as a genuine partnership or an opportunity for structural leverage.
— J