Europe must stop this disgrace: Viktor Orbán is dismantling democracy | Timothy Garton Ash

The Hungarian prime minister is consolidating his illiberal regime – with the help of European Union funding

When European Union leaders gather in Brussels on Thursday they will have a guilty secret: among them will sit the leader of a member state that is no longer a democracy. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister and de facto supreme leader, will sit there smiling as a democrat among democrats, but in reality he has demolished liberal democracy in his country over the last decade. Adding insult to injury, he has used EU taxpayers’ money to consolidate his illiberal regime. With a new European parliament and fresh institutional leadership in prospect, the EU must show that it will defend democracy in its own member states. Otherwise, all the fine words of article 2 of its basic treaty will be worth nothing.

To say that Hungary is no longer a democracy is a stark claim and I have thought, read and looked hard before making it. Often people apply the term that Orbán has himself used approvingly: “illiberal democracy”. But illiberal democracy is a contradiction in terms. That label may usefully describe a transitional phase in the erosion of a liberal democracy, such as we see in Poland, but Hungary is way beyond that. This year the human rights organisation Freedom House downgraded it to the status of “partly free” country, the only EU member state to earn that dishonour. The most neutral description I can find is that this is a “hybrid regime”, neither democracy nor dictatorship.

The ruling party, Fidesz, has so completely penetrated the state administration that Hungary is again a one-party state

Related: Hungary eyes science research as latest target for state control

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