"Illiberal Democracy"

Chapter 7 closed with Fidesz-KDNP holding a two-thirds supermajority large enough to replace Hungary's own constitution outright. This chapter covers what Orbán himself said, in his own words, once that new constitutional order was already in place and freshly re-endorsed by voters — a real, deliberately named political doctrine, not a label applied to him later by critics.

A Second Supermajority

On 6 April 2014, Hungary held its first parliamentary election under a reformed system: the National Assembly itself had been reduced from 386 seats to 199, a structural change made possible by the same 2011 Fundamental Law Chapter 7 already covered. Fidesz-KDNP won 133 of those 199 seats — 66.8% of the chamber, on 44.87% of the party-list vote — narrowly but genuinely retaining the two-thirds supermajority it had first won in 2010. The coalition's own governing mandate, and its own capacity to keep shaping Hungary's constitutional order without needing any other party's cooperation, was real and confirmed for a second consecutive term.

Băile Tușnad, July 2014

Three months later, in July 2014, Orbán delivered an annual address at the Bálványos Free Summer University and Student Camp, held at Băile Tușnad (Tusnádfürdő in Hungarian) in Romania's Transylvania region — a real, long-running summer gathering popular with Hungarian nationalist and right-wing political circles, including ethnic Hungarians living across the border in Romania. It was in this specific speech that Orbán, for the first time, gave his own governing project an explicit name.

He told the audience: "a democracy does not necessarily have to be liberal." He went further, stating directly: "the new state we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state." He elaborated on the reasoning behind it in a longer, real passage: "while breaking with the [liberal] dogmas and ideologies that have been adopted by the West and keeping ourselves independent from them, we are trying to find the form of community organisation, the new Hungarian state, which is capable of making our community competitive in the great global race for decades to come."

The Named Model Countries

Orbán did not present "illiberal" as an abstract or purely rhetorical label. In the same speech, he named specific real countries he pointed to as examples worth studying — Singapore, Russia, Turkey, and China — states he characterized as successful without being organized around Western liberal-democratic principles. Naming these particular countries was itself a real, significant break from the framing every Hungarian government since 1989 had used, one Chapter 4 traced directly back to the country's own explicit turn toward Western/Euro-Atlantic integration during the transition period.

What Changed at Home

The doctrine was not confined to a single speech. Fidesz's own dominance of the media landscape grew substantially over this same period — by 2019, independent reporting found that outlets controlling nearly 80% of the market for political news in Hungary had their financing controlled, directly or indirectly, by the ruling party, and media organizations critical of Fidesz were documented as frequently being purchased or shut down. This is a real, separate and later strand of the illiberal-democracy story — the specific European Union rule-of-law disputes this same era eventually produced, including formal EU action under Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union, are covered directly in the next chapter rather than here.

Hands-On Exercises