DE-EUROPEANIZATION AND DE-DEMOCRATIZATION TRENDS IN ECE: FROM THE POTEMKIN DEMOCRACY TO THE ELECTED AUTOCRACY IN HUNGARY

Abstract

The decline of the "deficit democracies" in East-Central Europe has accelerated during the global crisis. Nowadays it is rather difficult to find the proper term for these hybrid polities between democracy and non-democracy. The main tendency is the growing gap between the formal democracy and substantial democracy that has been hollowing out the democracy and deepened into DeEuropeanization and De-Democratization. This tendency has been the most evident and visible in Hungary as a worst-case scenario, since after the 2010 elections a genuine Potemkin democracy has emerged in Hungary with a democratic façade but with a quasi "one-party rule" behind that has turned by the 2014 elections into an elected autocracy. In the other ECE countries this decline has been much less marked, but the fusion of economy and politics has still taken place with the increasing public-political role of oligarchies, reaching even the government level. The decline of democracy - with this emptied Potemkin democracy and its oligarchical elite party politics - has generated deep dissatisfaction of the ECE populations and it has led to the collapse of the first party systems in the series of the "critical elections.

Headnote

The decline of the "deficit democracies" in East-Central Europe has accelerated during the global crisis. Nowadays it is rather difficult to find the proper term for these hybrid polities between democracy and non-democracy. The main tendency is the growing gap between the formal democracy and substantial democracy that has been hollowing out the democracy and deepened into DeEuropeanization and De-Democratization. This tendency has been the most evident and visible in Hungary as a worst-case scenario, since after the 2010 elections a genuine Potemkin democracy has emerged in Hungary with a democratic façade but with a quasi "one-party rule" behind that has turned by the 2014 elections into an elected autocracy. In the other ECE countries this decline has been much less marked, but the fusion of economy and politics has still taken place with the increasing public-political role of oligarchies, reaching even the government level. The decline of democracy - with this emptied Potemkin democracy and its oligarchical elite party politics - has generated deep dissatisfaction of the ECE populations and it has led to the collapse of the first party systems in the series of the "critical elections.

Key words: de-democratization, de-Europeanization, informal institutions, state/agency capture, democracy capture, chaotic democracy, elected autocracy.

1 INTRODUCTION: THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY IN THE ECE COUNTRIES "IN-BETWEEN"

The decline of democracy has been a common tendency in the ECE polities in general and in the ECE party systems in particular. Nowadays the ECE countries are "in-between", i.e. somewhere between democracy and non-democracy. Although this historical trajectory has been largely described in the international scholarship, it has still remained a very much-contested issue among the ECE academics due to the high national sensitivities and the apologetic efforts of the incumbent governments. The international political science has discussed the ECE region in terms of declining democracy at least since the 2007 Special Issue of Journal of Democracy (Rupnik 2007). On the occasion of the Ten Years of the EU Membership the ECE democracy decline has recently been reviewed by the 2013 Special Issue of East European Politics and Society (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013) and by the 2014 Special Issue of Journal of Common Market Studies (Epstein and Jacoby 2014).2

This decline has been confirmed and well-documented by the big ranking institutions, like the Bertelsmann Foundation, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the Freedom House (FH, with Nations in Transit, NIT Reports) and the likes. At the first glance, indeed, there has been a growing gap between the formal democracy and substantial democracy from the very beginning of systemic change as widely documented by the Freedom House and the EIU year by year. This gap has led to the increasing between tension between the level of socio-economic development and the policy performance of these countries, indicated by the contrast between the situation index (SI) and management index (MI) of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI). These comprehensive assessments have also been supported by the data on the growing corruption in ECE by the Transparency International and many other international institutions on the low trust in political elites. Finally, this basic contradiction has generated the decreasing competitiveness, described in the annual reports of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Institute of Management Development (IMD), so this "matrix" of historical trajectory has been completed by their worsening global rankings. Thus, despite the national sensitivities in the ECE countries and the apologetic views of the loyal experts around the national governments, the "medical check-up" of these countries has indicated serious socio-economic and political crisis as a converging assessment of all relevant international policy institutes.3

Moreover, the international media has also reported from the ECE countries about the electoral landslides and the high corruption scandals, and about the demonstrative actions of the oligarchs in and around the governments. These events have been accompanied by the decreasing popularity of the ECE parties and governments and by the increasing apathy, mass protest, radicalism and Euroscepticism among the populations generating a huge trust gap between the elite and the citizens. The loyal analysts in ECE can close their eyes before these developments, they can bagatelle them and/or enlist only the achievements, but in such a way "the lack of the deep substance of democracy remains largely and voluntarily unobserved" in ECE (Papadopoulos 2013, 2). The denial of this negative tendency just aggravates the situation, since it prevents to discover the causes of democracy decline. In the international political science, however, there has been a large variety of possible explanations with competing conceptual frameworks and terminologies for characterising this special situation in the "East" as hybrid/deficit democracies, semi-authoritarian systems, the tendencies of national-social populism, Euroscepticism, social deanchoring, crony or patrimonial capitalism/democracy, informal politics/networks, unorthodox parties etc. All these terms and theories point to the same direction by describing the same situation of the democracy decline, backsliding or "regression of democracy" from various sides.

As a result, in the political science the study about the Democratization and Europeanization of the ECE countries has entered the Age of Uncertainty. There are big troubles around the democracy definitions, between the positiveoptimistic and negative-pessimistic assessments of their recent developments. Many new terms have been whirling around with basically different - thin and thick - criteria of democracy and with the ensuing contradictory evaluations. The mainstream analyses have used the polite terms as hybrid, deficit or halfdemocracy, since some negative issues are too evident, first of all in the ECE parties and party systems. The increasing corruption and decreasing trust in politics and politicians can be already seen on the surface, but they have been treated in most cases separately and not in their organic connections as the systemic features that demonstrate the "deep decline" in the new democracies. In order to avoid the negative evaluations, many studies go back to the minimalist definition of democracy as the electoral democracy with "free" and "fair" elections and with the basic human rights. Supposedly this allows for qualifying these polities as democracies, but at the high price by neglecting both the "unfair", illusionary, non-representative character of the elections and the actual socio-political exclusion of large masses, which also prevent them enjoying their "individual freedoms".

However, beyond these shy and loyal explanations, it is obvious that in the broad set of the literature based on a systematic review of the main positions, nowadays more and more international criticism concerns those regimes that are as a result of "hybridization" somewhere "in-between". These regimes are placed somewhere between democracy and non-democracy, and the latter may be termed as illiberal democracy, semi-authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism and quasi dictatorship. On one side, according to the recent political science literature these hybrid regimes, that have been combining characteristics from both democracies and dictatorships, can also be found in ECE. On the other side, not only democracies but also the various soft kinds of dictatorships are still a widespread phenomenon even in Eastern Europe. Many dictatorships, in order to legitimise the regime, allow for some sort of manipulated and/or controlled elections e.g. as electoral autocracies and competitive authoritarianisms. Hence democracy and dictatorship have been nowadays under-theorised, given the fact that dictatorships could have embraced some core elements of democracy, while democracies could have been hollowed out by developing some authoritarian features. It is not enough any longer separating only the two main forms of regime types from each other in a simplistic way as analytical devices, i.e. describing democracy merely as the opposite to dictatorship. The theory of democracy needs a new systematization by providing definitions of both democracies and non-democracies as theoretically funded conceptualization with all sub-types in-between, since the usual analyses often lack the traits of the holistic or systemic approach. However, democracies and dictatorships, and their hybrid variants or sub-types in-between, can only be systematized by nuancing the earlier radical, mutually exclusive distinction between democracies and dictatorships. The systematization implies also that the emergence of hybrid democracy a process, but earlier only the transition to democracy was studied, whereas nowadays the systematization includes the transition from democracy to the authoritarian regimes. The various regimes as in-between sub-types have also to be geographically-regionally clustered e.g. in the ECE case (Lidén 2014, 50, 53].

Altogether, it is rather difficult to find the proper term for these hybrid polities between democracy and non-democracy in ECE. Basically, there are two models of explanation of democracy decline that may be described in the terms of the EU convergence and divergence. Democratization and Europeanization are, indeed, the two sides of the same coin, although De-Democratization (De-Dem] and De-Europeanization (De-EU] are also the same. The first model is evolutionary and optimistic, and it was dominant for a long time in the ECE literature. This explanatory model presupposes that the ECE countries have basically converged with the EU. There has also been a catching up process in economic, social and political terms, although with some hesitations, weaker forms and partial setbacks. The second model is backsliding-oriented and pessimistic, and it has recently become more influential. This new innovative model argues that the ECE countries have basically diverged from the Western trajectory, and therefore their EU membership has just reproduced the age-old East-West Divide "at a higher level". The second model in fact treats the controversial ECE development as a particular kind of underdevelopment in the semi-periphery. The above mentioned two Special Issues on the Ten Years (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013; Epstein and Jacoby 2014] represent an opening towards the innovative second model that will be further discussed and developed in this paper.4

This new approach raises additional questions about the opposite processes of the Democratization and "De-Democratization" (De-Dem] as well as the Europeanization and De-Europeanization (De-EU]. In this approach the "relative" De-Dem and De-EU means lagging behind in the EU when the convergence still dominates. The "absolute" De-Dem and De-EU are the process, in which already the divergence dominates in many policy fields. The relative De-Dem and De-EU presupposes that the distance between East and West may even be growing, but they still go in the same direction and on the same road. In this case, despite the continued lagging behind instead of catching up, altogether the evolutionary-convergence model works. However, the absolute De-Dem and De-EU suggest that even if there are new developments and achievements in some fields, the basic historical trajectory is the divergence from the mainstream Western Road that appears also in the losing global (economic] competitiveness and in the distorted socio-political structures in ECE. This situation has strengthened the broad arguments that "history matters" and "political culture matters", even the stronger argument of "path dependency" (Pierson 2004) that has been widely discussed in the recent international literature (see e.g. Benoist 2011; Kailitz 2013; Lilia 2014; Moeller and Skaaning 2013; Pappas 2014).

Correspondingly, in the first decade of systemic change the relative De-Dem model must have been working rather well, but in the second decade it became much less appropriate to evaluate the ECE development. In the third decade, however, the missing crisis-resilience during the global crisis has proven that the absolute model has only been suitable for the adequate assessment, since the historical deviation has been manifest as the basic divergence between East and West. In the ECE regional trajectory a special kind of hybrid democracy has emerged with more and more non-democratic features because the state/agency capture has been accomplished in the form of democracy capture. It has been discovered in the recent literature that the state/agency capture by the business and party oligarchs has led to a chaotic democracy with a relative power paralysis of the ECE states that has provoked the temptation that the leader in a guided democracy restores law and order. Therefore, I would like to elaborate further the second model in this paper towards theorising the democracy capture, in which a quasi-monopolistic power centre uses the formal institutions of democracy only as a Potemkin wall, a democratic façade to legitimise the regime inside and outside.

2 Quo VADIS EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE? - THE ECE FERRY MOVING EASTWARDS?

2.1 The relative De-Dem: the changing faces of modern democracy

The current democracy debate since the late 2000s has transformed completely the theoretical landscape of European Studies. This debate has embraced all states in the world and it has been basically about "the quality of democracy" with a high complexity of indicators by many international ranking institutions. It has grown out partly from the domestic developments of the most developed - first of all Nordic - states as their new quality of democracy, partly from the pressure of global crisis that has produced a "crisis resilience test" for all states based on their global competitiveness strictly connected with their particular type of democracy. The issue of the quality of democracy was raised even before the crisis, but it received a new, extended meaning of crisis-resilience by the social sustainability and investment to social and human capital. Thus, sustainability with social progress and social cohesion represented the new paradigm also for the EU, and this new approach was combined with the evaluation of global competitiveness in the individual member states. The EU proceeded with its "beyond the GDP" program before the outbreak of the global crisis and completed it with the elaboration of the EU2020 Strategy and with the introduction of the new statistical devices to measure human and social capital. Obviously, due to the global crisis all these novelties have been later even more strengthened in the ensuing debates.5

Worse of all, despite new demands for global competitiveness in human and social capital the ECE countries have not been able to switch from the GDP based traditional economies to the social progress based economies, accordingly they have not shown sensitivity for the new criteria for democracy. Just to the contrary, the ECE economy has performed worse in the period "beyond GDP" than before, since - instead of the knowledge triangle - the social exclusion-disintegration-fragmentation triangle has grown. In a word, by the mid-2010 the democracy has been drastically "hollowed" out for the large part of the ECE populations. It has become a legal formality of the electoral democracy and basic human rights with a democratic façade of fightingcompeting oligarchies, instead of the European mainstream of democracy with the multilevel governance (MLG) and multidimensional governance (MDG) as summarized in the EU2020 Strategy.6

Thus, this third debate in the period of the running globalization has expressed the shared experiences of the ECE countries and it has discovered their common weaknesses. First, the tremendous changes in ECE have not come organically from inside but arrived from outside as a tsunami or "imported crisis". The transformation crisis originated from the collapse of the East-West confrontation in the bipolar world, the post-accession adjustment crisis was generated by the EU entry process, and finally the competitiveness crisis broke out due to the global fiscal crisis. There have been only half-made, controversial reactions of the ECE countries to these external challenges in the triple crisis: first the democratic transition had not been properly completed; second, the "anticipatory" Europeanization and later the "adaptive" Europeanization had remained unfinished; and third, the global crisis explored the vulnerability of the ECE countries and it has deeply fragmented the ECE societies. The EU has only exerted a limited effect on these new member states because there has been a large capacity of the national administrations to modify, accommodate and neutralize or even resist the Europeanization pressure. An evergreen statement in the European Studies is that the EU had much more capacity to pressure the NMS in the pre-accession stage than afterwards, in the membership period. It has also been often repeated that the resistance of the ECE populations to these permanent and disturbing transformations has produced a "reform fatigue".7

As it has been mentioned above, there are two seminal books on the Ten Years, representing the turning point in the ECE literature towards the divergence model. In the 2013 volume the essence of the third debate has been formulated very markedly as an introduction to the "absolute" De-Dem in ECE: "Today the focus of political and academic debates is no longer on democratic transition or consolidation but on the quality of democracy." (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013,11) even in ECE. Consequently, the optimistic and evolutionary approach of democratization as the relative De-Dem model from the first two stages of democracy debate cannot be applied nowadays for the recent situation of the ECE countries. Also the short and formalistic Copenhagen criteria preparing the accession cannot be considered as sufficient for the evaluation of the QuarterCentury development in ECE either. The new criteria for democracy are even more important within the EU for ECE given both its often-mentioned "crisis" and the increasing Core-Periphery divide. Consequently, the academics have "refuted the kind of optimistic determinism, suggesting that the collapse of communism and the victory of Western liberalism would make a swift convergence between the east and west of Europe the most natural development." (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013,19).

Instead of swift convergence of ECE - that I called earlier as the Sleeping Beauty scenario - there has been a new kind of divergence within the EU, creating a special kind of ECE development path for the "Eastern Periphery" with a Decent Cinderella scenario. So instead of the relative and De-Dem model, the latest analyses have turned to the absolute De-Dem model. Originally, the ECE populations reacted to the collapse of the authoritarian rule with a "revolution of high expectations", so under the label of democracy they expected a Western welfare state "overnight", therefore after the Quarter-Century the disappointment has been tragic. In brief, in the divergence model with the deeper analysis of the absolute De-Dem suggests that the changes have only scratched the surface, since the complex transformation have led to a power vacuum with a fragmented, low capacity, weak state as a chaotic democracy and a sleepwalking modernizing elite. This paper tries to summarize this basic historical deviation in ECE in the terms of the absolute De-Dem that has generated also an absolute De-EU, in order to emphasize that the expected evolutionary and linear processes have not taken place. Just to the contrary, the actual processes of Europeanization and Democratization have been combined and counterbalanced by the opposite tendencies in the Quarter-Century of systemic change and in the Ten Years of the EU membership.

3 The ABSOLUTE DE-DEMOCRATIZATION: façade democracy AND STATE CAPTURE IN ECE

No doubt, an external observer or an outsider may get an impression at the first glance that everything looks nice in ECE, since the ECE political system given its democratic façade seems to be democratic. But at a closer look at least the contrast between the formal and the substantial democracy becomes visible, since the hardware (institutions) and software (patterns of political culture) of democracy collide. The formal institutions of democracy should have been built on the citizens' political culture in the participative democracy, since it could have filled them with content, but the citizens' political culture is still missing. Thus, there has been no "housewarming party" so far in the building of new democracies. The formal democratic institutions have remained the "Palace of Winds" (Jaipur), just a decorated façade looking at a street. In the ECE façade democracies the formal institutions have been constructed but they have not been embedded into the society as a whole, as the term of "Sand Palaces", the "institutions built on the moving sand" have indicated in the literature.

Nevertheless, the turbulent events in ECE in the last decade due to the collapse of the first party systems, and their short-lived governments, have pointed towards the accelerated decline of democracies. With the emergence of the second party systems in ECE after the "critical elections" the state capture through the deepening of the oligarchization has become even more evident, since the huge socio-economic actors have turned more and more powerful also in politics. It has opened a new horizon in the analysis of democracy decline towards the conceptual framework of state/agency capture. Moreover, the international and domestic tendencies have collided in ECE, because the ECE countries, instead of meeting the new criteria for democracy during the above discussed third debate, have even declined more and more to the Potemkin democracy with this increasing oligarchization. This new, controversial situation in the ECE democracy has been deeply analysed in the RupnikZielonka paper (2013) offering fresh overview of the twenty-year history of democratization in ECE. They have described this conflict between the new external criteria for democracy and the internal democracy decline in ECE by using the conceptual frame of informal institutions. The overview of their comprehensive analysis may lead us further to the well-known theory of state/agency capture that widens the picture on the decline of democracy, since it incorporates also the main tendency of oligarchization in ECE. These "informal networks" have led, in my view, finally to the complete "democracy capture" by the powerful joint political-business groups.

The point of departure in the analysis of Rupnik and Zielonka is that the ECE countries had embarked on a democratic transition in the nineties and were considered consolidated democracies in the 2000s when they joined the EU. But the pendulum according to Rupnik and Zielonka has swung back to some kind of authoritarianism and therefore these new democracies have to be assessed after a Quarter-Century as semi-authoritarian. The ECE countries have developed a reform fatigue, and they have not been ready for the new political transformations, therefore they have become vulnerable first to a populist turn then to an authoritarian turn of their elitist, oligarchy-prone parties in their over-centralized states. This backsliding of democracy or "democratic regression" has come as a surprise for most analysts who defined democracy very narrowly in the spirit of nineties as just some formal institutions in the young democracy. Namely, so far the "political scientists have devoted considerable attention to the study of formal institutions in the region such as parties, parliaments and courts. However, informal institutions and practices appear to be equally important in shaping and in some cases eroding democracy, and we know little about them." (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013, 3).

Hence, Rupnik and Zielonka, for explaining the reasons of backsliding, have put the contrast of formal and informal institutions at the centre of their analysis. They have pointed out the weakness of the former assessments by the simple fact that the political debates across the region have missed "the role of informal politics in undermining formal laws and institutions", although the formal democratic institutions "perform differently in different political cultures because of informal codes and habits". As a result, "Over years, students of Central and Eastern Europe have acquired a comprehensive set of data on formal laws and institutions, but their knowledge of informal rules, arrangements, and networks is rudimentary at best." The formalist-legalist approach is misleading, since "informal practices and structures are particularly potent of Central and Eastern Europe because of the relative weakness of formal practices. Informal practices and networks gain importance when the state is weak, political institutions are undeveloped, and the law is full of loopholes and contradictions. (...) The rule of law is replaced by the rule of informal ad hoc arrangements orchestrated by people who have no accountability operating in a mode of dirty togetherness." Therefore, "cultural anthropologists are probably more suited than political scientists to study social networks." (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013,12-14).

Rupnik and Zielonka have identified the special ECE type of the informal institutions as the non-transparent networks, basically between politics and economy, which are detrimental to democracy (uklad in Polish). Their analysis deserves special attention because it goes beyond the narrow horizon of the formalist-minimalist definition of democracy in the old spirit of nineties with electoral democracy and the likes. This approach offers the proper conceptual tools with the informal institutions to discover the present façade democracy as the product of "democratic regression". Explaining the backsliding of democracy, Rupnik and Zielonka have made a clear reference to the economic hardships in ECE during the global crisis. They have stressed first of all its dire socio-political consequences, the deep split between winners and losers that resulted in splitting the countries, since "There are two Polands as there are two Hungaries." In the increasing socio-economic crisis the ECE populations have fallen prey to populist agitation by some governments and/or parties in the form of "the politics of memory and historical justice". Rupnik and Zielonka have summarized the historical trajectory in ECE in such a way that although the formal-legal constitutional order was arranged right after the systemic change, the state and its agencies have still been captured later by the oligarchs as the rent seeking actors through their informal networks. Thus, there has been more and more a "gap between the institutional design and actual political practices", hence the democratic resilience of the ECE populations to the populist attacks has been weak in the global crisis, therefore, no sustainable democracy has emerged: "we have recently also witnessed setbacks in some Central European countries (in Poland under Kaczynski twindom, in Hungary under Viktor Orban or in Romania under Viktor Ponta)." (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013, 7,13).8

The "autocratic temptation" or "authoritarian drift" with Orbán returning to power in 2010 and the ensuing "slide into authoritarianism in Orban's Hungary" is the main worry in the Rupnik and Zielonka paper because "The disturbing question is the ease with which consolidated democracies such as Hungary can experience 'democratic regression', reminding us that democracies by their very nature are never 'definitely established'. As Poland was under Kaczynski twins, Hungary today is probably an explicit version of the possibility of democratic regression and populist temptation in established democracies." (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013, 21). This conclusion of the paper gives a possibility for developing further their analysis with the remark that "There is a continuous, diffused overlapping of various functions and interests between the media, business, and political circles." (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013, 15-16). Indeed, the oligarchization has embraced and colonized all social sectors by turning them into the complete party empires that I call democracy capture. Particularly, Rupnik and Zielonka have made a reference to the media tycoons and the suppression of media freedom in ECE, and in this case Hungary is again an eminent case in their analysis.9

The state capture as the basic problem runs across the Rupnik-Zielonka paper in the assessment of ECE democracies, since in their view the state in ECE "has become a hostage of various groups and interests trying to dominate its institutions and extract resources from it. These groups are not formally organized, but operate along cultural rather than administrative codes. Access to them is restricted and reflects social or family bonds rather than official affiliations. There is virtually no public control over their functioning." They return to this issue repeatedly, given its high salience: "These networks operate differently in diverse socio-political settings, but they are never transparent, institutionalized, or subject to accountability." As a conclusion, "The state becomes weak, unfair and volatile when partisan interests prevail over common good." (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013, 16). However, this informal network-based approach with the strong reference to state capture has to be completed with the oligarchization process to form a "thick" theory of state/agency capture in ECE. I call the weak, "captured" state, which is powerless against the world of fighting-competing oligarchies in many fields or even acts as their own machinery the stage of "chaotic democracy".

The chaotic democracy has emerged because the basic transformations in the economy and politics have been asynchronous, therefore they have contradicted to each other as the non-correspondence between the strong, aggressive economic and weak, perverse political transformations. Due to the missing social consolidation and under the pressure of the aggressive economic transformations there has been the relative power gap. The weak state could not cope with the many parallel transformations as a complexity management, therefore even the formal institutions have eroded due to the emerging "informal networks", and the informal institutions and/or networks as a dominant force have penetrated more and more into the other social sectors. This emergence of the chaotic democracy due to the state capture by the oligarchization is an "iron law" in ECE. It explains the ECE historical deviation from the Western mainstream development following the systemic change. The key issue is the relative power vacuum in the new system of the chaotic "postcommunist" democracy that emerged right after the collapse of the state socialism or "communism". There has been a big, complex and all-embracing institutional transformation in the Quarter-Century of systemic change, above all in the first decade after the collapse of the former system. Without going here into the historical periodization of the Quarter-Century, just looking at the transformation process in general, one can realize that the new institutions have been fragile, fragmented and controversial. In such a way, the weak, subdued "underdog" state has become the characteristic actor in ECE in the last years.

Thus, the new "statehood" has not been able to control and steer this multiple transformation process, given its high complexity, as well as the overwhelming external pressure and the deep domestic heterogeneity. The state and its institutions could not provide social and public security, neither at the state nor at the local levels. So the ECE populations have developed a mixed feeling about this transformation as a chaotic, non-transparent process above their heads and it has been distorted indeed to a great extent into "absolute" De-Dem and DeEU. The processes of Democratization and Europeanization have not just slowing down, but the state capture by the oligarchization has been actually damaging democracy and turning away from - if not against - the mainstream European integration more and more. In fact, it has reached the form of democracy capture, since the tradition of "far-reaching politicization" as the aggressive political patronage of the core executives as the main tendency has prevailed in ECE. It is not by chance that due to the political patronage the protracted political crisis has produced "poor governance" also in the global crisis management with the fragile governments in ECE.10

Basically, the socio-economic transformations have been deeply polarizing the ECE societies. Simply said, in the rapid privatization there have been two opposite processes, some people have become rich quickly, some other have been deeply impoverished. The new weak state machinery in its relative power vacuum could not control this privatization cum pauperization or empowerment-disempowerment process that has generated the economic and political "criminalization" of society on both sides, for winners and losers. These two kinds of very different "criminals" have met in the increasing number of mafia-type "criminal enterprises" as the "employers"-bosses and the "employees"-executing staff. Many types of the negative or "shadowy" informal networks have been organized with a large variety of their criminality levels as being harmful or detrimental to the public interests in different ways and to different extent. There have been many nuances of criminality, from the circumventing the regulations through serious violations of laws to the violent actions under the Penal Code. Nonetheless, all these informal networks or mafia-type organizations have undermined the rule of law in the new democracies and they have hollowed out the democracy for the large part of population. In the West, in the developed countries these socio-economic transformations were much slower, more regulated by the states, and finally the newly emerging private enterprises with social mechanisms have been completely put under the strong state control. In the Third Wave of Democratization, however, this has not been the case. Just to the contrary, the East-Central European type of the drastic and rapid social transformation with a relatively impotent state has produced an aggressive oligarchization. It was first more balanced, the oligarchs were somewhat more restricted and covered from the public, but during and after the global crisis they have begun to play a direct public and political role that has deeply shaken the ECE societies.11

The ECE parties - as their secret or shadowy history - have also played a big role in the oligarchization process in several ways, with their strengths and weaknesses alike. At the formal-legal level parties have been relatively well regulated and have been very strong as the monopolistic actors in the political life. But in the social dimension the parties have been very weak as the nonattractive actors in social life with very weak linkages to civil society. And since the parties are weak with no social support of a large membership behind and they are financially fragile without the membership-fees, so formally-legally they are of necessity dependent on the state financial assistance. Moreover, the state financial support is not enough for their workings, first of all in the campaign periods. Since there is no "Chinese Wall" between politics and business in general with a proper legislation, so both parties and the individual politicians are open towards the business world offering many temptations. Accordingly, the business networks are open to politics due to their black, shadowy or semi-official actions in this loosely or controversially regulated period of socio-economic transformations by a weak and non-transparent state. This creates ideal conditions for the fusion of the "exlex-leaning" business groups and the socially vulnerable parties, and/or their official government/parliamentary representatives, to create the "criminally"organized or "mafia-type" informal networks. The main playing ground between politics and business is the public procurement. Thus, the competitive young democracy without the solid social background for the competing parties and with weak, impotent state invites the downgrading and/or emptying of the substantive democracy. At the same time the formal, façade democracy in this troubled period of rapid socio-economic transformations has been kept thus it can be characterised by a relative power vacuum of the young and impotent state with a "democratic" façade. The decline of the competitive ECE democracy has been financed by either directly the oligarchs or by the large contributions of the business sector through the politically omnipotent but socially vulnerable parties. This situation has led to the competitive/elected autocracy, first in moderate and indirect way before the global crisis, but after the global crisis in a more brutal and direct way.

The agency capture leads to the fusion of business and politics in the twin forms of the "party state capture" or to the "corporate state capture" (Innés 2014). It involves the merger of politics and public administration by the close party patronage, as well as the colonization of all social sectors through the political invasion or penetration into civil society organizations. This "informal" history of the ECE parties has resulted in a hierarchical socio-political model with the subordination of all social sectors to politics, including large parts of the everyday life of citizens. Formulated in the mildest way, the oligarchization in ECE has been a sleepwalking of the democratic political elites or parties, since instead of the well-organized, "both responsive and responsible" state, a weak, fragile and quasi impotent state has emerged in ECE that has been unable to withstand the pressure of global crisis from outside and the overwhelming populist temptation and oligarchization from outside. Given this obvious historical deviation of ECE from the European mainstream the volume on the "Eastern Enlargement Ten Years On" has pointed out that there has been no "Transcending the East-West Divide". Consequently, "the continent's traditionally persistent divisions" have survived in the new forms. All in all, "Notable achievements of EU enlargements notwithstanding, the volume points to the continuing important differences between east and west and highlights the issue areas in which the EU transcends but also reinforces the centuries-old partition." (Epstein and Jacoby 2014, l).12

Thus, Europeanization and Democratization have been running across the entire period of Quarter-Century in ECE, but only in a controversial mixture of the processes of De-Europeanization and De-Democratization with the endemic corruption and overwhelming political patronage in public administration. This basic tendency of the recent ECE polities developing to the Potemkin democracies with oligarchization has to be taken in consideration for the analysis as the fusion of economy and politics resulting in the widespread dissatisfaction of population with the emptied democracy, including the established parties and elite politics. This tendency has been the most evident and visible in Hungary, since after the 2010 elections a genuine Potemkin democracy has emerged in Hungary with a democratic façade and with a quasi "one-party rule" behind. In Hungary even the formal façade of democracy has been corroded after 2010. In the other ECE countries this declining tendency has been much less marked, but in all ECE cases the substance of democracy and/or its social foundations have been significantly eroded and the fusion of economy and politics has still taken place with the increasing direct publicpolitical role of oligarchies, reaching even the government level.

4 THE "HUNGARIAN DISEASE" AS AN ANTIDEMOCRATIC CHALLENGE TO THE EU

4.1 The completion of Potemkin democracy in Hungary in the early 2010s

All these above discussed issues of the state/agency capture lead, indeed, to the "perfect" Hungarian case as an "ideal type" or the worst-case scenario of the decline of democracy and the transition to semi-authoritarian system. The "chaotic democracy" in Hungary before 2010 with the weak and fragmented formal institutions and the strong informal political-business networks was the best background for the emerging "Fidesz-world" as a Golem party to create its mafia-type organization that embraced - and step by step colonized - all economic, social, political and cultural sectors by 2010. Thus, in 2010 there was a big turning point in the Hungarian history, since after a Quarter-Century of systemic change the first party system collapsed at the 2010 elections and thereby a second party system came to being. This paper does not focus on the formal institutions or on the formal-legal side of the polity, since the emergence of the second party system was not just a routine change in the Hungarian party system either as the usual change of governments. It was not a simple "political event" in the narrow sense of the word, but a complete, comprehensive change of the Hungarian legal-political and socio-economic system as well. Before 2010 the Fidesz-Golem with its informal networks penetrated into the entire society, to all sectors from the economy to the media, and accomplished already a series of agency captures. In such a way, by 2010 it was not (only) a political party but it was a real party Golem as a complex, all-embracing and well-organized economic and social actor that was represented and organized by a hierarchically constructed political party and one almighty personal leader from above. After 2010 Fidesz, with the emerging second party system, has completed this process of agency captures through the complete state capture from the position of an overwhelming government monopolizing all political power. With the two-thirds majority enabling Fidesz to the constitution making the full "democracy capture" has been accomplished. Hence, not only the Fidesz party but the political system as a whole - and even more the entire Hungarian socio-economic system - has to be treated in the spirit of the above discussed conceptual framework of the informal institutions, state/agency capture that has led through the democracy capture to the Potemkin façade democracy.13

The second Orbán government in the first part of legislative cycle [2010-2012] made the complete overhaul of political system for a hegemonic party. In the second half of its term [2012-2014] the government concocted a manipulative electoral legislation to crafting a constitutional majority again through "democratic" elections. Altogether, this declining democracy as "populism from above" tended towards a new kind of authoritarian rule as the elected autocracy. The second Orbán government fundamentally weakened the checks and balances system, and replaced the heads of its basic institutions with the loyal Fidesz party soldiers. The main political weapon of this Golem party was the legal instrumentalism of the state machinery, using the legal rules for direct political purposes, since the two-thirds majority was in fact a constitutionalmaking majority and therefore all the anti-democratic actions of the second Orbán governments were strictly made "legal". Therefore, I have called above this process of converting all-important democratic rules through majoritarian democratic legal means into a non-democratic political system as democracy capture. Thus, the Fidesz-Golem reregulated the entire Hungarian legal structure in the period of the second Orbán government. It produced much more acts in this legislative period than usual [728 acts] that were amended very often [466 amendments] because there were many low quality acts legally and/or they were changed frequently and immediately with the new demands and the changing circumstances. Finally, the Orbán government passed also a new Constitution - termed by Kim Scheppele [2013] as "unconstitutional constitution" - in the spirit of legal traditionalism and the 19th century type of nationalism with a reference to the Saint Steven's Crown. By reregulating the political system as a whole, in this legislative period the second Orbán government built a completely new democratic façade for the undemocratic system of institutions. So on the surface everything looks still democratic and legally well regulated, since this Potemkin facade covers the actual hegemonic one-party rule in the new semi-authoritarian system. It has basically changed Hungary's position in the world by sliding back from deficit to defective democracy in the international rankings. The Hungarian political system has been treated in the political science mainstream as a new kind of [semiauthoritarian system of Fidesz combined with the extreme-right radicalism of Jobbik. Moreover, it has been considered in the international media [see e.g. Müller-Funk 2014] as a "leader democracy", with a reference to the Führer-Demokratie of Max Weber, that represent a danger for the EU.14

This Potemkin democracy has produced disastrous economic consequences for Hungary. It has aggravated the socio-economic crisis that caused mass migration to the West with more than half a million people in the last years, while it has generated only soft protests but deep apathy at home. In such a way, in 2014 a very polarized, frustrated and disillusioned society faced the domestic parliamentary and the EP elections. These 2014 elections have produced fatal consequences for the Hungarian party system and for Hungary in general, since these unfair, manipulated elections have led to the emergence of mature electoral autocracy.15

5 THE TURN TO THE ELECTORAL AUTOCRACY AT THE 2014 ELECTIONS IN HUNGARY

Abusing its two-thirds majority, the second Orbán government changed the rules of elections very often in this legislative period, even right before the 2014 elections. As a conclusion on the elections, Scheppele has noted that "Orbán's constitutional majority - which will allow him to govern without constraint - was made possible only by a series of legal changes unbecoming a proper democracy. (...) Remove any one of them and the two-thirds crumbles." And she continued with a warning: "The European Union imagines itself as a club of democracies, but now must face the reality of a Potemkin democracy in its midst. EU is now going into its own parliamentary elections, after which it will have to decide whether Hungary still qualifies to be a member of the club." (Scheppele 2014,17).16

Altogether, at the 2014 elections the Fidesz has further strengthened its dominant position in this second party system, and the extreme right has also preserved its big parliamentary role, while the Left has been weakened and fragmented. The third Orbán government has also changed the structure of government and it has extended its rule over the entire Hungarian society drastically. As to the government structure, a much bigger and more hierarchical and expensive government machinery entered on 15 June 2014. The super-ministries have been kept with much more power concentration than in the already over-concentrated second Orbán government. Although there is no big Prime Minister's Office in a traditional way, overseeing all sectors of government, but the huge "Primeministry" as an Office directly serving the Prime Minister has been further developed to control all walks of life under the leadership of a new minister with 3 state secretaries and 27 deputy state secretaries. Instead of 132 "government leaders" in the second Orbán government, there are already 198 in the third Orbán government and it is not yet the end of this process. There are two reasons for this growing number of high officials. First, Fidesz has to reward its good servants with government positions, since in this cycle there are less members of parliament, and with the reduction of their numbers Fidesz has compensated those Fidesz MPs who could not re-enter the parliament. Another 46 former Fidesz MPs will carry on as mayors and vice mayors to keep them loyal and to indicate that Fidesz does not want anybody left beside the road that has served loyally. Second, the role of government is expanding, since they need people to cover the newly colonised social areas for the Fidesz-Golem controlling everything from economy to civil society.

Fidesz has extended the rule of its almighty Golem party to all sectors of the new party state, and it has been controlling more and more over the society as a whole. After 2014 the third Orbán government has exercised in fact a "dictatorship on the everyday life" with the penetration into the life-world of all citizens. The Fidesz-Golem has built an extended system state corporatism through state-controlled organizations for all public employees with mandatory memberships, and in addition, the state-directed social movements have been organized into the fake civil society. What is more, the list of churches has been overviewed by the Fidesz controlled parliament, and the churches considered non-loyal to Fidesz have been deprived of their legal status. The worst may be the "cultural dictatorship", since the Fidesz-Golem has established the Hungarian Academy of the Artists (MMA). The government has entrusted all decisions related to the Arts to its leaders, and it has channelled all resources from the state to the cultural life through the MMA. In the second Orbán government there was only a shadow oligarchization because although the Fidesz controlled economy led by the trusted allies formed shadow government, but this informal super-network of networks was not in the forefront making the state corporatism public. The EU transfers already in the second Orbán government were used to build up clientele systems with the friendly oligarchs, since they received most of the public procurement. However, in the third Orbán government the situation has changed rather radically in this respect, and the government has also increased the strict direct state control over these Fidesz oligarchs. In a special kind of "hostile takeover" it has introduced a state-managed economy not only with the renationalization of the many multinationals, but also with the direct political control over its own domestic "friendly clienteles" to remove all possible competitive power centres.17

Parallel with these political developments the socio-economic situation has further worsened during the third Orbán government. By avoiding the painful reforms with national consensus, the Fidesz politics will still lead sooner or later to a strong confrontation with the masses that expect quick and easy miracles from Fidesz as it has been promised. The political destabilization and permanent confrontation has also produced economic destabilization. The vicious circle has started, and it cannot be prevented by the strong-handed government despite the self-reproducing nature of an electoral autocracy. The present hegemonic party system as a serious historical deviation from the mainstream European development cannot be consolidated within the EU. Its deepening socio-economic crisis and drastically declining international competitiveness, even compared to other ECE states, will lead sooner or later in the era of the accelerated globalization to the deep domestic and international crisis. The recent declaration of Orbán on the "illiberal democracy" (Orbán 2014) has unleashed an international protest wave and has invited tough reactions by the democratic governments worldwide.

6 CONCLUSION: HOW TO TRANSCEND THE EAST-WEST DIVIDE IN THE NEXT TEN YEARS?

This paper has tried to argue that Hungary is the worst-case scenario in ECE, but the other ECE polities have also "backslided" in the political terms within the EU. This problem of divergence between East and West is much deeper and wider in general than it was expected in the euphoric days of the EU accession of ECE countries. When analysing the "unhappy EU" in the process of global crisis management, the question may be raised with justification that "As for Hungary, how much tolerance should Europe show towards the wayward behaviour of one of its members with respect to democratic norms and human rights?" (Tsoukalis 2014, 58). Consequently, "if major institutions of liberal democracy in one member state radically deviate from the EU's member states' constitutional traditions, and undermine the rule of law, this is an issue that the EU needs to address directly." (Bugaric 2014, 25). This historical deviation as the serious case of De-EU and De-Dem with its national-social populism has also meant constant EU confrontation called as "the freedom fight against the EU colonization" by the Orbán governments. This divergence of Hungary from the democratic mainstream during the second Orbán government was already formulated by the Tavares Report passed by the European Parliament on 3 July 2013 with a large majority. This Tavares Report is the most important EU document on the decline of democracy in NMS. The Report has asked for organizing a "Copenhagen Commission" in the Hungarian case, but it has been set in an all-European context because the Report requests "the establishment of a new mechanism to ensure compliance by all Member States with the common values enshrined in Article 2 TEU" (Tavares 2013,15).

This control mechanism could assume the form of a "Copenhagen Commission" in order to "regulatory monitor respect for fundamental rights, the state of democracy and the rule of law in all Member States" (Tavares 2013, 15). The Report deals extensively with this Copenhagen Revisited Project: "whereas the obligations incumbent on candidate countries under the Copenhagen criteria continue to apply to the Member States after joining the EU (...) all Member States should therefore be assessed on a regular basis in order to verify their continued compliance with the EU's common values." (Tavares 2013, 3). The Report "Reiterates the urgent need to tackle the so called 'Copenhagen dilemma', whereby the EU remains very strict with regard to the compliance with the common values and standards on the part of candidate countries but lacks effective monitoring and sanctioning tools once they have joined the EU." (Tavares 2013, 15). Finally, in such a way the Report not only indicates, but it also predicts to a great extent the evaluation of the Ten Years of the EU Membership for ECE as a very controversial development with many achievements and failures.18

No doubt that the main responsibility for failures in Europeanization and Democratization belongs to the ECE countries not taking the historical opportunity of the EU membership, yet that question can also be raised whether the EU has developed after its enlargement strategy a proper integration strategy at all. As the case of Greece earlier in the "South" and that of Hungary later in the "East" has documented, the EU flexibility in order to avoid conflicts with member states has proved to be much less effective in resolving conflicts than its pre-empting and confronting procedure coping with the conflicts. Many conflicts in the EU with the ECE have been neglected, or treated as bagatelle and later on they have turned out as inducing-provoking more severe conflicts. Nowadays, the De-Europeanization in ECE in general and the DeDemocratization with the oligarchization in particular already threatens the EU as a whole in its values and visions.

The first Ten Years has not been transcending the East-West divide because this Ten Years period has proved to be too short to overcome the age-old divergence and to turn to convergence. However, the shock of underdevelopment in the ECE, as its painful "Sonderweg", is very big and deep, and it may mobilize the ECE populations to stop the vicious circle and to remove the populist politicians and the aggressive oligarchs. The next Ten Years of organizing the Competitive and Cohesive Europe could be a new start for an effective Democratization and Europeanization in ECE. Instead of the old mantra of the narrow party analyses and the dithyrambs over the achievements during the Ten Years of Membership, as the final conclusion of this paper, I would like to indicate here the anticipated progressive tendencies and the new research direction in order to assist to this new start for Democratization and Europeanization in ECE.

Footnote

2 1 continue here my analysis on democracy decline (Ágh 2014b) and I have recently written a paper on the transformation of the ECE party systems (Ágh 2014d). There has been a huge literature on democracy, but there has also been recently an increasing literature on dictatorships, or on the relationships between democracy and dictatorship as well. For the theory of electoral autocracy see e.g. Schedler (2006), on populism in general see e.g. Laclau (2007), Mudde (2014), Krouwel (2012), Giusto et al. (2013) and Melzer and Serafín (2013). In the comprehensive study of democracy, the book of Papadopoulos (2013, 2-3) discusses the "hollowing-out of democratic politics" (with a reference to Guy Hermet), which has been very characteristic for the ECE developments.

3 This paper relies mostly on the Bertelsmann country reports, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Freedom House (FH), World Economic Forum (2012, 2013) analyses, and the OECD (2013a,b, 2014) and Transparency International (2014) Reports.

Footnote

4 Of necessity, there is a temptation here for comparative politics, to compare the ECE countries with their similar trends and key indicators. Not simply comparing countries but comparing several variables in a cluster across countries like the weak party-society relationship and the very low trust in party political elites. Poland has often been mentioned - first of all by the Polish authors - as an exception but in fact it is part of the same regional tendency. By the way, Poland has also been mentioned high on the list of "crony capitalism" (The Economist 2014), and the Polish political system has been very critically analysed in the comprehensive paper of Rupnik and Zielonka (2013).

Footnote

5 I discussed the democracy debates at length earlier (Ágh 2013; Ágh 2014b). I concentrate in this paper on the present situation of the democracy debate (see Munck 2012). No surprise that the study of Lidén (2014) about the transition to authoritarianism has grown out from the Nordic school of the quality of democracy, since this issue has become topical in the 2010s with the sensational return of authoritarianism worldwide. It is not by chance that this time the Democratization Journal has published a Special Issue Unpacking Autocracies: Explaining Similarity and Difference (edited by Köllner and Kailitz 2013) on the autocracies with the papers of Gerschewski (2013), Kailitz (2013) and Moeller and Skaaning (2013).

Footnote

6 See WEF (2012). The story of the absolute and relative losers in the triple crisis needs a separate analysis, for the detailed ECE data see Ágh (2013a), for the failure of catching up see Ágh (2014a, 207). In the everyday terms it has to be noted that the civil society has been weakened very much due to the global crisis, since the middle strata have become "precarious", they have no reserves any longer and they face the risk of unemployment. So in a "5+55+40%" type society people have no time and energy to participate in civil society action. According to the Eurobarometer 81 (July 2014), the lesser half of the ECE populations has a fear to falling into the poverty. The definition of "citizen" in democratic society includes not only formal-legal liberties but also some kind of material-financial independence and security, which does not exist in ECE.

7 It has been a very controversial issue what are the main factors responsible for the divergence of ECE from the European mainstream. Although the external factors or the negative externalities have also been very crucial and responsible for the increasing Core-Periphery Divide, this paper still concentrates on the negative role of the domestic factors and processes.

Footnote

8 I call these parties conquering the economy (the world of business) and the public-private media through their organized informal networks as Golem parties but I do not enter their analysis here by describing the party-colonization of society. 1 just refer here to the growing literature of oligarchization and crony capitalism, especially to the paper of Jávor and Janies (2013) on the role of the organized informal networks in the state-party level the systematized corruption. The extreme version of oligarchization has taken place in the post-Soviet region (except for the Baltic states) where huge oligarchs have directly grasped the political power as it can be seen now even in Ukraine. So the term of oligarch appeared in the Western media first about the post-Soviet business magnates, and later on about their less marked counterparts in ECE and elsewhere. Oligarchy means obviously the power structure of few people in power, in business and politics combined.

Footnote

9 The special case of agency capture as media capture and/or media colonization has been properly described by Bajomi-Lázár with a distinction between colonized state media, versus media capture by parties: "The concept of 'media colonisation' is both narrower and broader than that of 'media capture'. It is narrower in that it focuses on state media and party control, and largely ignores private outlets and business groups' influence. And it is broader in that, in addition to the distortion of information, it also associates other purposes with control over media, notably the extraction of resources" (2013, 76).

Footnote

10 There has been a huge literature on the political patronage, see Kopecky et al (2012, 415), Meyer-Sahling (2011) and Nakrosis and Gudzinkas (2013). It would be a long list to mention the business oligarchs playing direct political role in ECE, and the cases of leading politicians in jail like Janez Jansa and Ivo Sanader on one side, and e.g. the collapse of the Ñecas government on the other. No surprise that, because of the full distrust in parties, there has been a "personal politics" in the ECE populations as a search for independent, "honest" personalities, see the 2014 Slovenian parliamentary elections.

11 Of course, the family relations have been vital in these informal networks at the first stage, but later on these oligarchic "informal organizations" have moved much beyond the nepotism, although these relations have been the core units. It can be widely seen in Hungary, starting with Orbán relatives in high political and business positions and ending up with the profitable networks of Fidesz mayors in small villages.

Footnote

12 On the responsive and responsible parties see the Special Issue of West European Politics Vol. 37, Issue 2. Responsiveness is when political parties and leaders "sympathetically respond to the short-term demands of voters, public opinion, interest groups and the media", while responsibility is when they "take into account (a) the long-term needs of their people and countries" and "(b) the claims of audiences other than the national electoral audience" (Baldi et al. 2014, 237). The long-term approach takes into consideration also the international "claims", first of all those of the Ell membership.

Footnote

13 In my former papers I have emphasized the direct connection between the decline of democracy and the decreasing competitiveness of Hungary (Ágh, 2013b,c,d). It is important to note that the performance of democracy and the competitiveness of Hungary slightly decreased already in the 2000s, but has declined drastically after 2010, during the Orbán governments (IMF 2014).

14 This Hungarian - and Romanian - case has brought a danger of the "contaminating" effect to the other states, see Boulin-Ghica (2013) and Sedelmeier (2014). See also the OECD Report by Nicolaidis and Kleinfeld (2012). This danger has also meant a challenge to the EU, see e.g. Bugaric for his thorough description of "unconstitutional constitution" in Hungary (2014).

Footnote

15 I can outline the Hungarian case only very shortly here as the best illustration of the Potemkin democracy (see Ágh 2014c for details). The full picture of the present situation in Hungary is available from the recent Bertelsmann country reports - BTI (Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2014a) and SGI (Sustainable Governance Indicators 2014b -, especially from the regional overview of Brusis (2014). See also Ágh (2013c; 2014a,b), Demos (2013) and EIU (2013). In FH (2014) Hungary has been mentioned with the biggest decline in the democracy score by 2014, and the Bertelsmann BTI and SGI Reports (2014) have qualified it as "defective" instead of "deficit" democracy.

16 I have described the entire process of the unfair, manipulated elections based on the arguments of Scheppele (2014) and Mudde (2014) in greater detail (Ágh, 2014c,d). See first of all the very critical OSCE Report (2014), also the international Press Review on the April 2014 elections. Here I focus on the emerging system of elected autocracy from the side of the new authoritarian system. In July 2014 the third Orbán government changed beyond recognition the electoral law on local governments for the early October elections.

Footnote

17 There is no space here for details concerning the state corporatism, see Bertelsmann (2014a,b). The issue of oligarchs and oligarchization has become high on the agenda of public debates and media in the last years in ECE. In Hungary there has been a huge media material both on the oligarchization and the on recent change in the third Orbán government, but this brand new research field needs further papers to develop it.

Footnote

18 There have been new steps taken in this direction by the Barroso administration (see EC 2014a,b,c,d,e) with the Rule of Law Initiative, but the next and much more serious steps of the EU can be expected from the new Juncker administration.

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