THE Hungarians have thrown down a gauntlet to the European Union. The parliament voted on March 11th to amend the constitution, ignoring pleas for delay from the European Commission, the Council of Europe and America’s State Department. Hungary’s Constitutional Court can no longer reject constitutional amendments on matters of substance—only on procedural grounds. The court must also ignore more than 20 years of legal precedent, basing future rulings on the constitution enacted in January 2012.

What may seem like an arcane legal manoeuvre has profound significance. The measures open the door for the government to use the constitution to pass new laws that might otherwise be rejected by the Constitutional Court. The process has already started. The amendments, the fourth round since the constitution was enacted, included several laws the court had previously thrown out, including provisions that allow local authorities to penalise the homeless, to limit political advertising in election campaigns and to force university graduates who get state funding to work in Hungary after graduation. As these will now be part of the constitution, they can be amended only by a two-thirds majority, limiting the scope of future governments to change them.

Some of the strongest criticism of the amendments came from Laszlo Solyom, who served as Hungary’s president between 2005 and 2010. Mr Solyom, a respected jurist, claimed that the ruling Fidesz Party led by Viktor Orban, the prime minister, had used the constitution to “meet daily political goals”. He called on the current president, Janos Ader, himself a former Fidesz MP, to throw out the constitutional amendments.

After the vote, the EU and the Council of Europe said that they would carefully assess the amendments, which raise “concern with respect to the principle of the rule of law, EU law and Council of Europe standards”. Janos Martonyi, Hungary’s foreign minister, said that the government was ready to find a solution to anything that was judged to conflict with EU law. But officials insist the new laws are in line with European norms.

The changes, they argue, are essentially procedural. Dumping 20 years of legal precedent will allow the Constitutional Court to base its work on the new constitution. The government has also listened to critics: a proposal to let the chief prosecutor allocate cases to a court of his choice has been removed. The court anyway had no powers to adjudicate on either the constitution or any amendments, the government says.

Not so, says Mate Daniel Szabo, a constitutional lawyer at the Eotvos Karoly Institute, a think-tank. Although the court had not reviewed previous constitutional amendments, it had the legal right to do so. Critics also asked why the amendments were introduced into parliament in a private member’s bill, rather than as government business, as would be normal for weighty matters of state.

For now, at least, the EU’s mutterings seem of little concern to Mr Orban. He is more confident than ever. He has attacked a court decision on energy prices as “scandalous” and called for half of the country’s banking system to be “in Hungarian hands”. Mr Orban knows that, whatever Brussels finds in its scrutiny, the EU can do little short of the nuclear option of suspending Hungary’s voting rights or ejecting it altogether. Yet even if Mr Orban wins in the short term, there will be a long-term cost. The impression is solidifying, especially among foreign investors, that legality in Hungary is a movable feast. Not surprisingly, the forint slid this week.