The country's creeping authoritarianism offers a warning for the Arab Spring and even for the U.S..



Protesters carry a poster of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban during a December demonstration against the Hungarian government / Reuters

The Hungarian parliament building, a grand neo-Gothic landmark along the Danube, is an enduring stone monument to representative government. Plans for such a structure were made in the years following the conversion of the Austrian Empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Construction began in the 1880s and was completed shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. It is the largest building in Hungary and the third-largest parliament building in the world.

The building symbolizes a Hungarian commitment to representative democracy, notwithstanding Hungary's straying from democracy more than once. The straying in the past has resulted mostly from external pressures. Hungary's falling in with the Axis powers in the 1930s was partly due to the Great Depression and an economic lifeline from Germany that helped to bring the country out of the Depression. It also had to do with a Germany-like resentment over post-World War I settlement terms. The Treaty of Trianon stripped Hungary of nearly two-thirds of the territory that had belonged to the kingdom of Hungary as part of the dual monarchy. Later came communist rule, but that of course was imposed by Soviet power, and forcefully reimposed in 1956 after a brief assertion by the Hungarians of freedom. When communist rule finally ended in 1989, a new republic of Hungary was proclaimed from a balcony of the parliament building. Shortly afterward, the red star that the communists had placed on the spire of the building was removed.

Now Hungary is showing worrying signs of straying again from democracy, and this time the wandering cannot be attributed to external forces. The Fidesz Party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has used the power of a supermajority to ram through a new constitution and to take other measures that appear to challenge the independence of the judiciary, the central bank and the media. Orban's government is having to answer to the European Union for some of the steps that seem to violate the Union's pluralistic standards. The EU's inquiries have led Orban to back off slightly from his changes, but his record suggests that he will not fundamentally alter his course.