It was not. Supermajority basically means that they can change any law, even the constitution if they want. The first attack on rule of law came in 2010. When the Constitutional Court annulled a 98% tax imposed on severance pays with a retroactive effect, the government simply prohibited the top court from making decisions affecting taxes. And that was just the beginning. The conservative party wrote a whole new constitution and media regulation while it appointed its people to positions that are supposed to be independent from the executive (president of the republic, president of the court of auditors, governor of the national bank, etc.). Step by step they dismantled the system of checks and balances while the parliament worked as a legislation-rewriting factory.

Viktor Orbán, the prime minister reasoned that these unorthodox measures are necessary if they want to beat “communism” for good. “Communism”, in Orbán’s terminology, is interchangeable with the socialist-liberal regime. The ex-communist socialist party and the anti-communist liberal intelligentsia have been in a strange marriage since 1992. Together they dominated the media since the fall of the communist regime and despised Orbán since he transformed his radical liberal party to a national conservative one between 1994 and 1998. But the authoritarian measures of the Fidesz government went well beyond the limits of any sane reasoning.

This summer Viktor Orbán made clear that they are building a new social order based on labour, which he calls ‘illiberal democracy’. He also stated that he based that model on Russian, Chinese and Turkish examples. He announced that Hungary will abandon Western ideologies because the West is declining and new, fresher winds are coming from the east. Orbán calls his regime the System of National Cooperation (NER). The governmental offices had to put the proclamation about NER on their walls. Orbán thinks democratic debates were slowing the country down, and with the supermajority he got the authority to abandon this old, worn out way of governing. He thinks he knows what is good for the Hungarian people (Hungarian families, as he likes to put it). As a consequence if he wants to build a stadium in his backyard, he can do that. He did that, actually.

Also, Fidesz is admittedly creating custom-tailored laws to punish foreign companies which are standing in the way of some Fidesz-affiliated businessman or the government itself. The reason they often gave is that these companies (telecom companies, foreign-owned supermarkets, banks etc.) are earning “extra-profit” in Hungary. They didn’t even feel the need to explain this phrase. The TV channel RTL, which was neutral and quiet in the last four years, recently started to speak against the government, after they were brutally taxed. Fidesz officials admitted that they are going to raise the ad tax next year because they want to punish RTL for its recent oppositional behaviour.