What are the legal and political criteria that distinguish between ‘correct’ and ‘unacceptable’ legal mobilisation? How does populism facilitate legal mobilisation? The questions of the workshop organizers led us back in Hungary to the democratic transition from socialism to liberal democracy in 1989, when legal mobilisation for the rule of law, democracy and human rights was led first and primarily by non-state actors (National Round Table). Participants of the democratic transition prepared the complete revision of the 1949 Constitution, which was an emblematic element in addition to the many legislative drafts of the transitory nature of the creation of the new system. In 2010, after the successful political mobilisation, the populist party coalition (lead by Viktor Orban) gained a two-thirds constitution-making majority in Parliament (in the absence of two opposition parties), and the Parliament adopted the new Fundamental Law (new constitution). This was also an emblematic element of the new legal mobilisation conducted by the two-thirds populist Government majority. This article will describe how populism – through the instrumentalisation of the law (disregarding the inherent values in/of law based on value choice) and the destruction of institutional checks and balances – facilitated new legal mobilisation. Based on this experience of the outcome of the equally strong and effective legal mobilisation in Hungary of the liberal and the illiberal (democratic and autocratic, respectively) transitions, in this article we aim to make valid theoretical propositions on how to assess ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ legal mobilisation and what influences the relevance of non-state actors in populism.

Since limiting judicial independence in Hungary and Poland, the politics of the rule of law crisis have been examined by various scholars discussing conflicts within and between EU and domestic institutions. The rule of law is no longer a purely national affair – it is of high political salience both for the Member States and the EU polity. The question addressed here is: how has the rule of law crisis reshaped the EU’s modes of governance? We argue that to safeguard this common value, the EU is evolving into a regulatory polity (3.0). This development marks a shift from Majone’s EU regulatory state’s focus on regulating markets (1.0) and regulation in core state powers in times of crises (2.0) to regulation on the core values of the polity (3.0). The article shows that in a context of growing dissensus over the rule of law, EU institutional actors have sought to strengthen “rulemaking,” “rule monitoring” and “rule enforcement” through a regulatory approach anchored in a market logic. It also shows that shifting from the traditional regulatory state 1.0 to regulation in core state powers 2.0, the regulatory polity 3.0 strengthens the EU’s institutional capacity to act when the rule of law is under strain through depoliticised “rule monitoring” and politicised “rulemaking“ and “rule enforcement“ as illustrated in the cases of Hungary and Poland discussed in this article.

Based on the discursive analysis of 28 semidirected interviews conducted in the small industrial town of Martfű, this article reflects on the role played by nationalism in the construction of political and cultural hegemony by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party since 2010. The ten themes mobilised by the respondents to express their vision of the Hungarian nation (identification, belonging, commitment, transmission, territory, uniqueness/fragility, heterogeneity/homogeneity, unity/division, east/west, and insubordination) and the issues attached to them (relationship to Hungarian minorities of neighbouring countries, relationship to the European Union, immigration, etc.) are paralleled with Fidesz’s discourse. On those subjects, Orbán’s party’s nationalism positions itself in a “central” way, managing to incarnate heterogeneous conceptions of the nation that are shared among this research’s respondents by Fidesz as well as non-Fidesz voters.

This article highlights the challenges of external reactions to authoritarian higher education governance in certain Central and Eastern European countries, especially Hungary and Poland. It interprets the political change in these countries as an authoritarian cultural backlash, which is not just a legal or political problem, but a kind of post-fascist cultural revolution contesting the liberal script. First, the article explains the framework of authoritarian policing in academia based on the more general works of Bob Altemeyer and Zeev Sternhell. Second, it tries to answer the question: What tools could counter these tendencies from the perspective of the European Union? As the article interprets the rise of authoritarianism as a phenomenon rooted in the cultural deficit of the countries concerned, it argues that a programme for a democratic and pluralist cultural counter-revolution should be implemented. However, no nation can be democratized solely by external actors, and the basics of democratic thinking should be developed from the grassroots level. If the crisis in academia is rooted in a value-crisis within the societies concerned, then measures countering this phenomenon should also include promoting Enlightened pluralism at all levels of these societies.

This article discusses the thin socio-legal conceptualisation of the rule of law in Hungary. Employing a culturalist perspective, it first shows how the rule of law had a thin foundation prior to the Second World War in this country. Then, the contribution demonstrates how, contrary to previous understandings, even in the most advanced stages of rule of law building in Hungary, in the early 1990s, the resulting concept had been thin mainly focusing on institutional guarantees and legal certainty. The remaining part of the contribution then critically discusses whether and to what extent it is possible to use backsliding to frame the ongoing legal changes in Hungary.

Both Hungary and Poland have been in the spotlight regarding their democratic backsliding, with Executives exerting control over supposedly independent pillars of democracy, such as courts or the media. While the concerns about these countries also voiced by leaders of European institutions were similar, the resistance against the systematic erosion of judicial independence comes in different forms. Using comparative longitudinal case study methodology, this article shows that a defining characteristic in the potential, visibility and feasibility of what judges did or could do under the current threats depends on the role judicial associations, understood as representative collegial judicial bodies. More precisely, the format, organisation and operative tools of judicial associations contribute to their influence on prior judicial reforms and their capacity to withstand ongoing efforts in curtailing their independence from political actors. Empirically, the article reviews multiple judicial changes in the 1992–2015 period in both countries and assesses how judicial associations then shaped the divergent responses to recent attempts at limiting judicial independence. The differences in the legal framework, organisation and network reliance explains variance in resistance. Overall, the article broadens the theoretical and empirical framework for studying the role of courts and judges with considerations regarding professional association organisation and co-ordination, as a potential layer of studying judicial resistance.

Democratic backsliding has posed significant challenges to democracies in many countries. Recent calls for a better theorization of pushback against backsliding have triggered renewed scholarly interest in the field of opposition and its role in stopping or reversing creeping authoritarian rule. This study calls for a theoretical and empirical recalibration of the concept of opposition to account for multifaceted ‘non-partisan’ actors and venues of oppositional mobilization. It proposes a new classification of resilient civic opposition. The explanatory typology is based on two factors: (1) the ability of civic opposition to bring multiple grievances together and to balance between on-street and off-street mediums, and (2) the rapport between political opposition parties and civic opposition. Four cases of civic opposition from Hungary and Turkey illustrate the proposed typology empirically.

The issue of oversimplified Norian conodont taxonomy has set back the development of Norian conodont biostratigraphy of the western Tethys Realm for decades. The majority of stratigraphic studies used the name Epigondolella multidentata, a North American endemic, to gather specimens indicative of strata from the lower part of the middle Norian substage. Detailed conodont biostratigraphic investigations were carried out on the Norian hemipelagic cherty dolostones of the Mátyás Hill section in the Buda Hills (Hungary) in order to resolve the ‘multidentata problem’. The age of the section ranges from the upper part of the lower Norian substage (Lacian-3) to the lower part of the middle Norian substage (Alaunian-1). The new species Ancyrogondolella manueli n. sp. is introduced, and A. transformis is documented for the first time in the Tethys. The studied conodont fauna significantly improves the correlation potential between the western Tethys and the eastern Pacific.

The Hungarian government has been utilising emergencies to expand its political power instead of upholding constitutionalism and the rule of law. This strategy has given the government almost unlimited power to enact emergency decrees, even when the state and the population are not in immediate danger. The ninth amendment to the Fundamental Law of Hungary has raised concerns about the government's use of emergency powers, granting the executive branch even more authority during exceptional times by allowing the government to prolong the ‘state of exception’ indefinitely and maintain pandemic-related emergency measures to respond to potential consequences of the war in Ukraine. As a result, the executive body has been able to exert significant political control without proper parliamentary oversight.

By tracing the history of abortion politics in Hungary since World War I, this article covers a century of conflict with particular attention to gynecologists’ self-serving professional jockeying and lobbying under very different political regimes. It suggests that nationalism has been a pivotal element of the abortion debates that both government actors and gynecologists have shaped over the last hundred years and argues that abortion rights were differently recognized in eastern and western Europe during the Cold War because of the legacy of mass wartime rapes committed by the Soviet troops in Hungary, among other countries, which determined those countries’ postwar legislation on abortion and reproductive rights. The article introduces the rarely researched contribution of the gynecologist lobby to the debates by examining how they could represent their own interests independently of political regime. Today, Hungary's illiberal regime questions the legitimacy of abortion by normalizing US fundamentalist-Christian discourse because anti-abortion policy fits into its nation-building course.

Following the first-ever rule of law conditionality procedure in September 2022, a resolution was adopted by the European Parliament which declared that Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy, as it had turned into a ‘hybrid regime of electoral autocracy’. Against this background, this article explains the business and human rights (BHR) gap in Hungary and presents its consequences for the Ukrainian refugee crisis. We first provide a general overview of the role of business in the development and consolidation of the Orbán regime over the past 13 years, highlighting how businesses are both agents and victims of legal and political developments. The paper distinguishes four types of ‘business’: multinational and foreign companies that are direct beneficiaries of the regime; local companies that are direct beneficiaries of the regime; multinational companies that are targets of restrictive and repressive populist rhetoric and economic policies; and the ‘rest’, the remainder that try to avoid becoming targets of oligarchic takeovers. The article also documents how the state and other stakeholders are failing to meet their commitments under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The next part of the article assesses how companies are responding to the refugee crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, Hungary’s neighbour. If the government does not adopt Pillar I and Pillar III of the UNGPs, what room for manoeuvre do companies have? The focus here is on how companies, domestic and foreign, multinational enterprises (MNEs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), engage in humanitarian (and human rights) crisis management.

This paper investigates the events and lessons from the 1848–49 cholera epidemic in Hungary. For contemporaries, the ongoing revolution and civil war pushed the devastation of the cholera epidemic into the background, even though the death rate was similar to that of the earlier 1831 infection. The epidemic hit the country in a period when the revolutionary Hungarian state was waging a war of self-defense. This article strives to refute the historiographic view that the movements of the different armies had a considerable influence on the development of the epidemic. Instead, this article argues that the cholera epidemic was a demographic crisis unfolding in the background of war, but for the most part independently of it. It mattered that most people of that time had already directly experienced cholera and that the Hungarian government did not want to cause panic with restrictive measures. In 1848, cholera was not a “mobilizing factor,” but in 1849 it contributed to the demoralization of the hinterland and frequently appeared in the political propaganda of the civil war.

There are two contrasting claims regarding the Hungarian judiciary. The Government asserts that it is in the best shape, while many other voices label it as captured or dependent. This article shows how both of these claims can be true, depending on the interplay between formality and informality and shows how a few small loopholes allow some actors to rig the judicial system. Therefore, the Hungarian judiciary is similar to Schrödinger’s cat, which is claimed to be dead and alive at the same time.

The synergy between formality and informality requires a network of a handful of trusted people in managerial positions to administer case allocation, promotion, and disciplinary systems, which seem to be very effective tools. Few small technical loopholes and some special remedies suffice to micromanage important cases precisely because key positions are captured which work as gatekeepers or emergency brakes. Most of these tools are legal in a very formal technical sense of the word because they rely on acts of Parliament. A formal legalism, a very thin understanding of the Rule of law, and a majoritarian mindset serve as a legitimizing ideology for the whole legal system.