Rebuilding a Constitutional Democracy:
Gábor Attila Tóth and Ellen Hinsey in Dialogue
After the April 2026 defeat of Victor Orbán, Hungary’s long-term prime minister and leader of Fidesz, NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey spoke to constitutional scholar Gábor Attila Tóth about the progress of democracy in Hungary after its undoing by Orbán’s illiberal regime.
As Tóth notes, under Orbán, “Parliament became nothing other than an automatic voting machine, judges were replaced, judicial independence was weakened, control over much of the media was secured, vulnerable groups were systematically deprived of constitutional protection, and the state of emergency became a permanent feature of governance. These were not isolated defects but interconnected elements of an autocratic system.”
Gábor Attila Tóth is a notable Hungarian constitutional scholar and author of numerous works. His most recent book is Non-Democracy (2024) and he is the editor of Constitution for a Disunited Nation: On Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law. Tóth is Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Debrecen. Ellen Hinsey is the author of ten books and has written extensively about democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Her essays on democracy are collected in Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism. She is a visiting professor at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and New England Review’s international correspondent.
Photos courtesy of Kirill Kékes