I have participated at the online event of Capitalist Transformations in Eastern and Central Europe May 19-22, 2025. My lecture was about The Extraordinary Governance Measures in Hungary.
The
authoritarian populist right-wing has rapidly reborn in the field of
authoritarian state and emergency governance, moreover the COVID-19 crisis gave
a new rise this phenomenon mainly at the expense of civil society. The failures
of liberal democracy opened the way of authoritarian populist right-wing
populism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which on the one hand remained
integrated into the neoliberal capitalism and on the other hand dismantled the
legal basis of liberal constitutionalism. Investigating the CEE authoritarian
populist regimes (especially Hungary), it has been argued that Hungarian
authoritarian populism and its regional followers established this politics from
the migration crisis of 2015 on the permanent state of exception and
extraordinary governance measures. The COVID-19 crisis offered a new
opportunity to maintain and extend the emergency measures. Viktor Orbán, Prime
Minister found the way to capitalize the pandemic crisis and introduced the
overlapping exceptional measures. Relying on the political theoretical concept
of exceptional governance, it has been argued and analysed in this paper that
the new forms of authoritarianism in CEE are based on the extraordinary
measures.
