Protesters demonstrating against the right-wing government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Credit: Laszlo Balogh / Getty
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There are two different stories of democracy’s afflictions in Europe being told at this political moment.
The first, is a story framed around democratic values and the electoral rise of parties that appear to threaten those values because they repudiate the democratic ideal of equality between citizens. In practice, of course, democracies never realise such an ideal even in regard to voting, since they invariably restrict the franchise by age and for prisoners. But as this ideal has come to dominate much of the discourse of democracy, democrats can no longer make arguments for other exclusions to the franchise, or to anyone’s legally protected rights.
Neither can they overtly deny the equality of citizens by privileging the historical, cultural or ethnic identity of any group of them over any others. Consequently, parties that explicitly and unreservedly reject multiculturalism – such as Lega in Italy, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands –make themselves parties in conflict with democratic values. (In this story, multiculturalism has become essential to liberalism, which is essential to democracy.)
The strongest manifestation of such an attack on democratic values is the Fidesz government in Hungary led by Viktor Orbán, which having now been in power for eight years has systematically deployed anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric as a central electoral strategy, and acted against any manifestations of multiculturalism in practice.
Orbán’s government also appears to threaten the conditions of a liberal democracy by running roughshod over freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, the separation of government and the party in campaign expenditure, as well as by effectively ending the existence of the Central European University in Budapest. In doing so, Orbán appears to treat democracy as a means, through its majoritarian features, to other ends, not least the consolidation of personal power.
Seen from Orbán’s vantage point, however, his disruption is not to democracy, but to liberalism. For Orbán, he is a democrat, and the difference between him and his critics elsewhere in Europe is they are liberal democrats and he is a Christian democrat. His idea of democracy rests not on equality but the representation of the people in government and the assumption that the people can be equated with the cultural and religious majority. He wants to claim the heritage of Christianity and he is unashamed in repudiating the ideals of liberalism that he presents as unable to accommodate the realities of human experience around faith, tradition and family.
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Subscribe1) Liberal democracy recognises of innate rights the denial of which makes a democracy both unjust and unstable. That’s fine, but who decides what those rights are? The majority or a self-appointed minority e.g. liberal human-rights lawyers?
2) The principle of elected representation makes the passage of laws less susceptible to wild swings of mood and passion. In the last free pre-WW2 elections in November 1932 the Nazis won 33% of the vote on an 80% turnout i.e. only 26% of the German electorate actually voted for Hitler. But he still took power and look what happened. So much for that argument
3) The principle of separation of powers makes it harder for a majority to subject a minority to its will. But, as we have seen in the US and the UK, packing the Supreme Court makes it easier for a minority to subject the majority to its will.
In some ways the term liberal democracy is a contradiction in terms.