Unmasking Authoritarian Constitutional Imaginary

This paper examines how the constitutional imaginary was transformed in Hungary after 2010, during the period of the right-wing populist government. While after the fall of the communist regime at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s there was a consensus that a Western-style democracy and the rule of law should be established in Hungary, and the democratic transition took place accordingly, 2010 was a turning point in the Hungarian constitutional development. The former right-wing opposition won a parliamentary supermajority in the general elections that year, which created an opportunity for the new government to unilaterally transform the country’s constitutional structure and at the same time introduce a new constitutional narrative. The paper analyzes this new kind of constitutional imaginary discussing its three main symbols, constitutional identity, the revival of the historical constitution, and the Christian culture. The study argues that these elements and other ideological features of the new constitutional order do not form a coherent system, nor did they create a new form of constitutionalism, but their primary goal has been to consolidate and strengthen the government’s power and make it exclusive. The Hungarian example shows how the constitutional imaginary has been instrumentalized during an authoritarian transition.