ABSTRACT
Hungary today is a post-communist mafia state. In 2010, an autocratic breakthrough replaced the world of competing corrupt networks, i.e., a patronal democracy, and established a single-pyramid patronal network, led by the chief patron, Viktor Orbán (Figure 1). With a two-thirds majority in the parliament, Orbán was able to rewrite the constitution and the electoral law one-sidedly; and in the last years, referring to different types of crisis situations (migration, the pandemic, and the Russian-Ukrainian war) he has ruled by decree without any democratic restraint. He has also been able appoint his own clients to head the institutions that would normally serve to check and balance state power in a democratic regime (constitutional court, media authority, national council overseeing the courts, election monitoring bodies, etc.) without the need for consensus. The creation of unlimited constitutional and appointing powers has emptied the formal institutional system: the people who hold the majority of public power are in practice political front men, at various levels, who do not exercise the authority of their position autonomously, but merely execute in the sphere of legality decisions made outside of legally defined institutions. The decisions made by the informal patronal network, Orbán’s adopted political family, can be described and understood by the twin motives of concentration of power and accumulation of wealth, carried out through bloodless means of state coercion applied with wide amplitude of arbitrariness. Hence, the regime is a patronal autocracy, and the state in such a regime can be identified as a mafia state. 1
