Analysis
Economy & Tech
Ukraine’s Reconstruction: A Second ‘Big Bang’ for European Business?
5 November 2024
The lynchpin of Viktor Orbán’s political ideology – his notion of “illiberal democracy” – parallels, in many important respects, the earlier Russian doctrine of “sovereign democracy”.
The proliferation of “democracies with adjectives” presents a particular danger to democratic institutions. Namely, while the fans of “adjectives” do not do away with the general idea of democracy altogether, they work from the inside to introduce their own “mutation” into its “DNA” – much in the way a virus does in a cell.
In doing so, they make use of actual problems and conflicts that democracies have to face. This includes the conflict between globalisation and the nation state (and globalised and national identities) the left-right or the liberal-conservative conflict of values, including such highly sensitive topics as family, gender and sexuality, as well as social and economic inequalities.
What antidotes are there to the virus? First, the “body politic” needs to acknowledge, in full scope, the kinship of Russian and Hungarian adjective viruses and avoid sympathising with them on ideological grounds.