Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Hungary was a regional leader in market and political reform, adopting all the key institutions of capitalist democracy. After a recession in the early 1990's the economy grew continually until the 2008 financial crisis. The Hungarian party system was stable, with every single government serving its full four-year mandate, and featured an alternation of left and right parties elected freely and fairly. Along with the Czech Republic and Poland, which could point to similar experiences, Hungary was in the first wave of countries to enter both the European Union and NATO. By virtually any measure Hungary had a consolidated liberal democracy. Since the landslide election of the conservative Fidesz party in 2010, however, Hungary has steadily turned away from the liberal democratic path. Enabled by its supermajority in parliament, Fidesz set about remaking the Hungarian social and political system. The contributions to The Hungarian Patient are an attempt to assess what this about-face means, how it happened, and the efforts to oppose it.

This volume has two big virtues. First, it covers a broad range of issues. Fidesz's efforts to centralize political power are well described but have already been documented in even greater detail elsewhere. What is new and fascinating are the chapters documenting Fidesz's attempts to recast state-society relations and the ways in which society has responded. In a section on the “symptoms” of the “Hungarian patient,” authors detail how Fidesz is attempting to dismantle the liberal state by restructuring relations between the state and women, the Roma minority, students, and the media. Fidesz's strategies include the cooptation of Roma political organizations, regulatory capture of the media and many civil society organizations, and favoring traditional, conservative views of gender, sexuality, religion, and public morals. In the following section, on the “immune reaction,” authors describe the origins and activities of civil and political movements that oppose Fidesz's policies. These chapters provide excellent accounts of how “bottom-up” organizations such as Solidarity, Milla, and HaHa have been able to mobilize many thousands of people but also how leadership squabbles, ideological divisions, and failures of messaging hampered their ability to bring about more fundamental systemic change.

The second virtue is that the chapters that attempt to interpret what is happening in Hungary from a broader perspective provide a much-needed corrective to the simplistic view, voiced even by the editors in the preface, that Hungary has simply abandoned democracy. Here I would especially highlight the pieces by András Bozóki; Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Balázs Jarábik. Each grapples in its own way with Fidesz's very real onslaught on the democratic system it inherited. The changes discussed include the drastic weakening of checks and balances and the concomitant centralization of power; the abolition of consensus rule in favor of pure majoritarianism; the manipulation of the electoral system to favor the incumbent; and the longer-term entrenchment of Fidesz policy preferences (beyond its electoral mandate) through excessive use of laws that require a two-thirds majority of parliament to overturn. All three chapters, however, also rightly distinguish between the indisputably illiberal majoritarian democracy Fidesz has fashioned and the openly dictatorial regimes that have taken root in some other post-communist countries.

My one significant criticism is that the editors fail to appreciate the broader significance of what is happening in Hungary. In the concluding chapter, Jon Van Til is not wrong to highlight the lessons for other countries of Hungarian civic movements' largely-failed efforts to reverse changes Fidesz has wrought. But Hungary under Fidesz raises a far weightier question: what is the boundary between democracy and dictatorship? Even Fidesz acknowledges that its reforms amount to a second transition, but it won its 2010 supermajority fair and square. With a handful of exceptions, Fidesz's policies have been implemented with exquisite procedural correctness. Fidesz did use electoral reform to tilt the playing field in favor of itself, but opposition politicians have not been jailed and parties have not been prevented from contesting elections. There was little evidence of fraud in the 2014 election, in which despite all the political change, social upheaval, and mass protest of the preceding years, Fidesz remained by a non-trivial margin the most popular party. The Fidesz regime may not be to liberals' taste, but it is harder to argue that it does not have a democratic mandate. The core issue this book does not adequately address, but that we must all grapple with, is what limits ought to be placed on majority rule.