Gabor Halmai

• PhD, Doctor of Sciences (Dsc.) in Hungary
• Professor (Full) at European University Institute

The illiberal regimes in Central and Eastern Europe present themselves as populist, using anti-representation and pro-direct democracy arguments. But in reality, this is only rhetoric, which does not necessarily correspond with these populists’ practice. Autocrats’ populism is ‘false’ their decisive characteristic is authoritarianism. What makes th...

The paper looks for the main reasons of how was the Hungarian government of the Fidesz Party lead by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán able to within 13 years undermine the independent checks on their power so that it could convert what had looked like a stable but imperfect democracy into an autocracy? After listing the most obvious reasons the paper lo...

This article addresses the concept of ‘constitutional moment’ in contemporary Israel, where an illiberal constitutionalisation process is in progress, and in Hungary, where the illiberal constitutional system has been in place since 2010. After discussing the judicial overhaul of the current Israeli government and the widespread protest movement ag...

The paper discusses the reactions of different political and constitutional systems reactions to the pandemic and also the impact of COVID to populism, constitutionalism, and autocracy. Beyond the choice between economic and health considerations also applied in liberal democratic countries, which have lead either to “under-” or “overreaction” to t...

In an infamous speech delivered on July 26, 2014, the populist and autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orbán proclaimed his intention to turn Hungary into a state that ‘will undertake the odium of expressing that in character it is not of liberal nature’. Citing as models he added: We have abandoned liberal methods and principles of organizing society...

On 12 September the European Parliament—for the first time ever—launched Art 7 TEU proceedings against Hungary. The decision was based on a report denouncing various violations of EU values by Viktor Orbán’s government. But triggering Art 7 TEU came too late, and meant also too little, because besides the important political function of naming and...

This volume is designed to mark the outstanding legacy of Professor Wojciech Sadurski’s scholarship in the field of comparative constitutional law. It provides a rich palette of chapters that aim to rethink the state of the art in this field, in light of the latest challenges to the foundations of liberal constitutionalism. Edited by former doctora...

The Article discusses the democratic backsliding after 2010 in Hungary, and how it affected the state of human rights in the country, a Member State of the European Union. The main argument of the Article is that paradoxically the non-legitimate 1989 constitution provided full-fledged protection of fundamental rights, while the procedurally legitim...

In the paper I try to answer the question, whether there is a genuine constitutional theory of ‘illiberal constitutionalism,’ recently advocated in some East-Central European member states of the European Union, especially in Hungary and Poland. As I demonstrate, court ideologists of populist autocrats use Carl Schmitt’s concept of political sovere...

The Cambridge Companion to Comparative Constitutional Law - edited by Roger Masterman October 2019

Transitional Constitutional Unamendability? This article discusses the pros and cons for a suggestion to use unamendable provisions in transitional constitutions to protect the integrity and identity of constitutions drafted after a democratic transition. The presumption for such a suggestion could be that most democratic constitution-making proces...

The paper deals with the relationship of different types of populism with authoritarianism and constitutionalism. In the first part, I try to define various approaches—Left and Right-Wing, “good” or “bad”—to populism, especially from the point of view of whether they aim at changing the liberal democratic constitutional system to an authoritarian o...

The intense engagement of populists with constitutionalism—a phenomenon originally related to experiences in Latin America—is increasingly evident in some of the new European Union member states. But the populist phenomenon is clearly not confined to more recently established democracies. Populist constitutionalism stands for a number of distinctiv...

This article first discusses transitional constitutionalism in East-Central Europe, which is represented in provisional constitutions as opposed to the conventional understanding of constitutionalism. The main part of the article deals with the activist jurisprudence of the Hungarian Constitutional Court in the early 1990s, filling the gap caused b...

The Application of European Constitutional Values in EU Member States: The Case of the Fundamental Law of Hungary This article deals with the backsliding of liberal democracy in Hungary, after 2010, and also with the ways in which the European Union (EU) has coped with the deviations from the shared values of rule of law and democracy in one of its...

The paper claims that during the fight over the compliance with the core values of the EU pronounced in Article 2 TEU with backsliding Member States the EU institutions using both the traditional mechanism (infringement procedures and Article 7), and the newly established Rule of Law Framework have proven incapable of enforcing compliance, which co...

This paper deals with the ways in which the European Union cope with recent deviations from the shared values of rule of law and democracy in some of the new Member States in East-Central Europe, especially in Hungary and Poland. The paper argues that during the fight over the compliance with the core values of the EU pronounced in Article 2 TEU wi...

The paper deals with recent deviations from the shared values of constitutionalism towards a kind of ‘populist, illiberal constitutionalism’ introduced by Hungary’s new constitution in 2011. The populism of FIDESZ was directed against all elites, including the ones that designed the 1989 constitutional system (in which FIDESZ also participated), cl...

This paper discusses a decision of the Hungarian Constitutional Court issued in December 2016, in which the judges refer to the country's constitutional identity to justify the government's refusal to apply the eu's refugee relocation scheme in Hungary. The paper concludes that this abuse of constitutional identity for merely nationalistic politica...

Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union, this book offers 'thick' descriptions, contextual histories and critical narratives engaging with leading or minor personalities involved behind the scenes of each case. The contributions depart from the notion that EU law and its history should be n...

In the first chapter the historical relationship of Judaism and Zionism was discussed, while the second discusses the constitutional conflict between Jewish and the democratic character of the State of Israel. The third chapter analyzes the millet system of religious laws (inherited from the Ottoman Empire) for both Jews, as the religious majority,...

This paper that deals with the practice of religious freedom in countries representing distinct models of state-church relations in different forms of constitutionalism from both a normative/theoretical and an empirical perspective. The normative part of the paper examines the characteristics of liberal versus constitutionalism with a special focus...

This article analyzes the use of foreign law in constitutional interpretation. It discusses the three broadly defined positions in the scholarly controversy over the uses of comparative constitutionalism: scholars supporting the idea of the use of foreign law legitimate this practice with the sameness of both the problems and solutions of constitut...

Az Országgyűlés 2011. április 18-án fogadta el Ma-gyarország Alaptörvényét, ami 2012. január 1-jén lépett hatályba. Az Európa Tanács Velencei Bizott-sága 2011. június 17. és 18-án tartott ülésén elfoga-dott véleményében komoly aggodalmát fejezte ki az Alaptörvénnyel kapcsolatban, ami az ellenzék, tár-sadalmi és szakmai szervezetek bevonása nélkül k...

Hungary’s 2010 election brought to power a Fidesz parliamentary supermajority led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban. In just two years, they have fundamentally changed the constitutional order of Hungary. The current government now has very few checks on its own power, but the new constitutional order permits the governing party to lodge its loyalis...

Hungary has a new constitution. The constitutional process was carried out under exclusion of the political opposition and legal experts. The constitution does not meet democratic standards. It breaks with the principle of religious and ideological neutrality. The protection of fundamental rights is being undermined, the constitutional court weaken...

This paper argues that post-transitional countries of East Central Europe have not yet fully succeeded in the task of honestly and seriously working through the communist past, and that the way in which this countries are dealing with their past has a detrimental impact on the process of democratic consolidation. The East Central European countries...

Amid the stormy political events of 1988‐89, Hungary took a turn toward becoming a constitutional state and moved in the direction of re‐establishing the rule of law and having a real constitution. The process of establishing the rule of law began with the recodification, adopted in January 1989, of the right of assembly and association. This right...

The introduction of seven referendum questions by the Hungarian opposition parties FIDESZ and KDNP on 23 rd October 2006 marked the beginning of a new chapter in the relationship between direct and representative democracy in the constitutional history of the post-regime transition era. These initiatives were openly aimed at discrediting the govern...

In Hungary, a comprehensive amendment to the 1949 Constitution took effect on 23 October 1989. According to the new preamble of the considerably amended Constitution, the revision was needed ‘in order to promote the peaceful political transition into the rule of law realizing the multiparty system, parliamentary democracy and social market economy’...

The Freedom of Expression in the Jurisprudence of the Hungarian Constitutional Court The freedom of expression is among those constitutional rights of which it might be said that the Hungarian Constitutional Court " s more than ten years of jurisprudence is not only rich, but also varied. The court has shown a predilection to apply the various meas...

The paper examines the jurisprudence of the Hungarian Constitutional Court in the area of freedom of expression. The Hungarian court, which began its work immediately after the political transformation on 1 January 1990, is the most active institution implementing the Austriarr-German type of judicial review in the Central East European countries....

Статья содержит результаты исследований, проводившихся на кафедре экономического права Университета им. Карла Маркса с 1981 по 1985 г. по поручению Министерства Строительства и Градостроительства по теме: инвестиционное право. В ходе исследований был написан целый ряд статей, охватывающих систему принятия решение по капиталовложениям, их финансиров...

"A Magyar Köztársaság jogrendszerének állapota 1989?2006. Komplex jog- és alkotmányelméleti, jogszociológiai és szakjogi elemzés" c. (Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest) megjelenő mű dokumentálja a kutatást. A magyar jogrendszert mint egészet és egységet kezelve írtam meg mozgásának dinamikáját, külső kapcsolatait és belső tagozódásának, tartalmai alakulásá...