Articles for author: Andrew Arato

Why We Lost

The united opposition in Hungary has suffered a crushing defeat at the parliamentary elections yesterday. Some of my friends and acquaintances will blame for the outcome the new electoral rules produced by Viktor Orbán’s government, and his high degree of control over electronic and printed media. They will be wrong, as they often were before. We lost! And by numbers that completely falsify the electoral rule thesis, that suggested in all its versions that the rules give Fidesz 3-5 % advantage.

4. April 2022

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Restoring Constitutionalism

How to restore constitutionalism and the rule of law is a somewhat neglected problem among constitutionalists. Thanks to forthcoming elections, some countries like Hungary where “democratic backsliding”  has taken place, may have the opportunity to restore the rule of law. Is a democratic community bound to follow constitutional rules of dubious democratic nature? Or can these be replaced in violation of legality, for example in an extra-parliamentary democratic process? If so, under what conditions? We call on constitutionalists to provide answers to these questions and formulate alternatives between the two extremes of legality and paralysis, possibly involving an element of illegality, but compensating for this by dramatic increase of democratic legitimacy.

17. November 2021

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So that the Name Hungarian Regain its Dignity

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We believe that the replacement of the Fundamental Law is necessary, with a rule of law constitution that restores freedom. The new document should be one created by a democratic constituent power according to newly enacted rules, making every effort to avoid civil war and its usually accompanying violence. In its process of drafting the role of the 1989 round table can be a model, even if we cannot count on the acceptance of its new constitutional draft by 2/3 of the parliament elected in 2022.

2. Juli 2021

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Coup, Revolution, or Negotiated Regime Change

All my Latin American students and not a few radical friends strongly claim that what took place in Bolivia was a coup, focusing on the military role. I hesitate to concede the point, to begin with because the previous extra-constitutional manipulation by President Evo Morales, concerning the most important legal issue under presidential governments, that of term limits, very much prepared his own down-fall.

29. November 2019

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Populism and the Courts

The antagonism of populist governments to apex courts is a matter of historical record, starting with Peronism, the first time that an openly populist movement established its own government. Currently, it is demonstrated by repeated conflicts between populist executive power and constitutional courts, and the often successful attempts of the former to pack and disempower the latter. Recent events in Venezuela, Israel, Hungary, Turkey and Poland indicate the attending harm to democratic government, and even these cases do not exhaust the present salience of the populist challenge that has now reached the United States. I believe that the way to ... continue reading

25. April 2017

Orbán’s (Counter-)Revolution of the Voting Booth and How it was Made Possible

Guest Post by ANDREW ARATO, Professor of Political and Social Theory at the New School for Social Research in New York. During the age of great revolutions, Joseph de Maistre distinguished between counter revolutions and the contraries of revolutions. Fearing, rightly, that counter revolutions may have the same horrible consequences as the Jacobinism that he witnessed, he expressed his preference for the contrary of revolutions, but never really explained how it would work. If we take the Bolshevik type revolutions of 1917 and after as the baseline, the self limiting, velvet, peaceful, negotiated revolutions, “refolutions” or “reforradalmak” of 1989, 1990 ... continue reading

16. April 2011