Who would have thought that twenty-two years after the fall of communism in Hungary that György Konrád, the respected writer and one of the most famous Central European dissidents, would have to sign yet another open letter defending fundamental rules of democracy in his home country? And that the letter would be a strong accusation addressed to that young man with soot black hair whose hard-shell speech in 1989, at the symbolic funeral of the martyrs of the ’56 revolution, electrified Budapest – one Viktor Orbán?

The New Year’s appeal of Hungarian intellectuals including former key figures of the opposition such as Konrád and Miklós Haraszti is a democratic alert not only for Hungary. It echoes the dissident appeals of the old days. It does not attack Orbán’s regime for its ideological content, but rather for its form. Liberal democracy is, first and foremost, a set of rules, written down so that the game remains fair for whoever might be sitting at the table. That was the essence of the democratic opposition’s struggle in Eastern Europe – to overthrow the red dictatorship, because it is a dictatorship.

On the other hand, the anti-Communist opposition, of which Orbán is a descendent, wanted to overthrow the red dictatorship because it was red. Following this logic, one can treat human rights in an instrumental fashion. One can perceive torture as justified or not – for example justified in the case of Pinochet, and vicious in the case of Castro. One can also believe that authoritarianism can be built in the name of a just cause. If you disagree with this judgment, you should listen carefully to what the Hungarian democratic dissidents . . .

Read more: Hungarian Alert for Central Europe