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 have to say.

Their letter is above all a dry summary of the legislative and institutional changes pushed through by Orbán’s government. It is a rather terrifying read, as it illustrates how in the very heart of Europe, using a series of small, barely visible steps, it is possible to introduce and entrench in a democratic system a conservative autocracy. Orbán gave the old idea of a “salami tactics” – cutting the opposition down, slice by slice – a new meaning. Today the main opposition party is declared a “criminal organization.” It is still hard to believe that we are talking not about some banana republic, but about one of the pillars of the Visegrad Group.

Some fifteen years ago the word “Visegrad” still had some meaning. Thanks to people such as Václav Havel “Central Europe” became a trademark – a recognized label of quality, of which the Baltic or Balkan nations dreamed. These two notions, Visegrad and Central Europe, stood for stability and the success of “democracy’s third wave.” Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary were the A-students of the East European academy (Slovakia’s time came later). Is there still anything that those three have in common? Never since 1989 were their political scenes as different as they are today.

This is not to say that Poland (as well as Czech Republic and, perhaps especially, Slovakia) should not treat the developments in Hungary as a threat. The example of our “bratanki”(a traditional Polish nickname for the Hungarians, implying a strong historical bond, despite cultural and ethnic differences), moving ever farther away, plunging into the turbid waters of the region’s history (Orbán is not ashamed of the parallels with Admiral Miklós Horthy), shows how fragile the democracy of our nations still is. The constant talk of a growing threat of authoritarianism as well as – let us utter this word without hesitation – fascism, is quite disheartening.

As the authors of the open letter sadly note, and as was reviewed by Kultura Liberalna in yesterday’s post here, the authoritarian deviation in Hungary has already passed a critical point and is largely irreversible. Even if the coming elections would bring a victory of the opposition, FIDESZ and its project for Hungary is already firmly anchored. The question “What happens after Orbán?” is therefore mostly an inquiry about how to dismantle an autocracy through democratic methods, when that autocracy had already undermined the foundations of the republic.

At Kultura Liberalna we asked sardonically if it is not high time to kick Hungary out of the European Union. This is not a mere provocation. The Hungarian dissidents acknowledge that in its present shape their country would not meet the “Copenhagen criteria” and thus could not count on being accepted in the EU. If we were supposed to bring in moral strength and the experience of a struggle for democracy into Europe, then it could be a good idea to react sharply, when someone is wiping his shoes on liberal democracy, even if that someone is an old friend.