Rule by Emergency Powers: On a Recent Amendment of the Hungarian Fundamental Law’s “Emergency Constitution”

Abstract The Hungarian government has maintained a “state of danger,” one of the constitutional states of emergency, since March 2020, when this emergency was first declared to address the Coronavirus pandemic. Although the pandemic-related “state of danger” was lifted on November 1, 2022, a new “state of danger” was declared in response to the war in Ukraine. This new emergency regime was based on an amendment to the Fundamental Law (Hungary’s Constitution) that went into effect on the same day the new emergency was declared. This article demonstrates that the amendment and the new provisions of Hungary’s Fundamental Law’s “emergency constitution” served a single purpose: to grant the government exclusive and effectively unlimited power. As the article illustrates, the new formal guarantees do not facilitate a return to the rule of law; in practice, the government has been endowed with exceptional powers without any effective limitations on its dictatorial exercise of authority.