Hungary's U-turn
02 February 2015
In a recently pre-published paper János Kornai, the world famous Hungarian economist, provides a detailed analysis of the political and economic situation in Hungary.
The final version of the paper will appear in the October issue of the American quarterly Journal of Democracy. The working paper is motivated by a deep worry concerning the situation in Hungary: the Orbán government made a U-turn leading the country back from democracy to autocracy, from the state of law to the disrespect of law and to arbitrarily improvised rules, from decentralization to centralization, from strong commitment to Europe to ambiguous and unpredictable attitude in basic issues of foreign policy. Kornai wrote this paper with the intention to help non-Hungarian readers to understand what is going on in his country but he emphasises that the issues are of wider concern in today’s Europe. He provides a deep and comprehensive analysis which covers political, economic and cultural issues.