The news arrives with a self-congratulatory sheen from Whitehall: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, that perennial thorn in the EU’s side, has been temporarily blocked by his own parliament. British officials, ever eager to point a finger at Brussels while polishing their own democratic credentials, have hailed this as a shining example of checks and balances in action. One might almost believe them, if one forgot the grotesque ironies at play.
Let us first dissect the Hungarian affair. Orban, a man who has spent a decade dismantling judicial independence, muzzling the press, and gerrymandering electoral laws, finds himself momentarily checkmated by a legislative manoeuvre. It is a rare victory for Hungary’s increasingly embattled opposition, but it is not a triumph of liberal democracy. It is a procedural hiccup, a speed bump on the road to autocracy. The same parliament that passed Orbán’s ‘lex NGO’ law and his ‘Stop Soros’ package is now asserting itself on a budget row. To see this as a systemic vindication is to mistake a cough for a cure.
But the British government’s reaction is more instructive than the Hungarian event itself. The UK, having spent the better part of the last decade lurching from one constitutional crisis to another, now positions itself as a tutor in democratic virtue. This is the nation that gave us the ‘elective dictatorship’ of a prime minister proroguing parliament unlawfully, the spectacle of a government losing its own majority, and a House of Lords that is still partly hereditary. It is the land where the whipping system ensures that rebellions are rare and costly, and where the first-past-the-post electoral system routinely produces governments with a minority of the popular vote. Yet here stands the UK, clapping itself on the back for Hungary’s internal bickering.
The true lesson of this episode is not about Hungary’s democratic resilience. It is about the intellectual decadence of European elites who mistake process for substance. Orban’s authoritarianism is not a bug in the EU system, it is its logical conclusion. For decades, Brussels has prioritised technocratic governance over popular sovereignty, hollowing out national parliaments while claiming to uphold democratic values. Orban simply took the EU’s disdain for democracy to its next level, using populist nationalism as a tool to consolidate power. The British applause is thus the applause of a man who has built a house of cards and points to a neighbour’s leaning wall as evidence of his own structural integrity.
Consider the historical parallels. When Rome was in its decline, senators would celebrate provincial distractions as proof of the empire’s vitality, even as the barbarians massed at the gates. The UK, in its own post-imperial twilight, now mimics this pathology. It clings to the illusion that its parliamentary traditions are in good health, while ignoring the rot at its core: a political class disconnected from the public, a media that has surrendered its watchdog role for clickbait, and a citizenry that has lost faith in institutions altogether. The Orban kerfuffle is merely a convenient smokescreen.
What should we make of this? Perhaps it is time to admit that the ‘democratic model’ the UK so proudly offers is itself a crumbling edifice. The rise of populism across Europe is not a response to Orban’s excesses; it is a response to the failure of liberal elites to deliver meaningful choices. The Hungarian parliament’s little revolt will not restore trust in the EU, nor will it improve the lives of Hungarians. It will simply allow the British to preen for another news cycle.
In the end, the real story is not Orban’s blockage, but the West’s desperate need to believe that its ship is still seaworthy. It is a tale of intellectual decadence, of a political class that mistakes rhetoric for reality. The Victorians, for all their faults, would have sniffed at such self-congratulation, knowing that an empire built on hypocrisy is an empire built on sand. We might do well to recall their grim wisdom.
