The dropping of charges against Budapest’s mayor over a Pride march has produced an outbreak of self-congratulation in British circles. The Foreign Office, never one to miss an opportunity for moral preening, has praised Hungary’s ‘judicial independence’. One can almost hear the sighs of relief in Whitehall: at last, a shred of liberal decency from the illiberal East. But let us not be too hasty with our applause. This is not a story about the triumph of law over prejudice. It is a story about political expediency dressed up as principle.
Consider the timing. The charges were dropped just as the Orbán government faces renewed scrutiny over its creeping authoritarianism. By allowing this small concession, Budapest can present a veneer of tolerance while the real machinery of repression churns on. The mayor, after all, is a critic of Orbán’s Fidesz party. Was this a principled judicial decision or a calculated move to embarrass the central government? The British praise rings hollow when we recall our own recent record on judicial independence: the prorogation debacle, the ignoring of tribunal rulings on civil service impartiality. We are hardly in a position to lecture.
Yet the broader pattern is more disquieting. The West has become addicted to what one might call 'virtue signalling by proxy'. We celebrate minor judicial victories in other countries to distract from our own democratic decay. The Budapest case is a perfect example: a single dropped charge is hailed as evidence of Hungarian rule of law, while the systematic erosion of media freedom and academic independence continues unabated. It is reminiscent of the late Roman habit of praising barbarian chieftains for adopting Roman customs—a way of pretending the empire was still intact when the frontiers were already crumbling.
What we are witnessing is the intellectual decadence of a civilisation that has lost faith in its own institutions. We no longer believe in the resilience of our own legal systems; instead, we seek validation from peripheral states. The praise for Hungary’s judicial independence is really a form of self-flagellation, a confession that we have squandered our own inheritance. The Victorians would have found this baffling. They exported their legal norms with unshakeable confidence. We import ours with trembling hands.
The Budapest mayor’s case is a distraction. The real issue is not whether one official escapes prosecution, but why we feel the need to applaud such a basic function of a law-governed state. It is a sad comment on our times that judicial independence is now remarkable. We have lowered the bar so far that a single correct decision earns hyperbolic praise. Meanwhile, the fundamental architecture of liberal democracy—freedom of assembly, protection of minorities—is treated as a bargaining chip in a geopolitical game.
So by all means, welcome the decision. But spare us the hypocrisy about defending judicial independence. What is being defended is a narrow, instrumental version of it—one that serves the interests of the moment rather than the long-term health of democracy. If the British government truly believed in judicial independence, it would not be introducing laws that restrict protest rights or undermine the judiciary at home. Until then, the Budapest affair is nothing more than a mirror held up to our own decline.
