Letters | 1 February 2018

Creeping repression

Sir: John O’Sullivan is correct to argue that Europe’s centrist establishment often ‘does not really accept the right of its challengers to come to power. And when they do, it casts them as being illegitimate as extremists’ (‘A new Europe’, 27 January). We fear, however, that like a number of our fellow conservatives, Mr O’Sullivan’s enthusiasm to see elites get their come-uppance creates blind spots for creeping authoritarianism.

At the end of a second term by its Fidesz government, Hungary performs worse on all of the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators than it did a decade ago. In its Index of Economic Freedom, the Heritage Foundation finds a sharp decline in government integrity in Hungary and Poland over the past year and classes Hungary as ‘repressed’. From 2010 to 2015, Hungary also took a sharp plunge on Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index, from 28th to 44th place worldwide. Fidesz promised to ‘sweep out’ the civil society organisations funded by George Soros.