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. It followed up with legislation echoing the 2012 Russian law labelling foreign-funded NGOs as ‘foreign agents’ and a bill that leaves the Central European University — arguably the region’s most prestigious academic institution – in a legal limbo.

In Poland, judicial reforms go far beyond the stand-off over the Constitutional Tribunal, which Mr O’Sullivan describes as a ‘response to court-packing by the previous government’. The changes give the justice minister full discretion to appoint, dismiss and ‘discipline’ presidents of ordinary courts, and bring the National Council of the Judiciary (a self-governing body which makes judicial appointments) under full control of parliament.

The average age of judges in Poland is around 40, so bringing the judiciary under political control is no longer about taking levers of power out of ‘post-communist hands’. And neither is there anything remotely conservative or patriotic about it.