Media Law and “Illiberal Democracy” in Europe: The Case of Hungary

This paper aims to analyse how media laws strongly affected democracy in Hungary. These laws contributed to shape what has been pictured as a U-turn in Hungary. Hungarian representatives defined Hungary as an “illiberal democracy”. Nevertheless, this paper argues that further analysis depicts it more precisely as a non democratic actor. The essential conditions for a democracy to function, including an independent and free media sector, seem to be lacking. An increased production of norms has been a crucial tool to undermine them. This thechnique affected in Hungary a great number of institutions and “shrank” democracy through law. This paper shows that the so called Hungarian “illiberal democracy” deeply transformed the state-society/law-society (and therefore law-citizens) bidirectional relationship: the law impacts upon society but society (citizens) cannot impact upon the law anymore. This paper also addresses the European Union (EU)’s response to the changes that have occurred in Hungary. It argues that this response is very complex and so far the EU has been a “giant with tied hands”. Nevertheless, the EU has come to a crucial point. The possibility of activating Article 7 of the Treaty on the European Union (TUE), which would suspend Hungary’s voting rights, has been mentioned for the first time and may be soon assessed.