PM Orbán’s strategy explained

A pro-government political philosopher attempts to outline what the Prime Minister means when he envisages reviving what he calls Christian Democracy, as an alternative to what he famously described four years ago as ‘illiberal democracy’.

In Magyar Hírlap, Ervin Nagy welcomes the Prime Minister’s announcement that what he opposes to liberal democracy should be termed Christian, rather than illiberal democracy. Nagy describes liberal democracy as an ideology centred around the individual. Its requirements of equality, unfettered competition and pluralism concern the individual citizen. For exactly this reason, Nagy suggests, liberal democracy has built a system of tenets including political correctness which aim to banish ‘undesirable’ expressions and views. Thereby, he continues, it turns into its opposite, a system the political philosopher describes as ‘liberal dictatorship’. He sees liberal democracy as a political current which not only disregards but deconstructs traditional communities, like families, churches and nations in which the individual ‘feels at home’. This is why, he argues, people in liberal democracies experience feelings of alienation, anxiety and other civilisational psychological disorders which finally create a gap between the elites who see liberalism as the only admissible option and the ordinary citizen. ‘Illiberal democracy’, as the term was used by the Hungarian Prime Minister in 2014, was a negation of all that, Nagy explains. When he now speaks about ‘dusting off’ Christian Democracy, he is proposing a positive alternative.

Tags: illiberalism