Among the quotes for this week, the statement from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán jumps off the page. “If we turn against the institutions of multi-party parliamentary democracy, then something else will happen in Hungary instead… Every other system apart from parliamentary democracy necessarily leads to the loss of individual freedom.”
Notice the way that the quote prioritizes specifically parliamentary democracy as the protector of individual freedom. By centering executive power emanating from the legislature, Orbán pushes aside constitutionalism and the judiciary as protectors of freedom. He also sidelines other EU states and the EU itself, as these communities are built on other models of executive formation.
Centering the legislature and the executive to the exclusion of the judiciary is striking both in the specific Hungarian context and from a comparative perspective. Orbán’s concentration of power in himself and his party, largely by undermining the judiciary and the free press, poses the greatest threat to individual liberty in Hungary. Instead, for democracy to survive, the enforcement of individual liberties by the judiciary must serve as a check on majority power.
In that context, the degree to which the past week’s quotes articulate a vision of Europe based so heavily on the rights and dignity of the individual is striking. This focus is reflected as well in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, but the idea in Article 2 that the European Union is built on these individual rights is more aspirational than descriptive of what brought the member states of the EU together or how the EU operates. The foundation of the EU remains the shared interest of the member states.
As a whole, these quotes—via their rhetorical focus on the individual—remind me more of statements that you’d expect from politicians in the United States, where ideas about government are almost exclusively expressed through the individual’s relationship to the state and the primacy of individual freedom. Individual rights, enforced by the judiciary against discrimination by local, state, and federal majorities has played a vital role in deepening democracy in the United States. It remains to be see seen whether attempts to center individual rights in the EU can do the same in Europe.