Liberal Democracy and its Current Illiberal Critique: The Emperor’s New Clothes?

Abstract

This article focuses on the challenge of illiberalism to democracy, even though the nature of this contestation is ambiguous. The illiberal critique of liberal democracy is contextualised using conceptual history and two major ‘political credit ratings’, namely the Democracy Index and the Freedom in the World Report. Empirically we concentrate on Hungarian politics, which we consider to be an example of soft authoritarianism, drawing on two key speeches by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán: his launch of the idea of the ‘illiberal state’ in 2014 and his emphasis on ‘Christian democracy’ after the 2018 election campaign.