Ex-dissidents attack Hungary’s constitution

Tens of thousands of Hungarians rallied in Budapest on Monday night to protest against the country’s controversial new constitution which came into force on January 1.

The demonstration, with a turn-out estimated by some as high as 30,000, was much bigger than expected and the biggest to date over what opponents describe as a power grab by the government of prime minister Viktor Orban.

It coincided with a state-sponsored celebration at Budapest’s opera house to honour the new constitution. A core of protesters refused to disperse and remained late in the evening, chanting slogans such as “Dictator, dictator”.

The street protest came just hours after former Hungarian dissidents denounced the government, accusing Mr Orban of “destroying the democratic rule of law”.

In a statement entitled The Decline of Democracy – the Rise of Dictatorship, the dissidents, who opposed communist governments between 1956 and 1989, accused Mr Orban of “removing checks and balances and pursuing a systematic policy of closing autonomous institutions”.

The 13 signatories, including Janos Kenedi, a historian, Gyorgy Konrad, an author, and Miklos Haraszti, a former representative on media for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, urged the European Union not to “sit back and watch as [Hungary] is being held hostage by an outdated, provincial tyrant,” and to “make a stand against” the prime minister.

Mr Orban’s Fidesz party pushed through legislation in the final weeks of last year which the government said supported a new constitutional law, also passed in 2011.

The laws included a bill allowing the government to appoint members of the central bank’s rate-setting council, a move which the EU says will reduce the bank’s independence. Another law enshrines a single rate of income tax into the constitution. Critics say this severely restricts any future government’s ability to raise taxes on higher income earners.

The EU had asked the government to scrap both laws as a condition for continuing talks on a new line of credit from the EU and International Monetary Fund, as requested by Budapest in November.

Mr Orban, who himself rose to fame as an anti-communist dissident, still heads the most popular party in Hungary, despite losing significant support since his election in 2010. He insists that the new laws are needed to end “the post-communist era” during which new civilian parties “were not able to acquire a stable structure” and had to “get by with an old constitution”.

Laszlo Rajk, one of the former dissident signatories, compared Mr Orban to Janos Kadar, the former communist leader who put down the 1956 uprising in Hungary.

“Both Kadar and Orban were originally on the side of their revolutions and both then betrayed its ideas. At first sight it seems strange to compare them but if you think about their careers, they are very similar,” he told the Financial Times.

The former dissidents focus on the legal and political aspects of the laws, including those affecting the constitutional court, the body designed to protect the constitution and the country’s ultimate institution to safeguard legality.

This, they say, has been “gradually turned into a weightless body, [as] the number of judges has been increased with members known to be loyal to [Fidesz].”

Critics said the former constitution, redrafted during the transition to democracy in 1989-90, was perfectly capable of sustaining democratic government.