Hungary’s Election as Baseline: Tracking a System of Embedded Exceptionality
ISSE Analysis
With Hungary approaching a national election later this month, attention will center on electoral outcomes and party dynamics. From the perspective of the Institute for the Study of States of Exception, however, the more consequential issue lies in the structure that produces those outcomes. Hungary offers a clear case through which to examine how systems evolve when emergency-derived powers are sustained, accumulated, and integrated over time into the ordinary functioning of governance.
This ISSE analysis adopts the concept of exceptionality, developed in recent legal and political theory by Gian Giacomo Fusco and Przemysław Tacik in their recent book Law and the Exception: Towards a New Paradigm, to describe that condition. Exceptionality refers to the enduring presence of exceptional measures, logics, and practices beyond formally declared emergencies. It captures how authority associated with crisis governance persists, diffuses, and becomes embedded across legal and institutional systems, often without reliance on continuous formal declarations of a state of exception.
Under Viktor Orbán, Hungary has developed a system in which embedded exceptionality shapes the baseline conditions of governance. The formal structures of constitutional democracy remain in place: elections are held, courts operate, and legislative processes continue. Over time, however, successive legal and institutional changes have shifted the effective distribution of authority toward the executive, with limited pathways for reversal through those same institutional channels.
Kim Lane Scheppele’s “How Viktor Orbán Wins” (published in the Journal of Democracy), provides a precise account of how this system operated at the level of electoral competition up through 2022. The governing party’s advantage was constructed through sustained modifications to the political field: redistricting, media consolidation, regulatory asymmetries, and institutional capture. These changes shaped the environment in which elections occurred, producing outcomes that reflected prior legal and structural decisions.
This restructuring has unfolded alongside a sustained reliance on emergency authority. Since 2010, Orbán’s government has governed through successive crises, including the 2015 migration emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Each episode has enabled the expansion of decree-based governance, accelerated institutional change, and reduced the constraining capacity of oversight mechanisms. Measures introduced under emergency justification have been extended, codified, and incorporated into the ordinary legal framework.
The cumulative effect is a system in which exceptional authority informs the baseline conditions of governance. Legal thresholds for the use of such authority have broadened, while institutional checks have become less capable of limiting their application. The distinction between emergency and ordinary governance has narrowed in practice, even where it remains formally intact. Exceptionality, in this sense, reflects not a single legal status but an accumulated condition produced through repeated cycles of crisis response, legal adaptation, and institutional consolidation.
Hungary’s trajectory aligns with developments observed in other jurisdictions. In Turkey, emergency authorities declared after the 2016 coup attempt facilitated large-scale restructuring of the state, with enduring institutional consequences. In India, legal frameworks tied to national security and public order have expanded executive discretion and narrowed the operational space for opposition actors. In Israel, long-standing emergency regulations continue to shape both security policy and domestic governance. In Russia, the sustained invocation of threat has become a central organizing principle of political authority.
Across these cases, emergency-derived powers enable rapid legal change, recalibrate institutional relationships, and reshape the conditions under which political competition takes place. These effects accumulate over time. Institutional arrangements that emerge from repeated reliance on exceptional authority become increasingly stable, even in the absence of continuous formal emergency declarations.
Hungary is particularly instructive because this process has been carried out through formal legal mechanisms while maintaining electoral continuity. The system retains opposition participation and procedural regularity. At the same time, the structure within which those processes operate has been steadily redefined in ways that favor the incumbent and constrain the prospects for alternation.
As Hungary approaches its next election, the central issue concerns the structure within which that election unfolds. The legal and institutional framework developed over the past decade defines the range of plausible outcomes and the conditions under which they can be contested. Scheppele’s analysis provides essential context for understanding how that framework was constructed. The purpose of this piece, however, is prospective. The coming election offers a near-term vantage point from which to assess how a system shaped through embedded exceptionality operates in practice, and to track how its dynamics evolve in the period that follows.
Kim Lane Scheppele is one of the leading scholars of constitutional law, democratic backsliding, and the modern state of exception. Her work has been central to documenting how legal and constitutional systems can be reconfigured through the sustained use of emergency powers to consolidate executive authority over time. Her analyses of Hungary have become foundational in comparative discussions of how exceptional authority is embedded within contemporary governance structures.
Photo by Keszthelyi Timi on Unsplash.
