Back in 2020, when almost every head of state in the world was declaring Covid-19 a state of emergency and national executives were obtaining their extraordinary powers, there was an international freak-out about Viktor Orbán, the husky Hungarian prime minister. One writer at the Atlantic said that the prime minister had undoubtedly crossed the line between emergency powers and outright authoritarianism. Another predicted that there would never be elections again in Hungary and that the Hungarian parliament had been dissolved forever. One of my colleagues at AEI said that a full-fledged dictatorship would arise from these emergency powers unless there was vigorous pushback from Brussels and Washington. Human Rights Watch warned that Orbán had seized “unlimited power.”
By July 20 of 2020, Viktor Orbán’s government had returned all his emergency powers back to the Hungarian parliament. His lifelong dictatorship lasted just 82 days.
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