Challenges and Pitfalls in the Recent Hungarian Constitutional Development [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION In the transition period to democracy at the turn of the 1980s and the 1990s, Hungary was the only post-communist country in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) which did not adopt a new constitution in place of the old communist-style basic law. Despite this, the constitution of 1949 was entirely revised in 1989 acknowledging the basic values and principles of the modern constitutionalism like human dignity, separation of powers, or rule of law. The new constitutional democracy developed on this basis, and existed for more than 20 years. Nevertheless, the idea of a new constitution has never been abandoned, even if the ideological division between the political parties and the political fragmentation did not provide the possibility of constitution-making for a long time. After a conservative government gained a two-thirds, that is a constitution-making parliamentary majority in 2010, it was possible to adopt singlehandedly a new Fundamental Law in 2011. Since then, this constitution has attracted widespread attention and criticism in Europe. European institutions, human rights organisations, and even foreign government officials of some EU states have expressed their concerns not only about the new constitutional rules but also the recent development and the situation of the rule of law. The new Hungarian constitution became a prominent topic of the present-day European constitutional and political discourse. One of the most interesting collection of studies in this topic was published in Italy, in which leading Italian constitutional scholars and CEE specialists discussed the Fundamental Law.' This interest encouraged us to organise an Italian-Hungarian discourse on the new constitution. An important part of the research project was a seminar on the Hungarian Fundamental Law held on 8 October 2014 in Rome, in the Palazzo Falconieri, the headquarters of Collegium Hungaricum. This conference provided an excellent opportunity for the participating Italian professors - Angela Di Gregorio (Milan), Carlo Fusaro (Florence), Cesare Pinelli (Rome), Giuseppe Franco Ferrari (Milan), Nicola Lupo (Rome) - and the Hungarian scholars - representing three universities and a research institute in Budapest - to exchange their ideas and opinions and to have a lively discussion. The applied method throughout this project was that some prominent Hungarian scholars addressed the most important issues of the new constitution, and the invited Italian professors reacted to their views from an inherently different position. La nuova Legge fondamentale ungherese. Diritto Pubblico Comparato ed Europeo 2012/3. Ed. Giuseppe Franco Ferrari