Why two thirds of the seats is the whole of Hungarian politics

What the constitutional order is

Hungary is a unitary parliamentary republic, and its politics operate under a constitutional framework called the Fundamental Law, which was most recently and heavily reformed in 2012.

A parliamentary supermajority of two thirds is typically needed to amend that law. That single procedural fact organises everything else about Hungarian politics, because it defines two entirely different situations: a government with two thirds of the seats can reshape the constitutional order, and a government without them can only legislate ordinarily.

The country has been a parliamentary republic since 1989, when the communist system was dismantled by negotiation rather than by rupture, and the constitutional settlement of that period was a heavily amended version of the earlier text rather than a new document. The 2012 reform replaced it.

The 1989 transition itself is worth describing, because it explains the shape of what followed. Hungary's communist system was dismantled through negotiated round-table talks between the ruling party and opposition groups rather than through a rupture, which produced a constitutional text that was an amended version of the previous one rather than a fresh document, an electoral system designed by the negotiating parties, and a political class that included figures from both sides of the table. A settlement reached by agreement rather than by victory leaves nobody defeated and nothing conclusively settled, and Hungarian constitutional politics has been reopening that settlement ever since.

Legislative power is exercised by a unicameral National Assembly of 199 members elected for four-year terms. There is no second chamber, no federal tier and no regional legislature, so a majority in that single body faces fewer institutional checks than a comparable majority would in most European systems. What checks exist are the Constitutional Court, the president and the European framework, and the first two are appointed or elected by the same parliament.

How the parliament is elected

Members are elected for four-year terms under a mixed system combining single-member constituencies with a national party list, so a voter casts two votes and the outcome combines a plurality element with a proportional one.

That design has a specific consequence. A mixed system with a substantial constituency component converts a plurality of votes into a considerably larger share of seats when the opposition is divided, and the relationship between vote share and seat share in Hungary has been correspondingly steep.

The number of seats was reduced from a larger assembly to 199 in the reforms of the early 2010s, and constituency boundaries were redrawn at the same time. Both changes were made by the parliament that benefited from them, which is possible in a system where the electoral law is not entrenched above ordinary legislation and no independent commission draws the boundaries.

Turnout is high by European standards and the electorate is sharply polarised along lines that have hardened over the past fifteen years. Hungarian elections are contested less on distributional questions than on questions about the nature of the state, national identity and the relationship with the European Union, which produces campaigns with very little overlap between the two sides and an electorate that consumes almost entirely separate media.

What the president does

Hungary's head of state is a president elected by parliament rather than by the electorate, for a fixed term, and the office is largely ceremonial with a small set of reserve functions.

The president signs and promulgates legislation and may return a bill to parliament for reconsideration or refer it to the Constitutional Court before signing. Those are real powers, they are exercised sparingly, and a president elected by the governing majority is unlikely to use them against it.

The office also nominates the prime minister for the Assembly to elect, appoints senior officials on proposal, and represents the state abroad. What it does not have is any independent political authority, and the choice to have parliament rather than voters elect the head of state was deliberate: a directly elected president would have a competing mandate.

The practical effect is that Hungarian executive power sits almost entirely with the prime minister and the government, and the constraints on it are the ones parliament and the courts provide, which is why the composition of both has been the subject of so much of the constitutional change since 2010.

Who reviews the laws

Hungary has a Constitutional Court, and its powers and composition were among the things changed in the constitutional reform. It rules on the conformity of legislation with the Fundamental Law, and it can annul statutes it finds incompatible.

Two changes altered its position. The scope of its review over budgetary and tax legislation was restricted, and the method of appointing its judges was changed so that a two-thirds parliamentary majority selects them without the cross-party nomination process that had previously applied.

The result is a court whose formal powers remain substantial and whose composition is determined by the same majority whose legislation it reviews. Whether that constitutes an adequate check is the central contested question in Hungarian constitutional law, and it is argued in exactly those terms domestically and in European institutions.

The ordinary courts sit under a separate judicial administration whose governance was also reorganised, and the independence of the judiciary has been a recurring subject in the European Union's rule of law procedures concerning Hungary, alongside media ownership and the funding of civil society.

What the party system became

Hungarian politics after 1989 began as a competition between several parties of roughly comparable size, drawn from the anti-communist opposition, the reformed successor to the ruling party, and liberal and agrarian groupings.

That structure consolidated. Two blocs emerged through the 1990s and 2000s, alternating in government, and after 2010 one of them established a durable dominance while the other fragmented, which is the condition under which the two-thirds threshold described above becomes reachable.

Fragmentation on one side and consolidation on the other interact with the electoral system in a specific way. Single-member constituencies reward a united bloc and punish a divided one severely, so opposition parties that stand separately lose seats they would collectively win, and the arithmetic has pushed them towards joint candidacies that are difficult to hold together across the ideological range involved.

A further party of the nationalist right and a set of green and liberal formations complete the chamber. What is missing by western European standards is a large social democratic party, and the collapse of the Hungarian left after 2010 is one of the sharper party-system changes anywhere in Europe in the past two decades, and the space it left has been contested by newer formations rather than reoccupied.

What the state provides

Hungary runs a European welfare system on a middle-income tax base, and the tension between those two facts shapes most domestic policy.

Health care and education are public and universal in principle. Both are funded well below western European levels and both have seen substantial emigration of qualified staff to higher-paying countries in the union, which is the standing problem of central European public services since accession: free movement of labour inside the union means a nurse or a doctor trained in Budapest can earn several times as much a few hundred kilometres west.

The pension system is the part the OECD assesses favourably. The Hungarian public pension, funded from current contributions rather than from a fund, performs well in maintaining living standards after retirement, and past reforms increased the effective retirement age and prolonged careers, which partly offsets the fiscal effect of an ageing population. Spending on public pensions is nonetheless expected to rise substantially as a share of output.

Family policy is the distinctive element and it is explicitly demographic. Tax allowances, loans and exemptions tied to childbearing are a central plank of government policy, aimed at raising a birth rate that has been below replacement for decades, and the country's population has been falling at around half a per cent a year regardless, which is the measure by which the policy has to be judged. Hungary: economy goes into what all of this costs.

What the argument with Europe is about

Hungary joined the European Union on 1 May 2004, NATO on 12 March 1999, the OECD in 1996, the Council of Europe in 1990 and the Schengen area in 2007, and it has been a United Nations member since December 1955. Its stated foreign policy commitments are to Atlantic cooperation, European integration, international development and international law.

The dispute with European institutions is about domestic constitutional arrangements rather than about membership. Proceedings have concerned judicial independence, media pluralism, academic freedom, the treatment of civil society organisations and the handling of European funds, and they have led to the withholding of money and to formal procedures under the union's rule of law mechanisms.

The Hungarian government's position is that these are matters of national competence and that the criticism reflects political disagreement rather than legal deficiency. The institutions' position is that membership entails commitments about how a member state governs itself and not only about what it trades.

That argument is unresolved and it is a genuine constitutional question rather than a procedural one. A union of states that are sovereign in their internal arrangements and bound by shared values has to decide what happens when a member's reading of the second changes, and Hungary is where that decision is being worked out, slowly, through procedures nobody designed for the purpose.

Where power sits below the state

Hungary is a unitary state with counties and municipalities beneath the national level, and the direction of the past fifteen years has been centralisation.

Competences that had sat with local government were moved upward. Schools were transferred to a central authority, hospital administration was centralised, and the financial position of municipalities was altered by a combination of debt consolidation and reduced revenue autonomy, which left local councils delivering services under central direction rather than setting policy.

Budapest is the exception and the friction point. A capital holding close to a fifth of the population, with a metropolitan government that has frequently been of a different political colour from the national one, produces continuous conflict over funding, transport, planning and public space, and the capital has been the one place where national policy is regularly contested by an elected authority of its own.

The counties themselves are administrative rather than political units with modest competences, and there is no regional tier with legislative power. A country of nine and a half million governed as a single unit with a strong centre is a coherent design. The argument is about how much of what a citizen experiences should be decided in one building, and about what remains for a local election to be about. Hungary: history deals with how the present arrangement was arrived at and Hungary: economy what it costs.