The Rise of Illiberal Christian Democracy in East-Central Europe

When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced in 2010 that he was building an illiberal democracy in the heart of Europe (and the European Union), it took many by surprise. The Hungarian Fundamental Law, complete with a National Avowal, passed in 2011, looked more like an exercise in memory politics than in modern statesmanship. In a few years, this constitutional experiment came to change the conversation about the foundations of the European public order. Yet, when PM Orban announced in the summer of 2018 that he was committed to building an illiberal Christian democracy, his speech was treated by most as a political provocation - and not as a serious program of statecraft for a post-liberal age. 

This lecture will offer a user’s guide to illiberal Christian democracy at a time when it is still taking shape. It situates illiberal Christian democracy not as a coherent political ideology or a political theology. Rather, it is a transformative political project based on a global intellectual and political network that connects actors across Brazil, the US, Austria, Italy, its ECE heartland (Hungary and Poland) all the way to Russia. Its intellectual resources are as diverse as its practitioners. Its early traditionalist intellectual influences (drawing on Gramsci, Guenon, de Carvalho and Dugin, Legutko) have recently been complemented by a more coherent embedding in common good constitutionalism (Dreher, Deneen and Vermeule). The latest package of amendments to Hungary's Fundamental Law, tabled in the spring of 2025, offers insight into the constitutional imaginary of the illiberal Christian democracy project. It is complemented by an ambitious plan to reset the European Union, developed by leading Hungarian and Polish centres of excellence, in close cooperation with the Heritage Foundation.

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