Scheppele, a leading scholar of Hungary, shows how a leader who wins a legislative supermajority can use the tools of constitutionalism itself—constitutional amendments, sweeping new statutes, and court appointments—to lock in power legally and durably.
Her central case is Viktor Orbán's Hungary after 2010: a rewritten constitution, a packed and curbed constitutional court, gerrymandered districts, captured media regulators, and election rules engineered so the ruling party keeps winning. Each step was formally legal; together they hollowed out the checks that make law democratic.
She names the deeper move: autocratic legalists exploit the gap between the letter of constitutional rules and their democratic spirit, wrapping power grabs in the legitimacy of proper procedure. Opposition parties, courts, and international bodies—trained to respect legal form—are slow to recognize the pattern until it is entrenched.
The essay is both diagnosis and warning. Constitutionalism can be weaponized against constitutional democracy, and defenders who fixate on procedure will miss it happening in plain sight. Hungary, she argues, is a template that other leaders can and do copy.
…new leaders are elected by democratic publics and then use their electoral mandates to dismantle by law the constitutional systems they inherited.— Autocratic Legalism