Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament

Abstract

Democracy in Central Europe is said to have begun in 1989. This statement is relatively easy to maintain if one defines democracy as the presence of a particular set of abstract institutions and procedures, such as independent legislatures and regularly held elections, but the picture becomes more complicated when one looks at the actual places where democracy happens. Consider the case of the Hungarian Parliament. By today’s standards, the first freely and fairly elected National Assembly was set up only in 1990, but the neo-Gothic building in the center of Budapest, on the east bank of the Danube, which serves as the home of the Hungarian legislature, was commissioned a little more than a hundred years before the collapse of communism. When opened in 1902, it was the largest (and arguably the most impressive) parliament building in the world (Figure 3.1). How could one account for its existence?