Direct Democracy, the Rule of Law and the Protection of Minorities: The Case of Hungary

Abstract

Three main factors are crucial for determining the relationship between direct democracy and minority protection in Hungary: first, the ethnic composition of the country; second, the Hungarian minorities living in the neighbouring countries; and third, the quality of the new democratic system installed in 1990. Viewing these elements together, it becomes clear that minority protection in the context of Hungarian direct democracy does not primarily concern ethnic minorities, but rather the political minorities, i.e. the opposition. Hungarian direct democracy is embedded in a predominantly representative constitutional system, which seeks to ensure parliamentary supremacy, democracy and the rule of law. In this system national minorities are protected through individual and collective rights. The protection of political minorities, however, results from the interplay of the different elements of the overall system of political decision-making, which regulates the interaction between direct and representative democracy: There are mechanisms for safeguarding the rights of the political minorities on both the input and output sides of the referendum process. On the input side, the National Election Committee plays the role of the foremost gatekeeper. It has to decide on the admissibility of the referendum questions. On the output side there are two kinds of safeguards, the first group relating to the principles of parliamentarianism, by which procedural rights are granted to the opposition, the second to the legal protection of rights by the Constitutional Court, which plays the role of a guardian of last resort of the rule of law on the output side.