The questionable relevance of institutions is brought home by the controversy over Hungary’s new constitution, which went into effect on January 1, and which has caused a firestorm of criticism in the European parliament and elsewhere. The document was the product of the electoral victory of Viktor Orbán and his conservative Fidesz party, which since 2010 has controlled more than 2/3s of the seats in the Hungarian Diet and has thus been able to change the Hungarian constitution.
The new constitution weighs in on a number of social issues, for instance by defining life as beginning with conception and marriage as between a man and a woman. Rick Santorum would like this constitution, and part of the criticism from the European left concerns these social issues. While they do not represent my personal preferences, that’s not what bothers me; it seems to me the Hungarians have the right to decide for themselves what positions to take on these issues.
Francis Fukuyama: Do institutions really matter?
Excerpt Via blogs.the-american-interest.com 
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Ah yes, Francis Fukyamama, the guy who predicted this wouldn’t happen.
Later he retracted his “end of history” prediction.
Just a small thing to characterize Fukuyama’s thoroughness:
“lowering of the retirement age for Constitutional Court judges”
Constitutional Court judges are exempted from the general age limit of 62, their retirement age is still 70.
Fukayama writes: “..it seems to me the Hungarians have the right to decide for themselves what positions to take on these (political) issues”
How enlighted, how broad-minded, how liberal! This is so damn decent of Prof Fukuyama.
And this bit is what is really entertaining:
“The point about institutions not mattering is this. In terms of the formal powers the new constitution grants the Hungarian executive, they are not greater than those traditionally possessed by a British prime minister. The Bank of England became independent only in 1998; there is no British constitutional court and therefore no judicial checks on legislative power; not just 2/3s but a fifty percent plus one majority in the House of Commons is sufficient to overturn any law in the land, including any protecting England’s fabled press freedoms.
So the real difference between Hungary under Orbán and classic British governments does not lie in the formal allocation of powers in the political system. The problem lies entirely in how those powers are used: nobody trusts Viktor Orbán and Fidesz to use their powers responsibly, as evidenced in the way that the government rammed the constitution itself through the Diet last year, with little willingness to give ground on issues of grave concern to important parts of Hungarian society. Orbán’s behavior betrays an authoritarian thin skin that would rather ban opposition than engage with it. ”
“nobody trusts Viktor Orbán and Fidesz to use their powers responsibly”
And this was published two days about the huge pro-government march. Lovely.
“The Bank of England became independent only in 1998; there is no British constitutional court and therefore no judicial checks on legislative power”
It would be a bit pointless having a constitutional court in the absence of a constitution. We do now have a supreme court, which “may make a declaration of incompatibility which means that it believes that the legislation subject to the declaration is incompatible with one of the rights of the European Convention on Human Rights and such a declaration can apply equally to primary and secondary legislation”
If Fukyamama was in contact with reality at any point, he would have realised that the trend in British Constitutional law is to make it more consisitent with its European Treaty commitments rather use a constitution to go off at a tangent to them. Constitutions – more trouble than they’ve worth.
“If Fukyamama was in contact with reality at any point”
Right. This blog post underpinned that he hasn’t been and he isn’t.