Table of Contents

1. The system we live under 1.2. Evolutionary forms of corruption 2. The disintegration of the Third Hungarian Republic in 2010 2.1. The value system of the Hungarian society 2.2. The political right and left: Two competing anachronisms 2.3. Spaces of rational public discourse in demise 2.4. The actors and the instability of the new ownership structure 2.5. The responsibility borne by the coalition government of the socialists and liberals 2.5.1. Lack in symbolic, community-building politics 2.5.2. Distributive politics and its exhaustion 2.5.3. The shoddiness of freedom and hopelessness of the dispossessed 2.5.4. Inefficacy in government, the incompatible attitudes of the two coalition parties 2.6. Frailty of the institutions guaranteeing the system of checks and balances 2.7. Fidesz as political apex predator 2.7.1. From the close college fraternity to the adopted political family, an alternative rebel turned godfather 2.7.2. Socialist erosion, liberal vaporization and Fidesz's accomplishment of social embeddedness 2.8. Pre-2010 political cold war, and the erosion of the institutional, two-thirds constraint 2.8.1. Political cold war 2.8.2. Economic trench truce: 70/30 2.8.3. Alternating corrupt regimes 3. Approaches of interpretation: from the functional disorders of democracy to a critique of the system 3.1. Trapped in an interpretation along the democracy-dictatorship axis 3.2. Moving on to substantive concepts of description 3.3. The limited validity of historical analogies 3.4. Proclamation of the Hungarian "illiberal state" 4. Definition of the post-communist mafia state 4.1. Post-communist 4.2. Mafia state 4.3. The expansion of the entitlements of the patriarchal head of the family: mafia, mafia state 5. Specific features of the mafia state: a subtype of autocratic regimes 5.1. Concentration of power and accumulation of wealth 5.2. Key players of the mafia state: the ruling elite and its accessories 5.2.1. The poligarch 5.2.2. The oligarch 5.2.3. The stooge 5.2.4. The corruption broker 5.2.5. The family security guard and the secret services 5.3. The political family's expropriation of databases ensuring democratic control 76 5.4. Polipburo, in place of the former communist politburo 5.4.1. Delineation of the mafia state's ruling elite from other historical analogies 5.5. "Law of rule" in place of the "rule of law" 5.5.1. Constitutional coup d'etat-the institutionalization of autocracy 5.5.2. Hostile takeover of the institutions of public authority 5.5.3. Government: not there to take decisions, but to manage decisions taken by the political family 5.5.4. The lexes-custom tailored legislation 5.5.5. Suppressing the control functions of other institutions of public authority 5.6. Administration through confidants and personal governors of the adopted political family instead of a professional bureaucratic administration 5.6.1. Array of devices employed to intimidate the professional administration 5.6.2. Max Weber on the historical path to modern professional bureaucratic administration 5.6.4. Why the mafia state cannot be considered a patrimonial system 5.7. Liquidation of societal autonomies 5.7.1. Liquidation of local autonomies: "caretakers" in place of local governments 5.7.2. Liquidation of the autonomous positions of the intelligentsia in culture and education 5.7.3. Domestication of Non Government Organizations 5.8. Patron-client relations in place of class relations 5.8.1. The changing patterns of existential vulnerability 5.8.2. The variety of the patron-client relations 5.9. The middle strata of the mafia state power hierarchy: service gentry and court purveyors-the "new national middle class" 5.9.1. The service gentry 5.9.2. The court purveyors 5.9.3. Cementing the "new national middle class" 5.9.4. The sin above all sins: disloyalty 5.10. Tributes exacted as economic policy: the system of special taxes 5.10.1. Some forms of special taxes prior to 2010 5.10.2. The systemic escalation of special taxes after 2010 5.10.3. State penalization of critical reactions called forth by special taxes 5.10.4. The inverse of special taxes: strategic agreements and mutual benefits 5.11. Takeover-replacement of the economic elite 5.11.1. The alliance of Fidesz and the "Christian middle-class" 5.11.2. The unique nature of property expropriation by the mafia state 5.11.3. A change of the owner elite and ensuring surrender 5.11.4. The offer that could not be refused 5.11.5. Types of nationalization defined by function 5.12. The rationale of power versus the irrationality of public policies 6. The legitimacy deficit faced by the mafia state and the means to overcome it 6.1. Domestication of the media 6.1.1. 2010-2014: Media control in the period of establishing the mafia state 6.1.2. Media control in transformation after 2014, under conditions of the established mafia state ... 148 The Post-Communist Mafia State 6.2. Manipulation of the electoral system 6.2.1. Changes to electoral law after 2010 6.2.2. The Prosecutor's Office as part of the campaign staff 6.2.3. Establishing the institutional means of electoral fraud 6.2.4. The 2014 spring parliamentary elections and autumn municipal elections 6.2.5. Means of curbing election results retrospectively 7. Legitimizing the mafia state: the ideological arsenal 7.1. Ideology-driven vs ideology-applying system 7.2. Target-ideological templates: God, homeland, family, work-based society 7.2.1. Nationalism, antisemitism, racism 7.2.2. Ideological pyramid scheme 7.2.3. Religion 7.3. Instrument-ideological templates: the System of National Cooperation and the national freedom fight 7.3.1. The System of National Cooperation (NER) 7.4. The national freedom fight 8. The Criminal State 8.1. Hungarian law on criminal organizations 8.2. The Palermo Protocols 8.3. The mafia state as a type of criminal state 8.3.1. One example: criminal organizations expropriating property 8.4. Classifying criminal organization actions 9. Pyramid schemes-the limits of the mafia state 9.1. Economic pyramid scheme 9.1.1. Autocracy and autarchy 9.2. Foreign policy pyramid scheme-"peacock dance" and Hungarian-style cunning 9.2.1. Dilemmas faced by the European Union 9.2.2. Opening towards the East 9.2.3. The disparate logic of EU and US sanctions Annexes Annex 1 Annex 2 Annex 3 Annex 4 List of accompanying studies

About the Author

Balint Magyar is a liberal politician and independent sociologist