Dismantling direct democracy: Referenda in Hungary 1 Róbert László In populist or, rather, in illiberal systems, after the conquest of independent institutions, referenda and other tools of direct democracy(such as civic disobedience, protests, strikes) become even more important as units of the diminishing set of instruments used to assert people’s interests against those in power. Since 2010, the Hungarian government has been successful at preventing any unwanted referendum to take place. Even more concerning is the fact that with the anti-quota referendum, one of the gravest dangers of illiberal politics seems to be materialising: the leadership’s reaction is making the tools of direct democracy(besides those of representative democracy) meaningless. The prelude to this was the reformulation of the legal environment for referenda in a way that it became significantly harder to initiate a referendum and to conclude it successfully. Although the theoretical chance for this is still there, referenda could continue to be the strongest tool outside of Parliament to balance the government’s politics, however, this device is much harder to access. The changes in the legal environment of referenda since 2010 In 2011, Parliament agreed to a new Fundamental Law, which was only supported by the supermajority of the parties in government. In 2013, a new Act on Initiating Referendums, the European Citizens’ Initiative and Referendum Procedure was promulgated(Act CCXXXVIII. of 2013, afterwards: Referenda Law). The framework of referenda is provided by this piece of legislation.  Similarly to the situation before the new law, the requirement for holding a legally binding referendum is still the collection of the signatures of 200 thousand Hungarian citizens. By keeping this precondition the same, Fidesz did show some self-restraint, probably not independently of the fact that there has been no party besides Fidesz to be able to successfully initiate a legally binding referendum in opposition since 1990.  The most important alteration is that the Fundamental Law reverted to the pre-1997 requirement for validating the referendum, necessitating the participation of over half of eligible voters in the referendum.(Decisiveness is almost given in case of a valid referendum, since the vote would only be indecisive if both possible options gained 50 per cent of support.) 1 This is the summarised version of Politic al Capital’s study in Hungarian. The original one is available here. 1