Hungary has fallen to last place in the European Union across virtually every major freedom and democracy index since Viktor Orban consolidated power, a comprehensive new policy analysis from the Cato Institute has found. The country's scores have deteriorated so sharply that it now ranks alongside nations in Africa and the Middle East on several key measures.
Johan Norberg, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, compiled data from half a dozen major indices to paint a picture of systematic institutional erosion, "Hvylya" reports.
Freedom House reclassified Hungary from "Free" to "Partly Free" in 2019 after its score dropped 20 points on a 100-point scale - the first EU member state to lose that designation. The Varieties of Democracy Institute's Liberal Democracy Index shows Hungary halving its performance from 0.65 to 0.32 between 2010 and 2024, placing it on par with Nigeria and Kuwait. V-Dem called Hungary "the world's leading autocratizer" in terms of magnitude of change.
The Cato Institute's own Human Freedom Index, published jointly with the Fraser Institute, recorded one of the steepest falls: Hungary dropped from 31st to 67th globally between 2010 and 2023, finishing behind Namibia and Botswana. The World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index now places Hungary 79th out of 143 countries overall, and a dismal 123rd in the "Constraints on Government Power" category - behind Uzbekistan and Niger.
Norberg traces the decline to Orban's systematic dismantling of institutional checks. After winning a two-thirds parliamentary majority in 2010, Fidesz rewrote the constitution, packed the Constitutional Court with loyalists, forced senior judges into early retirement, and stripped independent oversight bodies of their authority. Orban himself laid out the philosophy in 2014 when he declared that "the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state." He has also dismissed the very concept of checks and balances as "a US invention that for some reason of intellectual mediocrity Europe decided to adopt."
The Bertelsmann Transformation Index offers a final data point. In 2010, Hungary scored 9.35 out of 10 for political transformation. By 2024, that number had fallen to 6.3, earning the country a classification as a "defective democracy." Its governance performance score collapsed from 6.07 to 3.79 over the same period.
Earlier, "Hvylya" examined how the "America First" approach weakened the alliances that underpinned decades of global stability.