Executive aggrandisement: how a seemingly innocuous term is eroding our democracy

Angus Colwell looks at the way elected officials might gradually erode our democracy.

Travel to Budapest and you would be mistaken for believing yourself to be in a free country. The associated hallmarks of an unfree country are nowhere to be seen — no martial presence, no police on every corner, no overwhelming government propaganda. Ironically, one of Budapest’s main attractions is its Parliament building.

Hungary is a democracy, in a sense. The elections are free. But beyond that, not much else seems democratic about this nation. 85% of the press are under state control, and the prime minister Viktor Orbán’s party Fidesz has control over the constitutional court and the courts of appeals. All of these power grabs have been achieved within democracy, and through democratic means.

Orbán calls this “illiberal democracy”. Political scientists have defined it as “executive aggrandisement”. It is not hard to discern which of the two sounds more ominous. Nevertheless, what Orbán has done is a coup. Not a coup d’état in which the generals appear on the television screens asserting that everything will be OK, but an unapologetic extension of his own powers using the mechanisms handed to him by liberal democracy.

Executive aggrandisement, therefore, is defined as a process whereby an elected executive gradually curbs the powers of democratic institutions using legal means. It is bricolage in an acute and political sense — it is removing, brick-by-brick, the democratic accountability and legitimacy of institutions, but using the resources (“bricks”) available around us. In Orbán’s case, his weapon of choice has been the courts. As Michael Ignatieff, former politician and now Rector of the Orbán-abused Central European University, put it, “It looks like law, it walks like law, it talks like law, it smells like law, but it’s not law.”

Looking at the British political structure, it is not unreasonable to think that we may be vulnerable to this kind of democratic coup. In our first-past-the-post electoral system, the checks and balances on an executive with a healthy majority are limited. With Boris Johnson’s 80 seat advantage, it seems unlikely that parliament will restrict his capacities as effectively as the 2017-19 parliament curbed prerogative powers.

But Johnson knows that his majority does not mean he has completely free rein. In fact, tense votes loom in the future — rebellions on Huawei and HS2 are not unfeasible. In light of this, his Downing Street operation’s antagonistic briefings emerge as machismo posturing rather than expressing any desire (or ability) to undermine democracy. Take Number 10’s ban on ministers appearing on the Today programme or Good Morning Britain, in retaliation to their “biased” coverage during the election campaign. Today’s 8:10am slot used to be an iconic daily grilling of a poor cabinet minister sent out on the airwaves to defend a government cock-up — for many, it felt part of the well-established cultural constitution. Why does skipping the Today programme seem so blasphemous to us? Why does avoiding accountability from one radio programme feel like a cardinal sin? The answer to that is because of how entrenched our institutions are. And that is not the case in Hungary.

Ministers still appear on BBC Breakfast, Andrew Marr, The World at One — skipping Today is a petulant raspberry towards the BBC from the government, and does not represent a genuine desire to erode the power of the media. As David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge, put it to me in an interview for Pi Media, “the Orbán version is that you shut down the Today programme and arrest the editor!”

The picture of Johnson and Cummings putting the handcuffs on Sarah Sands seems a long way off. Not due to the goodness of their hearts, but because of the opposition it would face. The government needs the news organisations to reach the people. Similarly, it is not hard to imagine a Tory rebellion, or a judicial verdict, that steps in.

Hungary meanwhile has been a Soviet state in living memory. The first free elections following the era of communism happened in 1990. Like a young child, Hungarian democracy has been more vulnerable to wounds, infections, and illness. The same cannot be said for Britain — a democracy which has a keen (if perhaps inflated) sense of itself, and its importance and evolution throughout history.

If anything looks ready to ignite a fire, our first-past-the-post voting system is ready to blow, and has been for a while in this post-coalition age. The collapse of the Lib Dems in 2015 meant two things — firstly, it made it unlikely that any “third party” would enter into a formal coalition again, but more importantly, it meant the return of two-party politics: Conservatives and Labour, on the basis that no other party’s vote share looked significant enough to form a meaningful alliance.

Should another election return a minority government, we will be back in the same “logjam” we were in for two years. Brexit exposed, but did not create, the parliamentary chaos of 2017-19. With no coalitions, we look set for ad hoc minority governments with next to no power, interchanged with unrestrained majority governments. In a future minority government, it is not hard to see a “people vs. parliament” rhetoric being espoused by a posturing strongman again to get us out of the mess. Yet the proportional representation revered by many is not the answer. It would be unwise to treat a problem caused by a hatred of coalitions with an electoral system fundamentally reliant on coalition-making.

Democracy is entrenched in Britain in a way that in Hungary it is (or was) not. Looking for parallels with Orbán or Erdogan raises the national rhetoric to a level beyond the requirements. The Johnson government must be opposed like every government has been opposed, which requires a recognition that more people voted for the government than any other party. Branding the governing party as authoritarian demagogues when they are not only alienates the voters the opposition would be trying to win over. Instead, the government must be treated for what it is - childish and petulant. If the government is acting like a child having a tantrum, the opposition must look like the adult. Regrettably, it has so far failed to do so.

This article was originally published in Issue 725 of Pi Magazine.

Executive aggrandisement: how a seemingly innocuous term is eroding our democracy

© Pi Media 2024