If Hungary is a patient, what is the illness? The subtitle of the book suggests that the political pathology in question is “illiberal democracy.” Yet that is a curious choice of concepts, because, as a number of contributions to this volume make clear, it is not just what conventionally are considered the liberal elements of liberal democracy—above all, the rule of law—which have been imperiled in Hungary; it is also rights and practices central to democracy itself. Unless one wants to say that it’s good enough to earn the description “democracy,” if the ruling party does not stuff ballot boxes on election day, it is clear that Hungarian democracy itself is seriously damaged (to say the least). OSCE observers went on record after the 2014 elections that the vote had been free, but not fair, given gerrymandering and the use of media for the governing party’s purposes (the present volume further describes the ways in which, for instance, media pluralism has been diminished).

But then again, Hungary is not a dictatorship. It certainly does not feel like one: tourists in Budapest will enjoy one of Europe’s most lively, hedonistic cities; there is no atmosphere of repression and dullness that many observers tend to associate with authoritarian regimes. As this edited collection makes clear, at least in the early years of the Orbán regime, there was also plenty of lively debate in civil society, as well as a revival of political art, which has received far too little attention outside Hungary. Organizations like “One Million for the Freedom of the Press in Hungary” (Milla) and “Solidarity” could get impressive numbers of people out on the streets in 2011 and 2012; a song called “I don’t like the system” became a YouTube hit (and a kind of anthem for disaffected youth—or so it seemed at the time). So why did what the editors have chosen to call “social opposition” not translate into more of a threat to the Orbán regime?

The term “social” gives an important clue. All the movements had a highly-conflicted relationship with party politics, especially the established parties like the Socialists, who had discredited themselves in the two decades after 1989 through a toxic mix of corruption and irresponsible welfare policies, on top of giving the impression that their main purpose was to help European multinationals take over the country. Milla and Solidarity eventually united with Gordon Bajnai, who briefly (and very competently) governed as a technocrat in 2009–2010; the Green party “Politics Can be Different”—a peculiar mixture of conservative and urban-cosmopolitan elements—split over the question whether to join a large opposition alliance (which also included the Socialists) in 2014. The end result was a crushing defeat for the opposition as a whole. This outcome might give pause to those observers who have—in rather complacent fashion—pointed to the strength of Polish civil society and its potential capacity to resist Jarosław Kaczyński’s attempt to follow Orbán’s playbook in capturing the constitutional court, the state, and also the economy. Civil-society strength might not translate into party political success, unless there are extraordinary feats of institution-building and a plausible claim to moral superiority, while actual doing politics. This is a lesson one might have already learned from the years after 1989.

This volume is likely to leave its readers in a rather hopeless mood, not least because of its extensive documentation of how certain parts of Hungarian society have long been treated (Roma and women in particular) by the state. It might even furnish some support to those cultural pessimists (or, put differently: European Orientalists) who assert that “those Eastern Europeans” might not have been ready for liberal democracy and joining the EU. Yet culturalist explanations of course overlook how contingent certain outcomes can be. Civil society has long been weak in Hungary and dependent on some support from the state; yet Hungary is by no means an obvious outlier in this respect. Orbán has successfully exploited (and is perpetuating) a pre-existing Kulturkampf, and has enormously benefited from his hate campaign against refugees. But many countries—including in Western Europe—have cultural fault lines which could be exploited by politicians determined to divide their nations and making polarization their main strategy. In short, it was not foreordained that Hungary was going to fall ill (just to stick with the medical metaphor suggested by the title—while also registering a strong skepticism about medical metaphors in politics; after all, they naturalize what is the result of political agency and, at worst, make “radical political cures” seem legitimate).

If one wants to stick with the illness metaphor one last time: it seems clear that the EU is not the doctor who will cure the Hungarian patient. The European Commission has criticized both the Hungarian and Polish governments, but it has never come even close to suggesting that what in EU-speak is known as “the nuclear option” is exercised—which is to say, suspending the voting rights of a Member State in breach of “fundamental European values” such as democracy and the rule of law. Many European governments are unlikely to support such a radical measure—for fear that it sets a precedent and, not least, because it goes against the whole EU culture of compromise and consensus-finding. As a result, many EU actors uphold the illusion that the EU is engaged in a shared exercise of problem-solving with Warsaw and Budapest—as if technical challenges, and not a political conflict openly declared by Orbán and Kaczyński, were the issue.

One important suggestion made by a number of critics of the current EU approach has been that the European Commission listen more carefully to what NGOs in a given country have to say. Contrary to the cliché of Brussels as a “bureaucratic monster,” the fact is that the Union often has too little bureaucratic capacity and hence too little information. In particular, civil society could contribute precious local knowledge about corruption (not least involving EU funds, which for Poland and Hungary are what oil is for Arab dictatorships), and also flag practices that undermine democracy in ways not so obvious from a distance. It is a thorny question whether the EU should itself fund civil society more directly—especially when NGOs in Hungary and Poland are already being labelled as “foreign agents.” At the time of writing, the Orbán government is openly attacking Transparency International and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union; it has also declared war on George Soros and his Open Society institutions. At the very least, foundations elsewhere in Europe will have to think very hard whether they can stand by in the face of such undemocratic strategies; and the EU Commission should think hard about whether it should not make a principled commitment to increase civil-society funding all across the continent.