This paper aims to examine the impact of significant crisis situations on the constitutional framework over the past decade, including financial crisis, migration, pandemics and war. The paper focuses on the Visegrad countries, especially Hungary, and analyses the constitutional amendments adopted and the relevant constitutional court decisions. By examining the justifications for the amendments and decisions, it is possible to observe the efforts of legislators and governing parties to overcome difficult governance situations in crisis management. The study aims to interpret the relationship between constitutional responses to social crises and crises of democratic political systems, and argues that the inherent feature of constitutional changes triggered by crises is that they remain part of the political system in the longer term. In turn, their impact determines not only the resilience of states and societies, but also the direction in which democratic systems evolve.

This article aims to review the constitutional justifications for majority requirements arising from the democratic principle, and to analyze some current controversial cases. Although the qualified majority requirement is not a new institution in either the national constitutional systems or the functioning of the EU institutions, the democratic legitimacy of majority voting faces several challenges. In order to present aspects that should be re-evaluated in the light of certain new political strategies, this paper analyses the majoritarian requirements in the Treaties, in the rules of procedures of the European Parliament and also case studies pertaining to the constitution-making majority in Hungary and the controversial case of voting on the Sargentini-report. On the basis of this assessment, we may confirm but also reconsider the majority principle.

This paper studies the law pertaining to political parties in Hungary, from the viewpoint of establishing and maintaining of political pluralism. In the period of 1989-1990, the transition from the one-party system to the democratic and pluralistic state of law could be followed up relative to the development of the law pertaining to the political parties, which is based on the rules that foreclose the contingent development of unconstitutional political system. The paper reviews the concept of the political party according to the constitutional law, the normative framework of functioning and the regulations of the internal organization of political parties. The provisions of primary importance concern: a) equality of political parties, b) forbidden purposes and instruments, c) rules of incompatibility, d) state subvention. Rules concerning the internal organization require the openness and the prevailing of democratic will-making also inside the political parties, so contribute to the maintaining the democratic competition of political parties. The author emphasizes the factors that determine multiparty-system, and argues that electoral thresholds and the effective method of state-financing of political parties contest the principle of equality and harm the fair-competition. Thresholds and subvention are both based on the effectiveness of political parties-though being capable to prevent the party system and the parliament from fragmentation, nonetheless, they prefer extensively, if not unconstitutionally, the political parties in the Parliament, so they can be seen as being designed to protect the current political elite. © 2007 Akadémiai Kiadó.