In the last week, across two continents, two authoritarian governments faced significant blows, not by courts, not by international pressure, not by the slow grind of institutional resistance, but by oppositions that chose, against their fractious instincts, to act unitedly. In Hungary on 12 April 2026, Viktor Orbán conceded defeat after sixteen years in power. In India, on 17 April 2026, the Modi government’s Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill was defeated on the floor of the Lok Sabha. It was the first time since the Modi government assumed power in 2014 that it failed to pass its legislative proposal. These two episodes are separated by geography and context but share a common grammar: authoritarian entrenchment, a constitutionally fraught power-grab, and a united opposition that held the line. Together, they highlight how oppositional party politics play important constitutional and democratic functions, and must find crucial space in the study of comparative constitutional law. They also demonstrate how opposition unity can activate, and even re-purpose, constitutional design to check dominant governments, and thus, showing the capabilities of functioning as the final and most effective guardian against backsliding.

The Hungarian Case: How Unity Became the Weapon

Hungary’s descent into competitive authoritarianism is well-documented. Since returning to power in 2010, Orbán used his successive parliamentary supermajorities to rewrite the constitution, pack the courts, subordinate the media, and redesign the electoral rules in ways that entrenched Fidesz’s structural advantage. Beyond the institutions, Orbán was also able to capture the “minds and imagination of the people”. The mixed-member majoritarian electoral system that emerged from the 2011 reforms provided that 106 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly are elected by first-past-the-post in single-member constituencies, with the remaining 93 allocated by the closed list proportional representation using the D’Hondt method. The system was intentionally designed to generate structural disproportion by allowing the largest party to harvest disproportionate seat bonuses when facing a fragmented opposition. As one pre-election analysis noted, the opposition needed to win by at least a 4-5 percent vote margin to win a majority. Such were the mathematics of a system engineered for incumbency.

Understanding this, the broader opposition landscape underwent remarkable consolidation ahead of the April 2026 election. Rather than contest individually and split the vote across 106 constituencies, several smaller opposition parties withdrew from the race entirely, explicitly endorsing Tisza as the strongest vehicle for defeating Fidesz. The Hungarian Socialist Party, one of only two parties from the post-communist transition still active, announced its withdrawal, saying that the electoral system amounted to “legalised cheating” that could only be overcome by uniting behind a single opposition candidate. This, of course, in no manner implied ideological affinity among the several opposition parties. Instead, it reflected strategic clarity, which is critical for defeating an incumbent under a system built towards retaining power.

Péter Magyar and the Tisza party were, in many ways, an improbable vehicle. Magyar had been a Fidesz insider, affiliated with the party until a high-profile rupture in 2024 over a presidential pardon scandal involving the cover-up of child abuse. He was not a figure of the traditional left, and Tisza ran as a pro-European, centrist, anti-corruption party rather than an ideologically coherent bloc. But as political analyst Zsuzsanna Vegh observed, Magyar managed to unite an ideologically diverse coalition—not of parties but of voters—by focusing on policy responses, hitting a moderate tone, and restoring a sense of agency to the electorate. Daniel Kovarek has termed it as the creation of an “ideologically heterogeneous coalition of protest voters”. In essence, a successful counternarrative was built, though engaging in what István Benedek has termed “transformative repolarization”, that managed to draw away the “soft supporters”.

The results of such a unity were historic. After the final count of the votes, Tisza secured 141 seats on nearly 53 percent of the vote, enough for the two-thirds supermajority that Orbán had himself mandated in the 2011 constitution as the threshold for constitutional amendment. Fidesz was more than halved, to 52 seats. Turnout reached more than 77 percent, which is a record in post-communist Hungarian history. The constitutional design that Orbán had deployed as a tool of entrenchment ultimately became the very instrument of his removal, wielded by the opposition he had spent years trying to divide.

The Indian Case: Hiding Behind Women’s Reservation

To understand why the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, which was introduced along with the Delimitation Bill 2026, was both consequential and contested, one must grasp the fifty-year constitutional history it sought to unwind. The 42nd Constitutional Amendment of 1976 froze the allocation of Lok Sabha (the House of the People) seats among states based on the 1971 Census. The ostensible reason was that southern states, which had more aggressively pursued the population control mandate, risked being electorally punished for their success by losing seats to northern states whose populations had grown faster. The freeze was initially set to last until after the first census following 2000. The 84th Amendment of 2001 (See Article 82 of the Constitution) extended it until the first census after 2026, reinforcing the logic of protecting states that had successfully stabilised their populations. I have written at greater length on how this history of constitutional design intersects with partisan benefit elsewhere on this blog.

The 131st Amendment Bill proposed to expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats, ostensibly to operationalise the 33 percent women’s reservation introduced by the 106th Constitutional Amendment of 2023. The framing was carefully chosen. The Women’s Reservation Act had been passed unanimously in 2023 but remained contingent on a delimitation exercise following the next census, meaning it would lie dormant for years. The 131st Amendment sought to delink that reservation from the census requirement and trigger delimitation immediately, using the 2011 census data. The government presented this as an urgency in the service of women. The opposition read it, quite accurately, as something else entirely.

The BJP is a party whose support base is concentrated largely in northern and central India. A delimitation exercise recalibrated to 2011 population data, in a house expanded to 850 seats, would increase the proportional weight of high-population northern states at the expense of the South. The government’s repeated oral assurance that all states would receive proportional seat increases, preserving their current share, was not written into the bill. The text of the Constitution Amendment Bill instead provided that Parliament would decide by simple majority which census to use and when to conduct delimitation, effectively removing the constitutional constraint that had protected southern states for five decades. An oral assurance from a government with an absolute parliamentary majority is, of course, no assurance at all; it dissolves the moment political arithmetic or necessities change.

Moreover, given that the 2026–27 census was already underway, the decision to use 2011 data was a political choice, not a technical necessity. The South’s fear was concrete as under one projected scenario, Uttar Pradesh’s (a state where the BJP is currently dominant) seats could rise from 80 to 140 while Tamil Nadu’s (a state where the BJP has never won) would increase only from 39 to 51, fundamentally altering parliamentary arithmetic in ways that would benefit the BJP’s geographic strongholds for a generation.

The opposition stood united against this amendment. At the voting, 298 votes were cast in favour and 230 against, well short of the 352 required for a two-thirds majority of members present and voting. While the Home Minister, in his reply to the debate, repeatedly accused the opposition of denying representation by reservation to women, an argument that collapses under scrutiny, given that the Women’s Reservation Act had already been notified and brought into force on 16 April 2026, the day before the vote. The reservation was always an operative law; what the government sought to accelerate, through constitutionally dubious means and without securing a renewed federal compact, was the delimitation exercise that would reshape the political map of the country. The united opposition did not oppose women’s reservation. It opposed a delimitation exercise engineered to lock in northern dominance, dressed in the language of gender justice.

Constitutional Design and Its Discontents

These two episodes, read together, illuminate something important about democratic resilience that is often obscured by the emphasis on courts and formal accountability institutions. Constitutional design is quite important and not neutral. In Hungary, Orbán’s 2011 constitution contained the seeds of his undoing—the supermajority threshold he wrote to entrench himself became the mandate that ousted him. In India, the freeze on delimitation that was originally a protection for southern states became the constitutional constraint that the opposition invoked to block a partisan reshaping of parliament. Design choices made in one political moment become resources or constraints in another.

Both cases also confirm something that empirical work on democratic backsliding has begun to document more rigorously: the electoral system is the terrain that directs how political battles are shaped and fought, and thus, is central to understanding why institutions and constitutional actors behave in a certain manner. Orbán redesigned Hungary’s constituencies to favour Fidesz’s rural base, eliminated the two-round runoff that had previously required coalition-building, and used the winner compensation mechanism to amplify the seat bonus of the largest party. The opposition learned from this and adapted its behaviour to them. Rather than banking on securing an opposition alliance around an ideological convergence (something that took place, quite unsuccessfully, during the 2022 election), the 2026 opposition developed a rational response to a system designed to punish fragmentation. It shows how, in addition to laying down the rules of who secures political power, constitutional design also shaped the behaviour of the actors.

Concluding Remarks: The Last Guardrail

There is a recurring tendency in academic and public commentary on democratic backsliding to locate the last line of defence in courts or in what is sometimes called the “fourth branch”. The assumption is that institutional design, properly conceived, can hold even when politicians fail. The evidence from Hungary, India, Poland, Turkey, and elsewhere tells a different story. These institutions are typically the first to fall. Courts are packed, election commissions are staffed with loyalists, and regulatory bodies are defunded or restructured into submission. The Orbán government spent sixteen years demonstrating, methodically, that institutional capture is not difficult once a supermajority is in hand. India’s own record on judicial independence under sustained executive pressure is well-catalogued.

We need to stop fetishising courts and fourth-branch institutions as the guardians of last resort. They fall. They fall too often, and too soon. The record shows that what has actually arrested democratic erosion, including in Poland in 2023, in Hungary in 2026, and now, at a smaller but significant scale, in India’s Lok Sabha, is political resistance. It is parties that choose to set aside individual advantage, electoral systems that can be turned against their designers when the opposition has the discipline to exploit them, and people who turn out in record numbers because they have decided that the vote still means something.

Both episodes should be read as arguments for taking opposition politics seriously as a constitutional function. Parties don’t belong only to political science; they are also integral to the proper understanding and working of constitutional law. Before the government formation stage, a united opposition can prevent the accession to power of forces that would otherwise govern authoritatively. However, if such leaders manage to form governments, a united opposition can deny even entrenched governments the supermajority thresholds that constitutional amendment requires and pose many other frictions in the legislative chamber, as the Indian and other cases aptly demonstrate. The opposition is not merely the government-in-waiting. It is, in the most literal sense available to democratic theory, the check. It is the most versatile and the most resilient of the guardrails because, unlike courts, it cannot be appointed out of relevance.