Hungarian novelist Kálmán Mikszáth once pertinently remarked that ‘each new minister is like an uncut watermelon. It is difficult to tell from the rind whether it will be any good.’ I wonder what he would have said if he had heard that one day there would exist a previously unknown institution in Hungarian public law: a ‘Political Director of the Prime Minister’.
In this case, we can speak not only of a new minister or ministry, but of an entirely new governmental role. And the institution will be what it becomes over time.
Nevertheless, it is easy to understand the legislative intent: The task of the political director is to ensure that strategic aspects going beyond day-to-day affairs have a prominent place in the government’s work, or in other words, to make sure that long-term goals are not lost amid the myriad of routine tasks arising from the nature of governance and newly emerging challenges. In addition, since politics by its very nature always takes place in an intellectual space, it is in constant, back-and-forth contact with this world. The political director therefore also works to detect and map out domestic and international intellectual currents, and to channel these into decision-making processes.
A new institution is thus emerging, the traditions of which are only now crystallizing in the structures of Hungarian public law and government. But what will the watermelon look like years, or even decades later, when we have already cut it open? Let history judge.