Demokratikus vezetés mint „bálványfogalom”?
Democratic Leadership as an “Idol Concept”?

Summary/Abstract: The tension between democracy and political leadership is one of the great paradoxes in the fi eld of political theory and political leadership studies. The contradiction emerges in the expectations towards leaders that require leaders to solve community problems and to enforce the public will at any cost, but at the same time to respect the rules of democracy, to allow and not to jeopardize the self-government of the people or civic participation. The literature has pointed out that the question is not whether leadership is necessary for the functioning of democracy, but how these concepts and practices can be linked to each other. Accordingly, this study is based on the presupposition that democracy and leadership are not only conceptually related, but they also depend on each other in practice. The article is written with the modest ambition to illustrate the necessity of this conceptual relationship from the perspective of leadership. Drawing on political and generic leadership literature, the paper unravels the stable denotation, the strict boundaries and the normative connotations of leadership that make democratic leadership not an oxymoron, but even an “idol concept”.

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