Chapter 1

Orbán’s Hungary

Despite Hungary’s increasingly “illiberal” drift and growing divergence from European norms, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has successfully deflected international criticism and maintained its electoral popularity. It has achieved this by a combination of domestic media dominance and a comprehensive discursive strategy which has re-written the political orthodoxy of the Hungarian right. A key element of this strategy is the othering of liberal Western Europe – once seen as Hungary’s manifest destiny after its escape from Soviet dominance. Liberalism is reconstructed as a hostile ideology that has taken Western Europe hostage and seeks nothing less than the destruction of the Hungarian nation. Elements of the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis will be employed to uncover how intertextual references to widely-held historical identity discourses, including from the period of Soviet domination, provide credibility to the Orbán government’s discursive constructions. The Essex School’s logics of equivalence and difference also explain how multifarious critics, both domestic and international, are welded together into one monolithic “left-liberal” other, and how Hungarian society is polarized into “traitors” and supporters of Orbán’s “freedom fight” against the existential threat posed by western liberalism. Under consideration are three major speeches by Orbán, coverage of these speeches in the (then) government-friendly newspaper Magyar Nemzet , and semi-public comments posted by readers of these articles. The analysis of these source materials provides insight into how the government’s discursive strategy is realized in the discourses of right-wing voters.