Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Since the landslide victory of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in 2010, numerous institutional reforms have been introduced, thus implementing the so-called “System of National Cooperation” (SNC) within an” illiberal state”. In the past few years, Orbán’s populist rhetoric and policies received widespread criticism across the world, evoking headlines such as “Hungary’s Authoritarian Descent” (Waller 2016). Nevertheless, he remains popular in Hungary, as his re-election in April 2018 proved. The Fidesz government maintains its success through an interactive set of political, economic and cultural strategies. One of strongest tools are embedded narratives, which portray policies as necessity to create a “Sovereign Hungarian Nation”. The concept of the Hungarian “illiberal state” is evaluated from an interdisciplinary perspective, using a mixed methods research approach, including critical discourse analysis, framing and descriptive statistics. Hereby, the research visualizes rhetoric strategies and narratives in everyday political communication and voters’ perception of such. Finally, it answers the claim for deeper structural analysis of the current Hungarian political system and its strategies.