Peasant Whettering the Scythe (1928), Gyula Derkovits
Visiting the similarities and differences between contemporary “populists” and the interwar népi (folk; populist; popular) movement that arose amid radical shifts in the organization of territories, peoples, and borders (the scalar organization of capital) will illuminate important historical particularities. It will also highlight the ways in which categories favored by liberalism provide analytical blind spots that aid in misidentifying movements and their historical contexts, while establishing liberalism as the normative political center. Teasing out differences and similarities among the political questions in Hungary in the long 1930s and today can give us valuable insight into how to think about the work of “populism” and (liberal) antipopulism and bring to light the historical and processual making of hegemonic formations.
My approach here emerges from my research on a folk dance and music revival movement that arose in the 1970s (also népi, but rarely translated as populist), which drew on methods of the interwar populist movement and inherited some of its organizational and institutional forms in the context of the state socialist cultural apparatus. I noted that while, like interwar “populists,” this revival was concerned with peasants as the folk, unlike them, it neither tended to note “class” distinctions among peasants nor addressed land distribution. The revival has instead been particularly focused on ethnic Hungarian peasants in neighboring countries and preserving their “culture” in the face of assimilation, ethnic discrimination, and (first socialist, now capitalist) modernization. At the time of that research (2004/2005), I documented the strong support among folk revivalists for Orbán and Fidesz (with a vocal minority supporting the far-right MIÉP). Fidesz was in opposition then, having governed for a single term (1998–2002), and was coming to be associated with what I called the folk critique (Taylor 2008a). In 2004, folk revivalist support was voiced most loudly in connection with a referendum, supported by Fidesz, on establishing dual citizenship for ethnic Hungarians “over the borders.”
The tendency to link Orbán and Fidesz to both the interwar government(s) and the népi movement makes a certain sense. It also reveals blind spots, however, particularly around the latter’s opposition to these government(s). Calling Orbán and Fidesz populist (rarely if ever using the Hungarian term népi, but rather, the Latinate term populista) and associating him with interwar Christian National, fascist, and National Socialist governments, as well as the interwar populists without pause has the effect of obscuring class struggle and reducing the problem of the folk/people to race or ethnicity. What I call liberal antipopulism does the work of delegitimating various political actors and parties (left or right), while establishing liberal as a neutral norm and justifying the technocratic decision-making so common to contemporary (neo)liberal governance as “democratic.” It does so by labeling appeals for popular sovereignty and equality as “populist.”
The chapter proceeds as follows: In the next section, I introduce the interwar népi movement and the conditions in which it arose. I then go on to discuss the historical conditions that gave rise to liberalisms, leftisms, and the Christian National Horthy regime against which both populists and urbanists agitated. I next introduce the three pillars of the népi movement: land reform, the franchise, and cultural validation in this context. Following this, I jump to the populist/antipopulist dynamics of the postsocialist period. I then touch on the rise of Fidesz’s “populism” in a period in which the policies of state socialist Hungary and the gains of popular and populist pressure on its agrarian policies were being dismantled, but the folk revival was going strong. Examining today’s conditions via the lens of the three pillars of interwar populism, I argue that Fidesz’ “populism” is a strategy to gain and maintain its unprecedented power in parliament for three terms in a row, which has more in common with the interwar government(s) than with the populists who opposed it.
The Interwar Populist Movement
World War I saw the fall of empires and the establishment of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The new nation-state of Hungary that emerged was largely agricultural. This sector employed over 50% of the total labor force, providing over 30% of the national product and over 60% of exports (Kopsidis 2006). It also played an important role in subsistence/reproduction of workers.
By the mid-1930s, with the global depression in full bloom, a network of initiatives, organizations, and practices organized around land reform, the franchise, and cultural validation for the “Three Million Paupers,” the third of Hungary’s population (67% of the peasant population) comprised of manorial servants, landless and land-poor peasants, and their families (some forced to migrate to urban centers to work) had come to be referred to as the “népi mozgalom” (folk/people’s/populist/popular movement).1 While the movement is often reduced to the prolific and well-known népi writers, it was sustained by the many who took part in village visiting, sociography (documenting the conditions of the folk), learning folk knowledges, agitating for land reform and the franchise, and organizing “Folk Colleges” (Taylor 2008a, 2009). Broadly shared elements of the népi program included the notion of a third way of development between (Western) capitalism and (Soviet) communism, the vision of a “garden Hungary” that involved forms of democratization and progress that would take the agrarian nature of society into account, and the cooperation of small nations of the Danube Basin.
Mihály Bimbó (2013) stresses that this movement emerged from within counterrevolutionary organizations and argues that it is not possible to understand their program as socialist. “If there is any socialism there,” he writes, “it is a romantic socialism, one which does not have anything to say about capitalism or private property. In the face of the erasure of diversity put into place by capitalist and socialist progress alike; in the face of quantity, it proposed quality; diversity.”2 The populist movement was, nevertheless, a radical political voice for land poor and landless agrarian workers in the interwar period. Arguing for a complete overturn of existing property relations, it was also unfriendly to the Bolshevik strategies of concentration of land in the hands of the state and forced cooperativization. The népi movement espoused the redistribution of the huge swaths of private property that made up (post)feudal estates and Church holdings, toward the goal of producing a population of smallholders—a “garden Hungary.”
Understanding how this “romantic socialist” movement would come to be a main voice of justice for the bulk of the working class in Hungary—and how it came to be conflated with the Christian National, fascist, and National Socialist governments to which it saw itself in opposition—requires setting it in the context of the waves of revolution and counterrevolution that accompanied the reorganization of territories into “nation-states” and their tumultuous incorporation into the world capitalist system.
The term nép (volk, folk, people) had a number of overlapping, even competing, meanings: the working class; the majority; the lower strata; those who should have sovereignty in a republic; the oldest layer that preserves the special characteristics unique to the nation, and the ethnos in cultural, racial, or both senses. To many interwar népi activists, the nép was the mass of rural Hungarians subjected to a neofeudal “middle class” regime of land ownership and labor. To others, the nép was (also) those rural Hungarians subjected to an urbanizing process associated with the “bourgeoisie,” a group equated with “Jews” and “foreigners.” By the mid-1930s, however, the identity of népi (of the folk/people) was coming to signify one side in an increasingly hostile series of debates between népi and urbánus writers playing out in Budapest’s rich literary scene, the critical medium of the day. It is this opposition that is usually considered primary today and is thus important in contemporary conflations.
The opposition between these two groupings took shape around their different visions of progress. Both contested the conservative neofeudal interests of the government, espousing democratization, the franchise, and land reform, and a number of them worked together at literary journals and in political parties in the earlier days of this period. Yet some of the most visible népi writers made overtly antisemitic comments, while others used the language of “foreign” to talk about Jewish elements of society in their sociological analyses of the peasant question and rural bourgeoisification (see Tóth 2012).3 These populists highlighted, however, that a good part of the lowest strata of society in Hungary was not an industrial or urban proletariat , but rather, landless agricultural workers and land-poor peasants. They acted in opposition to a nationalist conservative government invested in preserving the feudal property and political privileges of the nobility-derived officer and bureaucratic “middle class .”
While the government tried to absorb népi energies into its sphere of influence by adopting, imitating, and sponsoring its rhetoric and practices, it never fully succeeded. And while individual népi actors came to be associated with antisemitism and some eventually even with the National Socialist Arrow Cross, far more seem to have placed themselves on the left. The most organized and explicitly political of the népi efforts were the political mobilizations March Front (1936), the National Peasant Party (NPP), and the movement to found Folk Colleges (later, in the coalition period, NÉKOSZ—the Association of Folk Colleges). The NPP was formed in 1939, with Germany now Hungary’s next-door neighbor and as an array of far-right parties fared well in local elections. While remaining illegal (like the Communist Party) until 1945, it joined the antifascist (or perhaps for some, anti-German) Magyar Front in 1944, which unified the parties of the resistance (see Borbándi 1989, 326). It subsequently took part in the ruling coalition that came to power in 1945, from which Communist Party rule would emerge (Borbándi 1989, 344).
The history of leftist movements and their suppression surely shaped the populist movement and its approach to the problem of the people/folk. The Horthy period (1920–1944) began with a “White Terror,” consisting of violent attacks on the leftists and Jews that the new “ancien régime blamed for the instability and loss of territory. Tens of thousands were imprisoned, and 5000 were killed (Bodo 2010).4 While the Communist Party was banned, most “liberal” parties simply dissolved, and the Social Democrats boycotted the 1920 elections in protest of the authoritarian turn. This treatment of leftists was necessary for the consolidation of the regime, precisely because socialism and communism had popular appeal. Interwar populism took the form it did in part because of the suppression of the legacy of socialist and communist politics, as well as the shortcomings of the short-lived 1919 Soviet.
The Radical Reorganization of Territories, Peoples, and Borders
In the context of the Dual Monarchy (1867–1918), absolutism mixed with elements of economic and cultural liberalism, making Hungarian “liberalism” a complex and multi-headed creature. A habit of referring to parties for independence as “radical nationalists” in contrast to the (economic) “liberals” of the Liberal Party controlling parliament can mislead today’s readers. In fact, positions ranged from support for remaining within the Empire to support for independence in both monarchist and republican versions. Addressing sovereignty meant addressing the “ethnic diversity” of the Hungarian lands—how to treat the majority of greater Hungary’s population who did not speak Hungarian as a mother tongue and increasingly agitated for their own states. There were indeed “radical nationalists” (or petite imperialists), who regarded ethnic Hungarians as superior, and deserving to rule over the territory without ceding rights to the “nationalities,” while others hoped to convince the latter to remain as equals. Both groups had thinkers who entertained a regional federation of some kind.
At the end of World War I, as during the 1848 Revolution, those who would govern Hungary were confronted anew with the agrarian and national questions. Now, faced by “national” armies supported by the Entente assembled on what would become (more or less) the borders of the new polity, the questions of who would govern, who would be citizens, and what rights they would have were imminent. In March 1918, after the (Habsburg) Emperor and Monarch appointed Count Mihály Károlyi Prime Minister of Hungary, the latter declared a Republic, terminating the union between Austria and Hungary.5 The victorious Entente demanded immediate surrender of approximately two-thirds of “Hungarian” territory to other nations/nationalities: the region would be carved up into “nation-states .”
After the Entente denied a request for a referendum on the postwar boundaries, Károlyi turned power over to a coalition of Social Democrats and Communists who established a Republic of Councils in 1919, the second socialist state in the world. The Soviet too faced the unresolvable problem of the borders, and expected reinforcements from the Soviet in Russia did not materialize. The occupation of Budapest by the Romanian army created the conditions for the counterrevolutionary government, formed in the southern city of Szeged (with the support of powerful landowners, many of whose vast estates lay beyond the Entente-enforced borders, along with millions of ethnic Hungarians) to take power with the help of a “national army.” War hero and Admiral Miklós Horthy was installed as regent shortly thereafter.
The Horthy era would last until October 1944, when the regent resigned in the face of a coup by the Arrow Cross Party, supported by the occupying German forces. Horthy’s ascendance restored the “ancien régime,” “but eliminated its liberal characteristics and institutionalized a conservative, antisemitic oppressive authoritarianism” (Berend 2001, 141). Successive governments represented the class interests and “Christian National” values of the aristocracy, middle nobility, land-holding gentry, and the bureaucratic, military officer, and intellectual layers derived from them, while using irredentist propaganda to promote “national unity.” To understand how the Horthy government(s) and populist positions came to be conflated, how they can legitimately be associated, and how the népi-urbánus opposition is remembered as primary, let us explore the népi movement’s three main demands: land reform, the franchise, and cultural validation for the nép.
Three Pillars: Land Reform, the Franchise and Political Representation, and Cultural Validation
In 1918, under pressure of mass demonstrations, Károlyi’s government had drawn up a land reform program to distribute lay estates exceeding 500 yokes and ecclesiastical estates exceeding 200 to agrarian workers, but the plan was not actualized in the short time this government was in power. Next, the 1919 Soviet decided to nationalize large and medium-sized estates. This alienated many peasants, who, along with other workers, had earlier demanded the Communist Party’s rise to power, contributing to their unification with other peasant strata (Romsics 2015, 193). Once Horthy was installed, the National Smallholders and Agricultural Worker’s party, the largest party in parliament (1920–1922) pushed for the breakup and redistribution of large estates (Romsics 2015, 191). While the scale of the 1920 land reform was small and the distributed plots (2–3 yokes) insufficient for supporting a family, this action successfully removed land reform from the government agenda.6
The franchise was also rolled back. Although, until then, parliamentary parties had represented less than 10% of the (adult male) population, the Károlyi government had extended the franchise to most literate men over 21 and women over 24 (about 50% of the adult population), while also introducing the secret ballot. No elections took place under this government, but many of these gains were preserved in the 1920 elections. By the 1922 elections, however, “the right to vote was limited and circumscribed by age, sex, property, educational and other qualifications (e.g., open voting in the countryside), which kept the number of eligible voters between 26.6% and 33.8% of the total population” (Vardy 1983, 10; see also, Harsfalvi 1981). Prime ministers were appointed by the regent.
Meeting the qualifications required to vote would have been particularly difficult for landless agrarian workers, because of land and education requirements. Even those poor peasants eligible to vote were likely affected by the open ballot system exercised outside the cities. Further, having boycotted the 1920 elections, the Social Democratic Party subsequently came to an agreement with the government on terms unfavorable for widespread organizing, especially in the countryside (Berend 2001, 142). Poor agrarian workers were left unrepresented, while Communists and Social Democrats were virtually absent from the agrarian sphere and associated now with urbanists (in contrast to the first decade of the century when the Agrarian Socialist Union boasted upwards of 70,000 members) (Romsics 2015, 175).
Debates between népi and urbánus writers centered around their respective visions of progress. While they shared interest in land reform, the franchise, and democratic freedoms, they differed on the question of “culture.” It is this aspect of népi politics that appears to overlap with the politics of successive interwar (and World War II) governments. The “counterrevolutionary organizations” from which the populist movement emerged were in constant flux. With many other social spaces and political activities banned or without support, these organizations hosted many tendencies (see Bimbó 2013). Government support for the activities of such organizations was tied to hopes that “exposure” to the territories of greater Hungary would (re)produce an attachment helpful to irredentist aims. But the “village visiting” activities in which participants (mainly youths) took part, and for which populists were famous, also lent themselves to sympathy with the folk as agrarian workers both oppressed and demeaned by the ruling classes. The same practices could thus serve quite different ideological causes, and the cultivation of a sympathy for peasants via learning their practices (songs, dances, harvesting, etc.) could overlap with nationalist and neo-feudal interests in the absence of a leftist cell and a class analysis.
From the populist position of sympathy with the plight of the agrarian poor, the urbánus vision of catching up to the West (or on the other hand, following Soviet Union inspired development) appeared unsympathetic to agrarian workers/peasants. This difference was often framed as a kind of ethnic divide between “authentic” Hungarians and others: populists understood peasants to be knowledge bearers in the sense that Herder did, as bearers of the “national soul.” But they were also keen observers of how neofeudal and capitalist elements could be particularly exploitative of agrarian workers.
A growing equation between populism and fascism today relies on covering this populist advocacy for the nép with the broad brushstroke of the Christian Nationalist, conservative counterrevolutionary, fascist, and later National Socialist governments and their supporters. Understanding the differences, as well as the overlaps, is aided by attending to what Csaba Tibor Tóth calls a “more complex picture of the Jew,” that takes into account both “the acceptance into Hungarian society and the differentiation from Hungarianness” (Tóth 2012, 31).
Until the end of World War I, Hungary had been a deeply “multinational” state, and “ethnic Hungarians” were a minority in the territory of historic Hungary (Kann 1945, 359). While Hungarian political nationalists had alienated the so-called nationalities, they sought and found willing allies for their plans to retain the crownlands as a nation-state in the Jewish population. The 1868 Emancipation of Jews, expressing a commitment to religious equality, was tightly tied to linguistic assimilation, which Jews of local and foreign origins embraced. Through magyarization of Jews, political nationalists of this ilk were able to increase the number of “Hungarians” (measured by mother tongue) in the territories of the Hungarian crownlands, benefitting also from the “nationalist” posture that many of the assimilated adopted (Sakmyster 2006, 159; Kann 1945).
The so-called “liberal” government (mostly conservative except with regard to ideas of free trade) relied on this population as the bourgeoisie that the “middle class” failed to produce. Jews and their converted offspring were visible in the processes of modernization tied to Budapest’s turn-of-the-century status as a metropolitan center on the map of European culture. Here, Jews were overrepresented in the professions and at the forefront of both the owning and working classes of industry. Bourgeois Jews were visible in cultural production and politics—in radical bourgeois (liberal), socialist, and communist spheres (Karády 2008) as well as in the urbánus camp of writers (Fenyo 1976). These sociological factors were drawn upon by (some) populists and others to make arguments about Jewish “foreignness,” their relation to capitalism and liberalism (as well as socialism and communism), and their distance from the agrarian “people.”
The népi-urbánus debate was unfolding, however, in a context in which a numerus clausus law had been passed to restrict the numbers of Jews in universities already in 1920, part of the Horthy government’s project to replace Jews in these roles with a modernized “national” middle class. As the népi movement wanted to see agrarian workers become recognized and entitled to full membership in society (i.e., citizenship), their hopes had the potential to intersect with government policies that promised to assure wellbeing to “Magyars.” Pitting “Magyar” against “Jew” or “foreigner” could effectively elide the class problem of the peasantry. This was aided by the fact that the terms “peasant” and “nép” could be used to cover a range from the poorest of agrarian workers to the landed gentry, the latter more likely to have some land but, even without it, still likely to bear vestiges of feudal privilege, including employment in the state apparatus.
Populists wished to see agrarian workers and their knowledges valorized in contrast to both the conservative neo-feudal ruling classes and “urbanite” modernizers. While Magyar vs. Jew was one variation, the position that the nép was the older and most “Hungarian” layer also justified an antiaristocratic essentialism, this elite, culturally aligned with European nobility and European values, was also a “newer” layer (Taylor 2008b).
The ascent of Mussolini-admirer Gyula Gömbös to prime minister in 1932 marked a shift to the “new guard.” A founder of the paramilitary Hungarian Defense Association (MOVE), Gömbös had helped to place Horthy in power, yet he made promises of reform. In 1935, he attempted to convince a group of népi writers to join his “New Spiritual Front.” While no clear agreement seems to have been come to, and some writers were quite aggressive with the prime minister, their willingness to meet at all explains the escalation of the népi-urbánus animosities. For urbánus actors, any reproachement with Gömbös meant aligning with a notorious antisemite. This was a man who had once argued openly for antisemitic redistributions, even if he had formally renounced such views upon becoming prime minister and his government even included some Jews. By this time, overlaps were apparent between the government and some népi positions, particularly regarding the nation and the role of Jews in society. The popular népi writer László Németh was frequently critiqued by urbánus writers for his antisemitic comments and positions that seemed to advocate a broadening of the numerus clausus to the context of cultural production. Urbanite fears that any redistribution in this climate in favor of the nép would take an anti-Jewish form were not lessened by accusations by some populists that they were oversensitive. While it is impossible to know much about the personal positions of the many people who together took part in the various strands of the népi movement, Tóth (2012) points out that even the leftist populist sociographer Ferenc Erdei, who treated the agrarian question, tended to work with a binary in which Jews (and with a little stretch all “urbanites” and liberals) were a foreign (new) element. Further, it does not seem there was any attempt to oust the loudly antisemitic characters from populist activities.
After years of flirtation with Germany (including a trade agreement that likely pulled Hungary out of economic crisis), and associated revisionism, the end of the Horthy era was marked by war, the introduction of further antisemitic laws, forced labor and deportations, Nazi occupation, and followed by the application of the Final Solution by the Arrow Cross Party to Budapest’s Jews. While interwar populists were first and foremost oriented toward justice for poor agricultural workers in the face of the reproduction of (neo)feudal relations in the countryside under new relationships of capital, the positions of at least some (quite influential) populists contributed to a climate of racial essentialism in which an estimated 50,000 Jews were deported and murdered and the Roma Holocaust was enacted (Karsai 2005).
Postsocialism and the Populism/Antipopulism Dynamic
Today, the terms nép (people) and nemzet (nation) are often used interchangeably by Orbán/Fidesz, their competitor, the Jobbik party, and, in fact, many other Hungarians. “Regular people” (az ember -literally: “a person”) are often portrayed as rural, agrarian, and provincial, i.e., not urban or cosmopolitan, while “the people” is equated with “the nation.” But this is not the reason why the international press and commentators call Orbán and Fidesz populist. Nor is it because Fidesz has pursued policies focused on bettering the lives of the poor and underrepresented, whether rural or urban. Orbán is called a populist because in his style of “constructing the political,” he establishes a distinction between two groups: the people/nation and the elite/foreigner (see Laclau 2005). These characteristics associated with populism as a rhetorical style are combined with other characteristics often associated with the term: Orbán is a demagogue, authoritarian, and pursues “unorthodox economics.”
While Hungary’s state-territorial borders would remain untouched in 1989, the region faced a new round of radical shifts in the scalar organization of capital; state socialism was over. The Republic of Hungary would be regarded as a liberal democracy until Fidesz rewrote the constitution in 2010. Liberal principles had been adopted in the neoliberalizing era of global capitalism, as the socialist economy was rolled back through the privatization and dismantling of industrial and agricultural enterprises and of land and housing. The establishment of the inviolability of property rights, electoral democracy and civil society, and the overturn of socialist democratic ideals were presented as measures of progress. In the name of democratization, the parties controlling parliament all took part in the (neo)liberalization of the economy. These peripheralizing postsocialist countries lost ground in the hierarchy of the world system, as the “end of history” was declared and socialism deemed an historical aberration.
Communist Party-led socialism had completed Hungary’s transformation into an industrialized nation-state that nevertheless remained heavily dependent on agrarian production for export, to subsidize industry, and to reproduce the population. Late socialism was characterized by experiments with a “mixed economy” as the country struggled with changing economic conditions, including the global “oil crisis” and mounting debt. A unique adaptation was the system of private plot production and the subsidiary industrial and semi-industrial production supported by the agricultural cooperatives. As the socialist sector was dismantled, it became apparent that predictions of an easy transition for agrarian “socialist entrepreneurs” were not apt (Szelényi 1988).
Hungary was seen as one of the successes of “the transition,” along with the other “Central European” Visegrad nations. It was among the early states of the region to join the EU (but not the Eurozone) in 2004 and agreed to the terms of the Maastricht criteria in preparation to adopt the Euro (which it still has not). Despite claims of success, Eastern European countries remain poorer than those in the Western part of the EU, and Western European capital (German car companies, for example) is deeply involved in labor exploitation there (Gagyi and Gerőcs 2018).
In 1993, a far-right party (MIÉP) had emerged out of a faction expelled by the first post-1989 ruling party, MDF. Together these parties had (re)activated different parts of the national question. MDF’s prime minister had stated a responsibility to the 5 million “over the border Hungarians,” and MIÉP pointed to Jews as conspirators in the “stolen regime change (Taylor 2008a).” Some viewed this antisemitic position as part of a renewed népi-urbánus opposition. But few of these “neopopulists” showed much concern for the well-being of agrarian workers, while the reconstituted Independent Smallholders Party failed at gaining wide membership. People identified with népi critique did lament the “loss of tradition” among the agrarian folk in Hungary, but were especially vocal around the issues of (ethnic) Hungarians over the border, particularly the cultural activities of the peasants.
The successor of the Communist Party, now a Euro Socialist Party, MSZP—Hungarian Socialist Party, was the first to lead parliament twice, with Fidesz leading in the term between. At the time of my 2004/2005 fieldwork, I noted a polarization between left and right. By 2006, what Hungarians call “left-liberals” were losing legitimacy, as massive street protests shored up dissatisfaction. MSZP’s incumbent election in 2006 was mired in controversy after a recording was circulated of the incumbent prime minister admitting he had lied about the economy to get reelected. Fidesz was able to harness street protests in its favor and won wild support in a referendum challenging austerity measures introduced by MSZP. The Jobbik party, founded in 2003, began to make inroads, organizing rallies (while its paramilitary arm, the Magyar Guard, organized patrols) in depressed regions where tensions were growing between ethnic Hungarian “post peasants” and the largely Roma “surplus population,” suturing local experiences into a national rhetoric around “Gypsy crime” (Szombati 2018).
The global economic crisis hit with a vengeance, exacerbating disparities and related anxiety and anger. The third of households who had taken mortgages out in foreign currencies between 2005 and 2008 were left with no way to pay as the forint plummeted. Poverty, homelessness, and unemployment spiraled upward. In the countryside, the continuing impact of the demise of state socialist infrastructure combined with a liberal welfare regime and accession to the EU to underdevelop regions and reethnicize class relations. While Roma were the first to lose their jobs, in the provinces, the liberal style welfare system was seen by struggling “post peasants” (read Magyar) as favoring the “work shy,” i.e., Roma (Szombati 2018). Fidesz offered a less radical solution to the problem than Jobbik (Szombati 2018), managing to retain power, and by 2018, Jobbik would attempt a move to the center, even as Fidesz consolidated an increasingly authoritarian form of rule, while relying on ethnonationalist rhetoric and policy.
Conclusion: Examining Today’s Populism Through an Interwar Populist Lens
The questions of land reform, the franchise and political representation, and cultural validation can be turned into lenses on the massive transformations in citizenship in a context in which Hungarians expected “democracy” to enhance many benefits of state socialism they took for granted (see Pogotsa’s chapter, this volume). The land and property reforms set in motion via “the transition” were in fact a radical rearrangement of citizenship rights and obligations. In the countryside, land privatization was central to this transformation. While the myth of the independent smallholder was embraced with passion, it took some time for rural households to discover the losses associated with the new arrangements. Most found themselves in worse conditions, as the resources provided by socialist institutions dropped off. Despite the returns of property, land became concentrated, either in ownership or in operation.
Employment became a general problem in the countryside, exacerbated by the local manifestations of the global economic crisis. While MSZP established a workfare program toward the end of its last term, it was Fidesz who became famous for it. Critiques have focused on the low pay and the political character of access, yet many rural workers regard workfare positively. For at least some of those in the countryside facing the choice between unemployment and outmigration, this paternalist scheme is a welcome opportunity, which seems to address those without work as well as the “work shy” (Hann 2016, see also Szombati 2018).
Another significant marker of the “transition” was the introduction of electoral democracy and the multiparty system. A “universal franchise” was granted to all citizens above 18, and distance voting is also allowed. Most postsocialist countries have followed the broader trend toward the “postpolitical” (see Mouffe 2016), in which the sense that there are no real options has led to lower voter turnout. Hungary, however, has defied this downward trend (The Guardian 2014); voter turnout for parliamentary elections in 2018, in which Fidesz won a two-thirds majority for a third time in a row, reached around 70% (Mounk 2018). While civic investment in the outcome of elections is clearly shown in these numbers, Fidesz’s last two victories have to be read against the far-reaching changes the Orbán governments have made to electoral law since 2011. We also have to take into account the effects of a law passed early after Fidesz’s 2010 victory that granted dual citizenship to more than two million “over the border Hungarians,” and made it possible for them to vote in Hungarian elections. Over 95% of these nearly 130,000 new citizens voted for Fidesz in 2014 (Simon 2017).
The importance of the franchise is also seen regarding the several referenda that have been voted on since 1989. Referenda have rarely been technically successful in Hungary, as turnout has usually not met the minimum percentage of voters. Nevertheless, putting issues to the electorate in this way can be read as a strategy, just as non-turnout can be read as an abstention. Both in power and in opposition, Fidesz has called on referenda (another measure often associated with populism) to secure a “mandate” on various issues. This method helped the party to establish itself as “anti-system” at the time of the referenda on dual citizenship (2004) and austerity measures (2008). While in power, Fidesz claimed the results of the 2014 referendum on whether the government should adopt the refugee settlement quotas set by the EU as a mandate, despite the fact that it failed to draw enough voters to be valid (About Hungary 2016).
This brings us to the issue of cultural validation. Fidesz is known for its rhetoric defending European and Christian values in light of migration from the East and South and pressure from Brussels to receive migrants. But this ties to a much more complex strategy to which cultural validation is central. The transition was pushed through with a politics of shock therapy—politicians acknowledged that it would be painful and that popular approval was unlikely. Not only did liberal and left politicians (and intellectuals) tend to dismiss popular complaints and demands, they dressed their dismissal with Orientalist ideas of backwardness, whether targeting Eastern or provincial culture or socialist personhood.
By the early 2000s, a binary opposition distinguishing “left-liberal” globalizers from “those who protect the nation” was emerging, with framings introduced by the far right and amplified by Fidesz (Gagyi 2016). The former claimed to defend the “democracy” it imported from the civilized West alongside neoliberal and comprador arrangements, in contrast to what it perceived as the provincial and backward nationalism of the opposition and the opinions of the citizenry—both marking the Oriental nature of the region and the consequent need to “catch up.” While the language of theft was widespread, the language of class was rarely heard, as the two elite blocs competed based on a preference for either “national” or global capital (Gagyi 2016). By 2014, Orbán had consolidated his pursuit of an “illiberal state.” His strategies for staying in power would require authoritarian measures, the building of a clientelist network “parasitic” on the state (Martin 2017, Koltai 2018), and the successful reproduction and tightening of the binary between liberal/foreign-minded and illiberal/national. These can be fit into a cascading set of binaries that include liberal-illiberal and urbánus-népi.
While, despite his dramatic overtures, Orbán’s policies have had little positive effect on the dire conditions of the working classes (urban or rural), his rhetoric animates a cultural validation for those who felt unheard by other politicians. While this distinction need not be a national or ethnic one, Orbán has woven this validation together with a primary opposition of the ethnonation with the foreign, on which a series of cascading oppositions builds. Echoing Horthy’s governments, Orbán has set forward the goal of completing the regime change by creating a new “national” middle class. As the “migrant crisis” unfolded in 2015, the Orbán government built fences on the southern borders. It also passed the “Lex CEU,” threatening the operation of the American degree-granting Central European University (CEU). Both are framed as protecting the nation against “foreigners,” as is the villainization of “foreign-funded” NGOs. These moves work to keep the hegemonic binary between the national and the foreign active and tense. Centering on the figure of the finance capitalist George Soros, a Hungarian of Jewish descent and founder of the CEU and of foundations that have supported liberal and left organizations in Hungary and the region, as a symbol of the “foreign minded,” Fidesz has used this binding trope for the attacks on media, NGOs, academics, civil society writ large, the university, and the field of gender studies. This “national” positioning is itself deeply contradictory: when Orbán claims that he is defending “European values,” he places Hungary inside Europe, even as Hungarian and other East European migrants themselves face exploitation and humiliation in the EU’s core states (Böröcz and Sarkar 2017).
The interwar népi movement pointed to the dire conditions of the agrarian working class and the problem of paths of development in a moment marked by intense political and economic change. The movement not only failed to constructively address the diversity of the population (they basically ignored the plight of Roma, who were neither regarded as ethnic Magyar nor as a nationality, for example), but also contributed to the climate of antisemitism that justified the Shoah. In this way, Orbán’s “populism,” with its spurius nation-foreigner opposition, seems to be part of a “populist” (népi) tradition dating to the interwar period. But Orbán’s “populism,” also developed in a period marked by intense change, is, in contrast, the political strategy of a politician and his party seeking to maintain political power. It is a far cry from interwar népi commitment to rights for agrarian workers. Yes, these workers were seen as ethnic Hungarians, but they were denied those rights and freedoms by ethnic Hungarians in power, a neo-feudal group that sought to maintain its own privileged position while using national rhetoric to gain the allegiance of those they oppressed. Despite the evident overlaps, and the very real problems and consequences of ethnonational essentialism, to equate the interwar populist movement with the interwar governments deprives us of the opportunity to see how other formations might have emerged. Likewise, if we are too quick to adopt a liberal antipopulist stance, conflating the legitimate concerns of many Hungarians with the strategies of Fidesz, we will miss out on the nuances that distinguish groups that might or might not be woven together into a historical bloc. In 1957, Karl (Károlyi) Polányi (the converted child of a Hungarian Jew and the daughter of a teacher in a Vilnius rabbinical seminary) wrote, “By accident only … was European fascism in the twenties connected with national and counterrevolutionary tendencies. It was a case of symbiosis between movements of independent origin” (1957, 242). Extending his analysis to include the interwar populists, we conclude that understanding such contingencies is an important analytical and political task. Let us try to do the same with regard to the present.