This essay analyses the consolidation of authoritarian rule in Hungary by focusing attention on the ruling party's workfare programme, which has become the cornerstone of rural poverty governance. It ...is argued, on the basis of ethnographic research carried out by the author and the secondary literature, that workfare successfully tamed the angry politics born out of the dislocations caused by neoliberal restructuring. It consolidated post-peasant hegemonies by tying the 'deserving poor' into clientelistic relations with mayors. This 'illiberal paternalism' constitutes an alternative to neoliberal regimes of poverty governance.
This article presents and empirically substantiates a theoretical account explaining the making and stabilisation of illiberal hegemony in Hungary. It combines a Polanyian institutionalist framework ...with a neo-Gramscian analysis of right-wing hegemonic strategy and a relational class analysis inspired by the political economy tradition in anthropology. The article identifies the social actors behind the illiberal transformation, showing how ‘neoliberal disembedding’ fuelled the rightward shift of constituencies who had erstwhile been brought into the fold of liberal hegemony: blue-collar workers, post-peasants and sections of domestic capital. Finally, the article describes the emergence of a new regime of accumulation and Fidesz’s strategy of ‘authoritarian re-embedding’, which relies on ‘institutional authoritarianism’ and ‘authoritarian populism’. This two-pronged approach has so far allowed the ruling party to stabilise illiberal hegemony, even in the face of reforms that have generated discontents and exacerbated social inequality.
The revolt of the provinces Szombati, Kristóf; Carbonella, August; Kalb, Don ...
2018., 20180612, 2018, 2018-06-01, Letnik:
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The first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe, The Revolt of the Provinces explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade. It ...explains the spread of racist sensibilities in depressed rural areas, shows how activists, intellectuals and politicians took advantage of popular racism to empower right-wing agendas and examines the new ruling party's success in stabilizing an 'illiberal regime'. To illuminate these important dynamics, the author proposes an innovative multi-scalar and relational framework, focusing on interaction between social antagonisms emerging on the local level and struggles waged within the political public sphere.
This paper analyses the reconfiguration of social relations in rural Hungary after the collapse of socialism as well as the cultural idioms in which these changes were interpreted in order to unearth ...the connection between structural transformation, the re-articulation of ethnic and peasant traditions and the discourse on Roma as a threat to communal harmony. The locality in the focus of our case study is a village that played a major role in the rise of the far-right Jobbik party. By applying an ethnographic approach, we seek to uncover structural forces, discourses and agencies that help explain the success of the anti-Roma mobilization campaign that ended with Jobbik's electoral victory.
In this chapter, I analyze the impact of right-wing rivalry (in the context of the moral panic on “Gypsy criminality”) on the politics of governmental power, and argue that it played a key role in ...the liberal state’s transformation in an authoritarian direction under the new Fidesz government in the 2010– 2014 period. I begin by highlighting Jobbik’s e ff ort to stabilize its support after its parliamentary entry by returning to the “ Gypsy issue” and organizing a major mobilization campaign in Gyöngyöspata. I then analyze the government’s response by highlighting a series of tactical maneuvers, which— together with
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