The affective politics of the Orbán-regime’s populist nationalism in Hungary: Reconstituting collective identity along racialized and political lines

Abstract

The populism of the Hungarian Orbán-regime has been examined at length since Orbán and his Fidesz party came to power in 2010. However, most of these analyses do not have a concrete conceptualization of populism, and none of them address the affective politics of populism, even though they implicitly acknowledge the crucial role of affects in populist politics. In this dissertation, I mobilize a constructivist—affective conception of populism in order to ask the question: how does the Orbán-regime attempt to construct a political camp identity? I analyze the government’s responses to a 2018 verdict by the Curia (the Supreme Court of Hungary) which ordered the state to pay those Roma students who had been educated in a segregated school in the town of Gyöngyöspata. I use discourse-historical analysis, a subset of critical discourse analysis, to link this discourse to historically specific political struggles and broader political cleavages in Hungary. I argue that the Orbán-regime, utilizing the affective repertoire of populism, rearticulates already-existing political and racialized cleavages in the discourse analyzed, thereby reconstituting the collective identity embodied by ʻthe people’ as well as ʻthe enemy’. Ultimately, I seek to contribute to a research agenda which takes seriously the role of affects and the construction of group identity in the Orbán-regime’s politics.