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ISS0010.1177/0268580920930591International SociologyScheiring and Szombati

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International Sociology
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From neoliberal disembedding © The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0268580920930591
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The making of illiberal journals.sagepub.com/home/iss

hegemony in Hungary

Gábor Scheiring
Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University, Italy

Kristóf Szombati
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany

Abstract
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.

Keywords
Authoritarian populism, authoritarian re-embedding, countermovement, Hungary, illiberalism

Introduction
New forms of authoritarian domination and exclusionary regimes are emerging around
the world. Hungary is among the most dramatic cases. Riding the waves of a multifac-
eted disillusionment, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party swept to power in 2010 with an

Corresponding author:
Gábor Scheiring, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Università Bocconi, via Guglielmo Rontgen 1,
Milano, 20136, Italy.
Email: gabor@gaborscheiring.com
2 International Sociology 00(0)

unprecedented supermajority. In the next nine years, Fidesz restructured the foundations
of Hungary’s polity, society and economy. The ruling party gradually dismantled the
system of checks and balances, extending control over independent institutions. Fidesz
also set a new direction in social policy by institutionalising workfare, redistributing
welfare benefits to economically and biologically ‘productive’ families, and withdraw-
ing support from ‘unproductive’ citizens (Szombati, 2018b). In the economy, wealth has
been redistributed to loyal capitalists and an emergent ‘national bourgeoisie’ while main-
taining the dominance of foreign capital in manufacturing export sectors (Scheiring,
2019). The political science consensus treats contemporary Hungary as a hybrid, com-
petitive authoritarian regime (Bozóki and Hegedűs, 2018).
A strand in the literature on neo-nationalist populism argues that it is a cultural phe-
nomenon that can be captured by measuring illiberal attitudes (Norris and Inglehart,
2019). Some contend that a nationalist political culture is responsible for illiberalism,
which has eroded the liberal foundations of democracy (e.g. Skidelsky, 2019). The chief
problem with such culturalist accounts is that they cannot explain the widespread popu-
lar support for the liberal model in the two decades that followed the regime change in
1989. It is a mistake to think of symbolic processes in terms of attitudes lodged in indi-
vidual psyche: culture is a dynamically changing set of relations influenced by economic
structures and the lived experience of class.
Others have shown that Fidesz played an active role in elevating neo-nationalist, xen-
ophobic and even racist discourses into mainstream political discourse in the second half
of the 2000s (Bocskor, 2018; Buzogány and Varga, 2018; Halmai, 2011). While these
agency-based explanations offer a much needed correction to culturalist accounts, they
run the risk of overestimating the role of elites and underestimating the bottom-up
demand for a break with the pre-2010 liberal era.
Qualitative sociologists and anthropologists who studied how such popular discon-
tents and demands have been generated in the midst of processes of postsocialist restruc-
turation have offered insights into how the political right was able to benefit from the
process of neoliberal disembedding (Bartha, 2011; Hann, 2018; Kalb, 2018; Scheiring,
2020; Szombati, 2018b). These scholars have documented the disintegration of a cultur-
ally and ideologically incorporated (but never fully unified) socialist ‘working class’
along the lines of status and ethnicity; the problems of social reproduction affecting crisis
regions, along with the erosion of communal solidarities; and the declining power of
labour on both the shop floor and in party politics. They have also called attention to
processes of de-agrarianisation and de-peasantisation, which spawned a crisis of ‘post-
peasant’ hegemonies in depressed provincial regions.
The work of the previously cited scholars has found an echo in a new critical political
economy approach, which attempts to explain authoritarianism by reference to a new
stage of neoliberal capital accumulation unfolding after the 2008 financial crisis (Fabry,
2019; Gagyi, 2016; Scheiring, 2019; Toplišek, 2020). While the emphasis on the co-
constitution of political and economic dynamics is fruitful, these analyses leave little
space for the investigation of agency and strategy, and underplay the role of ‘soft’, cul-
tural elements of illiberal hegemony. In sum, despite significant efforts to uncover the
causes of the authoritarian turn, the literature still lacks satisfactory explanations of the
stability of illiberal hegemony in Hungary.
Scheiring and Szombati 3

This article offers theoretical insights into the rise and stabilisation of illiberal hegem-
ony in Hungary, relying on empirical research the authors carried out over the last five
years. Drawing inspiration from Polanyi’s notion of the ‘double movement’, the article
first examines how a process of ‘neoliberal disembedding’, set in motion by Hungary’s
reintegration into the global capitalist economy, fuelled the rightward shift of constituen-
cies who had erstwhile been brought into the fold of liberal hegemony: blue-collar work-
ers, post-peasants and the ‘national bourgeoisie’.
The article grounds this Polanyian institutionalist framework in relational class analy-
sis inspired by the political economy tradition in anthropology. Drawing insights from
Friedman’s (2003) and Kalb’s (2011, 2013) analysis of ‘double polarisation’, the article
extends the anthropological debates on the lived experience of class into institutionalist
international political economy. This way, the study rejects the easy separation of ‘eco-
nomic’ versus ‘cultural’ explanations.
Finally, relying on Stuart Hall’s neo-Gramscian analysis of Thatcherite hegemonic
strategy, the article focuses on the unravelling of the power bloc that supported the liberal
‘competition state’ and outlines the contours of the new regime of accumulation, which
emerged after 2010 in conjunction with a new power bloc. The article analyses Fidesz’s
strategy of ‘authoritarian re-embedding’, highlighting how a two-pronged approach,
involving the combination of ‘institutional authoritarianism’ and ‘authoritarian pop-
ulism’1 has allowed the ruling party to stabilise its rule, even in the face of reforms that
have generated discontents and exacerbated social inequality.

The political economy of authoritarian re-embedding

To grasp the linkages between global economic transformations and the rise of illiberal-
ism, the article starts with Karl Polanyi’s concepts of (dis)embedding, commodification
and countermovement (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). Scholars have convincingly shown that
Polanyi’s theory can be adapted to the context of contemporary financialised capitalism
on Europe’s Eastern periphery to highlight how postsocialist dependent development
strained livelihoods, social relations and cultural imaginaries in specific locales (see
Bohle and Greskovits, 2012; Hann, 2019; Scheiring, 2016; Szombati, 2018b).
However, Polanyi’s historical institutionalist framework on the social and political
ramifications of marketisation remained tainted by functionalism. This is why, amongst
other things, he was unable to explain why countermovements take particular political
directions in specific locales. One part of the problem is that his debate with orthodox
Marxism led Polanyi to eschew class theory. This made him overlook the fact that coun-
termovements arise from particular tensions and experiences and that they can only be
brought to life through the articulation of a specific political project and attendant dis-
courses. This study remedies this limitation by injecting insights from cultural material-
ist anthropology into institutionalist international political economy, and by drawing on
Stuart Hall’s neo-Gramscian analysis of hegemony.
First, the article refines Polanyi’s framework by incorporating insights from the
anthropology of globalisation, more particularly Jonathan Friedman's conceptualisation
of ‘double polarisation’ (Friedman, 2003; Kalb, 2011, 2013). This involves a ‘vertical
polarisation’ along the lines of class (a growth in inequality translating into increased
4 International Sociology 00(0)

distance and antagonism in intra- and inter-class relations) and a ‘horizontal polarisa-
tion’, referring both to uneven spatial development and the emergence of new cultural
divides, and resulting in the fragmentation of the national territory and community of
solidarity.
Friedman’s conceptualisation highlights the emergent conflict between cosmopolitan
elites and ethnically rooted workers as a critical feature of financialised globalisation.
However, the current trajectory of capitalist globalisation also increases the polarisation
between domestic and transnational sections of capital, especially in dependent market
economies (Evans, 1979; Nölke and Vliegenthart, 2009; Schrank, 2008). In addition,
globalisation increases the concentration of capital in the new metropolitan growth cen-
tres (Hall and Savage, 2016), which suck human, physical and financial capital out of old
industrial and agricultural areas, leading to regional deindustrialisation and de-agrariani-
sation. This necessarily oversimplified macro-dynamic is what we will call in this article
‘neoliberal disembedding’.
Our neo-Gramscian reading of the countermovement is inspired by Hall’s analysis of
Thatcherite neoconservatism (Hall, 1988). In addition to highlighting the role played by
illiberal political entrepreneurs, this article emphasises the role of domestic capitalists in
unmaking a political-economic consensus whose terms were increasingly unfavourable
to them. This ‘national bourgeoisie’ is an emergent class whose representatives played a
crucial role in the institutionalisation of a new regime of accumulation which reconfig-
ured relations between the state, transnational and domestic capital, leading to the insti-
tutionalisation of a new regime of accumulation. The new political-economic consensus
relies on the flexibilisation of labour and diminished spending on welfare and public
services. This explains why the countermovement has taken an authoritarian form rely-
ing on the erosion of democratic rights and strategic efforts to politically polarise and
demobilise society. Below, we outline this complex entanglement of ‘institutional
authoritarianism’ and ‘authoritarian populism’.

Neoliberal disembedding
Facing the exhaustion of the strategy of state-socialist import-substitution, policymakers
in Central and Eastern Europe implemented deep-seated economic reforms modelled on
neoliberal programmes and competed fiercely to attract foreign direct investment (FDI)
as a means of reindustrialisation (Bandelj, 2009; Bohle and Greskovits, 2012; Böröcz,
1999; King, 2007; Nölke and Vliegenthart, 2009). Liberal-technocratic politicians domi-
nated economic policymaking in every Hungarian government before 2010. Though
their approach to privatisation differed, there was a consensus among them about the
need to compete for FDI. The resulting state structure was the liberal ‘competition state’,
institutionalised by the dominant power bloc formed by transnational corporations
(TNCs), technocratic politicians and the liberal intelligentsia (Drahokoupil, 2008).
The policy instruments of the liberal competition state included generous tax incen-
tives, direct subsidies, deregulation, flexible labour standards and low wages for a rela-
tively well-educated labour force. The tax incentives and the continuously lowered
corporate tax rate positively discriminated TNCs to the detriment of domestic capitalists.
The duration and value of unemployment insurance progressively declined between 1990
Scheiring and Szombati 5

and 2010. Crucially, the left-liberal coalition presided over the most pronounced wave of
neoliberalism, which included the privatisation of pensions (Appel and Orenstein, 2018),
as well as energy and water utilities (Boda and Scheiring, 2006). It also made – an ulti-
mately failed – effort to liberalise health insurance (Korkut and Buzogány, 2015).
The hope that liberalisation would help the emergence of efficient enterprises and
mobilise inactivated segments of the labour force failed to materialise. Even though
Hungary was a champion in attracting FDI, the country also had one of the lowest
employment rates in Europe, with only 55% of the population employed in 2009
(Eurostat, 2018), one year before Orbán took power. The attendant jobless growth under-
cut wage convergence with Western Europe, with Hungarian wages lagging behind aver-
age wages in the region (OECD, 2020). Quantitative research has also shown that the
expansion of markets also led to higher mortality in towns dominated by domestic capi-
tal and TNCs, compared to towns with prolonged state ownership (Scheiring et al.,
2018). The majority of workers experienced the transition as an accumulation of injus-
tices, with those permanently excluded from the labour market or trapped in low-wage
jobs becoming especially bitter with the new settlement.
The highly productive and profitable (technology-intensive) transnational sector and
the less productive and profitable (labour-intensive) domestic sector of the economy
became increasingly disintegrated: forward, and backward linkages between them have
remained weak. Wages in the transnational sector are higher than in the domestic one, but
this is restricted to educated people living in the growth hubs, with little impact on wage
levels in the domestic sector. Domestic capitalists have been generally hostile towards
wage growth as their enterprises depend on cheap, low-skilled labour.
The technocratic politicians who steered the country through the process of neoliberal
disembedding knew that this would generate discontents, potentially destabilising their
rule. In the 1990s, unemployment benefits and pension schemes were introduced to
counterbalance the most corrosive effects of deindustrialisation (Bohle and Greskovits,
2012; Bruszt, 2006). Then, in the 2000s, governments sought to offset the lack of wage
growth by helping families acquire homes and by boosting private consumption. In this,
they relied on Western banks, which offered citizens relatively cheap mortgages and
consumer loans. However, these political strategies of legitimation proved to be
short-lived.
While pacification through pensions and foreign currency loans prevented the explo-
sion of discontent, both strategies were exhausted by the end of the 2000s. Inactivation
put a brake on growth and strained public budgets, and these problems became acute
when the global economic crisis hit Hungary. The country was especially negatively
affected by the drying up of credit and the depreciation of the national currency, which
drove interest (which had been borrowed in Swiss Francs and Euros) on both public debt
and private mortgages to the ceiling, sending the state and hundreds of thousands of
families into a debt spiral. These conditions triggered a political crisis, leading to the col-
lapse of the left-liberal government in 2009. In 2010 voters abandoned the Socialists in
droves, flocking to rival Fidesz, which had been out of power since 2002 and could,
therefore, disassociate itself from the crisis of liberal hegemony (Enyedi et al., 2014).
The spectacular rise of Fidesz is part and parcel of a by now familiar story of neolib-
eral disembedding coming together with the left’s increasingly evident abandonment of
6 International Sociology 00(0)

its former supporters and the latter’s recuperation by a new right. The first chapter of the
story is the disintegration of the culturally and ideologically integrated socialist working
class. Working class communities were especially severely hit in places where state-
owned enterprises were shut down, as in ‘steel’ and ‘sugar’ towns, as well as in agricul-
tural areas (Hann, 2018; Scheiring, 2020; Szombati, 2018b). The changes were
experienced as a loss of control over one’s life, of being at the mercy of uncontrollable
forces. The other dominant feeling was an increasing alienation from and anger towards
political elites. The process of disintegration also led to a process of racialisation: indi-
viduals of Roma ethnic descent were overrepresented among the ‘surplus population’,
which found itself excluded from the labour market. This created fertile ground for the
emergence of racism, with workers blaming ‘work-shy, lazy Gypsies’ for preying on
taxpayers and calling on elites to defend ‘hard-working’ people (Feischmidt and
Szombati, 2017).
The failure of social democratic politics to maintain its embeddedness in working
class communities was critical for the rise of illiberalism. There are three main factors
behind this. First, the Hungarian Socialist Party, which came to dominate the left after
1990, lacked a clear ideological commitment to social democracy. It would be an over-
simplification to label the party neoliberal, since it was committed to maintaining a mod-
icum of redistribution, especially through pensions. However, the legacy of ‘really
existing socialism’ delegitimised left-wing political language, and a technocratic mod-
ernisation discourse emerged as the unifying symbolic framework, leaving much room
for avant-garde neoliberal policies. The party adopted a Blairite Third Way strategy after
Ferenc Gyurcsány became its leader in 2004.
The second factor is structural. Local and transnational capital, as well as interna-
tional financial institutions and the EU put a priority on ‘market-friendly’ policies with
the possibility of introducing socially progressive policies being contingent on the imple-
mentation of market-friendly ones. Finally, the Socialist Party inherited its organisational
structure from its communist predecessor. Initially this meant the party had the best
infrastructure, but it also led it to neglect grassroots work and organisation building. This
resulted in a gradual erosion of ties to core constituencies. In addition, the trade union
movement was also severely weakened, fragmented and lacked the intellectual and
organisational resources to incorporate workers ideologically. Left-liberal governments
also did not do much to strengthen the trade union movement, which saw its membership
gradually decrease.
These processes created favourable conditions for the mobilisation of workers against
‘deracinated, uncaring’ cosmopolitans and ‘unworthy, unruly’ surplus populations. In
Hungary, this task was first taken up by the newly formed Jobbik party, which relied on
paramilitary proxy organisations to mobilise workers and worker peasantries against
Roma in economically deprived communities where Roma and non-Roma were compet-
ing over increasingly scarce public goods and services. Soon after Jobbik, Fidesz also
sought to mobilise working class constituencies in defence of public services under the
banner of more inclusive nationalism. Fidesz promised to reintegrate the national com-
munity by returning the state to its rightful owners: hard-working people and entrepre-
neurs who could come to a new compromise in the sharing of national wealth. Fidesz
spent a great deal of effort on politically integrating disaffected constituencies through
Scheiring and Szombati 7

the creation of locally rooted civic networks (Greskovits, 2020) and the organisation of
rituals of resistance and solidarity (Halmai, 2011). It was as a result of all these factors
that workers shifted to the right, choosing Fidesz over the Socialists in 2010.2
There was one more factor that played an essential role in the collapse of the neolib-
eral consensus: the increasing polarisation of the capitalist class. TNCs, the very few
successful technological companies owned by domestic entrepreneurs and the domestic
service class, which directly profited from the presence of foreign capital (see
Drahokoupil, 2008), were mostly satisfied with the liberal competition state and contin-
ued to support the left-liberal political elite. However, the overwhelming majority of the
national bourgeoisie grew dissatisfied with the ruling elite after the turn of the millen-
nium. The left-liberal coalition that governed between 2002 and 2010 lost support among
billionaires during the second half of its reign (Scheiring, 2018, 2019). Just like many
workers, the national bourgeoisie also shifted its allegiance to Fidesz.

A new regime of accumulation

Fidesz used the strong mandate it received at the 2010 parliamentary elections to engi-
neer a new class compromise between the political class, the national bourgeoisie and
TNCs. The latter were allowed to maintain their dominance in technology-intensive sec-
tors, but Fidesz actively sought to change the balance of power between foreign and
domestic capital in other sectors, such as banking and energy. This necessitated a stronger
fusion of economic and state power than previously under the liberal competition state
and the introduction of new policy tools to support capital accumulation. It also led to the
national bourgeoisie being incorporated more tightly than before into the dominant
power bloc alongside transnational capital. The emergent state formation has been
labelled the ‘accumulative state’ (Scheiring, 2019). The accumulative state is more than
a corrupt captured state as it relies on the support of a broad segment of the elite; how-
ever, it is less than a developmental state, as it lacks an independent bureaucracy and a
long-term programme of economic upgrading.
The new regime of accumulation offers a political solution to the internal contradic-
tions of dependent development by accelerating capital accumulation in a way that is
favourable to every faction of the new power bloc. It does this by retaining and intensify-
ing the policies of the competition state in relation to foreign capital, while at the same
time introducing new tools to satisfy the needs of domestic capital and the political class,
which has coalesced around Orbán. The new regime of accumulation focuses on the
satisfaction of short-term interests through the reduction of welfare spending, the curtail-
ment of labour rights, and enhanced direct and indirect support for various factions of the
economic elite (Scheiring, 2019).
What was the impact of this new regime of accumulation? Although the overall inflow
of FDI declined significantly, TNCs involved in technology-intensive production, espe-
cially those active in the automotive sector, continued to relocate manufacturing capaci-
ties to Hungary to take advantage of its relatively cheap and highly flexible labour force.
These companies have created new jobs that offer higher wages than the companies
owned by domestic capitalists do. Both national and transnational capitalists were forced
to raise salaries after a large number of younger workers moved to Western Europe to
8 International Sociology 00(0)

find better-paying jobs. The increasingly acute labour shortage led to a 13.1% increase in
the average real wage between 2010 and 2018 (OECD, 2020).
The upward economic cycle that unfolded after the sudden collapse in global demand
in 2008–2009 played a crucial role in Hungarian wage dynamics. The global financial
crisis forced transnational companies to accelerate their investments into their existing
assembly platforms in Central and Eastern Europe in order to bring down prices and their
Western wage bill. The unprecedented liquidity boom after the crisis also fuelled new
investments by TNCs as well as asset price bubbles in Budapest. As a consequence,
propertied middle classes and workers of transnational assembly plants began to profit
from the post-1989 insertion in global capitalism.
However, average wage growth hides enormous inequalities. The share of working
poor (those earning less than 60% of the median wage) increased by 6.8% between 2010
and 2017 in the total population, one of the most significant increases in the whole of the
EU (Eurostat, 2019). Hungary’s Gini index, which measures the distribution of incomes,
grew from 24.1 in 2010 to 28.7 in 2018 (Eurostat, 2020), which means that by now
Hungary is the most unequal country in the Visegrád region.
Governmental policies directly contributed to the rise in inequality. The social income
(i.e. income that individuals receive from the state in addition to their wage) of the bot-
tom 40% was reduced by 6–12% between 2009 and 2016, while social income support
for the top 10% increased by 42% (HCSO, 2018). These numbers clearly show that sup-
porting the social reproduction of impoverished populations is not a concern for Fidesz.
At the same time, the liberalisation of the labour code highlights the ruling elite’s com-
mitment to prioritising the needs of capital over workers (Szombati, 2018a). Thus, the
new regime of accumulation creates and intensifies social tensions, while reallocating
resources to the upper classes. In this sense, the new state is an exclusionary state also.
While there have been outbursts of anger about the obscene enrichment of a new
regime-friendly nobility, such outrage has failed to fully break the cross-class popular
alliance of workers and the bourgeoisie, which brought Fidesz to power. Working class
support for the ruling party dips at certain moments (one such instance being the period
of mobilisations against the ‘slave law’), but Fidesz has exhibited a remarkable ability to
claw back popular support.
To account for the absence of anti-systemic mobilisation among the losers of the new
accumulation regime, we need to focus on the ruling party’s two-pronged strategy of
‘authoritarian re-embedding’, which prevents the mobilisation of grievances.

Authoritarian re-embedding
To protect itself against a possible political backlash from the losers of capital accumula-
tion, Fidesz occupied all democratic institutions, undermined the system of checks and
balances and obstructed the channels of direct democracy. This amounted to a centralisa-
tion of power in the hands of the executive or, more precisely, a small group of people
surrounding the prime minister. The new rulers were able to implement such a profound
transformation by taking advantage of the ruling party’s parliamentary supermajority
and a new constitution that provides the regime with a mantle of legitimacy and respect-
ability. While the democratic facade has been preserved, the mechanisms characteristic
Scheiring and Szombati 9

of a functioning democracy (transparent decision-making, oversight, deliberation, par-

ticipation, fair political competition) are missing. The only institutions which have
retained an ability to place limits on executive power have been the courts, but even these
are coming under intense pressure to stop interfering with key governmental initiatives.
This near-total takeover of the polity has been accompanied by a coordinated effort to
re-feudalise the public sphere to allow for control of the airwaves and to prevent critical
voices from reaching provincial citizens who now constitute the ruling party’s core elec-
torate. The government converted public broadcasting into a centralised propaganda
machine. Key representatives of the national bourgeoisie have contributed to this effort
by acquisitioning private media and subsequently handing them over to a centralised
holding company (Wilkin, 2016). While this vast media empire allows Fidesz to control
the political agenda, national communication campaigns allow the ruling party to com-
municate its messages to the public (Bocskor, 2018).
Finally, the ruling party has also sought to restrict the political opposition’s room of
manoeuvre and tilt the political playing field in its favour to engineer electoral victories.
These victories not only legitimise Fidesz’s rule but also contribute to the regime’s sta-
bility by demoralising opponents. The key initiative was the drafting of a new electoral
law which favours Fidesz. However, recent research has also shown that the ruling party
relies on local mayors to coerce poor citizens into supporting Fidesz at elections (Mares
and Young, 2019). Fidesz’s arsenal also includes initiatives that are more ad hoc. The
State Audit Office has been mobilised to impose arbitrary fines on opposition parties
(Freedom House, 2018).
The ruling party has, on one occasion, even mobilised football hooligans to physically
prevent opposition MPs from initiating a referendum (Freedom House, 2018: 226–227).
While state-owned companies fund loyal ‘civil society groups’ organised from above,
trade unions’ organisational possibilities have been severely curtailed, and human rights
NGOs face recurrent attacks. Taken together, the country’s rulers have thus managed to
impose significant obstacles to the emergence, symbolic framing and mobilisation of
discontents. There is a new consensus emerging among political scientists that Hungary
is not a democracy anymore, but a competitive authoritarian hybrid regime (Bozóki and
Hegedűs, 2018).
Institutional authoritarianism is, however, only one of the strategies deployed by the
regime. The ruling party also seeks to manufacture consent through authoritarian pop-
ulism, a strategy that aims to neutralise opposing forces and disaggregate the opposition
by addressing real contradictions in a way as to represent them within a logic of dis-
course which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies of the
new illiberal hegemony (Hall, 1988). Hall’s conceptualisation of hegemony helps us
identify the role of critical policies and attendant discourses which have contributed to
the consolidation of Fidesz’s rule and legitimised a broader move towards a more coer-
cive and exclusionary form of state power in the post-2010 period.
Firstly, the government’s welfare policies have increasingly become narrowly centred
on supporting the reproduction of ‘hard-working’ families. This in practice means that
families with at least two children where at least one adult is gainfully employed are
rewarded with tax rebates and other subsidies, while single mothers, disabled people, the
unemployed and those on workfare are prevented from taking full advantage of benefits
10 International Sociology 00(0)

supporting childrearing. These reforms have been legitimised through a Social Darwinist
discourse of deservingness and the extolling of motherhood and family life (Gregor and
Kováts, 2018).
The government’s other highly popular policy is the so-called ‘public works pro-
gramme’ (Hann, 2016, 2018), a centrally financed but locally administered workfare
scheme, which was introduced with the dual aim of establishing greater control over
surplus populations and demonstrating the ruling party’s commitment to restoring threat-
ened social hierarchies in depressed provincial regions (Szombati, 2018b). More broadly,
the national workfare programme has functioned as the dominant policy instrument for
alleviating long-term unemployment since Fidesz came to power, replacing universal
social and family allowances and so-called active labour market instruments, which were
the preferred tools of left-liberal governments (Szikra, 2014).
This reconfiguration of the state–citizen nexus was couched in a broader ideology of
work as foundational value and productivity as the source of entitlements (Hann, 2018).
The intention was to signal that Fidesz is building a ‘work-based society’, which rewards
those who work hard and withholds support from surplus populations who supposedly
refuse to take up formal employment. The rhetorical and institutional separation between
‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ people is accompanied by the celebration of the ‘produc-
tive Magyar family’ and the castigation of ‘undeservingness’ and ‘welfare-dependency’.
Following a historically tested strategy, blaming the poor for their predicament serves to
discipline them, to justify the government’s anti-egalitarian policies and to obfuscate the
fact that the state is intimately involved in the reproduction of socio-economic exclusion
and poverty. Furthermore, as Herbert Gans (1994) has argued, the undeserving poor
serve as cathartic objects on whom the better-off can offload their problems. Punishing
them offers provincial working classes a degree of emotional satisfaction, while also
reinforcing the legitimacy of mayors and politicians who take up the task of punishing
the undeserving (Mares and Young, 2019).
The third policy that was key for manufacturing consent was the securitisation of
Hungary’s southern border. In the summer of 2015, at the height of the Syrian refugee
crisis, the government built a barrier on its border with Serbia to prevent asylum-seekers
from ‘illegally’ entering Hungary. Hungary’s new wall symbolises the barrier between
‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarity’, thus establishing Orbán as the leader of a pan-European
civilisational crusade. This holy war, as all holy wars, requires national unity and there-
fore incorporates calls for the centralisation of power in the hands of the executive.
Besides significantly contributing to Fidesz’s triumphant re-election in 2018, the wall
and the discourse of securitisation have also reconfigured the political field by relegating
socio-economic conflicts to the sideline of public debate (Hann, 2016).
Thus, while effectively conducting a divisive politics of class warfare from above,
Fidesz portrays itself as the guarantor of unity and security amid the looming threats of
international migration and terrorism. The move from a technocratic-liberal conception
of the state to ‘political constitutionalism’ (Antal, 2017) allows Fidesz to portray itself as
an active agent using the state as a tool of national self-protection. This politics of
national defence is juxtaposed to Western liberalism, which is presented as a model in
terminal decline. The ongoing upscaling of illiberalism in the Visegrád bloc (Kalb,
2018), and attendant East–West tensions in the EU allow Orbán to articulate his project
Scheiring and Szombati 11

in an agonistic mode, as a choice between two mutually exclusive political programmes

– a liberal and an ethnic-nationalist one – making it very difficult for the political opposi-
tion to avoid being associated with cosmopolitan-neoliberal politics.

Concluding discussion
This article presented a political-economic analysis of the rise and stabilisation of illib-
eral hegemony in Hungary. Our study departed from Polanyi’s notion of the double
movement and combined his historical institutionalist framework with relational class
analysis developed by Marxian anthropology.
We drew on Jonathan Friedman’s conceptualisation of ‘double polarisation’
(Friedman, 2003; Kalb, 2011, 2013), which involves a ‘vertical polarisation’ along the
lines of class and a ‘horizontal polarisation’ along the lines of culture, and results in the
fragmentation of the national territory and community of solidarity. Friedman’s concep-
tualisation highlights the emergent conflict between cosmopolitan elites and ethnically
rooted workers as a critical feature of globalisation. Moreover, the current trajectory of
capitalist globalisation also increases the polarisation between domestic and transna-
tional sections of capital, especially in dependent market economies. In addition, globali-
sation increases the concentration of capital in the new metropolitan growth centres and
accelerates the deindustrialisation and de-agrarianisation of peripheral regions. This nec-
essarily oversimplified macro-dynamic is what we called ‘neoliberal disembedding’.
We argued that neoliberal disembedding kicked off a classic Polanyian countermove-
ment. Socio-economic dislocations in working class and post-peasant communities
eroded the legitimacy of the liberal competition state. This argument echoes a new strand
of qualitative research, which has emerged in the wake of the Trump and Brexit shocks
and emphasises that working class neo-nationalism in the US and UK is connected to the
loss of industrial jobs and workers’ sense of being abandoned by neoliberal politicians
(Koch, 2017; McQuarrie, 2017). To be sure, such experiences are not homogeneous.
However, they do share essential traits, and it appears that these traits are connected to
the structuring effects of globalisation.
The discussion in this article highlights that it is a misunderstanding to separate the
analysis of cultural and economic factors in the analysis of contemporary politics
(Ausserladscheider, 2019), and an even bigger mistake to argue that cultural factors
trump economic ones as drivers of neo-nationalist populism. It is also crucial to recog-
nise that immigrants did not matter at all in Hungary until 2015, only well after the
establishment of the illiberal state. Thus, a reference to immigration and xenophobia is
not enough to explain the success of illiberal populism. Relational class analysis reveals
the dynamic interplay between symbolic processes, the lived experience of class and
structural change. East European, West European and American neo-nationalisms
emerge out of the lived experiences of class in the context of globalisation.
In addition to dislocations caused by neoliberal disembedding, this article highlighted
the crucial role of polarisation between transnational and domestic sections of capital
(Schrank, 2008) in creating fertile ground for illiberal politics. In the first decade of the
new millennium, representatives of the national bourgeoisie forged an alliance with
Fidesz, successfully pushing the party to devise a set of policies that would shift the
12 International Sociology 00(0)

balance of power between domestic and foreign capital. After coming to power, Fidesz
implemented a relatively coherent set of policies that were designed to accelerate capital
accumulation to the benefit of both capital factions, integrating both into the new power
bloc. However, the new political-economic consensus is predicated on the flexibilisation
of labour and the weakening of state protection to vulnerable populations. It, therefore,
has the potential to alienate both workers and subordinated surplus populations.
To stabilise the new illiberal hegemony Fidesz adopted a strategy of ‘authoritarian
re-embedding’ combining ‘institutional authoritarianism’ and ‘authoritarian populism’.
Institutional authoritarianism serves to limit the rise of a competitive civic and political
opposition by recourse to a kind of institutional bricolage, which preserves the facade of
democratic institutions but tilts the political playing field to the advantage of the ruling
party. Institutional authoritarianism has thus been instrumental in limiting the political
opposition’s ability to mobilise grievances. However, this is only one part of the story.
Intensifying the country’s embeddedness in global value chains by solidifying
Hungary’s role as a cheap and flexible assembly platform for TNCs also helped Orbán
temporarily stabilise illiberal hegemony. The post-2010 state went to great lengths to
renew the Hungarian economy’s embeddedness in global value chains by repressing
wages until 2015, disempowering trade unions, liberalising the labour code and keeping
the budget deficit low (Scheiring, 2019; Bohle and Greskovits, 2019). The economic
boom driven by corporate and financialised global investments (rooted in quantitative
easing) after the 2008 financial crisis underwrote the emergent illiberal regime in
Hungary. Thus, illiberalism was not only stabilised through institutional bricolage, but
also through a process of embedding into global capitalist structures.
Finally, workfarist and nativist discourse and policies have also played a crucial role
in legitimising Fidesz’s rule among workers and, more broadly, the lower-middle class.
In this part of our analysis we drew on the work of Stuart Hall on authoritarian populism
(Hall, 1988). While Hall argued that law-and-order policies played a major role in legiti-
mising Thatcherism in certain segments of the British working class, we in this article
highlighted the Hungarian government’s family and workfare policies. We claim that
these addressed real problems, but in a way as to represent them within a logic of dis-
course (Social Darwinism) which pulls them systematically into line with policies and
class strategies of illiberal power-holders. Just as the family policy addressed a real prob-
lem (low fertility), the national workfare programme also responded to pressing social
concerns: the lack of jobs and social security in regions hit by economic decline. We
argued that these two policies were instrumental in drawing a separation between
‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ citizens and that punishing the latter (by partially depriv-
ing them of access to welfare) offers provincial working classes a degree of emotional
satisfaction, while also reinforcing the legitimacy of rightist mayors and politicians
(Gans, 1994; Mares and Young, 2019). Finally, we also argued that the securitisation of
Hungary’s southern border also allowed the prime minister to parade as the protector of
Hungarians and Christian Europe. Orbán has successfully polarised politics along the
nationalist–cosmopolitan axis, making it very difficult for the political opposition to
avoid being associated with cosmopolitan politics.
These authoritarian populist initiatives have successfully reframed class-based con-
flicts around welfare and redistribution as having to do with culture and morality. This,
Scheiring and Szombati 13

in conjunction with the disempowering effect of institutional authoritarianism, has thus

far prevented the opposition from forging an inter-class alliance of the victims of the new
accumulation strategy. At the same time, authoritarian populism, by fostering a sense of
common interest and purpose in the face of looming external threats, has allowed Orbán
to mobilise diverse constituencies on behalf and in defence of the illiberal regime. While
most Hungarians are critical of tendencies generated by the new regime of accumulation,
the strategy of authoritarian populism has made Orbán’s politics palatable or at least
tolerable to the majority of Hungarians.
What are some of the broader theoretical lessons of the analysis? First, we ought to be
wary of conceptualisations that posit liberal and illiberal regimes as antipodes. While
Fidesz prides itself on having established a decisive break with liberalism, and in the
realm of political institutions, the break is indeed fundamental, the new regime’s socio-
economic policies have actually radicalised certain neoliberal tendencies. In the eco-
nomic domain, there is an enhanced rivalry for FDI in certain sectors of the economy,
while in the area of social policy there is a continued underfunding of health care and
education, the dismantlement of universal social protections and the curtailment of
labour rights.
Second, our analysis shows that domestic varieties of the illiberal countermovement
have to be analysed against the backdrop of global economic processes. Echoing the
argument of Johnson and Barnes (2015), this article showed how the logic of dependent
integration into the global capitalist economy and accompanying neoliberal policies
generated conditions that created fertile ground for the rise of illiberal politics. However,
globalisation is always translated into local outcomes through a particular local con-
figuration of social forces and changing class coalitions. This article highlighted one
such critical local reconfiguration. The privileging of transnational capital in the liberal
competition state alienated the representatives of domestic capital who eventually allied
themselves with Orbán’s party. This was pivotal since the national bourgeoisie both
funded and legitimised Fidesz’s effort to build civic networks in disaffected urban and
provincial communities, allowing the party to mobilise workers and post-peasantries
later.
Finally, the case of Hungary is a highly creative state formation, which combines a
diverse set of strategies to stabilise the rule of the new power bloc. Neo-utilitarian
approaches emphasising corruption (Magyar, 2016) tend to overstate the possibilities
available to politicians while underplaying the relevance of consent generated through
enhanced capital accumulation for the economic elite as well as through highly sophisti-
cated authoritarian populist strategies. Although the new regime of accumulation also
serves narrow clientelistic interests by implementing a set of neo-patrimonial policies, it
fundamentally caters to the short-term interests of all capitalist factions. Thus, the new
illiberal hegemony should not be seen as a divergence from ‘economic rationality’, but
rather as a complex authoritarian state-capitalist strategy, which emerged in response to
the local contradictions of global economic transformations.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
14 International Sociology 00(0)

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iDs
Gábor Scheiring https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0775-8610
Kristóf Szombati https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7427-6769

Notes
1. The unqualified term ‘populism’ refers to a political style or strategy whereby the elites
are pitted against the people. Populist movements or parties are often led by a charismatic
leader and represent a challenge for established liberal democratic practices. This article
eschews equating populism with ‘demagogue’, ‘opportunistic’, ‘irresponsible’, or ‘anti-
democratic’ politics. There are many different forms of populism from the left to the right;
some might be harmful, while others might represent a healthy political innovation. To
avoid this confusing variety of meanings, this article uses the term ‘authoritarian populism’
as a specific political strategy identified by Hall, as defined in the section on authoritarian
re-embedding.
2. For an explanation of why disaffected voters chose Fidesz over Jobbik see Szombati (2018b).

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Author biographies
Gábor Scheiring (PhD, University of Cambridge) is a research fellow at Bocconi University,
Milan. His research focuses on the political economy of health, the social consequences of eco-
nomic globalisation and how the lived experience of class is related to illiberalism.
Kristóf Szombati (PhD, Central European University) is a research fellow at the Max Planck
Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. His research focuses on illiberal statecraft, right-wing
movements and the role of race and class in authoritarian politics.

Résumé
Cet article présente, et étaye empiriquement, une argumentation théorique pour expliquer
la formation et la stabilisation de l’hégémonie illibérale en Hongrie. Il combine un cadre
institutionnaliste polanyien avec une analyse néo-gramscienne de la stratégie hégémonique de
la droite et une analyse de classe relationnelle inspirée de la tradition de l’économie politique
en anthropologie. L’article identifie les acteurs sociaux à l’origine de la transformation illibérale,
en montrant comment le « désencastrement néolibéral » a favorisé le glissement vers la droite
d’électeurs qui avaient été autrefois amenés dans le giron de l’hégémonie libérale : ouvriers,
post-paysans, et certaines catégories du capital national. Enfin, l’article retrace l’émergence d’un
nouveau régime d’accumulation et la stratégie de « ré-encastrement autoritaire » du Fidesz,
qui repose sur « l’autoritarisme institutionnel » et le « populisme autoritaire ». Cette double
stratégie a jusqu’à présent permis au parti au pouvoir de stabiliser l’hégémonie illibérale, et ce,
malgré des réformes qui ont suscité des mécontentements et exacerbé les inégalités sociales.

Mots-clés
Contre-mouvement, Hongrie, illibéralisme, populisme autoritaire, ré-encastrement autoritaire
18 International Sociology 00(0)

Resumen
Este artículo presenta y confirma empíricamente un argumento teórico que explica la realización
y estabilización de la hegemonía iliberal en Hungría. Combina un marco institucionalista de
Polanyi con un análisis neogramsciano de la estrategia hegemónica de la derecha y un análisis
de clase relacional inspirado en la tradición de la economía política en antropología. El artículo
identifica a los actores sociales que están detrás de la transformación iliberal, y muestra cómo
la “des-integración neoliberal” impulsó el desplazamiento hacia la derecha de los electores que
habían sido llevados al redil de la hegemonía liberal: trabajadores de cuello azul, post-campesinos
y sectores del capital nacional. Finalmente, el artículo describe la aparición de un nuevo régimen
de acumulación y la estrategia del Fidesz de “re-integración autoritaria”, que se basa en el
“autoritarismo institucional” y el “populismo autoritario”. Esta doble estrategia ha permitido
hasta ahora que el partido gobernante estabilice la hegemonía iliberal, incluso frente a las reformas
que han generado descontento y exacerbado la desigualdad social.

Palabras clave
Contramovimiento, Hungría, iliberalismo, populismo autoritario, re-integración autoritaria.