AUTHOR=Sata Robert 

TITLE=Performing crisis to create your enemy: Europe vs. the EU in Hungarian populist discourse

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Political Science

VOLUME=Volume 5 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1032470

DOI=10.3389/fpos.2023.1032470

ISSN=2673-3145

ABSTRACT=Hungary has become the leader of democratic backsliding within Europe, with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán being the staunchest critic of the EU. Orbán has continuously radicalized his populist Eurosceptic discourse, despite consistent support for the European project among the wider public and Hungary being a net benefiter of EU membership. To resolve this puzzle, I claim the radicalization of the discourse is a direct consequence of a continuous populist performance of crisis that demands the creation of images of friends and foes to unite and mobilize people. Orbán relies on discursive processes of othering to construct to his liking both ‘the good people’ and its enemies, who are to be blamed for the crises. Using a systematic analysis of all speeches, statements and interviews of the PM for his three consecutive governments 2010-2022, I show how anybody can become an enemy in the various crises that follow each other. At the same time, discursive conceptions of Europe vs. the EU remain in the center of the discourse to establish Hungary’s European belonging as well as opposition to EU policies that allegedly people reject. While the economic crisis pits an economic ‘us’ against the former socialist political elite, foreign capital, and the EU and IMF that are all blamed for Hungary’s near-bankruptcy situation. The refugee crisis redefines both ‘us’ and ‘others’, the ‘self’ is distinguished using ethno-linguistic criteria and identitarian Christianity to signal the cultural distance from the migrant ‘other’ as well as multicultural EU. The pandemic crisis is performed only to further exacerbate the conflict between the illiberal ‘self’ and the liberal ‘others’, where supranational EU, promoting multiculturalism, gender ideology or neoliberal policies not only threatens the very existence of traditional-national lifestyles but endangers the people themselves. With each crisis performed, newer and newer conflict lines between various ‘European self’s and ‘threatening EU’ are identified, each adding to the radicalization of Orbán’s discourse. The demonization of the EU using these false discursive constructs enables Orbán defend illiberal democracy as a fundamentally European project to serve the people by opposing the liberal world order embodied by the EU.