Ideology and pragmatism in an illiberal state. The case study of Hungarian cultural politics after 2010

’…(T)he new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.’ said Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister in his infamous performative speech in July of 2014, declaring the illiberal turn of Hungarian democracy. Since then, numerous attempts in social science literature tried to capture the essence and features of this new regime, classifying it as managed illiberal democratic capitalism (Csillag – Szelényi 2015) or even a competitive authoritarian regime (Bozóki 2015). Csillag and Szelényi argue that the popular ideology of the regime is traditionalism/neoconservatism: it is conservative due to its emphasis on the concepts of nation, religion and traditional family. However, Eastern-European post-communist traditionalism cannot be classified as mainstream conservativism because it is not refusing etatism and not fully respecting individual freedom rights. On the contrary, etatism and paternalism are main characteristics of the regime (Körösényi 2015) and government acts in favour of transforming the relationship between state and society. In economic policy it means the attempts of redistributing property according to political loyalty (neo-prebendalism). Similarly, in the field of culture the redistribution of cultural positions and resources can be observed. The government creates an ideological background and facilitates the diffusion of illiberal norms by founding new cultural institutions and positions, and by creating or strengthening parallel/alternative structures aside the existing ones in the cultural field. Top-down NGO-s are also acting as norm diffusers. Besides the centralisation of cultural decision-making and administrative elite change, governmental attempts on rewriting the cultural canon are also continuous. In my paper I examine the effects of the significant political intervention in Hungarian culture leading to strong cultural dissent, with the help of discourse analysis and additional interviews.