Enemy image, hegemony and reflection – The content and the function of the antagonistic politicisation of the concept of gender in the Orbán regime

The Orbán regime, on power since 2010, has been widely using a populist discourse, including deliberately polarizing and scapegoating. Besides “the migrants” and György Soros, since 2017, and in a more intensified way since 2020, their populist rhetoric and policymaking have evolved around LGBT issues and the term gender itself, depicting them as a danger to human civilization, the Hungarian nation and children. Based on the author’s empiry collected for her dissertation, the paper attempts to theorize this phenomenon, and the linkages between Orbán’s populism and feminist and LGBT politics, along three dimensions. The dimension ‘enemy image’ captures the short-term political goals (winning elections), where the enemy images “gender ideology” and “LGBT ideology” are just convenient and replaceable vehicles. The dimension ‘hegemony’ carries the long-term political goal: building a new right-wing hegemony, as opposed to the liberal and neoliberal hegemony established after the transformations in 1989. The paper argues that their counter-hegemonic project in the field of women’s and LGBT rights cannot be reduced to an antifeminist and homophobic backlash. And finally, the dimension ‘reflection’ addresses the empirical credibility of the anti-gender discourse of the Hungarian governing populist Right and captures the relationship between the Orbán regime’s populist discourse and the developments in Western feminist politics, especially the current queer feminist trends having a universalist approach. The paper argues that the three dimensions need to be equally addressed to gain a full picture about the contents and functions of the anti-gender discourse in Hungary.