The morality of public discourse in illiberal democracy

In recent years, Hungary has become infamous for leading the wave of democratic backsliding in the EU, with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán successfully exploiting economic insecurity and cultural fears to legitimize his illiberal, authoritarian rule. The country has been a forerunner not only in adopting unorthodox economic measures blaming foreign capital for its troubles but was among the first erecting barbed wire fences on the borders to protect the country (and Europe) from mainly Muslim refugees. I argue recent crises provide solid ground for new identity based morality politics. Although nationalism has a long tradition in Hungary, most people have no strong ties to religion, yet, Orbán uses religion-based morality to support his exclusivist identity politics. Using systematic content analysis of the official speeches of the PM from 2010 to 2022, I examine the creation of this new discourse of values and morality that is not only populist in being anti-establishment or anti-Europe but also increasingly ethnocentric being anti-migrant and uses religious references to (re)create a 19c conservative morality that mobilizes against the collapse of traditional national values. In Orbán’s illiberal democracy, identity of the nation rests on the discursive processes of ‘othering’ that stands for a contestation of liberal equality and diversity for the sake of saving the nation: migrants and refugees stand for culturally deviant people and liberal rationalism of EU institutions or progressive gender and sexuality rights are threatening nativist conceptions of society. It is this illiberal refusal of equality and diversity that brings back references to Christianity into secular Hungarian society. Yet, in this morality-based politics, Christianity is evoked as a religion only to render Islam an intrinsically foreign and it is rather hijacked to support the restoration of traditional culture and morality that is accompanied by the idea of an essential righteous battle to be waged against “others” who are culturally or religiously different (migrants) or reject traditionalism (liberals, Brussels bureaucrats). In turn, the “right people” are seen in absolute terms as morally “pure,” “noble” and “virtuous” signaling the moral seriousness of the discourse to animate populist followers in defense of these values.