Turning citizens into spectators

Hungary and Poland have been leading the wave of anti-democratic and anti-European developments in the European Union. Both countries set out to build an illiberal democracy using a right-wing nationalist rhetoric that promised to return power from the corrupt elites to the people to help the nation stand up from its knees. This paper argues that despite this “vox populi” rhetoric, the Fidesz and PiS governments have undertaken political reforms that turn citizens into spectators with a very limited say or take in politics but are passive objects of propaganda and disinformation. We see the making of spectators as the diametric opposite of the historical dynamics of citizenship, where citizenship is understood as an expansion process to include new types of rights (civil, political and social) to an ever-larger number of societal groups (Marshall 1950). We understand citizenship to have three main elements or dimensions (Cohen 1999; Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Carens 2000): citizenship as legal status, as political agency of the country’s political institutions, and as membership in a political community. We argue Fidesz’s and PiS’s populist politics empty citizenship of all its meaning, populist strategies mask authoritarian policies that limit social, political, and legal aspects of contemporary citizenship. This is only exacerbated by the radical expansion of visual mass media such as TV, internet and social media and the rise of “homo videns” (Sartori 1997), who clings to pictures, video messages and crude entertainment, becoming spectators instead active citizens. This way “spectator democracy” captures the internal logic of illiberal democracy, where political actors are in control of media and can influence public opinion (unlike in audience democracy [Manin 1997]), while citizens are alienated from the political process. Move towards more-and-more authoritarian systems ensures there are no “candor moments” (Green 2009), there are no controls on executive power and citizens cannot exercise agency of political institutions. Populism is employed to increase societal polarization and redefine the political community to the extent that security that citizenship is to provide cannot be enjoyed as it itself cannot be secured against authorities themselves. Last but not least, complex political decisions are simplified into pro and con decisions to ensure leaders can be sustained by acclamation rather than critical evaluation. This way, politics becomes a media show, tightly controlled by government, transforming citizens into spectators who pass judgment based on the politician’s media performance, often based on propaganda, fake news or straight lies.