Legitimizing "illiberal" democracy: ideological familism in the Hungarian FIDESZ-KDNP government's discourses

The rise of "illiberal" democracy in Hungary after the 2010 parliamentary elections has highlighted the contested nature of the concept of democracy and the necessity of its intersectional research. In post-socialist right-wing populist discourses, the concept of gender is seen from two different perspectives: on the one hand, gender is perceived to be a colonizing instrument of the "West", while on the other hand, traditional gender roles are constructed as commonsensical and natural. Accordingly, freedom in a national populist context refers to the autonomy of "the nation" to make political decisions serving their own interests as opposed to of "the supranational elites". Safety refers to the dangers of the "reproduction of the White national body" battled for with anti-immigration, selective pro-natalist as well as anti-LGBTQ+ politics. As such, gender, and in the case of Hungary, family politics, apart from the policy level, also carries ideological value. So, in a bid to "defend the families", the Hungarian government uses gender to "culturalize political divides" for successful mobilization. This paper builds upon the concept of ideological familism, which sees the family as a model for other social institutions. We argue, that in Hungary ideological familism is used by the Fidesz-KDNP government to promote an "illiberal" understanding of democracy, based on ethno-centric majoritarian rule, national sovereignty and heterosexist pro-natalism. As such, ideological familism serves as a base for an understanding of "illiberal" democracy, in which gender, age and ethnicity intersect. Relying on the post-foundational discourse analysis of Viktor Orbán's speeches on "family" between 2010 and 2024, the paper argues that "family" functions as a "symbolic glue", expressing a combination of the mobilizing logics of populism, nationalism and religion. First, references to "family" are used to legitimate and normalize the government's exclusionary notion on democracy. Second, they enable the government to spread and normalize its political ideology beyond its electorate.