Acts of violence targeting Roma individuals in 2008-2009 raised public attention to an ethnicizing/racist political discourse on behalf of radical right-wing actors in Hungary who, playing on the prevalent strong anti-Roma attitudes of Hungarian society, aimed at creating a ‘Roma issue’ and presenting it as a concern to societal security. The paper argues that radical and extreme right wing actors successfully used societal resentment, identifying ‘Roma otherness’ – used here as an analytical term – as a key motif of radical right wing discourse and setting the scene for securitizing the Roma population of Hungary. The paper also examines those political practices on behalf of the central government that aimed at desecuritization, temporarily removing these concerns from the societal security agenda.
