Common Sense Nationalism and Illiberal Populism in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary

The aim of this paper is to explore the ways Hungarian nationalism is constructed in the common sense (Gramsci, 1975) of ordinary citizens, in the context of the hegemony of illiberal populism in Hungary. After the election of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in 2010, Hungarian politics have been the subject of what Enyedi (2015, 2016) described as a « deep transformation » of the political landscape. Since then the outcome of every Hungarian election has expressed the electoral domination of illiberal populist parties, with the Fidesz as governing party and the Jobbik as a complementary and oppositional political force. Those parties both share nationalism as one of the main organizing elements of their discourses (Ádám and Bozóki, 2016 ; Tartakoff, 2012), an articulation which is indeed frequent in populist rhetoric (De Cleen, 2017). If we consider populism as a discourse aiming at the articulation of a diversity of demands emerging from the society (Laclau, 2005), we can wonder if the nationalism of Hungarian illiberal populism is an answer to an actual social demand and how it interacts and can be compared with the Hungarian citizens’ own conceptions of their nation. In this paper, I will tackle those questions by presenting the results of a first set of in-depth interviews conducted in the small industrial town of Martfű, in the south-east of Hungary. In these interviews, citizens of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds who do not take part in party politics express their relation to national politics, nationalism, and their conception of the Hungarian nation. Adopting a discursive approach of nationalism (Billig, 1995 ; Brubaker, 1996 ; Torfing, 1999), I will analyze those recorded talks through the theoretical tools of discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985 ; Jørgensen and Philips, 2002), to show how they apprehend, construct and reconstruct Hungarian nationalism. This will allow me to discuss not only the potential interactions and similitudes between this common sense nationalism and the nationalism of the Fidesz and the Jobbik, but also the challenges represented by nationalism as an important part of illiberal populist parties’ strategy to build electoral consent and reshape Hungarian politics and society.