Civil Society and Gender in an Illiberal Democracy. The Changing Landscape of Women’s Organizations in Hungary Since 2010

Feminist civil society actors have been under direct governmental attack in recent years in Hungary while the issue of family and mothers, alongside with some of the related organizations, have been embraced by the Orbán-cabinets. This study, based on the qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with representatives of civil society organizations and governmental officials between 2018 and 2020, maps the changing relations between the state and civil society movements/organizations in the field of gender and family policies. We adopted a dual perspective to capture the substantive (norms, values, issues) and procedural (dynamics, strategies, patterns of organizing) dimensions of civil society organizing. Our findings confirm earlier assumptions of the primacy of co-operation-based transactional activism in Eastern Europe. However, we further refined this notion with pointing out some new trends, including the “gongoization” of some of the civil organization in return for legitimizing government policies; the re-invented strategies and alliances of feminist organizations; and the enthusiastic ideological support to Orbán’s family policies by some of the civil movements that did not receive direct governmental support.