Anti-Politics and Hidden Agendas in the Hungarian Environmental Movement: the Role of Transactional Networks in the Illiberal State

The concept of transactional activism has been of high importance for grassroots movements in the region of Central and Eastern Europe, where the citizens’ representation has been relatively weak, while the different organizations’ involvement in transnational support network has been more effective. This is has been particularly so for the Hungarian environmental movement, which, as one of the most established sectors of the civil society, has been relatively influential on the policy level throughout the 1990s, but has gradually lost ground with the weakening structures and limited opportunities within the closing state structures. In this process, the turn towards the so-called ‘illiberal’ state, including the series of institutional and policy changes, as well as the change in the funding structures for NGOs have lead up to an increased exclusion of the NGOs from decision making. At the same time, formerly professional NGOs have been (involuntarily) politicized on a national scale, while on the non-institutional grassroots scene, an opposite phenomenon seems to arise – a tendency for de-politicization and an exit from the institutional channels. While the “anti-political” sentiments of the grassroots movements concern primarily the political parties, the professional NGOs and institutional organizations have also lost visibility in these local protests. Empirical evidence shows that this does not mean an absence of the NGOs from local protest issues, rather a deliberate strategy of the grassroots to prove neutrality and thus a “true” representation of the issue. This has resulted in new dimensions of transactional activism in the less inclusive in the illiberal state in CEE, where the civil society in its traditional sense sometimes is confronted with an explicitly hostile environment for. In this paper, I would like to discuss recent cases from the environmental movement, where the access to decision making structures is very limited, and the mobilization of transactional networks is either hidden or non-existent.