From Berlin to Budapest and Back: “Illiberal Democracy” and the Mirror of Neo-Liberal Post-Democracy

This contribution undertakes a post-foundational discourse analysis of Viktor Orbán’s project of “System of National Cooperation” (from 2010 to the present, also referred to as “illiberal state” or “illiberal democracy” in a 2014 speech) and Angela Merkel’s Eurozone crisis management discourse (concentrated in the period from 2010 to 2015) in terms of their constructions of “democracy” in relation to the state. The basic proposition is that in spite of the important differences between them, Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” and Merkel’s “market-conforming democracy” converge in non-trivial ways in both a democratic-theoretical and a political-economic vein: both discourses have in common a fundamentally “post-political” (Mouffe) denial of the need for democratic conflict, whether in the name of neo-liberal economic rationality or a naturalizing conception of “the national interest”; illiberal nationalism or “illiberal democracy,” while positioning itself as a “national” and “democratic” antipode to post-democratic neo-liberalism, also mirrors the latter in subordinating the value of democracy and democratic institutions to economic expediency. The implication is that both forms of post-politics undermine not only liberal democracy as the terrain of a productive tension, but also democracy understood even in the narrower sense of popular sovereignty.