What did the Prime Minister say? Government responses to COVID-19 in Hungary: A policy analysis

In Hungary, first years of pandemic changed the policy content of Prime Minister’s speeches radically. Dominant policies of the last decade, such as family policy and labor, were replaced by health and by issues related to the significant social and economic effects of coronavirus. This change, however, not only affected the policy content of Viktor Orbán’s communication, but it also reshaped the logic of the structure of his speeches. Before pandemic, highlighted policy issues derived mostly from the agenda of the government, while external influences were able to distract Orbán’s attention very rarely. Such a change was experienced only in 2015, when migration crisis swept across the countries of the European Union, including Hungary. However, migration-management was integrated into the political strategy of the government, and the Prime Minister raised it into the group of symbolic policy areas of his communication very soon. How did the government handle the external policy impact of coronavirus in the first two years of pandemic? What changes did the coronavirus make in the content of Prime Minister’s speeches? We assume that government responds to COVID-19 can be approached in two ways. On the one hand, virus-related issues, such as the number of new cases or the effectiveness of vaccines, overshadowed other policy issues rapidly, as migration policy did. However, COVID-19 wave intensifies confronted the government with a new and unknown enemy, thus epidemic management not always brought as successful results as the public expected. During the deepening periods of the virus, therefore, health policy could not able to be the only leg of government crisis communication. As a respond, in the first years of pandemic, Prime Minister usually underlined important government successes in other policy areas (such as to the (re)introduction of a 13-month pension system in social policy), and put a quasi-equal attention on them to soft the edge of the crisis for the citizens and to increase people’s trust in the government. New lines of Prime Minister’s communication strategy therefore might be a significant cornerstone of the investigation of government crisis management in Hungary. We examine two type of speeches of the Prime Minister. First, we analyze his weekly interviews of the last two years (from March 2020) at ‘Good Morning Hungary!’. This radio show presents the only forum, where Orbán prefers to give comprehensive overviews about government strategies to the public. However, we also investigate his parliamentary statements between 2020 and 2021. We use two datasets built by the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). The datasets contain all the speeches of Viktor Orbán between 2020 and 2021, separated by sentences, coded by policy fields (the codebook uses 21 policies, such as health or education). The two tables have almost 10.000 coded items. We investigate the data by a policy dictionary with virus-related keywords to explore the position of COVID-19 in the speeches of the last two years. Based on our preliminary results, coronavirus was significantly embedded in Prime Minister's speeches and reshaped his communication strategy significantly.