What Can Illiberalism Offer? Pillars of the Orbán Regime's Social Contract

The paper aims to interpret the Orbán regime in terms of a multi-layered social contract (SC). Despite the regime's massive erosion of democracy after 2010, it maintained significant citizen support for a long time, leading us to ask what it could offer. The presentation attempts to determine what the conceptual framework of the social contract, combined with a post-Laclaudian and Mouffian discourse theory, can tell us about Orbán's illiberal experiment as a whole. A massive body of literature has been written about the Orbán regime over the past decade and a half, mostly focusing on one aspect or another. The discourse theory/SC framework provides an opportunity to interpret them together, with a result likely to be a political theory within a methodological individualist framework, which focuses on what and how integrated people (at the same time convinced them) into the alternative SC (counter-hegemony) built by the Orbán regime; what this proposal looked like, and what can we say, at least hypothetically, about what proved to be durable, so we can understand it as a real SC layer and what was occasional (possibly only a short-term layer). The Tisza Party, which came to life in 2024, and Péter Magyar's political discourse, with a uniquely structured chain of equivalence, can help to achieve this by showing what could be adopted, what they became silent on, and what Tisza left completely in Fidesz's discursive repertoire. Against this background, the presentation is therefore primarily concerned with exploring the layers and/or pillars of the illiberal SC. This evolving theory currently identifies three such pillars: 1) the individual pillar, which focuses primarily on the individual; including the long durée layer dating back to the post-1956 state socialist past, consumption and its variations after 2010; 2) the particular pillar, which aims to integrate citizens into the SC via certain ideological claims, such as, the nation, the sexual contract, and moral superiority structures; and 3) the universal pillar, which includes the state contract per se: the international reorientation of the country, Euroscepticism and infrastructure for the regime’s long-term sustenance.