National Identity In Contemporary Hungary PDF Download

Authoritarianism is on the rise in Europe and is changing global perceptions of good governance and nationality. This dissertation addresses authoritarian discourse in Hungary, both an EU member-state and located in post-socialist space, by examining the political rhetoric not just of Hungary's long-standing authoritarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, and his party Fidesz, but also that of the people he speaks to and for, i.e., Hungarian citizens. The "truths" that Orban offers his citizens in texts, whether in words or phrases, live on in citizens' own expressions-but are not just passively received. This ethnographic research shows that after political elites produce discourse, people talk about those political texts with those they trust before going to vote. Political talk in private spaces matters because as texts circulate between public and private spaces, people produce meaning from otherwise ambiguous or abstract political slogans before voting. This process heavily influences and can even change the way people vote. This dissertation contributes to the fields of political science, political communication, linguistic and political anthropology, and in the field of Hungarian area studies as a distinctive ethnographic study that explores Hungarian national identity and political talk as a series of texts in circulation. It emphasizes the complexity of political communication by analyzing the narratives of Hungarian citizens from all sides of the political spectrum. It finds that emotive responses like anger to the political text "Orban" can stand as signs for the loss of political agency. In extreme cases, citizens experience national identity loss, when Fidesz's widely circulated definition of what it means to be Hungarian leaves citizens unable to identify with the party's political message. Finally, this work explores the multimodal landscape of Budapest during the 2019 municipal elections, where citizens could "see" corruption through the placing of text on billboards and signs-and some changed their views because of it.