CHAPTER 13. Hungary

The 2010 Hungarian Parliamentary elections made it onto the front page of many international newspapers. Although most papers reported on the electoral success of the radical right-wing political party, Jobbik, at the same time another, arguably more important, development had occurred in Hungarian electoral politics that led to the restructuring of the entire Hungarian political landscape. The previously governing Hungarian Socialist Party was unseated (capturing only a couple more percentage points of the vote than Jobbik), while the Fidesz-KDNP coalition (the centre-right Hungarian Civic Union-Christian Democratic People’s Party, hereinafter simply ‘Fidesz’) received enough votes to secure a two-thirds majority in parliament, making it possible for them to pass legislation (or even change the constitution) without support from the opposition. The new government made it clear that they saw their victory as a “two-thirds revolution” reflecting the will of the “Hungarian nation”. Thus, as the new Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared, Fidesz formed a “Government of National Causes” which would not shy away from using its constitutional majority “to demolish taboos”. They intended to push their own legislation through parliament and to rewrite the Hungarian Constitution to reflect “the moral system of the new Framework for National Cooperation”.
The ‘nation’ played a central role in Fidesz’s vision of legislative and constitutional reform for Hungary. Through its national discourse and policies, Fidesz implicitly and explicitly identified who belonged, and who, by extension did not, to the nation. Ethnic Hungarians living outside of Hungary in the neighbouring countries were included (and not only symbolically) in Fidesz’s conception of the ‘Hungarian Nation’. This was reflected in the institution of dual citizenship for transborder Hungarians, one of the first laws passed by the new parliament. The new law removed residency requirements for those speaking Hungarian and claiming Hungarian ancestry. In effect, this meant that the approximately 2.5 million ethnic Hungarians in the neighbouring countries were now eligible for Hungarian citizenship. In his ‘one-hundred day’ speech Orbán made it clear that these transborder Hungarians were now ‘reunited’ with the ‘Nation’.
At the same time, boundaries of exclusion from the ‘Nation’ were also being redrawn at the level of discourse and in some cases policies as well. The roma minority, which had featured prominently in the 2010 elections as the primary ‘Other’ against which the ‘Nation’ was constructed, clearly did not fit in Fidesz’s conception of the ‘Nation’. A series of laws were passed that directly or indirectly targeted the roma ‘problem’: tougher measures on petty crime were introduced; school behaviour of children deemed violent was to be more strictly punished; it again became possible to fail students, thus forcing them to repeat the school year even if they were only in the first grade; and actions seen as ‘welfare delinquencies’ were criminalized. Although none of these changes named the roma explicitly (to the contrary, Fidesz repeatedly invoked an anti-discrimination discourse citing ‘dignity for all’) it is clear that the roma were disproportionately affected by these measures.
Our study on tolerance will focus its attention on these two groups: the transborder Hungarians and the roma. We will sketch out the position of other groups in Hungary in both historical and demographic context, but our main focus will be on these two groups that have also received historically the main focus in Hungarian political, cultural, and social life.