Civil Society and the Right-Wing Radicalization of the Public Sphere in Hungary

The paper argues that contrary to the widely held view that traces the recent rise of populism in Hungary and Eastern Europe to a weak civil society, the past decade has witnessed a surge of civil society activism. But rather than working exclusively toward strengthening and complementing liberal political institutions, civil society has also provided fertile soil to the spread of right-wing populism, radicalism, and xenophobia. Moreover, the paper suggests that civil society organizations have played an important role in the right-­wing radicalization of contemporary Hungarian politics. Conservative civic groups have been instrumental in reinvigorating the symbolic vocabulary of a mythic nationalism that was widespread at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century as well as in the 1930s. The resurrection and accompanying commodification of nationalist, irredentist, and anti-Semitic symbols and paraphernalia (e.g., greater Hungary car stickers) have been a major vehicle for increasing the public visibility and political impact of these groups. These civic organizations have also been very adept at using new media to create an alternative public sphere. The paper shows through case studies of specific organizations (“Goyim Riders”, the "kuruc.info" online news portal, and foreign currency debtor organizations) how this seemingly anachronistic symbolic repertoire has found new resonance in contemporary Hungarian public life.