Perception and Visions of Europe in Hungary

• In Event: Comparative Party Polarization

Abstract

After the critical elections in Hungary in 2010 perceptions about the European Union changed significantly in Hungarian politics. While in the beginning on the 2010s Jobbik was known as a hard Eurosceptic party, burning EU flags and suggesting that Hungary left the EU, after the 2014 elections the party left Euroscepticism behind. FIDESZ, however, is more difficult to categorize – being a functional Europeanist party before 2010, they already started to use a different narrative already when holding the EU presidency in 2011. While leaders of the party claim to support European integration, especially its intergovernmental version, however, government propaganda campaigns are conducted clearly against „Brussels”. The scattered political left presents definitely pro-European values and that is unchanged since the regime change. Some of them are supranationalist but we find federalist parties as well. Thus, Hungarian political parties range from sovereignism to federalism – both visions are embedded in the political ideology and the programme of the party concerned. These developments are explored in the paper using the method of discourse analysis.

Author

• Krisztina Arató, Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Law