Faces of the Same Coin?: Two Radical Critics of the Post-Communist Hungarian Neo-Liberal Consensus

• In Event: Liberation through Transition: Democratic and Economic Transformation in Central Eastern Europe towards the End of the Cold War, 1975-1991

Abstract

This article deals with the emergence of public criticism of the post-communist liberal consensus in Hungary in the 1990s by analyzing the political writings of two intellectuals who could not have been more ideologically distant: the left-wing philosopher Tamás Gáspár Miklós (TGM) and the writer Csurka István, who became a radical right-wing politician. I analyze their writings and public speeches from the early 1990s to the 2010s to find out why they became so disillusioned with the state of Hungarian democracy, and how the intellectual debates of the first half of the twentieth century shaped their views. Although TGM and Csurka disliked each other, their fierce criticism of the post-1989 neoliberal order shows points of convergence that are worth exploring in order to better understand the roots of the democratic backsliding that led Hungary to an authoritarian turn under the rule of Viktor Orbán.

Author

• Stefano Bottoni, U of Florence (Italy)