Marketing Authenticity : Analysis of Hungarian Right-Wing Populist Rhetoric

Abstract

Both populism and conspiracy theories are gaining attention as they tend to saturate everyday political rhetoric. Earlier research notices how populist and conspiratorial rhetoric intertwine, yet they rarely focus on them as explanations for current social change, and even more, as arguments against it, in defence of an 'authentic' way of life. Both populism and conspiracy theories are often pathologized, while their explanatory aspects are neglected. This thesis aims to fill these gaps: it is interested in how right-wing populism and conspiratorial rhetoric used by them highlight the difference between an 'authentic', organically evolved society and unwanted, dangerous changes in it. Therefore, it does not only explain social change: it claims that 1. it is an attack on the 'authenticity' of a given society and 2. this attack is planned by conspirators 3. who are in fact 'the elite', acting against 'the people'. As case study, this thesis analyses speeches held by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, between 2015 and 2020, three in each year, held publicly and translated to English on official government websites. The research question is, how epistemic work is found in the data, using the methodological toolkit of epistemic governance and membership categorization analysis (MCA), built in the framework of World Society Theory and the Bordieuan field theory. The thesis is interested in how basic assumptions on our world appear in the data, how actors in the political field are re-arranged, and how certain qualities are attached to them. Findings show how the issue of European immigration after 2015 and the influence of the European Union was understood as an attack on the 'authenticity' of Hungary and Europe and constructed as a global conspiracy against national sovereignty. Also, by utilizing MCA, the thesis reflects on how populism re-arranges actors of the political field compared to how it is understood in liberal democracies.