Antisemitic Tropes, Fifth-Columnism, and “Soros-Bashing”

Abstract

This chapter investigates the ways in which the post-2010 Fidesz government under Viktor Orbán used antisemitic tropes to configure George Soros—once hailed as a champion of market reform, freedom, and democracy—as an ontological threat to the Hungarian nation that should therefore be expunged from the country, together with “his networks,” including the Open Society Institute and Central European University. To show the government’s communication strategy in action, we combined an analysis of antisemitic discourse on the far right with a media content analysis of Sorosozás in government-backed online news portals from 2015 to 2020. We show that, from 2010, Orbán and his media allies discursively interpellated specific individuals and states as “financiers” and “global powers” as cogs in a global “Soros network.” In doing so, they drew upon well-established fifth-column narratives originally constructed and refined by ideologists from the Kádár era who employed a latent antisemitic code in their writing. At one time vehemently rejecting such discourse, Orbán and his government allies have become its chief articulators with devastating effects for one of his targets—the Central European University in Budapest.