Democracy and Populism. The Constitution of the Political Community in Early Post-War Hungary

Máté Zombory

doi:10.5077/journals/connexe.2018.e162

Abstract

   This article proposes to reconsider the relation between populism and democracy. Instead of taking democracy as a given, it will study populism in the context of democratization in a case study from a historical sociological perspective. The post-war and pre-Cold War historical context is analyzed here on the example of Hungary. First, I analyze the public debate on democracy in order to map out the discursive field in which the different political positions were taken. I show that the debate was about the legitimate definition of the political community, the demos. Second, I situate the political wing of the Hungarian populist movement in this discursive field. I establish that the position of the populists’ party did not differ considerably from the standpoint of the other participants: the basic populist claims and references were articulated as part of the problem of democracy. Third, I analyze the continuity of the populist tradition in the context of the post-war redefinition of the ethnoscape, that is, in relation to the “Jewish question” and the “German question”.  

Highlights

It is a commonplace in contemporary scholarly debate on populism that the extreme ambiguity of the term makes any attempt of a clear-cut definition difficult
The question is usually put as “Is populism a threat or a corrective to democracy?”, and the typical answer is formulated in the “populism vs. democracy” paradigm (e.g. Taggart 2000, Mény & Surel 2002), even if Ernesto Laclau’s opposite view is referenced, whereby populism is a possible way for political life to be structured (Laclau 2005)
Instead of underlying similarities between old and new populist movements, this paper aims to emphasize the importance of taking into account the historical transformation of politics at large

Summary

Introduction

It is a commonplace in contemporary scholarly debate on populism that the extreme ambiguity of the term makes any attempt of a clear-cut definition difficult. The Constitution of the Political Community in Early Post-War Hungary to democracy, and that the relation between the two is debated among the experts; they contend, that “it is not far-fetched to suggest that the conventional position is that populism constitutes an intrinsic danger to democracy” (Mudde & Kaltwasser 2017: 79) They solve the problem stemming from the ambiguity of populism by differentiating between democracy (the combination of popular sovereignty and majority rule) and liberal democracy (the same combination together with the institutional protection of fundamental rights). The most important feature of the post-war discursive field was the democracy paradox: the nation constituted both the subject and the object of political action aiming to reconstruct the country. Let us first see how the political forces, the party of the populists in particular, positioned themselves in relation to the question of revolution

The inclusion of the people

The exclusion of antidemocratic elements

Positions in the ethnoscape

Conclusion

Findings

Bibliographic References