Abstract
This essay analyses the consolidation of authoritarian rule in Hungary by focusing attention on the ruling party’s workfare programme, which has become the cornerstone of rural poverty governance. It is argued, on the basis of ethnographic research carried out by the author and the secondary literature, that workfare successfully tamed the angry politics born out of the dislocations caused by neoliberal restructuring. It consolidated post-peasant hegemonies by tying the ‘deserving poor’ into clientelistic relations with mayors. This ‘illiberal paternalism’ constitutes an alternative to neoliberal regimes of poverty governance.
Highlights
HOW CAN WE ACCOUNT FOR THE CONSOLIDATION OF authoritarian rule on the European Union’s eastern periphery? Most of the scholarship on illiberal statecraft has focused on the capture and instrumentalisation of key institutions to explain the stability of ‘competitive authoritarian’ regimes (Levitsky & Way 2010)
This essay analyses the consolidation of authoritarian rule in Hungary by focusing attention on the ruling party’s workfare programme, which has become the cornerstone of rural poverty governance
Citing ideas promoted by Fidesz’s key ideologue, Gyula Tellér, Enyedi argues that the emphasis placed on citizens’ duties and the symbolic downgrading of those who do not work serve to legitimise the systematic redistribution of resources from the lower to the upper classes. This approach to paternalism dovetails with my conceptualisation of punitive populism but differs from the emphasis I place on the reconfiguration of relations between welfare claimants and local mayors, and my insistence that this new clientelism should be seen as the microfoundation of illiberal rule in depressed rural areas
Summary
To cite this article: Kristóf Szombati (2021) The Consolidation of Authoritarian Rule in Rural Hungary: Workfare and the Shift from Punitive Populist to Illiberal Paternalist Poverty Governance, Europe-Asia Studies, 73:9, 1703-1725, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2021.1990861 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2021.1990861
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