The fierce anti-migrant hate campaign was the most visible sign of the length to which Orbán was prepared to go to ensure his majority. Since 2010 Orbán has been using the momentum created by popular anger at the failures of liberal policies to build up his own system: authoritarian capitalism. A system that is deeply illiberal but capitalist: private property and the profit logic still dominate, but the state bureaucracy and its institutions are subdued to the enrichment of the preferred national economic elite. [...]
Hungary has also been characterised by painfully low wage levels that lagged behind Central and Eastern European wages throughout the last thirty years. Low wages, lost jobs, and high indebtedness made the Hungarian working middle class extremely fragile. As a result, social tensions grew and the approval rates for post-socialist liberal capitalism dropped dramatically in the first twenty years. These tensions and disillusionment swept the working middle class to the Right. [...]
Between 2014 and 2018, real incomes and the employment rate have risen somewhat, but the bottom forty per cent has remained on the losing side of Orbán’s economic policies. To prevent a backlash from those who have lost out, Orbán uses the authoritarian state as a disciplining tool. He controls the economically vulnerable population from above, by using their fears of losing access to public works and other public services and benefits.
Another way the authoritarian state secures the consent of the economically vulnerable is redirecting distributional conflicts along cultural lines. He attacks the unworthy, undeserving poor and immigrants with hate campaigns to pose as the saviour of the nation. Targeting George Soros in the most recent parliamentary election was a strategic move to connect the enemy images of the reckless global investor and the fearful migrant, portraying both as threats to the vulnerable working class. Orbán’s authoritarianism cannot be separated from the model of capitalism he builds.
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