This Authoritarian Life
This Authoritarian Life explores everyday human stories to make sense of authoritarian politics. Once a month, anthropologists Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren, relying on their own experience from Hungary and Turkey, invite guests from all over the world to shine light on the following questions:
What are the roots of authoritarianism? What does the rise of authoritarianism look like up close? How can everyday people navigate authoritarian spaces? And how can authoritarianism be confronted?
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It’s about understanding: giving you a better grasp of the deeper causes driving authoritarianism. It’s about insight: offering a glimpse into the difficulties of navigating authoritarian lifeworlds. It’s about hope: examples of people who work toward a more humane world.
This Authoritarian Life
The Allure of Authority: The Example of Hungary (Origins) #1
What drives ordinary people to espouse authoritarian figures? Join us, Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren, as we unravel this question through our personal journeys and anthropological studies in Hungary and Turkey. We kick off our new podcast by dissecting the spatial origins of right-wing authoritarianism, focusing on rural Hungary from 2006 onwards.
The countryside has often been seen as a space where politics flows to, but does not grow out of. When it comes to the authoritarian right, this could not be further from the truth. Kristóf shares his eye-opening experiences with the Hungarian Guard, a far-right paramilitary group that grew in influence by exploiting local grievances and the perceived void left by the state.
We also explore the socio-economic turbulence that came with Hungary's EU accession and how it reshaped rural communities in wine-making regions. We discuss the struggles these communities faced, from battling subsidized European goods to feeling overlooked by left-liberal elites. Delve into the tensions that erupted in a wine-making village in the period of the Great Recession, with acts of grape theft and paramilitary marches painting a vivid picture of life under authoritarian influence.
The rise of the far-right Jobbik party, fueled by resentment towards Roma communities and a promise to restore order in the countryside, is pivotal to understanding this shift. But of perhaps even greater importance is how Viktor Orbán's Fidesz managed to co-opt Jobbik’s platform, presenting a more palatable vision focused on the traditional work ethic and the creation of new jobs. Our discussion also covers how Fidesz's policies and new far-right formations continue to shape Hungary's political landscape.
Special thanks to our collaborators at the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) and for the indispensable support from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Tune in for a gripping exploration of the human stories that define authoritarian politics.
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Can you tell us how all this played out in the Hungarian countryside? What drove people there to seek authoritarian figures.
Speaker 2:That's how it began the state kind of withdrawing its tentacles from rural areas, and then I actually witnessed firsthand the paramilitary marches. This loss of authority is exactly what the right wing promised to redress, and in the end, that is pretty much what Fidesz ended up doing. You're listening to this Authoritarian Life, a podcast in which we explore everyday human stories to make sense of authoritarian politics. My name is Kristof Sombati and I'm Erdem Evra, so maybe it's best to start by saying that we're in Berlin, we're sitting in my flat, and that Berlin functions as a kind of place of refuge for people like us. We're both dissidents. I'm from Hungary, erdem is from Turkey.
Speaker 2:You've lived in Berlin for a longer time. Yes, I moved here what? Two years ago with my wife and when, here in Berlin, I think about two years ago, a common friend introduced us and we had this first discussion over dinner at her place. And I think one of the things we realized we share two very important things. We both lived through an authoritarian transformation, witnessed it from close up, and this showed that there's lots of commonalities between spaces like Turkey and Hungary. And the second thing which I think really connected us is that we have both studied this phenomenon as anthropologists and talked about it, reflected on it for over a decade now, and we really share, I think, this desire to communicate what we've learned to a broader public or publics.
Speaker 1:And this is how we intend to do it. We will invite people academics, journalists, activists and more who have deep and meaningful personal stories to tell and stories that can shed light on some important aspects of authoritarianism. We plan to have guests from all around the world who have an intimate understanding of this phenomena and to give you a brief overview of the structure of the podcast. We would like to address four broad themes. The first one concerns the roots of authoritarianism. The second one is about authoritarian transformation and the different dynamics that are at play in different places. The third theme concerns life under authoritarianism, that is, people's personal experiences of navigating authoritarian contexts. And the fourth one, in a slightly different way, is about how to confront authoritarianism.
Speaker 2:So how about introducing ourselves to our audience?
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll go first. So I grew up in Turkey, but I left Turkey in the early years of the Justice and Development Party rule, the AKP rule, and then came to Germany. But I remain deeply connected to Turkey at the personal level, intellectual level, political level. In Germany I was involved in the academics for peace group at an early stage that tried to provide some support for those academics who lost their jobs in Turkey, and I've worked for quite a long time as an anthropologist, as an academic, and currently I'm earning my life as a translator. How about you, Christoph?
Speaker 2:I was born in 1980 in Hungary, when the state socialist system was still in place, but I also lived abroad because my father was a diplomat. So we moved around, lived in Vietnam, the States, france, but I decided at the age of 19 to go home from France and grow roots. I studied sociology and later anthropology at the university, but in my 20s I was mainly an activist. I was a long-term member of the Green Movement, the ecological movement in Hungary, and that led us to create a political party called Politics Can Be Different in 2007. I was one of the party's leaders at the beginning and I also worked with Roma communities in Hungary who are socially stigmatized, helped them build a cooperative and did many other things. Things, and I left Hungary in 2022 after the fourth consecutive victory of the Fidesz party, which has been in power since 2010 and which is led by Mr Viktor Orbán.
Speaker 1:Incidentally, we'll start with Hungary today and we'll take a closer look at the roots of authoritarianism in rural areas.
Speaker 2:So should we just jump into it? Yes, let's do that.
Speaker 1:Can you tell us how all this played out in the Hungarian countryside? What drove people there to seek authoritarian figures and acquire some of the crucial actors of this transformation?
Speaker 2:Sure, I think to do that we need to go back in time to a period when important things were set in motion, and that's the period between 2006 and 2010 in Hungary. And at that time I was actually working with a local Roma community in northeastern Hungary, helping them actually build a cucumber-growing cooperative, which we thought was an important example to set kind of in the country, that cooperatives, you know, have a future in this country. And this was 2008, 2009. And it was exactly at this time that you saw a new far-right paramilitary formation called the Hungarian Guard launching, organizing a series of marches through small villages, small towns, demanding that gypsy criminals be punished by the state, Also promising local villagers that they would protect them from criminals, basically mimicking kind of the police, which at that time was felt to be very absent. And, in more general terms, I think the elites in Budapest were seen and felt to not really take the considerations of villagers, at least in this region, seriously. And so this really was what got me into trying to understand the rise of the far-right in Hungary, because it was actually happening around us. And it was an extreme situation in the sense that in the village where I helped this local Roma community with a colleague of mine.
Speaker 2:In the next village, two people were murdered in 2008, as far as I remember, as part of a wave of terrorist attacks targeting Roma with the explicit aim of triggering a civil and ethnic war in Hungary between Roma and non-Roma. And the way villagers spoke about these deaths was really shocking, because many of the so Hungarian kind of post peasants that I went on to do research amongst and with were saying, yeah, well, we're actually we're not happy to see people being killed, obviously, but we're happy to see gypsies being put back into their place, was how they put it. So there was this sense that things were breaking apart, a sense that there was social disorder and a sense that elites were and it was a left liberal government at that time in power that that elite was very aloof and absent and had abandoned kind of the countryside. You know, which are experiences which now, 10, 15 years ago, we kind of see them emerging in other parts of Europe, but I think Hungary was one of the first where we saw this and where I was able to watch this unfold.
Speaker 1:So what you're telling us suggests that things were different before. Like I presume that under socialism the kind of relations that the regime had with the Roma population and with the ethnically Hungarian population were different. So how did the fall of socialism kind of contribute to all this?
Speaker 2:Well, okay, so let's jump back there and then let's come back to the present. So under socialism the socialists made an effort to really build a unitary working class, and part of that drive was to bring Roma who at that time, until the 50s 60s, were really living on the margins of society Not all of them, but a large percentage of the Roma population, and that's about 500,000-600,000 people at that time in a country of 10 million, living in shacks, some of them in the forest, on former aristocratic estates, in traditional communities. But already before socialism they had started losing their jobs as industrialization picked up. Because they were, they repaired things, they, they were craftsmen, they were musicians, and some of these professions were lost already before socialism. And the socialists faced this task of doing something with this really marginal group, and the idea they came up with was to proletarianize them, so put them in factories, basically. And they also saw their task. There was a big debate within the Communist Party about what to do, but the faction that promoted basically cultural assimilation won out. So they also deliberately tried to break up traditional communities and these communities. Some of them had their own language, but they all had their own customs and rituals and the idea was to make good workers, basically Hungarian workers, out of them, and so they brought them from the margins or the outskirts of villages and towns into towns, building new houses for them, as I said, putting them into factories and really integrating them into schools and to some extent into public life. So this is what I meant by kind of building this unitary working class After 1990, so this project was semi-successful, I would say.
Speaker 2:There were still prejudices against Roma, especially amongst village populations who felt well, morally superior. Also, they had the cultural leading role, showing Roma what the right life is. But after 1990, we really saw a disintegration, so like a process of integration reversed, and what triggered that was the fact that the first jobs to go when socialism was slowly transformed into capitalism, where it was heavy industry and also large agricultural state enterprises and Roma were overrepresented among the unskilled workers basically working in heavy industry and agriculture and they just lost their jobs and the post-socialist states tried to prevent a total fall into poverty. So in the beginning there were some stop cities to prevent a full marginalization. But in the 90s still, this process unfolded of more of roma basically becoming, you know, resegregated physically again moving to the outskirts of villages. You saw deep impoverishment well. I also saw you know social ills associated with poverty growing. Drug use was pretty heavy in some of the areas I did work in.
Speaker 1:And how did post-socialism affect the lives of ethnically Hungarian peasants then in the countryside?
Speaker 2:So the peasants were better off than the Roma were. To simplify it, in the beginning there was a process of reprivatizing land and some families in villages got substantial amounts of land back and they started working it for themselves again. Not everyone won out in this process because the cooperatives were destroyed. So the less skilled workers, those who didn't get substantial amount of land back, weren't so well off and they had to kind of find new jobs in the service sector or away from their birthplaces. But there was a fraction of the population that emerged kind of as a winner, and these were local mid-sized agricultural entrepreneurs who managed to kind of bring, you know, agricultural enterprises on their, put them on their feet and then basically access local markets. The big problem, if I may jump ahead, was with the EU accession, because the country wasn't prepared for that, and so it was this group that I call post-peasants who really felt the brunt of Europeanization, in the sense that suddenly, in 2004, the Hungarian market was flooded by, you know, cheaper consumer goods, agricultural goods. In the region I worked, this was a winemaking region. You suddenly found local wine producers competing with, you know, spanish and Italian winemakers who were heavily subsidized by the EU, who were heavily subsidized by the EU and this. So there was a process of status loss, also of economic uncertainty, and it's in this process that this gypsy problem kind of emerged as a key feature of public life. Why? Because these post-peasants felt that the liberal elites had not only kind of not prepared them for this EU accession but were also supporting Roma, whom they felt unworthy of support.
Speaker 2:And what we have to say there is that in this period of 2005-6, so the left liberal government actually put in place a social democratic welfare reform precisely to help these really impoverished Roma communities get back on their feet. But the villagers felt that this was unjust because they were helping people who were not working, who they considered work-shy, and that they would be the ones you know really worthy of state support and they were not getting that support. At the same time, you saw schools being desegregated by the liberal education ministry. So there was an emancipation reform also in this time, and that was also felt in these rural areas to be very problematic in the sense that they had not been consulted on this. It was a central reform drive Things we hear, things we hear now from, like you know, france comes to my mind, where you see the president implementing these neoliberal reforms, and we can mention other places. So in Hungary the same thing happened and it caused lots of grievances.
Speaker 1:So what seems to have happened then is this toxic combination of dumping, the social costs of this transformation on the one hand, and some kind of pro-minority, pro-roma reforms, if I understand it correctly.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and the problem wasn't with emancipation as such, it was that emancipation was carried out in this broader context or broader framework of neoliberal reform.
Speaker 2:So, if you think about this process from the perspective of post-peasants, whom I did research amongst I also did research amongst the Roma, but I was mostly interested in understanding why post-peasants were shifting to the right, it's this perspective of you know, things are not going well economically for us. The elite seems not to care about our problems, and not only that, but they really recognize, you know, the people, the group below us, this underclass, who really caused trouble for us, and I can say a bit about what that trouble was. But the important thing is that this sense of abandonment and of resentment is formed in this triangle of a population that you know used to be used to see itself as the rightful owner of the state and the good citizens. Seeing an alliance being built by liberal elites who don't care about their predicament, their situation, and helping these racialized sub-proletariats or surplus population and not helping them. That's a toxic mix. That's a toxic mix.
Speaker 2:And I suppose this is precisely what Fidesz tapped into in the course of the 2000s and 2010s Right. But before Fidesz did, there was another far-right party that emerged. I mentioned these paramilitary marches and this paramilitary group it was called the Hungarian Guard was very closely linked to the Jobbik Party, which so there was in Hungary after 1990 already a far-right, an anti-Semitic, far-right party that put the Jewish question first, but they were not very successful. So they, you know, they got sometimes into parliament, but they weren't really able to influence the political agenda. They kept up this anti-Semitic discourse. So it did have an impact, but they didn't reach broad popular audiences.
Speaker 2:This new Jobbik party did because it saw in the so-called gypsy problem, the social problem we could say, an opportunity to mobilize these resentments and turn them against this elite and also to parade as the defenders of the good citizens and to call for a new type of social order to be built. And so Jobbik was very successful in realizing that there was a grassroots popular movement, that which was, you know, basically in birth, in a period of being born, and they connected with that, with that grassroots, somewhat racist, anti-liberal movement. And Fidesz only later came to really tap into that and promote a more moderate version of what Jobbik was proposing.
Speaker 1:What was that exactly? What did it consist of?
Speaker 2:So Jobbik really wanted to punish the gypsies, as they said, you know, like clamp down on gypsy criminality. That was their promise, which meant taking social subsidies away from poorer Roma. It also meant resegregating Roma physically, so territorially, also in schools again, so institutionalizing segregation. It meant strengthening local figures of authority, local mayors, because this welfare reform I mentioned briefly, it took mayors' power away of deciding about who gets social access to social subsidies. So the left liberal government, led by the socialists with a minority liberal coalition partner, took lots of powers away from local mayors, this power to decide basically who gets what. And that was very important, because this loss of authority is exactly what the right wing promised to redress and it promised to bring back figures of authority and in the end that is pretty much what fides ended up doing and, if I understand it correctly, work or moralities that developed around work, is a crucial part of what Fidesz also did, very much so.
Speaker 2:Very much so, and this goes back to the post-peasant ethic and the view of the good life or the right life, and that is that it is work and hard work only that should get you ahead in life, as one of my post-peasant interlocutors put it to me in this village where I worked, and just if I may come to this village just briefly, just to maybe give the audience a sense of what was going on. So it's a small village, 3,000 people, with maybe 400 Roma living in former streets, I mean inhabit in streets that were formerly inhabited by poor peasants and they'd been living there since the 50s. But in the period when I was doing research and a bit before that, there were really a set of tensions that arose between the Roma and non-Roma population Frictions, border frictions. Roma were, on the one hand, trying to leave the segregated settlement where they were living and trying to buy houses within the village, properly speaking, and the peasants wanted to prevent that. Why? Because the narrative was that Roma were becoming well, were out of hand or were unruly and that they were responsible for petty theft.
Speaker 2:And there was this right below or right behind the Roma settlement, there was this so-called cellar hill where supposedly, the best wine could be made. Remember, this is a viticultural region, so winemaking has really strong roots and traditions. And between 2000 and 2010, just before, I did research there, but my research was partly bent on trying to understand this micro-history of the earlier 10 years what had gone wrong? So, as I dug into local history, I found that this cellar hill was actually being abandoned, so cellars and vineyards and orchards were being abandoned bit by bit and kind of the houses built there were falling apart, and the local non-Roma blamed the Roma for this situation, saying you know, the local underworld, as they called it, these good for nothings are taking our houses apart, they're stealing fruit from us and no one's here to protect us. The police is not doing anything. The interior ministry is legalizing petty theft. It was a liberal interior minister.
Speaker 2:So there was a direct kind of link to the central government doing things wrong and they blamed Roma basically for their larger problem, which was basically, as I said, this EU accession going wrong and just status loss and a feeling of disempowerment, of power shifting away from these villages, of resources shifting away from these villages, and Roma became scapegoats and there was a local elite group that really played a very important role in signaling Roma out and in spinning this new narrative of gypsy criminality before you obicted. That's important. And these were people who wanted to transform the village into a tourism destination because, besides winemaking, it also had a very old and beautiful Catholic church, so it still had these peasant traditions that were intact, people were still wearing the costume for important festivals and other occasions. And this elite group saw, or believed, that Roma had no place. Impoverished Roma had no place in their vision of the village, and so they deliberately thought that by targeting the Roma they could push them out or they could at least keep them, you know, on their little settlement, not coming out from there too much, just staying put, staying calm, staying quiet. That was the target of this new discourse. And then Jobbik. So this was going on not only in this village but in many other places, and Jobbik was the first to feel this and to pick it up.
Speaker 2:And then Fidesz went kind of in a slightly different direction by not saying we will come and punish the gypsies, but we will bring a workfare program in which those who want social support will have to work. So that's what workfare was about when Fidesz came to power. It was actually started by the socialists. When they already saw that they were about to lose the election, they brought this new reform in. But it was a program in which the poor had to perform community work if they wanted to get access to subsidies. And again, what we see is that Fidesz brought this program under the umbrella of local mayors. So it was again local mayors who got to decide who can be part of this program, again reversing the cycle of history from taking powers away from mayors to granting mayors power again, to granting mayors power again to reorder these local social relations in a way in which these local surplus people are more controlled, so to speak.
Speaker 1:And how does the situation look like now? Like is the gypsy question, the Roma problem? Does it still play a big role?
Speaker 2:Well, today, not so much because this fides is, you know, effort to build a work-based society, as it calls, in which those who work are the ones who are primarily rewarded and those who don't work are not rewarded. This was very successful. I would say or that's what my research in this place, but in also other places showed, and other researchers have come to the same conclusion that this really tempered this anti-poor sentiment, because people saw their poor neighbors being forced back into work and they also saw that they were actually doing something productive for the community. So the way this workfare program looked was in this village a local garden was built with the participation of local Roma and they grew vegetables and there were also some small animals like chickens and ducks and the produce from the local garden and these animals ended up in the kitchen of the local kindergarten and the local school.
Speaker 2:So this you know kind of village economy was kind of re-energized through this program and people like the post peasants felt like there's new life in the village. Also, roma were cleaning the streets as part of this workforce, they were embellishing the village by planting flowers. So suddenly they were again part of the local economy, part of the local social fabric with the help of the Fidesz-Ran state, and this post-peasant group also felt that they were much more kind of in control of the situation again, thanks to this local authority figure that was the mayor. So it was a lot of. I think Fidesz's success in the countryside has to do with this successful reordering, bringing a new order, and an order that this social group perceived to be much more moral because it rewarded the good citizens.
Speaker 1:Finally, you spent such a long time conducting research in this place, in this wine-making village. What sort of conversations got stuck on your mind? What sort of encounters do you still remember from this time that speak into what you are talking about?
Speaker 2:oh, I have many memories but, um, so one of them is these conversations with with these, you know, local post peasants and and also with local mayors and saying how one of the mayors was telling me well, yes, you know, stealing 20 kilos of grapes earlier, really it happened, but it was never a problem. But now that the peasants aren't doing so well, even 10 kilos of fruit matter when they're gone from one day to the other. So you could really see that the same act kind of had a totally different signification before the economic crisis and after the economic crisis. And I have lots of these conversations in mind. I also have conversations that were very painful to listen to in mind, when you know, you heard people and these were the most. So the people I have in mind are, like, really the ones who became associated and staunch supporters of the far right, your big, first of all, and you know they were saying things to me, probably also provoking me that you know they want to see roma being sent away to gas chambers and seeing them go up in smoke. Um, I mean, that was the most extreme, but but there was lots of like verbal violence saying, yeah, these people really need to be punished and put back into their place.
Speaker 2:And then I actually witnessed firsthand the paramilitary marches, and in this village it wasn't only a march, so usually the paramilitaries would arrive to a place and stay, you know, just for day or maximum two days, going up and down the main street, following Roma to the shop, just to mimic the state and saying we're here to protect the good citizens. But in my village, so to speak, they stayed for three weeks and I could feel the tension raising day by day among the Roma, and little kids were peeing in their pants at night. There was terror among the Roma, which was exactly what the paramilitaries wanted to provoke. And then I saw a street fight, but I didn't see it, but I heard it. I was because I was staying in this border zone between the Gypsy settlement and the village, properly speaking, and there was a clear demarcation zone, by the way and I heard a fight breaking out between the paramilitaries and Roma, lots of shouting. It seemed very violent. In the end there wasn't lots of shouting, it seemed very violent. In the end there wasn't lots of injuries. So there was more smoke than flame, but still it was a very, very tense situation where you could see what a racist popular mobilization looks like and it was in a way quite frightening. And it was in a way quite frightening, I have to say.
Speaker 2:The last thing about this is that towards the end of my research I took on a much more active role. So I stepped out of the researcher role because I was also founder of the Green Party and actually responsible for the Roma integration policy of the party and what we tried to do in this village, since I knew it so well, was to have representatives of both groups kind of sit around the table to discuss how this violent situation could be tempered and de-escalated. But the takeaway from that was that it was impossible to have this kind of negotiation and mediation in such a tense situation. And what solved that was actually Fidesz finally agreeing to sending the police, to have this kind of negotiation and mediation in such a tense situation, and what solved that was actually Fidesz finally agreeing to sending the police into the village and kind of forcing the paramilitaries to leave. But it took three weeks for Orban to actually say something. It was a national incident. Even international news outlets were there with reporters. But after three weeks I think Orban wanted the country to see that gypsies were a problem that the far right had no good solution because violence was going to beget more violence. So he deliberately I think waited and then he sent the police in to show that now there's law and order and we will restore it.
Speaker 2:So, besides the workfare program, there was an effort to finance the police forces better in the countryside and that also probably played a role in tempering these racist sentiments and calming the situation. And lastly, and I'll end with this, but it's also important that so I mentioned the socialist emancipation program, which I found, you know, problematic, but in the sense of these, you know, being combined with these neoliberal reforms. But also in the sense that the socialists had no economic strategy of what actually to do with poor populations, unskilled people who used to work in factories. And Fidesz, what did it do? It brought new factories to the countryside. So at first German capital was attracted with tax subsidies, also very low corporate taxes, to Hungary, and these days it's Chinese automakers who are coming also to Hungary to build new factories. And these factories sucked up some of the people who were left surplus in the neoliberal economy, people who were left surplus in the neoliberal economy. So Fidesz also had an economic strategy besides this answer, this work-fairist answer to this racist dynamic.
Speaker 1:It also had an economic strategy that was also quite successful for a time, and do you think that the strategy will remain successful, or can you imagine a scenario where the paramilitaries or the Jobbik actually potentially galvanize the situation or try to control the situation through force, violence, etc.
Speaker 2:Right now it's hard to see that. So the Jobbik party then shifted towards the political center after it saw Fidesz taking its place on the far right, and then it actually that strategy failed. It's a long story, but in the end it ended up failing and the party disintegrated. But there's a new radical right or no extremist right-wing formation called the Our Homeland Party, which was founded by earlier FIDE or Yobik members. So it's a new permutation of that kind of far-right politics and they're making inroads into rural areas, but they're not able to. So.
Speaker 2:Fides has entrenched itself so deeply in rural areas that this far-right group, which is even to the right of FIDES, has a very hard time mobilizing. It's trying and it's achieving some kind of success and they're also reviving this Roma topic, but it's not their main kind of thrust right now. They're talking about well, you know there were anti-vaxxers after COVID. Their discourse was also a lot about the, you know, against the refugees. So basically supporting or even pushing Orban to the right of being really tough on refugees entering Hungary, keeping asylum seekers out, and the Roma issue is there. But I wouldn't say that they're really successful at doing what Jobig did before. I don't see that coming.
Speaker 1:So one important point that comes out of this conversation is that the desire for authority is partially born out of resentments and a sense of social and moral breakdown. And a sense of social and moral breakdown. Authoritarian politicians like Orban precisely speak to these resentments, not only by acknowledging them and giving them an outlet, but also by providing certain solutions and fixes. And what we saw in the Hungarian example was that the right strengthened local figures of authority, and this proved popular with rural constituencies, who still remember this 10 years after the fact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. I think that's important. Of course, I think we should also keep in mind that these fixes are never kind of permanent and I didn't have time to go into it. But there are obviously problems with the economic model that Hungary is pursuing and lately also there's, you know, political challengers to Fidesz's rule. But I think it is important to keep these rural areas in our heads because so many things happen in them and we can see in Hungary that the ruling party is really so deeply entrenched there that it's hard to dislodge it. You know, I think this Gramscian perspective on wars of position is helpful in that sense to see, you know, this entrenchment and it will require quite a lot of political, associational, cultural work for an alternative to emerge in the countryside.
Speaker 1:Well, in the Turkish case, it took an unprecedented economic meltdown for that to happen.
Speaker 2:actually, Right, right, we'll talk about that.
Speaker 2:We'll talk about that I guess we'll come back to Turkey. We'll come back to that, but yeah, so just following up on you, I think this other, or like another takeaway is just the way we think about the countryside, the rural areas, because usually we tend to see them as these places where things arrive to but things don't come from. And that's also I mean not only in politics, but also in politics, and I think not only my story but other stories unfolding at this moment in time around us are sending the message that we need to think in different ways, the message that we need to think in different ways. Rural areas can be very much places where new political moments and a new political momentum can be born. And I think at this point we should mention that we're actually recording this first episode the day after the French elections, the first round of the French legislative elections elections, the first round of the French legislative elections, and I mean, of course, we still need to properly look at what happened, but it's very clear from the results that the Rassemblement National gained foothold in areas where it had none before, I mean in Brittany, southwestern France, in the Pyrenees and, of course, in the north, where it already had a foothold. It just sweeped all of the constituencies.
Speaker 2:And if you look at the French discourse now about why this is happening, it's very much focused on social dumping in the countryside, the fact that you know public services, social services have been slowly dismantled, that there's no post office.
Speaker 2:This is exactly what happened in Hungary and in the period I was talking about.
Speaker 2:That's how it began the state kind of withdrawing its tentacles from rural areas, thinking that it can get away with it because these are passive populations and they'll just swallow the bitter pill of neoliberal reform. And we see that that pill can be swallowed, but then it upsets the stomach, so to speak. And then, just ending with this reflection on yesterday's events in France, and then it's too late when either a liberal president and his camp realize that they have been wiped out from most of their bastions Absolutely, and the left also is, I mean, licking its wounds, is maybe, I mean it comes close to it. But they also won in certain but mostly urban strongholds right, and they're seeing also that they can't mount this challenge anymore in rural areas, where it's basically the far right and radical right-wing elements from the former Les Républicains party that are there. There are, of course, exceptions still in France, but still the dynamic I think we're seeing speaks to this revolt of the provinces that I think we don't always notice immediately when it's happening, because we tend to be far from these places.
Speaker 1:And not to forget that we are facing a very similar problem here in Germany as well, and actually more recently. Whereas the left party is becoming almost irrelevant electorally speaking, it is Sarah Wagenknecht's party, bsv, that is actually potentially making gains in rural areas, mainly in the eastern provinces, but potentially also, maybe also, in the west, and even though we may not agree with her solutions or her answers, I think she seems to be one of the few politicians who actually understands where the problem lies yeah, and just the last word on this.
Speaker 2:I think so. You know, we I talked about this toxic mix of neoliberal reforms that hurt, um, you know, petty bourgeois constituencies and an emancipation politics targeting racialized minorities. I think this is exactly kind of the toxic mix that we see in Germany also playing out and that, as you say, the Bühne-Sahara-Wagenknecht is trying to answer in their own way. I guess we can still come back to discussing her later. But yeah, there are resonances, so to speak, between European spaces, and I think these resonances we'll want to explore them during later episodes, and I think next time we'll also continue to look at rural areas, because we find that they are underrepresented, under-researched, they're not talked about enough. But we can promise our listeners that we'll move away from Hungary and towards more contemporary spaces and look at another case, perhaps with someone else.
Speaker 1:So that's it from us for today. Thanks for listening, goodbye. This episode was sponsored by the Rosalux Amruks Stiftung and was produced in cooperation with the IRGAC Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter Strategies.
Speaker 2:We would also like to thank podcaster Martin Fischer, who gave us really invaluable advice. Martin has a highly popular German language podcast called Staatsbürgerkunde, which deals with the history of the German Democratic Republic. We would really encourage you to have a listen. And finally, we would like to name the people who helped us actually make this episode, and they are Vera Jonasch and Sáj Lévi, who are responsible for sound engineering and mastering, polina Georgescu, who designed the logo, and Anna Silágyi, who is our in-house comms expert, whose role is to help us move away from our academic talk.
