Viktor Orbán and the Role of Religion in Hungarian Politics (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - Region: Eastern Europe, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Institut für Politikwissenschaft), course: BAK15 Osteuropastudien, language: English, abstract: This paper examines the role of religion both in Hungarian society and explicitly in Mr. Viktor Orbán's successful political oevre. The aim of this research report will be to explain why Viktor Orbán and his Christianity-fueled public statements are not vehemently rejected, as one could suspect from the country's secular and secularized past, but instead very much appreciated by the general public, which was before Mr. Orbán unused to political profiling through religious affiliation.

For this purpose, I studied articles on Hungarian current affairs specifically trying to find a pattern to understand on the one hand, the governmental success of the re-definition, on the other hand the societal acceptance and encouragement of the former, finally combining it with ideas of Francis Fukuyama's recent thoughts on identity politics, as to me it seems to be a strong shifting and crafting of a new identity, which happens in Hungary, one that happens in ways deemed in-appropriate in Europe and utterly despicable in democratic societies.