In this episode, I am joined by two Hungarian scholars, Gábor Scheiring from Bocconi University and Kristóf Szombati from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Gábor and Kristóf have worked extensively together in opposition politics but also in academia, co-authoring multiple papers on the political economy of Hungary. We discuss together the ideology and class-coalitions sustaining Hungary’s current authoritarian regime. We talk about racism, labor exploitation, democratic suppression - but also social policy initiatives such as the Public Works Program, which solved unemployment by making the state an employer of last resort… with far-reaching political consequences. Join us!

You can follow Gábor's work at: www.gaborscheiring.com and @gscheiring on Twitter

You can follow Kristóf's work at: https://eth-mpg.academia.edu/KristofSzombati?fbclid=IwAR2dr07TBsar124dpiOnYtudKV5pSJyzRoaWxOKE3t4boTdXHR6fYR6c1og

Check out their respective books:

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030487515

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SzombatiRevolt

... And recent publications:

Scheiring, G., and  Szombati, K. (2020) 'From Neoliberal Disembedding to Authoritarian Re-embedding: The Making of Illiberal Hegemony in Hungary.'  International Sociology 35 (6):721-738. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/fbnu2ary

Scheiring, G. (2020) ‘Left Behind in the Hungarian Rustbelt: The Cultural Political Economy of Working-Class Neo-Nationalism’, Sociology, 54, 6, pp. 1159–1177. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/3ssbzchc

Scheiring, G. (2019) ‘Dependent Development and Authoritarian State Capitalism: Democratic Backsliding and the Rise of the Accumulative State in Hungary’, Geoforum, Published online: 5 September 2019. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/2yctuuep

Feischmidt, Margit, and Kristóf Szombati. 2016. "Understanding the rise of the far right from a local perspective: Structural and cultural conditions of ethno-traditionalist inclusion and racial exclusion in rural Hungary."  Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 24 (3):1-19. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/y3mvufsk

Szombati, Kristóf, and Anna Szilágyi. 2020. Enemy in the Making. The Language of “Anti-Sorosism” in the U.S. and Hungary. Political Research Associates.  Available at: https://tinyurl.com/39kkkm6t

Further Readings:

Mudge, S. L. (2018) Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).