With the global rise of illiberalism in the twenty-first century, the reputation of Viktor Orbán’s regime has far exceeded Hungary’s actual geopolitical and economic weight. During late-socialism and around 1989, high profile international discourse on Hungary was shaped by the relationship of Hungarian dissident intellectuals and their Western friends (Harms 2025). Under Orbán, Hungary’s friends became autocratic leaders and far right politicians, and the exchange of ideas took place within transnational networks of knowledge production as a backdrop for an emerging illiberal international in Europe and beyond (Végh 2025). Now that Orbán’s regime is suddenly over as a result of this spring’s electoral revolt, Hungary’s local-global history as political laboratory seems to be entering a new phase, defined by the prospects of overthrowing illiberal regimes. A multitude of commentators are seeking to answer the question of how Orbán was defeated, hoping that the answer may have implications for the struggle against similar leaders in other countries.
The conferral of the political laboratory status often occurs alongside a near-complete disregard for social and intellectual history. Dominated largely by political science and commentary, studies of illiberalism tend toward analytic presentism and theorization in the negative, construing their object of scrutiny as a recent challenge, a style of leadership that does not fully correspond to the normative ideals of liberal democratic conduct. Illiberals reject the universalist criticism directed at them over corruption or the abuse of power, claiming that such critique is just an expression of liberals’ disrespect towards local custom and culture.
In my recent work, I trace a genealogy of two key words, or emic intellectual concepts—post-feudalism and post-fascism—to provide a historically and socially embedded account of the fatal symbiosis we today call illiberalism. These two concepts are rooted in the work of two towering figures of Hungarian social thought, István Bibó and Ferenc Erdei, who developed their main ideas as critics of admiral Horthy’s interwar authoritarian regime and then in the immediate aftermath of World War II (Bibó 2015, Erdei 1988), After the communist takeover, Bibó was marginalized, while Erdei became a high-ranking politician, but in 1956, they both became members of Hungary’s revolutionary government. As I return to it below, at the end of Fidesz’s first term in power in 2002, philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás described Orbán’s rule as an autocracy based on personal dependence, in other words a fatal symbiosis of post-feudalism and post-fascism.
Post-feudalism
Hungarian interwar populist progressives criticized the system of large landownership, monopolies and the redistribution of the national wealth by oligarchs who belonged to a political clientele. In their footsteps, generations of social critics engaged with forms of contingent closure, relying simultaneously on the categories of class and estate rather than reducing one to the other (Böröcz 1997). The concept of post-feudalism (utórendiség) was developed by Ferenc Erdei and his intellectual followers.In post-feudalism, the economic sphere has been thoroughly reshaped by capitalism (hence the ‘post’), yet the dominant logic of inequality remains a rank-based hierarchy of privilege and allegiance, entrenched in a political and administrative system in which the supremacy of the nobility—the ruling estate—persists behind the façade of parliamentary arrangements.
The practical side of post-feudalism is clientelist domination, based on the exchange of loyalty and support for guarantees of security and well-being—or simply the right to exist—between partners in unequal positions of power. In the period between the commodification of land in the mid-nineteenth century and the state-socialist collectivisation of agriculture, patron-client relations functioned as an institution that mitigated the consequences of polarization among different strata of the peasantry—such as landed farmers, smallholders, and landless day labourers within the same village community (Fél & Hofer 1973). As a system of domination and dependence, such networks of kinship and friendship regulated the flow of labour, services, and material goods, as well as the distribution of political loyalty. In clientelist transactions, participants placed strong emphasis on the idea of horizontal camaraderie or the ethics of mutual aid, even while remaining acutely aware of the inequalities between their positions. The wealthy benefited at the expense of the poor, who nonetheless took part in maintaining the relation for reasons of prestige (membership) and the expectation of return service. While clients could criticize their patrons in informal settings, open dissent—particularly in elections—was effectively prohibited.
Depending on the concentration of wealth and power, post-feudal arrangements may involve divergent forms of patronage, brokerage or atomized advocacy. Especially in the initial Stalinist version, the state-socialist regime managed to incorporate clientelism by the organization of the party-bureaucracy or nomenklatura, based on the principle of top-down appointment. In exchange for assistance in advancing their careers, clients carried out their patrons’ policies. (Szelényi & Mihályi 2020: 43) From the 1990s, local entrepreneurs in rural Hungary competed for monopolistic privileges to get access to profit flows by retaining some leverage (i.e. power over the distribution of advantages and disadvantages) and safeguards in relation to the state as well as business partners, banks and customers. Hierarchical forms of mutual obligation provided durable ways to bind the labour force to entrepreneurs as much as local constituencies to their political leaders. Amid the relative absence or decline of universal services, everyday problem-solving became increasingly synonymous with the pursuit of preferential treatment, entitlements, or various micro- and macro-privileges. At the same time, in the post-socialist political field, different factions established durable alliances with party-affiliated companies and economic elites that received competitive advantages and orders from governments in exchange for party and campaign financing (Stark & Vedres 2010). Post-socialist policies of austerity gave rise to a multitude of lobbies and strategies of informal and personalized bargaining to gain exemptions, concessions and favours. With Orbán’s rise to power in 2010, post-feudal arrangements took on an ever more centralized and systematic form. Relations of clientelism and brokerage were increasingly facilitated by the central state—as in case of workfare, the governance of poverty by discretionary power delegated to local mayors (Kovai, Pulay & Szombati 2022)—while minor corruption such as in hospitals was increasingly policed. With parliamentary super-majority, funding from the EU and some economic growth after the recovery from the financial crisis of the late-2000s, Orbán’s ruling estate was profiting from semi-peripheral capitalist integration through monopolizing the resources available through the state, without being held accountable for their misdemeanours. Still, these arrangements were not based on total consent. The introduction of new bills (including the one curtailing labour rights, or the amendments of the constitution) drew large crowds to the streets, but protests had virtually no effect on the ruling party’s decisions. By the early 2020s, popular criticism had become a common feature of everyday talk among ordinary Hungarians who were yearning for normal lives and ‘barking at politicians’ (Jansen 2015) mostly in restricted, confidential and friendly settings, without any necessary implication for their formal political participation or electoral behaviour. Post-feudal forms of domination continued to persist through the gift-like exchange of obligations and channels of atomized advocacy, accompanied by parallel publics and rampant forms of doublespeak. In Orbán’s Hungary, such apparent imperfections of hegemony were to be resolved by the more explicit forms of illiberal propaganda.
Post-fascism
If post-feudalism is a form of hierarchical organization, post-fascism is rather a vision or ideology of hierarchy. In a predominantly rural country like Hungary, twentieth-century fascism responded to economic crisis and a widespread sense of cultural decline by promoting the (re-)invention of supposedly archaic traditions, and the idea of collective rebirth after the elimination of the nation’s ‘others’. Conceiving hierarchy as natural, fascism subdued class-based differences to the principle of the racialized community (Kékesi 2023).
Post-fascism became a core concept in the work of Gáspár Miklós Tamás, following his profound disillusionment with post-socialist liberalization (Tamás 2000, 2002). The concept was inspired by the work of István Bibó, particularly his notion of ‘political hysteria’ from the 1940s, which GM Tamás sought to reframe for the conditions of the twenty-first century. Post-fascism describes a movement within global capitalism that reverses the Enlightenment tendency to equate citizenship with the human condition. In continuity with twentieth-century fascisms, it represents hierarchy as natural and seeks to reinforce the division between sub-political humanity and the privileges or elevated status of ‘proper’ citizens. Post-fascism denies the possibility of reconciliation between groups defined by gender, ethnicity, ‘race,’ or religion. Inter-group relations are instead construed as a domain of existential struggle, in which one side’s gain necessarily entails the other’s loss. This denial of reconciliation produces a vision of the social world in which the common good becomes unintelligible beyond the loyalties of the hierarchical in-group.
In Hungary, amid severe economic and social crises following the fall of state-socialism in 1989-1990, the demand for legitimation increased in a weakened state. Citizens harboured illusions about the protective capacities of state dependency in an attempt to find rescue from the terrifying outcomes of capitalism. The politics of refeudalization eroded and bypassed the entire system of impersonal administration, the rule of law, and bureaucracy by dismissing them as non-national institutions. Thus, understanding its manifestations merely as corruption misses the system’s core dynamics. Refeudalized power binds individuals and groups by concessions, exemptions, waivers, posts, titles, ranks, informal access to goods and services granted outside the statutory scheme (see also: Szalai 2017). Politicians of the new right salvaged what they could from crumbling nation-states, acting as operators of wealth and institutions extracted from the state on territory left behind by global capital. Two main pillars of Orbán’s ideology can be identified: the idea of permanent war against internal and external ’aliens,’ and an understanding of politics as structured by the existential fear for the community. Orbán’s anti-liberalism promised protection from the very minorities that liberals sought to protect against the ‘normal’ (hardworking, heterosexual and obedient) majority. Amid growing economic and social insecurity, majoritarian neo-nationalisms appropriate the language and modes of claim-making originally developed for the recognition struggles of minorities or the truly disadvantaged (Gille 2010). The inversion of human rights liberalism is central to the project, as exemplified by the construction of the white Christian majority as a vulnerable category in need of privileged protection against the threat of becoming a minority in its own homeland. This parasitic dependence on liberal discourse reflected the symbolic dimension of the Orbán-regime’s material dependence on EU-funding—at least while such funding remained available.
What comes next?
Orbán’s downfall resulted from a rare convergence of geopolitical, economic and moral crises. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party and movement emerged as a specialized task force aimed at confronting Orbán’s regime through a broad populist coalition that seeks to liberate suppressed creative energies and defend life itself from a parasitic elite (cf. Rajković 2023). Magyar’s credibility was reinforced by his former insider status within the Orbánist ruling estate, providing him with in-depth knowledge of the regime’s inner workings, akin to the role of former mafia members in anti-mafia struggles (cf. Rakopoulos 2017). Magyar relates to Orbán similarly to the way reform-socialists once related to Stalinists whose crimes they have rejected.
The post-Orbán moment is marked by ambivalence: euphoria, relief and hope coexist with a sense of loss and sacrifice. In states of collective effervescence, we tend to experience heightened clarity regarding temporal divisions between the old and new, as well as social divisions between the victims and perpetrators. Later, however, these distinctions appear more complex, as the experience of shared suffering becomes intertwined with recognition of shared complicity. The new Hungarian parliament is comprised of different conservative, right-wing parties and that should give an impetus for new political movements and platforms that we do not yet see. Fidesz has become a mid-sized party representing predominantly rural, less-educated, elderly, and poorer voters, which should serve as a warning sign for anyone concerned about social inequalities and another backlash.
One of the corrosive effects of illiberal hegemony has been the erosion of critical imagination. In this context, I propose to revisit theoretical ideas from the past in order to reclaim their critical potential in the present, to envisage alternatives for the future. Post-feudal or clientelist social arrangements are often criticized in the name of meritocracy or the autonomous, rights-bearing individual. However, they can be even more powerfully criticized for the way in which—behind the façade of mutual aid—they undermine horizontal forms of association, class-based solidarity and shared claim-making in the name of the commons. Together with anti-fascism, and alongside the more familiar de-colonial agenda, the project of de-clientization should go beyond the critique of specific elites in order to challenge the broader patriarchal mode of social reproduction. For the time being, it is worth recognizing that a huge majority of Hungarian voters expressed their readiness to accept change as a forward-looking condition—even as something desirable—rather than associating it with threat and danger, as Orbán’s propaganda has done for sixteen years.
Gergely Pulay is a sociologist and social anthropologist, Research Fellow at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. His research interests include urban marginality, value and livelihood and intellectual history in Hungary and Romania.
References
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Kékesi, Zoltán. 2023. Memory in Hungarian Fascism. A Cultural History. Routledge.
Kovai, Cecília, Gergely Pulay and Kristóf Szombati. 2022. ‘Building the ‘work-based society’: State-enabled grassroots clientelism and the re-establishment of order in present-day Hungary’ Paper presented at EASA2022 Belfast: Transformation, Hope and the Commons.
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Végh, Zsuzsanna 2025. ‘Rewriting the European Project? The balance and implications of Fidesz’s illiberal alliance-building in Europe.’ Wrocław: College of Eastern Europe. https://www.kew.org.pl/en/2025/05/05/rewriting-the-european-project-the-balance-and-implications-of-fideszs-illiberal-alliance-building-in-europe/
Cite as: Pulay, G. 2026. “Post-feudalism and post-fascism at the end of the Orbán-regime in Hungary” Focaalblog, May 6. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/05/06/gergely-pulay-post-feudalism-and-post-fascism-at-the-end-of-the-orban-regime-in-hungary/