Land grabbing and the making of an authoritarian populist regime in Hungary

ABSTRACT

How do authoritarian populist regimes emerge within the European Union in the twenty-first century? In Hungary, land grabbing by oligarchs have been one of the pillars maintaining Prime Minister Orbán’s regime. The phenomenon remains out of the public purview and meets little resistance as the regime-controlled media keeps Hungarians ‘distracted’ with ‘dangers’ inflicted by the ‘enemies of the Hungarian people’ such as refugees and the European Union. The Hungarian case calls for scholarly-activist attention to how authoritarian populism is maintained by, and affects rural areas, as well as how emancipation can be envisaged in such a context.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian populism
• land grabbing
• authority
• subjectivities
• emancipation
• Hungary

Introduction

In the discourse of the Hungarian authoritarian populist government, new ‘enemies’ of the people constantly pop up like in a shooting game at an amusement park. The ‘dangers’ that they represent are taken up by the media, which is controlled by the ruling power. Among the latest ‘enemies’ are refugees, the investor George Soros, NGOs, and the European Union. Parallel to, and under cover of this ‘distraction’, the regime is consolidating itself economically and politically via land grabbing by and for national oligarchs and ‘pocket contract’ foreigners.

Land rights have been propelled into the global spotlight as vital for achieving the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and have been extensively discussed in academia and activist circles, in particular on the pages of this journal. Scholars and activists have been especially interested in understanding how increased competition for land has led to evictions, the privatization of natural resources, and human rights violations, thereby threatening equitable natural resource management across the Global North and South (e.g. Borras et al. 2011; Daniel 2011; De Schutter 2011; Hernandez-Arthur and Grainger 2016; McMichael 2012; Peluso and Lund 2011; White et al. 2012; Zoomers 2010). Securing the land-tenure rights of farmers has therefore become a core concern of international development donors, development research institutes, human rights activists, farmers groups, and local government agencies alike. Yet in several countries whose political regimes have become more authoritarian, the process of (re-)making the state has recently involved agricultural land grabbing by the regime itself. Land grabbing in these cases entails the transfer of control over agricultural land from smallholder farmers to national-scale entities and to the regime’s supporters, with a clear agenda of promoting the regime’s control and power. In order to advance our understanding of how authoritarian populist regimes arise and maintain themselves, an effort that is at the heart of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), there is an urgent need to explore in more depth these processes of promoting authoritarian regimes’ power through land grabbing, a relationship insufficiently addressed in most literature to date.

In this article, I examine agricultural land grabbing at the domestic level in Hungary, a country that has recently undergone significant political changes at both the governmental and societal levels. I explore how recent political regime shifts have altered state involvement in land tenure. My aim is to contribute to discussions on the extent to which domestic agricultural land-grabbing processes are inserted into broader governance struggles over power relations and identities, ultimately leading to the development and maintenance of authoritarian populism. With this goal in mind, I discuss how state-supported land grabbing by both Hungarian elite oligarchs and ‘pocket-contract’ foreigners helps sustain the authoritarian populist regime in Hungary. After presenting my theoretical and methodological approaches, I argue, first, that changes in land tenure are both a key rural driver and an important outcome of Prime Minister Orbán’s electoral victories (2010, 2014, 2018). Second, I show how populist narratives that generate ‘subjects’ – whether the lazy Roma, the valiant Magyar ¹ farmer, or the meddling EU – combine to generate a particular authoritarian political dynamic, with strong rural dimensions. Third, I highlight how emancipatory initiatives are contesting these subjectification processes, as people in the countryside begin engaging through new forms of agency. In my analysis, the latter discussion provides an opportunity for a conceptual rethinking of emancipation in oppressive contexts.

Theoretical and methodological approaches

How have changes in rural land ownership affected domestic politics, and how have they created the context for the rise of authoritarian populism with its clear rural origins under Orbán’s regime? This is the core question this paper asks, which then prompts us, scholar-activists, to think in new ways about emancipation in this type of context.

Many studies discuss land grabbing as the source of state power. For example, academic debates on agricultural land grabbing often focus on how capital accumulation drives processes aimed at controlling natural resources in regions where they are still available (e.g. Borras et al. 2012; De Schutter 2011). Other research examines land grabbing’s consequences for food security, employment, and welfare (e.g. Jiao, Smith-Hall, and Theilade 2015; McMichael 2012). In these debates, the state is frequently discussed according to a Manichean perspective: either as a weak ‘target’ state, which does not have the capacity to resist the pressures from foreign and domestic agricultural businesses, or as a ‘host’, which facilitates land accumulation by providing infrastructure and financial support to large farm enterprises. However, the strategic use of domestic land grabbing and land-grab related conflicts in generating and maintaining state power has not been discussed enough in contemporary literature. Because land grabbing remains an urgent socio-environmental concern, especially in countries where democracy is under threat, I address this gap by re-situating discussions of domestic land grabbing and land-grab related conflicts as part of a broader question of democratic governance.

Land grabbing tends to be discussed as a North to South (e.g. White et al. 2012; Zoomers 2010) and South to South (e.g. Hall 2011) phenomena of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2004). Scholarly work on domestic land grabs, understood as national land forcibly acquired by investors, is less common both in the South (exceptions are Lavers 2012 on Ethiopia, Levien 2011 on India) and the North (exceptions are Desmarais et al. 2015 on Canada, Visser and Spoor 2011 on former Soviet countries). This gap is more than merely geographical: it makes researchers and activists focus on land grabbing through an international lens rather than on democratic land governance within states, and particularly within certain political regimes that strategically use domestic land grabbing and land-grab related conflicts to consolidate authoritarianism.

Additionally, there is an insufficient focus on the role of the European Union in enabling (or impeding) land grabbing, in particular in post-socialist states. The roles of transnational companies in land grabbing are often highlighted. However, the contribution of regional rural development institutions and policies, while sometimes cited (Transnational Institute 2013), are insufficiently known. European development institutions are increasingly questioned (Hulme 2016; Pe'er et al. 2014) on their roles (e.g. enabling development for whom? At what social and environmental price?). Therefore, it is timely to understand not only the role of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in potentially facilitating the expansion of industrial farms to the detriment of Europe’s small producers but also in contributing to the maintenance of authoritarianism within its own borders.

Finally, this discussion is timely as there has clearly already been a recent and notable proliferation of what Scoones et al. call authoritarian populist regimes since the start of the twenty-first century (2017). This is a cause of worry, particularly for rural areas, as can be seen by the large mobilization around the ERPI research effort, initiated in 2017 by the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Netherlands. Researchers and civil society are increasingly interested in understanding authoritarian rural politics and envisioning how democratic alternatives can emerge. My article aims to strengthen ERPI’s efforts in this direction.

The concept of power is central to my analysis. But ‘power relations’ is not an easy concept to operationalize. Thus, I use authority (the recursive processes through which power relations are accepted as legitimate; [Sikor and Lund 2009]), intersectional subjectivities (the ways people are brought into relations of power in specific subject positions based on differences such as gender, class, and ethnicity), and emancipation as analytical lenses through which to understand power relations. I see authority as constantly (re)produced or challenged ‘through the process of successfully defining and enforcing rights to community membership and rights of access to important resources’ (Lund 2016, 1199) such as land. Given this, land governance turns out to be as much about the processes of authorization of power actors (Lund 2016, 1221) and the governing of citizens (Valdivia 2008) as anything else. Hence, I start from the idea that struggles to control land politics will reveal the tenets of how authority works and how the exercise of authority generates specific exclusions and inclusions, rights, and permissions to use land – in short, power relations. Thus, in my discussion of authority, I ask to what extent (if any) are authoritarian regime-making processes enabling or impeding agricultural land grabbing and vice versa, and how the regime uses land-grab related conflicts to assert its power. Analyzing the Orbán regime’s land politics will highlight how exclusions and oppressions are (re)produced and how they may become integrated in broader governance systems that are ultimately maintaining his authoritarian regime.

But looking at power relations as simply struggles over authority misses key dimensions of how the exercise of power always contains both oppressive and emancipatory possibilities (Ahlborg and Nightingale 2018). Intersectional subjectivities captures the possibility that people may adopt the subject position they are ‘supposed to’ or challenge it while they are enrolled in everyday affairs, including land governance and land conflicts. The intersectional lens enables me to explore the social differences that emerge from everyday practices (Nightingale 2011) of relating to both the land (e.g. via agricultural activities) and the regime (via complying with or resisting its discourses, its measures and policies), and to ultimately discuss how we might envision and promote the development of emancipatory land governance regimes that can contribute to challenging exclusions based on social differences such as gender, class, and ethnicity.

In addition, the focus on subjectivities allows me to discuss the possible moments in which the norms that influence the constitution of subjects (especially the subjugated ones) are broken. As Butler claims, norms must not be understood as operating in a deterministic way. Rather, ‘[n]ormative schemes are interrupted by one another, they emerge and fade depending on broader operations of power’ (2009, 4). The conceptual focus on subjectivities helps to show the possibilities for emancipation to emerge as subjectivities change (Butler 1997; Sundberg 2004) and particular groups of people refuse the subject position they are assigned. This focus is useful to developing a new analytics of emancipation in particularly oppressive contexts.

With this threefold focus on (1) authority (how rural authority is shifting under the Orbán regime), (2) subjectivities (how rural subjects are changing), and: (3) emancipation (how opportunities for emancipation open up and close down), my ultimate aim is to reveal how the authoritarian regime and its citizen subjects are made in relation to each other, how resources like land as well as land conflicts are vital to their making, and what the possibilities are for creating more democratic relations. I raise the strategic question about emancipatory possibility given Orbán’s dominance and his hold on the rural areas.

My analysis relies upon my long-term engagement in rural Hungary, which began in 2000 when I first undertook a sociological study of the North-Eastern wine-making region of Tokaj. I also draw upon information gathered over many years from my Hungarian network of activists who endeavor to envision and support alternatives to Hungarian authoritarian populism. My engagement in this network was especially strong between 2011 and 2017 when I lived in Hungary. To write this article, I also undertook an additional three months of complementary research in Hungary during 2017–18. This included participant observation in debates concerning this article’s topic, many informal discussions with Hungarians and people living in Hungary during important moments such as just before and after the 2018 elections, and thirteen qualitative interviews with researchers, journalists, activists, and policy-analysts, as well as staff of environmental organizations. I also reviewed secondary sources on the topic such as policy documents, research publications, blogs, and newspaper articles. One important limitation is that I did not talk directly with farmers to write this article, as extensive fieldwork is just about to be undertaken. While my conclusions should be considered preliminary for this reason, the conceptual approach and the empirical findings nevertheless serve to highlight the need to continue and deepen this debate. In light of the global tendency towards a rise in authoritarian populist regimes, there is an urgent need for scholar-activists to systematically engage with the ways in which the development of such regimes is linked to the depletion of natural resources and, in particular, land grabbing for speculative purposes.

Discussion: the politics of domestic land grabbing in authoritarian populist Hungary and the possibilities for emancipation

Authority

Using state-owned land and European subsidies to constitute the pro-regime oligarchy

In Hungary, agriculture has been instrumentally used by the Orbán regime to both please and control its oligarchs by making them owners of the land. The climax was reached in 2015 when the Orbán regime took a great quantity of agricultural land that had been owned by the Hungarian state and privatized it that year via a ‘thunderstorm’ process that mainly benefitted the oligarchy. The agricultural sector attracted oligarchs and oligarchs-to-be for two main reasons. First, agriculture is an important economic sector in Hungary that has been receiving considerable amounts of European subsidies representing potential economic benefits in the short term. Second, land prices are likely to increase significantly in the medium term following the end of the moratorium that once limited the possibilities of foreign land ownership in Hungary. Thus, the agricultural sector has been an important carrot of the Orbán regime because it can potentially make its owners rich in both the short and long terms.

The Hungarian state’s ownership of this great quantity of agricultural land, prior to 2015, is a legacy of the communist era and of the post-communist land tenure system, which was based on long-term leases. Indeed, after the fall of communism in 1989, a relatively large proportion of land – representing 23 per cent of the country’s overall land in 2014 – remained in the hands of the Hungarian state. According to Ángyán’s study (2015), which uses 2014 data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, this corresponded to 1.7 million hectares of productive land owned by the state, of which 500,000 hectares were arable land, 1.2 million hectares were forested, and the rest were so-called non-productive land, such as protected areas (Ángyán 2015; Hungarian Central Statistical Office 2014). The dismantling of state-owned socialist farms in the late 1980s and early 1990s was followed by agrarian reform via the distribution of compensation vouchers to former owners of expropriated land. Only the original receiver of the voucher could in theory use it to purchase agricultural land (Hartvigsen 2014). Despite this restriction, the commercialization of compensation vouchers happened in such a way that it favored wealthy Hungarian actors interested in investing in land rather than former cooperative workers (Roszík 2011; Szabó 2013); the first oligarchs – some of them still present in the agricultural sector today – started to constitute their wealth during that period of the early 1990s. Despite this phenomenon that contributed to the increasing polarization of agrarian society from the 1990s onwards, the agrarian structure remained relatively fragmented until 2015 with the presence of many smallholder farms, at least in comparison to other European countries (Hartvigsen 2014). This was essentially due to the fact that the state-owned large tracts of land that were leased out to producers via long-term agreements.

The commercialization of most state-owned lands, conceived with the objective of ending this long-term lease-based land tenure system, was announced by the government in August 2015. The intent was to complete the process by the end of 2015 via what several of my interviewees describe as a ‘thunderstorm’ process, which, most importantly, took place in the midst of a refugee crisis whose handling fueled a politics of fear that ‘conveniently’ kept Hungarian people’s minds occupied. Of course, the strategy for establishing a new land tenure system had been prepared earlier. Some lease contracts had been given to national oligarchs and their family members two to three years prior to 2015 so that they could easily benefit from the land commercialization process that (in theory) was supposed to prioritize the leaser over any other potential buyer. According to former Fidesz (Orbán’s party) MP József Ángyán, the regime’s supporters had been warned before Orbán won the 2014 elections that this would happen in the case of his victory; thus, they were given ample time in particular to collect the requested liquidities for their entrance and/or consolidation within the Hungarian land market. It is precisely this lack of liquidities that impeded most smallholder land-leasers to buy the land they had been farming for decades.

The significance of the Hungarian agricultural sector is clearly evident when one compares Hungarian statistics with those of the EU 28. According to a report by the Hungarian Agricultural Ministry, the Institute of Agricultural Research, and the National Agricultural Chamber (Bene et al. 2016), the country has the fifth most important proportion of agricultural land in relation to its total size within the EU 28, and the second most important proportion of arable land. Indeed, 58 per cent of the country’s 9.3 million hectares are under agricultural cultivation, of which 80 per cent is arable land and 15 per cent is grasslands. The proportion of arable land is higher than the EU 28 average, where 42 per cent of the total area is agricultural and 25 per cent is arable land. In 2016, there were 415,800 individual farms in Hungary, 12.3 per cent less than in 2013 (Bene et al. 2016). However, the agricultural area grew in this same period with an additional 256,000 hectares on top of the 5,372,000 hectares of 2013, which is a sign of rapid land concentration: it is mostly very small farms, of less than 4 hectares, that disappeared between 2013 and 2016 (minus 30.4 per cent). This, I argue, is in large part due to the 2015 land privatization.

Agricultural subsidies and rural development funding within the framework of the CAP have been important for the regime’s oligarchs. Hungary is receiving in the 2014–2020 period a total of 12.4 billion euros; this figure represents 3.19 per cent of the total CAP budget – one of the highest shares in comparison with other EU countries (Bene et al. 2016). Prior to 2015, CAP payments made land lease contracts economically interesting, and after 2015, the ownership was economically desirable because of speculation on land prices. The subsidy payment in 2014 was around € 240 per hectare of land, which was a significant amount for those who leased large quantities of land (Krasznai Kovács 2015). It was all the more significant when viewed in relation to the average price for which the state leases land: approximately € 100 per hectare (interview with a staff member of a Hungarian environmentalist organization, October 2017). Hence, even if one did little with the leased land, he/she would receive a benefit of more than a 100 € per hectare by declaring it land under agricultural cultivation.

Those that were close to the regime and who leased agricultural lands often did not even cultivate it. Some pro-Orbán leasers (often illegally) sub-contracted the original leaser or a neighboring farmer to take care of their plots, while others just left them fallow. As one of my interviewees told me, these types of irregularities were not detected by CAP controllers. Instead, they were facilitated by the fact that CAP-related controls are often biased in Hungary; their implementation is the responsibility the Agricultural and Rural Development Agency (Mezőgazdasági es Vidékfejlesztési Hivatal), which, instead of randomly choosing the producers to be controlled often chooses them from among the farmers who ‘don’t agree [with the regime]’, as one of my interviewees put it. Additionally, in Hungary, the system to control the distribution and use of subsidies works in such a way that it is depersonalized and rendered apolitical, especially towards the ‘upper spheres’ (Krasznai Kovács 2015). Thus, when the fines are distributed for (rightly or wrongly identified) non-compliances with EU requirements and farmers complain, the government is not blamed for the supposedly unjust implementation of the system as the street-level bureaucrats claim that they are not responsible for the procedures; rather, their critiques point to the inadequacy of the European policy. The latter reinforces Orbán’s anti-EU rhetoric at the same time that it contributes to hiding the oppressions generated by the way CAP-related procedures are implemented in Hungary (Krasznai Kovács 2015), and in particular how CAP contributes to strengthening the pro-Orbán oligarchy.

The EU subsidies, initially designed to develop the new members’ economies, went instead to oligarchs, and not only in Hungary; in Macedonia and Poland they have been, to a certain extent, linked with the development of authoritarian populist regimes via benefitting their allies. In Macedonia, Otten (2013) described this phenomenon in the wine-making region of Tikveš. In Poland, oligarchs have been acquiring land for speculative purposes and benefitting from EU subsidies; meanwhile land prices started increasing with the 2016 lapse of the moratorium on foreign ownership (van der Ploeg, Franco, and Borras 2015).

Despite a lack of official studies, it is clear that there has been a massive land transfer to oligarchs and oligarchs-to-be and that the decline of smallholder farming in Hungary is, to a great extent, related to this dynamic of land grabbing by and for oligarchs. Ángyán’s investigations (Ángyán 2015, 2016, 2018) in seven Hungarian counties (made public on the Web to denounce governmental abuse) show this connection. Reflective of what happened in most parts of the country is the case of the county of Csongrád in South-East Hungary. Ángyán’s recent report (Ángyán 2018) shows that twenty-seven stakeholders – mostly those close to Fidesz – obtained 70 per cent of the land put up for auction during the 2015 land privatization process. Smallholders (who obtained farms of less than 20 hectares) received less than nine per cent of the territory put up for auction. Calling the process an ‘auction’ has contributed to governmental propaganda; in fact, among the 12,000 hectares of land ‘put up for auction’, in reality, nearly 65 per cent was distributed without being auctioned, despite the government’s narrative about the need to establish land prices via market mechanisms. Land transactions were organized in such a way that they impeded real auctions from taking place; local smallholders who had already been farming for decades in the region were unable to compete for their own plots or for additional neighboring ones as the government promoted the commercialization of large plots (more than twenty hectares) with starting prices that smallholders could not afford. Moreover, they were not given sufficient time to arrange credit. Additionally, intimidation, threats, and other non-documented but often mentioned mechanisms, forced smallholders to withdraw from engaging in the auctions. As a result, most people who acquired land through these auction processes, despite being described by the government propaganda as ‘local producers’, were not farmers in reality: they were, among other professions, teachers, merchants, pharmacists. They had in common that they were speculators and supporters of the regime.

The process described above has contributed to the creation and consolidation of the pro-Orbán oligarchy. One of its key figures is Sándor Csányi, the wealthiest person in Hungary (Forbes 2017), a businessman and banker who is not only a shareholder in the Hungary-based multinational oil and gas company, MOL group, he is also the exclusive owner of the Hungarian food manufacturer BONAFARM which is in the process of becoming an inevitable actor in the Hungarian agricultural and food processing scene. At a lower scale, the oligarchic system consolidates itself by involving family members of pro-regime figures. For example, in the county of Csongrád, the group of people that won the third biggest area of land in the auction (514 hectares) is related to János Lázár, ex-minister of Orbán and current Fidesz MP; the group includes his father, uncle, and several cousins (Ángyán 2018).

Land speculation and the consolidation of privileges

The 1994 Law LV, known as the land moratorium, stipulated that foreign citizens, legal entities, or any other organization without legal personality could not, until its expiration (which happened in 2014, essentially due to pressure by the EU), acquire ownership of arable land or any natural reserve in Hungary. In addition, even a private Hungarian citizen could only acquire up to a maximum of 300 hectares or 6000 golden crowns (Arany Korona) of value (Téglási 2013).

The average price of a hectare of land in Hungary is 1 million Hungarian Forints (HUF), which is equivalent to € 3,300, while in the Netherlands, a hectare of land costs thirty-five times that much – approximately € 115,000 (Ángyán 2015). The 2015 ‘thunderstorm’ commercialization of formerly state-owned land attracted most wealthy Hungarians, like the previously mentioned Sándor Csányi, to buy land without the aim of using it to produce agricultural goods. These Hungarian oligarchs are speculating on the fact that within a short time period the EU will start an infringement procedure against Hungary thereby obligating the country to liberalize its land market. That moment will bring more wealth to the wealthiest Hungarians, who will happily sell their land to foreigners. In addition, Orbán will most probably blame the EU to explain to his supporters why so many foreigners will get hold of Hungarian land so quickly, thus fueling the anti-EU and anti-foreigner sentiments of his right-wing voters.

The reasons for Orbán’s rural support

Land has been key in the development of Hungarian authoritarian populism under the Orbán government, starting with the 2010 elections. Land has not lost its importance since then, but its role has changed. In 2010, Orbán used the scandals that had emerged just a few months before the elections on land grabbing by foreigners to ally the countryside. He built upon a nationalist rhetoric that stated that Hungarian land should go to Hungarians, and he held out the prospect of a socially sensitive rural development policy that would not only support existing smallholder farmers but would also lease out state-owned land to young Hungarian families. The latter families were discursively constructed as the dynamic, albeit traditional, neo-rurals who would engage in diversified production of háztáji (small-scale, backyard, good quality, traditionally Hungarian) agricultural products that would be sold through short circuits such as farmers markets. This discourse was bolstered by the fact that, by then, the Hungarian state already owned a great quantity of land, and Orbán declared publicly that that would continue: the ‘State will buy rather than sell land’ (Ángyán 2015).

This perspective, which appealed to so many smallholder farmers, was supported by the fact that (1) at that time, Hungary had a land moratorium and (2) it had a national rural strategy, written in 2010, that included a social program intended to develop small-scale diversified family farming by repopulating rural areas with young families. These two instruments could theoretically be qualified as potentially emancipatory for rural areas, even though one of them (the rural development strategy) was developed only with the express aim of winning the 2010 elections. Their example shows how progressive instruments can so easily be co-opted by authoritarian regimes, but also how difficult it is for emancipation to emerge from within the state. Equally important, they show how these kinds of instruments can appear as emancipatory and favorable for smallholder farmers while in fact serving the interests of pro-regime elites and fueling a nationalist rhetoric.

Orbán strategically used the conflicts that rose concerning the non-respect of the land moratorium to gain rural voters in 2010. Land moratorium was supposed to guarantee that only Hungarians would become agricultural land owners in Hungary and to impede land concentration by setting maximums for farm superficies per owner. In reality, while the moratorium did limit, to a certain extent, land speculation over relatively cheap Hungarian land by foreigners with much higher purchasing power than Hungarian citizens, it contributed to the rise of the so-called ‘pocket contracts’. Originally used to describe land deals with foreigners that omitted the date of purchase, and that were kept ‘in the pocket’ until the moratorium was lifted, the expression has been generalized to describe contracts utilized to overcome the existing legal restrictions (Fidrich 2013). According to Roszík (2011), more than 1 million hectares of land had been acquired by foreigners via ‘pocket contracts’; the foreign owner (which in many cases was a Western-European company) usually relied on Hungarian foremen who would ‘lend’ their names for the contract(s) (Fidrich 2013; Roszík 2011). As for the surface limit, it has usually been overcome by using family members’ names to acquire extensions of thousands of hectares (Ángyán 2015).

The 2010 national rural strategy (nemzeti vidékstratégia) for the 2012–2020 period also played an important role in Orbán’s electoral victory in 2010. The strategy, which was a reason for many Hungarian smallholders, environmentalists, and justice activists to be hopeful, rightly describes itself as innovative in comparison with former Hungarian rural policies. On the website that still bears the logo of the Ministry of Rural Development (Vidékfejlesztési Minisztérium) that has been dismantled since then, it explains the innovative character of the strategy, with the arguments that

its goal is an integral rural development policy that gives priority to the development of family farming instead of monocultural mass production, that favors a type of agriculture based on quality production, a fragmented agricultural structure, as well as environmentally and landscape-friendly management.²

Ángyán, who had been a respected professor in a Hungarian agricultural university and a popular figure in agricultural union circles, developed this strategy upon Orbán’s request to help his campaign in the countryside. He became State Secretary of Agriculture after Orbán’s victory in 2010. His rural development strategy, had it been implemented, could have been rightly described as emancipatory, democratic, and socio-environmentally just. Unfortunately, the strategy ended up in the dustbin while Ángyán, its ideologue, resigned from his position after realizing that he had been merely used as an instrument for the campaign (Interview with József Ángyán, October 2017).

The strategy’s central pillar was the so-called demographic land program (demográfiai földprogram) aimed at increasing the quantity of state-owned land and leasing it long-term to families and young people who would live and work on the farm and who would be willing to raise two or more children (Ángyán 2015). This program would have made land accumulation and speculation increasingly difficult while, on the other hand, it would have strengthened diversified family farming and attracted young people to the countryside. Equally important for Fidesz, the program would have meshed well with the populist right-wing rhetoric about ‘land to Hungarians’, Hungarian rural traditions, and the need for Hungarians to have more children – a point of convergence that Fidesz used to have with Hungary’s second most popular political party: the extreme-right-wing Jobbik.

However, unlike Jobbik’s platform, Fidesz’s politicians no longer assert that Hungarian land should go to Hungarians (Lubarda 2018). On the contrary, the political program of the party refers to the interests of Hungarian agriculture in general and of farmers within Europe and globally. This focus on Hungarian agriculture, rather than on Hungarian farmers, reinforces the hypothesis that the regime’s speculative plans regarding land are aimed at generating wealth for its oligarchs and were prepared prior to Orbán’s first election in 2010. Put somewhat differently, what has been at stake for the regime was to make Hungarian agriculture more valuable in the global context while getting rid of smallholder farmers without however losing their votes.

In 2014 and 2018, Orbán and Fidesz no longer needed the type of instruments they had used in 2010 to win the support of rural voters. In addition to a careful mediation of Orbán’s image as a ‘man of the people and the countryside’ (Wilkin 2016, 55), in 2011, a new electoral law was accepted by the Hungarian Parliament that was at that time ruling with a majority of Fidesz MPs (in alliance with the conservative Christian Democrats KDNP). As explained by Kovács and Vida (2015), in the countryside, the clear political winner of the 2014 elections was the radical nationalist party Jobbik, but it did not challenge Fidesz’s victory due to the electoral system change. They explain:

The analysis of the 2014 pattern of voting showed that (…) even though Fidesz-KDNP lost more than 570,000 voters compared to the 2010 elections, a drop of 8.2 percent, given the extreme disproportionality of the new electoral system led only to a drop of only 1.3 percent of the seats. (Kovács and Vida 2015, 63)

A similar explanation is valid for Fidesz’s 2018 victory (with 49 per cent of the votes) with the difference being that by 2018, Fidesz had, in addition, gathered a significant proportion of usual far-right-party Jobbik voters (Jobbik received 19 per cent of the votes in 2018), especially in poor rural areas. The ruling party was indeed extremely popular among the poorest: Fidesz scored over 80 per cent in the most disadvantaged villages (Juhász and Molnár 2018b). A majority of the Romas (representing approximately 6–7% of the Hungarian population) also voted for Orbán’s party. While there are no quantitative studies that break down votes according to ethnicity, my interviewees claim that in rural areas, approximately 90 per cent of Romas voted for Fidesz. It is also in the poorest regions and in the countryside where FIDESZ’s anti-refugee narrative has found an audience of increasingly impoverished rural populations receptive to simplistic and racialized explanations for their economic hardships.

Ironically, those most excluded in Hungarian society have been precisely the ones who most contribute to maintaining the forces that create and reproduce their oppressions:

The most frequently mentioned reasons [for the fact that the poor and Roma massively vote for Fidesz] (…) [are] the Public Work Scheme (PWS) and its relative popularity, the neo-feudal dependence on the government and local rulers, the effective governmental campaign focusing on fears about migration and Fidesz’s domination of the media market in the countryside. (Juhász and Molnár 2018a)

The PWS is indeed an illustrative example of the Orbán government’s social model and how it became the ‘symbol of subservience, as mayors, notaries and minority leaders decide who is and who is not allowed to partake in the scheme’ (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018, 23). The PWS provides work for unemployed and often unskilled people for a monthly wage that is significantly lower than on the primary labor market. The average number of monthly participants in the PWS had been steadily increasing before the 2018 elections: it was 178,852 in 2014, 208,127 in 2015, and 224,812 in the first ten months of 2016 (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018, 23). PWS has also contributed to improving the statistics on poverty and unemployment: this improvement has often been mentioned in Fidesz’s political campaign.

Furthermore, according to my interviewees, the contract with the Russian company Rosatom is going to take the relay in providing the necessary liquidities for Orbán to keep not only his oligarchs but also his poorer voters content once the state has no land to lease and no CAP payments to manipulate. Indeed, in 2015, Rosatom was given an impressive € 12.5 billion contract to build two additional reactors to the nuclear power plant in the Hungarian town of Paks (Dunai 2017), something that made no sense in a country whose environmental characteristics allow not only for more environmentally friendly but also cheaper alternatives to nuclear power via renewables (Greenpeace 2017). As one of my interviewees stated:

[from 12.5 billion €—the price tag of the project] if you have only 1 per cent corruption rate, which is extremely low, then you are already able to finance everybody (…). [In addition], Hungary needs loans to finance its pension system and health system and you cannot get loans for that—you can get loans for power plants—and with that loan, you are able to subsidize other things (…) [the government’s] rhetoric is that Hungary doesn't have a stable enough renewable energy supply and that’s why we have to have [the nuclear power plant in] Paks. [In reality, Orbán’s problem with renewables is that they] lack this point of central control [which is needed for the authoritarian system to maintain itself]. (Interview with a Hungarian expert in environmental policies, September 2017)

The situation highlights how money from speculative land-grabbing, but also corruption within energy projects, can help support political elites and, in the meantime, subsidize welfare redistribution, both key elements for maintaining authoritarian populism. Thus, authority under the Orbán regime is working in such a way that the most excluded support a system that could not be maintained without these exclusions. These processes have been mobilizing different measures such as the rural development strategy, the land moratorium, and the PWS that had significant effects on the Hungarian countryside and its people. In particular, they have assigned specific people certain subject positions that are likely to reinforce the regime’s authority. In the next section, I discuss some of these positions as a way to start thinking about emancipation.

The shifting ‘subjects’ of Hungarian authoritarian populism

The politics of land grabbing that underpin Hungarian authoritarian populism have mobilized, one after the other, the subjectivities of the young smallholder; the dynamic, neo-rural farmer; and the poor Roma rural populations living on welfare, and have recently put forward a new figure that fits well with the profile of the national oligarchs: that of the post-European feudal Magyar producer.

The young, dynamic, rural Hungarians who used to be the central subjects in the political narrative prior to the 2010 election, and who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the never-implemented rural development strategy, have been progressively replaced in the public discourse on the ‘backwards’ and poor countryside with the figure of the lazy Roma living on welfare (Schwarcz 2012). And indeed, as Krasznai Kovács (2016, 175) highlights, there is a distinctly racist underpinning to the regime’s rationale when it comes to implementing programs like the already mentioned PWS:

One of the key driving rationales for this [welfare] programme by the majority Fidesz government who instigated it is to ‘make gypsies work’, to break the ‘dependency’ of local communities on the state, as traditionally (so the political rhetoric goes), gypsies have become too lazy to work and ‘milk’ the system in a calculating, targeted way.

While the narrative is about breaking the dependency on the state, the regime’s logic is to create and maintain dependency so that the poor and the Romas continue voting for Fidesz.

Recently, the Romas’ ‘issues’ lost some of their importance in the governmental discourse as it started focusing on the need to defend the Hungarian borders from international refugees. However, the racist underpinnings of Fidesz’s political program is still manifest in many ‘social’ measures so that the Romas’ exclusion is maintained. For example, it is part of Orbán’s rhetoric to make the Hungarian nation strong ‘again’ by encouraging Hungarian women (sic) to have more children. Extremely conservative policy measures support this by inciting women to become housewives and fulltime mothers. But Romas, who usually have more children than non-Romas in Hungary, face many obstacles to accessing the related support: their children are clearly not the ones that in the regime’s narrative are called upon to populate Hungary and make it ‘great’.

In the countryside, with the decreasing importance of EU subsidies to maintain the oligarchy, a new figure is progressively appearing: what I call the post-European Magyar farmer. The post-European Magyar farmer is the oligarch, the aristocrat of a new feudal system, the neoliberal entrepreneur who will capitalize on Hungary’s agricultural assets, some of its national products (‘Hungarikums’), and the cheap labor force to be found in the Hungarian hinterlands, while speculating on land prices, positioning themselves in the agro-industry sector and in parallel selling plots to foreigners. According to my interviewees, who are familiar with the debates taking place within the Parliament, this will be enabled by a future rural policy architecture that gives the power to organize the agricultural sector to big integrator agricultural companies such as Csányi’s BONAFARM. This is the opposite of the never-implemented rural development plan discussed above, as it uses land as a pure commodity rather than as a source of social, historical, and cultural wealth related to a nation’s well-being and its democratic development.

Of great worry for biodiversity, is that national lands with a protected status will follow the fate of agricultural lands. In 2015 there was a failed intent of the government to turn over the management of protected areas from nature conservation organizations to the national land portfolio management institute (Nemzeti Földalap Kezelő szervezet- NFA) – an organization driven by economic rather than conservation interests (Benedetti 2015). Opposition by organizations such as WWF in Hungary, Birdlife Hungary, and the Hungarian Association for Environmental Protection (Magyar Természetvédők Szövetsége) ultimately contributed to a presidential veto of the initiative. However, several of my interviewees believe that Orbán has only temporarily backed out on this point. Now that he won the 2018 elections, he will probably undertake the privatization of protected areas, too.

In sum, in the course of its development, Hungarian authoritarian populism has relied on the construction of different subjects and subject positions to, in the end, divert attention from the exclusionary politics of land grabbing by national oligarchs and the role of corruption in supporting the system (including to support the welfare policies that maintain the dependent poor). To challenge the regime, the first step, to which I tried to contribute above, was to understand its development, on what grounds it lies, which subject positions it puts to the fore and which others are hidden, and how its pillars are likely to evolve in the future. The next challenge is to think about emancipation in this context.

Emancipation

Emancipatory subjectivities and the need for alliances

Permaculture, seed exchange initiatives, and farmers markets are growing in Hungary; however, even when they are put in place by people who otherwise oppose the regime, few rationalize them as initiatives that could challenge authoritarian populism. As Scoones et al. highlight, because so many initiatives fail to fuel radical transformation, scholar-activists have an important role in helping local communities come together with the global community ‘to reimagine rural spaces and democracy, underpinned by emancipatory politics’ across scales and places (2017, 12). Indeed, as they state:

The radical potential of these local, rooted alternatives (…) may only be realised when they are connected to a wider debate about political transformation, in rural spaces and beyond. This in turn requires situating practical grounded ‘alternatives’ in a broader historical, social and political context, where deepening, linking and scaling up become essential. (Scoones et al. 2017, 11)

According to my interviewees who are working on alternatives, people who might be described as the Hungarian bobos (bourgeois-bohemians) could become key actors in a potentially transformational process. These young, educated Hungarian women and men – who are either neo-rural (people of urban origin who have recently settled in the countryside) or interested in becoming ones and implement environmentally and socially friendly production and living practices – have one important strength: they are informed and connected. Moreover, their production models do not require large amounts of land and they currently fall outside of the regime’s main focus and narrative. They could play a central role in challenging authoritarian rural politics via scaling-up emancipatory initiatives and making them the basis for democratic emancipatory politics, conceptualized through an emancipatory political rationality. Via the Internet, not only can they access the information that the Hungarian government tries to hide from its citizens by controlling the media, they can also establish solidary connections with initiatives abroad as well as benefit from the support of the half a million (mostly young) Hungarians who fled the country because of the lack of economic and social opportunities in contemporary Hungary. These dissidents, to whom I also belong (most of them being opposed to the regime), can be of great support for those in Hungary ready to soil their hands and boots to engage in the construction of emancipatory rural politics. Hence, the Hungarian bobos allied over a common political project with Hungarian consumers in Hungary and beyond, and the model of production and consumption that they convey makes them potential subjects and agents of Hungarian emancipatory rural politics. Bobos, however, need to build alliances with the oppressed groups: smallholders, Romas, and women who do not want to have children with the objective of ‘making Hungary great again’, among others. We scholars and activists should help them to creatively design the concrete steps towards a clear emancipatory political project.

Emancipatory initiatives need to be scaled up

There have been many small and less-small triggers that have led to mobilizations against the regime, even if, in the end, they have not significantly challenged its solidity. Some of these have already been successful, such as the already mentioned campaign to stop the government from privatizing the management of conservation areas. The case of the Kishantos Rural Development Centre is another symbolic example. The center has been working for more than twenty years on 452 hectares of state-owned land leased out to implement an organic show farm that functions in partnership with a folk high school. The government decided to end the center’s lease contract in 2012 and to thereby open up the possibility of other ‘local producers’ obtaining lease contracts. In reality, the ‘local producers’ who ended up winning those contracts were not ‘local’. Often, they were not even ‘producers’. According to Ángyán, they were a conventional 29,00 hectares agricultural firm, a businessman, a mayor who is not farming, farmers from dozens of kilometers away, as well as a company specialized in construction. After getting the lease contract in 2012, they got the right to buy the land in February 2016 from the state (Ángyán 2016). A mobilization demanding that the government reverse this process and give the land back to its former users – the organic farm and the folk school – took place (Greenpeace 2014) in the midst of violence. Indeed, some of the new leasers spread chemical products on the until-then organically produced plots, thereby destroying productions. A lawsuit was brought against the Hungarian state, where it was rejected in 2016 by Hungary’s constitutional court (where the government has its agents); it was then taken to the European Court with the help of Greenpeace Hungary. The Kishantos case has yet to be resolved, but it shows how the emancipatory rural subjectivities of organic farmers allied with environmentalist organizations can challenge the regime’s authority. Scholar-activists need clearer strategies to find out how to support these types of initiative and to help them become examples and triggers with which to challenge authoritarian populism.

The importance of emotions in thinking about emancipation

I argue that emotions can help us think about democratic alternatives, radical political transformations, and a novel project of living life in common in the type of context described in this article. Indeed, as highlighted by Singh, emotions are the openings through which new ways of living life in common will emerge: they can ‘contribute to the emergence of novel collective subjectivities that animate a new politics of life and modes of being’ (2013, 197). The Hungarian regime is currently trying hard to create artificial enemies, fear, and intolerance within Hungarian society. To counter this and produce new and democratic ways of living life in common, there is a need to produce new subjectivities based on positive emotions that are not manipulated by the regime. Among these emotions are those that may be triggered by initiatives that promote healthy ways of living and producing, such as the bobos are doing. Those who are subjugated by the regime and their allies need to refuse subject positions such as the ‘lazy Roma’, ‘the blamed recipients of subsidies’, or the ‘mothers who will make Hungary great again’ and to, instead, claim emancipatory ones for themselves and the society – as have the smallholders who very recently contributed to imagining the Hungarian countryside as a democratic and dynamic place. Similarly, scholar-activists need to support the emergence of such emancipatory subjectivities, both individual and collective.

While waiting for the spark

Putting the Hungarian situation in perspective with situations in other places can be enlightening, especially for those who think that there is no way out from Hungarian authoritarianism ‘unless the system implodes or rots due to its own moral decadence, similar to what happened once with the Roman Empire’, as stated by one of my interviewees. Another of my interviewees, who is involved in the degrowth movement in Europe, stressed that Hungarians tend to think that emancipatory rural politics are more likely to occur in places other than Hungary. However in Hungary, more so than elsewhere in Europe, there is still some land in the hands of the state, and there is a culture of appreciating the local, the háztáji, the traditional. These elements could be creatively used to trigger positive emotions for building an emancipatory rural political project because they fit with small-scale farming and democratic organizations (but can nevertheless become dangerously co-opted as much by nationalist stances as by emancipatory ones). In addition, it was not long ago that the intention was there to develop a rural strategy based on visions of small-scale farming, cooperation, and agro-ecology – a strategy that would be supported by a majority of local farmers as the former State Secretary for Agriculture who designed the strategy discovered when he ‘toured’ the country looking for farmers’ support in 2010. Although temporarily silenced, intimidated, and oppressed by current Hungarian rural politics, some of these farmers are still out there, hopefully waiting for the spark that will lead to emancipatory changes. This spark can start anywhere: from the mobilisations in January 2019 against a new alienating labor law to the expulsion of the Central European University from Hungary. For this reason, we all need to be ready to overthrow the regime and contribute to re-constructing a new, democratic state.

Conclusion

Speculation on agricultural land by and for oligarchs has been a key driver to consolidate the authoritarian populist regime in Hungary and to create its subjects. While land grabbing via ‘pocket contracts’ with foreigners was conveniently used by Fidesz to win the election in 2010, the significance of land grabbing by and for national oligarchs in maintaining the authoritarian populist system (including after the 2014 and 2018 elections) remains mostly invisible. In particular, the role played by national oligarchs in the processes that render the poorest and most marginalized populations vulnerable is discursively hidden, while blame is placed on those most excluded, such as Romas living on welfare. This, in the end, diverts attention from the oppressive and exclusionary politics of land grabbing by and for national oligarchs.

The EU’s land policy and CAP are fueling Hungarian authoritarian populism, even as the EU is conveniently blamed by the government and its allies for being anti-Hungarian. Land market liberalization promoted by the EU is favoring land grabbing motivated by speculation on land prices. This was denounced by Fidesz when it motivated foreign land grabbers to acquire land in Hungary via ‘pocket contracts’, but the same policy is now favored by national oligarchs to enrich themselves and to indirectly maintain the authoritarian system. Second, the CAP as well as the push by the EU to end the 2004 land moratorium are facilitating and encouraging land grabbing by oligarchs.

Understanding how domestic land-grabbing and related conflicts have been used by the Orbán regime to develop and maintain authoritarian populism is a key topic for scholar-activists concerned by the recent ‘authoritarian turn’ in many places of the world, and in Europe in particular. While this type of land-grabbing has been written about (e.g. Ángyán 2015; Fidrich 2013; Greenpeace 2014; Szabó 2013), its importance, and the precise mechanisms through which it works, is under-theorised in both international academic spheres and within Hungarian scholar-activist circles as it gets diluted among other important topics such as the lack of a free press in Hungary, Orbán’s racist refugee policy, his anti-EU rhetoric, or his anti-gender-equality stances.

Despite the oppressive context, a myriad of emancipatory initiatives exist, each of which could become the spark needed to initiate emancipation. People are brought into relations of power through specific subject positions, but the subjectification process is always contested, always in the making. This is key for scholar-activists because it offers hope. However, the moments in which emancipation might emerge need to be better known, understood, discussed and built-upon, so as to inspire the social imaginary – of scholar-activists and subject populations – of what is possible in terms of breaking free from subjugated positions and mobilizing for an emancipatory rural politics.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the constructive suggestions made by the Journal of Peasant Studies reviewers, Balsa Lubarda and the participants to the conference on Authoritarian Populism in the Rural World (The Hague, March 2018) on previous versions of the article. The Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy at Central European University must also be acknowledged for their supporting role as well as the author's family who took care of her children while she was doing doing research and writing up this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Noémi Gonda http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1261-8380

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for sustainable development (mobility grant No. 2018-00442).

Notes on contributors

Noémi Gonda

Noémi Gonda is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Urban and Rural Development of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. She holds a PhD from Central European University. Her PhD research (2016) was a feminist ethnography in Nicaragua focused on the politics of gender and climate change. She is currently doing research on justice and conflict resolution in resource management as well as on the development of authoritarian regimes.

Notes

1 Magyar means Hungarian in Hungarian.

2 www.videkstrategia.kormany.hu; My translation.