An anti-migration campaign and its impact on public opinion: The Hungarian case

Abstract

During the 2015 migration wave, Hungary was a transit, rather than a target, country for migrants fleeing from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe. In reaction to this, Viktor Orbán’s right-wing populist government built a wall on the country’s southern border and launched an anti-migration communication campaign, portraying itself as the saviour of European, Hungarian and Christian values. This article reconstructs the messages and effects of this campaign. It finds that in a context of limited political and media pluralism, an anti-migration campaign may exert a significant impact on public opinion and political behaviour.

Politics Turns Moral Foundations Into Consequences of Intergroup Attitudes

“…The Hungarian Election Campaign of 2018 as the Moral Framing of Immigration (Bajomi-Lázár, 2019;Bíró-Nagy, 2018). Within this campaign, values directly reflecting binding moral foundations were strongly emphasized.…”

“…According to the narrative of the Fidesz campaign, immigration from Muslim countries is planned and organized by George Soros, a Hungarian-American billionaire with the help of NGOs and Hungarian and European liberal political actors whom he personally financed. The explicit message of the campaign was that their plan was to disintegrate traditionally Christian European nation-states by arranging the immigration of a great number of Muslim people (Bajomi-Lázár, 2019; Bíró-Nagy, 2018).…”

Are anti-immigrant attitudes the Holy Grail of populists? : A comparative analysis of attitudes towards immigrants, values, and political populism in Europe

“…Such openly hostile attitudes in Hungary may be attributed to several intersecting factors: the small number of immigrants and consequent lack of personal experience and knowledge about them, together with the generally low levels of trust and social cohesion that characterise Hungarian society (Messing & Ságvári, 2018;. A society in such a state proved to be extremely fertile terrain for the manipulative, anti-migrant propaganda that the Hungarian government put into action in early 2015 and has kept operating since then in a de-pluralized media environment unparalleled in the EU (Bernáth & Messing, 2016;Barlai & Sik, 2017;Goździak & Márton, 2018;Bajomi-Lázár, 2019;Kende & Krekó, 2020).…”

Habermas on people-building in the European Union

“…Just as we cannot democratize the markets (Habermas, 2015), so we cannot prevent ‘reactions against diversity, xenophobic reactions against others, and anti-modern reactions against the complexity of contemporary living conditions’ (Habermas, 2003, p. 92). This is evident in the nationalistic arguments underlying Great Britain’s departure from Europe (Calhoun, 2017) and in the rising xenophobia in the EU (Rydgren, 2003), namely the xenophobic attacks on immigrants and refugees in Italy (D’Alimonte, 2019), Poland (Cap, 2018) and Hungary (Bajomi-Lázár, 2019); the persistent ethnic discrimination against Jews (Wieviorka, 2018), Roma (Yıldız & De Genova, 2018) and Muslims (Stokes, 2016); and racism against Black citizens across Europe (Silverstein, 2005). Only feedback from a mobilized European public sphere ‘can still affect the global system in line with a coordinated world domestic policy’ (Habermas, 1995, p. 305).…”