Global Crisis and the Realignment of Eastern European Capitalist Class Alliances

the Case of Hungarian Illiberalism

Abstract

This chapter discusses how Hungary’s present authoritarian regime has emerged as a result of a transition that began with a state socialist, then post- socialist neoliberal regime transformation. This transformation affected state- class relations, political control of the state, and the reconfiguration of geopolitical relations with the European Union, Russia and China. The chapter examines how class tensions brewing under previous forms of neoliberal democratic parliamentary politics have been utilized to build the new illiberal hegemony, and how the present regime suppresses those tensions to sustain a
reconstituted national bourgeoisie through the institutional centralization of political power.