Carving Hungarian Illiberal Democracy in stones: the recreation of the past in Kossuth Square since 2010

Supervisor/s: Rui Cunha Martins, Paula Abreu, Péter Apor and Anna Wessely

Doctoral Programme: Discourses: Culture, History and Society

Funding: FCT

Since 2010, democratic institutions have been used to legitimize the political use of history for the benefit of the ultra-conservative and populist agenda of Viktor Orbán's government in Hungary. This paper will investigate whether (and how) institutions and the democratic rite have failed to protect the heritage, collective memory, historiography, and contemporaneity of Kossuth Square, the address of the Hungarian parliament, from the narratives (re)created by Hungarian Illiberal Democracy. The conception, approval and execution of the Steindl Imre Program was the case chosen for analysis. A hybrid of qualitative methods and knowledge from political science, history, sociology, and cultural studies will be used to interpret one of the longest and most successful right-wing populist governments of the 21st century. This work is not intended to document the history of the square or its monuments, but to demonstrate how the resulting materiality and symbolism, both individual and collective, represent illiberal democracy more than the nation itself.