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Blooming Populism: An Ethnography of Rural Hungary under Viktor Orbán

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Volume 54

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Blooming Populism

An Ethnography of Rural Hungary under Viktor Orbán

Tatyjana Szafonova

216 pages, 18 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-80768-089-3 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (February 2027)


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Reviews

"In this profound and beautiful book, Tatyjana Szafonova shows us how caring for plants can sustain populist politics and anti-immigrant sentiments. From land grabs, to village beautification, to empty soccer stadiums, we see how state power works in ordinary lives in rural Hungary." — Andrew S. Mathews, University of California

Description

Based on long-term ethnographic research in a Hungarian village between 2014 and 2026, this book examines how Viktor Orbán’s rule takes shape through everyday ‘populist projects.’ From pest control and greenhouses to soil, flowers and vegetables, rural life becomes a medium for redistributing resources to loyal networks while generating tacit and explicit propaganda. As successive crises – from the 2015 refugee moment to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine – reconfigure social relations, ordinary practices are recast as symbols of national belonging. Tracing these shifts, the book shows how populism appropriates and exhausts social commons, even as its grip begins to loosen.;

Tatyjana Szafonova is Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Comenius University. She was previously a Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Budapest. From 2023 to 2025, she led the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions–funded project “Pan-Ideologies in Central Europe: Paradoxes of Right-Wing Self-Orientalism,” examining political imagination and self-exoticism in contemporary Central Europe.

Subject: Political and Economic AnthropologyDevelopment Studies
Area: Central/Eastern Europe


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