HUNGARY HAS BECOME one of the most vocal critics of international migration despite the fact that the country is not a traditional target but rather a sending or transit country of migration. Ever since prime minister Viktor Orbán declared that he wants to build an ‘illiberal state’ (for full speech see Tóth 2014), the country has been in the headlines, commentators trying to understand Orbán's radical, nationalist and illiberal shift . The country has been leading the wave of antidemocratic and anti-European developments in the European Union in recent years. Many have been puzzled by how fast and spectacularly the dismantling of democratic institutions took place in a country that used to be a poster-child of post-Communist democratisation and, according to scholars, has had the most institutionalised party system in Eastern Europe (Enyedi 2016). Yet, since 2010, when Orbán returned to power, the priority seems to be to redefine the country, to redraw the boundaries of the national community and the political regime on the basis of a populist nationalist discourse that focuses on reinterpreting political as well as socio-cultural belonging in exclusionary nationalist and illiberal terms.

Some might even think that this shift away from mainstream politics in Hungary might be due to the strengthening of the radical right in recent years. After all, Jobbik (The Movement for Better Hungary – the name in Hungarian implies both ‘better’ and ‘more to the right’) has been one of the most successful of such formations across Europe. Jobbik had become the second most popular political party in the country by 2014, being better positioned to mount a challenge to Orbán's Fidesz (Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Union) than the fragmented opposition on the left . Yet, this chapter argues this simple explanation of Orbán turning illiberal to win the hearts of far right voters cannot explain the radicalisation of Hungarian politics. First of all, Jobbik has considerably toned down its radical rhetoric since 2010 to widen its electoral appeal, and, as the chapter argues, Orbán has himself radicalised his electorate with his anti-establishment, anti-Western, anti-Europe and anti-liberal discourse. Orbán has adopted this strategy of mainstreaming the radical or radicalising the mainstream in order to consolidate his illiberal system. Similarly, while Hungary was at the centre of the 2015 European refugee crisis with more than 300,000 people entering the country, none of these migrants stayed to pose any difficulty for Hungary.