After Orbán: Trapped in a Political Continuum?
Viktor Orbán is no longer in power in Hungary. At the level of institutions, this marks a rupture. At the level of political culture, it is far less clear that anything has ended.
Analysis
Viktor Orbán is no longer in power in Hungary.
At the level of institutions, this marks a rupture. At the level of political culture, it is far less clear that anything has ended.
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On Hungarian public television, Péter Magyar sits across from a visibly unsettled host.
What begins as a routine interview quickly turns into confrontation. He accuses the broadcaster - on its own air- of operating as a propaganda machine, of spreading fabrications, even invoking comparisons to “North Korean-style” media.
Days later, he signals that the state broadcaster itself may be suspended.
The scene is striking not only for its content, but for its form.
A single figure, a direct clash, a claim to speak truth against a corrupted system: broadcast through the very institution being challenged.
What we are witnessing is not simply a transition of power. It is a moment in which a society shaped for over a decade by authoritarian populism confronts a paradox: whether the tools that mobilized it against illiberal rule can be used without reproducing the very logic they seek to overcome.
This is often framed, somewhat optimistically, as the possibility of defeating authoritarian populism with democratic populism. But such a formulation underestimates the depth at which populism operates.
Populism as Political Culture, Not Strategy
In much of the public debate, populism is treated as a political strategy: a repertoire of slogans, narratives, and mobilization techniques. From a social anthropological and social psychological perspective, this is insufficient.
Populism is better understood as a cultural-cognitive schema: a way of organizing political reality around moral binaries, affective intensities, and simplified representations of agency. It reduces the complexity of social life into a legible opposition between a virtuous collective (“the people”) and a delegitimized other (“the elite,” “the corrupt,” “the enemies”).
Such schemas are not easily discarded. They become internalized through repetition, media environments, and institutional practices. Over time, they shape what Pierre Bourdieu would call a political habitus: a set of dispositions that guide perception and action without requiring conscious reflection.
Orbán’s political project did not only transform institutions; it recalibrated this habitus.
The Internalization of Leadership
One of the most consequential shifts has been the normalization of leader-centered representation. In this model, legitimacy is not mediated through institutions but embodied in individuals. Trust is personalized. Accountability becomes secondary to perceived authenticity or strength.
The emergence of Péter Magyar must be situated precisely within this transformed field. His political appeal does not arise in a vacuum. It resonates precisely because it aligns, at least partially, with expectations that have been socially produced over time.
From a social psychological standpoint, this reflects what can be described as a transfer of charismatic attachment. Voters disillusioned with one leader do not necessarily abandon the underlying desire for personalized authority. Instead, they redirect it. This is not a failure of rationality. It is a response to prolonged uncertainty.
Uncertainty, Cognitive Closure, and the Demand for Simplicity
Decades of research in social psychology, particularly around need for cognitive closure, suggest that individuals facing sustained ambiguity or threat tend to prefer clear, decisive, and unambiguous frameworks.
Hungary’s recent trajectory - economic volatility, institutional erosion, geopolitical tension-has produced precisely such conditions.
Populist politics, whether authoritarian or democratic in orientation, offers an answer: it simplifies: It tells people who they are. It tells them who is responsible. And it promises that someone can act decisively on their behalf.
The problem is not that this is persuasive. The problem is that it reshapes what citizens come to expect from politics itself.
The Risk of a Populist Continuum
If populism is internalized at the level of political habitus, then transitions of power do not necessarily produce transitions of logic. Instead, we observe what might be called a populist continuum: a situation in which different political actors compete within the same underlying framework of representation: leader-centric, morally polarized, affectively charged.
The language may shift from exclusion to inclusion, from authoritarian to democratic aspirations. But the structure remains. And this is exactly the point, where the idea of “democratic populism” becomes analytically fragile. Because it assumes that populism can be normatively reoriented without being structurally reproduced.
The Dangers of Large Majorities
The current political moment introduces an additional layer of complexity: the possibility of overwhelming electoral success for the new governing force.
From an institutional perspective, such a majority may be necessary to dismantle entrenched illiberal mechanisms. From a sociological perspective, however, it introduces what can be termed a majoritarian temptation.
Large mandates generate a sense of moral legitimacy that can weaken the perceived need for constraint. The distinction between “having the right to govern” and “having the right to reshape the system unilaterally” becomes blurred.
This is precisely the tension that István Bibó identified in his reflections on democratic fragility: the danger that political actors, in the name of national or popular interest, bypass the very limits that make democratic coexistence possible.
Authoritarian Residues: The Afterlife of Power
Anthropologically, power does not simply vanish, it sediments. What remains after long periods of centralized rule is not only an institutional architecture of laws, regulations, and administrative hierarchies. It is also a cultural imprint: a set of embodied practices, expectations, and symbolic codes through which power continues to be recognized and reproduced.
Pierre Bourdieu conceptualized this as habitus: internalized dispositions that persist even when the external structures that produced them begin to shift. In this sense, authoritarianism leaves behind more than institutions; it leaves behind a way of perceiving authority.
These residues operate subtly. They are visible in:
communication styles that privilege certainty over deliberation
expectations of leadership centered on decisiveness rather than accountability
norms of political engagement that frame disagreement as threat rather than plurality
From Political Sociology to transitional justice research, studies of post-authoritarian societies consistently show that such patterns endure well beyond regime change.
Katherine Verdery, for instance, demonstrated how socialist power structures in Eastern Europe persisted as “social facts” even after their formal dismantling. Similarly, Levitsky and Way highlight how informal institutions often outlive formal democratic transitions, shaping behavior in ways that can undermine reform.
Hungary’s post-Orbán moment is therefore not a rupture in the anthropological sense. It is a layered field, saturated with what we might call authoritarian residues.
And these residues matter. Because they structure not only how power is exercised, but how it is expected to be exercised.
Without deliberate efforts to transform these underlying patterns, new political actors risk reproducing them: not out of ideological commitment, but because they have become normalized, even commonsensical.
Beyond the Instrumental Use of Populism
This leads to a more difficult question. The issue is not whether democratic actors can use populism effectively. It is whether they can disentangle themselves from its logic.
Ernesto Laclau famously argued that populism is an inevitable dimension of democratic politics: a way of constructing “the people” as a political subject. Yet even within this framework, the boundary between mobilization and simplification remains fragile.
Once politics is consistently articulated through moral binaries and leader-centered representation, it becomes structurally difficult to return to pluralist forms of mediation.
So moving beyond populism, therefore, is not a matter of abandoning political energy, it is a matter of reconfiguring how that energy is organized.
This requires more than institutional reform. It demands a transformation of political culture:
from personalization to institutional mediation
from moral polarization to pluralist recognition
from immediacy to proceduralism
From a social psychological perspective, this shift is particularly demanding. Research on need for cognitive closure (Kruglanski, 1990s) suggests that individuals exposed to prolonged uncertainty develop a preference for clear, stable, and decisive frameworks. Populist politics satisfies precisely this need.
Reversing this dynamic means reintroducing tolerance for ambiguity: what political theorists from Hannah Arendt to contemporary democratic scholars have seen as essential for pluralistic coexistence. But such tolerance cannot be imposed. It must be gradually relearned.
A Fragile Transition
Hungary stands at a critical juncture. The fall of Viktor Orbán creates an opening, but openings are not outcomes. They are contingent moments, shaped by how actors respond to them.
If the transition relies too heavily on the mobilizing logic of populism, even in its democratic form, it risks stabilizing the very structures it seeks to dismantle. The language may shift, the intentions may differ, but the underlying patterns of political expectation remain intact.
If, however, the transition embraces a more sustainable process: rebuilding trust in institutions, normalizing disagreement, and re-establishing limits on power. Only then a different trajectory becomes possible.
But this isn’t the kind of politics that delivers quick wins.
It’s slower, often frustrating—and far less loud or visible than populist politics. Orbán’s era may be over. But what made it possible is still there. In habits. In expectations. In the way politics is imagined. That is the harder part to change.
Because systems don’t just disappear. They leave traces. And those traces shape what comes next: often quietly, without being noticed.
If those patterns remain untouched, then change stays on the surface. And sooner or later, the same logic finds its way back.