Democracy and Populism. The Constitution of the Political Community in Early Post-War Hungary

This article proposes to reconsider the relation between populism and democracy. Instead of taking democracy as a given, it will study populism in the context of democratization in a case study from a historical sociological perspective. The post-war and pre-Cold War historical context is analyzed here on the example of Hungary. First, I analyze the public debate on democracy in order to map out the discursive field in which the different political positions were taken. I show that the debate was about the legitimate definition of the political community, the demos. Second, I situate the political wing of the Hungarian populist movement in this discursive field. I establish that the position of the populists’ party did not differ considerably from the standpoint of the other participants: the basic populist claims and references were articulated as part of the problem of democracy. Third, I analyze the continuity of the populist tradition in the context of the post-war redefinition of the ethnoscape, that is, in relation to the “Jewish question” and the “German question”.