Populism in Turkey and Hungary: A Search for Security and Belonging

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to gain an understanding of the potential relationship between populism and a population’s search for security and belonging. Furthermore, how this is expressed through the rhetoric and policies of a country’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, this is examined through conducting a qualitative content analysis. Here I use newspaper articles, academic papers, and books, based on theories of “Ontological security”, and populism. The findings of the thesis suggest how intertwined the rhetoric and policies of the populists are with notions of existential anxiety and the need to secure a stabile identity, based on stories and memories of a glorious or traumatic past. In this, Turkey has adopted an identity, that highlights the ethnically Turkish, Sunni Muslim, based on stories of the Ottoman Empire and its fall. In Hungary, an identity has been constructed, based on defending Christian culture and values, stemming from the fall of “Greater Hungary”, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its subsequent Soviet occupation. The two proposed identities are personified by respective populist leader, both of whom, by embracing and continually using exclusionary, populist narratives, have awakened society’s latent populists and, in turn increased their support.