ABSTRACT
Hungarian research on populism deviates from canonic models in the international literature in the sense that it relates populism to establishment parties rather than to their anti-establishment challengers. Orbns right-wing party, Fidesz Hungarian Civic Alliance, won the parliamentary elections in 2010 with 52" of the votes, but because of the electoral system, it got more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament. The most infamous case of anti-Romanian populist mobilization relates to the socialist leader Gyurcsny who, in the lead-up to a 2004 referendum on granting citizenship to ethnic Hungarian minorities in surrounding countries. The penal populism is mainly promoted by right-wing political actors but not by the tabloid media in Hungary. The empty populism of mainstream parties is conceived as a structural ill of today's democratic politics, which is increasingly obsessed with the logic of the hunt for short-term popularity via popular media communication.
