ABSTRACT
This chapter studies how the material space of Budapest, the national capital of Hungary, is entangled in the transformation of the country’s democratic structures since 2010. It focuses on two symbolic spaces that have – throughout the history of the modern Hungarian nation state – been inseparable from political change. They are the Kossuth square around the Hungarian Parliament building and the Castle District of Buda. The “Essex-School” approach to discourse analysis enables a conceptualisation of urban transformations not as mere consequences or instruments of larger political changes, but as integral, mutually co-constitutive parts of them. In this context, shifting power relations between the legislative and executive branches of government under the current Hungarian regime are explored through the example of these two central symbolic spaces. The chapter dissects how the reconstruction and use of the Kossuth square became essential to the government’s efforts to articulate a unified national subject, and how the changing relations between Parliament building and the surrounding square, as well as between the Parliament and the Castle District, served the emptying out of the legislative process and empowerment of the executive.
