The countryside has often been seen as a space where politics flows to, but does not grow out of. When it comes to the authoritarian right, this could not be further from the truth. So what draws people in rural areas to seek an ordered world?
In this first episode of their new podcast This Authoritarian Life RevDem Editor Kristóf Szombati and his co-host Erdem Evren embark on an exploration of the origins of contemporary authoritarianism by inspecting the case of rural Hungary, where Kristóf had worked both as an anthropologist and a community worker. What dislocations fueled the rise of the far-right Jobbik party and what did Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party offer to temper popular discontents?
Kristóf Szombati is a scholar, educator and practitioner based in Berlin. After spending a decade in the Hungarian environmental movement, he co-founded the green LMP party and was an elected member of the Steering Committee which initially led the party. He left LMP in 2011 to pursue a doctoral degree focusing on the rise of racist and authoritarian politics in rural Hungary. Since defending his PhD at the Central European University (CEU) in 2016, Kristóf has been active as both a scholar and democracy practitioner. He has published extensively on right-wing politics, taught courses on de-democratization at universities in the US and Europe, and supported a series of democratization initiatives in his native Hungary and more recently in Germany where he has been living since 2022. His current employer is the Humboldt University, he is acting Editor for Political Economy at the Review of Democracy.
